In Christ

 

Text: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Focus: Being Born again

Function: what it means to be new people in Christ

¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is one of the foundational scriptures for my life. It gives to us something to do. We are now ambassadors for Christ, which means that our first allegiance is to the Kingdom of God. When Jesus was before Pilate and Pilate asked Him if He could defend Himself since He was a king, Jesus answered that He is a king of a different kind of Kingdom. We are ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. That is why most of our Churches of the Brethren do not have any kind of flag denoting a national symbol, because we recognize that our Church buildings are sanctuaries away from the political forces of this world.

We are first and foremost, members of God’s family and then members of a particular nation. To place nations above the Kingdom of God seems to me to be a misalignment of our mission of ambassadors of God’s kingdom.

That as why I preach against the false religion of Christian nationalism that permits people to place borders over Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger as a neighbor.

God promises to bless us and keep us strong as a nation if we care for the least of these. We cannot out give God. And, we as believers live by faith in the fact that if we are generous to others, God will be generous to us.

At the beginning of our text, Paul speaks in a sort of mysterious way. He says that we no longer recognize people according to human standards, but we try to look at them from God’s point of view. He says it is a change that has happened to us since we have come to know Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

It is a spiritual transformation that he is talking about. We are new creatures, he says, in Christ. We are new creations. Created by God. Loved by God. Given a purpose by God. We are here to be ambassadors of the Kingdom of God by demonstrating to people what it means to be reconciled to God.

More than anything today, I want to focus on the nature of what it means for us to be born again, or to be born from above by the Spirit of God.

But one of my favorite titles, one I thought was very clever, for a sermon that I preached on this passage is: “The biggest twit in the Bible.”

A twit is a person of substandard quality for whatever reason it is. Normally because they are obnoxious. That has nothing to do with this text.

If one reads it from the King James Version, one reads in verse 19 where the NRSV reads “that is” it says, “to wit.”

“To wit, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself not counting their transgressions against them.”

In old English it meant, to wit ,meant appealing to your intellect. I played on words to get attention about a twit and then changed it to a subject that has always excited me to the point of tears and worship.

God was in Christ bringing us back to God. One deacon in a church that I pastored used to say: “The message of the Bible is that God wants everyone back.”

God is actively forgiving us. That is what the passage says. God forgave the past sins and God continues to wash us in His cleansing power through our relationship with Him expressed in the power of God’s Spirit that dwells inside of us.

God forgives.

I love the concept. God forgives me.

I, like most people, am proud and want to be self-sufficient. But God takes over where our self-sufficiency wears thin and continues to restore, heal and forgive us.

To Wit. Pause and Think about this, Paul says. God forgives you and is reconciling the entire world to God’s own self through us, His ambassadors.

All of this happens because when we confess Jesus as our Savior, His Spirit takes up residence inside of us.

In the early years of my Christian experience, one of the primary motivators of my experience was what happened to me during worship services where we just stopped and took time to focus on the love and grace of God given to us.

Almost always, it happens in song. You see pictures of believers with their hands raised in worship, you might have experienced it yourself at times.

I experience it here when we worship and I make sure that I take the time to actually think and reflect on the songs that I am singing.

Worship seems to draw us in to the presence of God as we experience the love and joy of God flowing through us.

I learned at some time or another that a lot of that experience was what happens when a group of people get together and are united in a common cause. I felt the same exhilaration in worship that I experienced at an exciting sports event where my team wins in a cliffhanger.

We have this need to be together, united in purpose. I believe it is evolutionary. And it can be tribal.

One of the things that turned me off was when they would get “the Spirit moving” in worship and then stop and take an offering. Or, what was worse was when that tribal excitement that we felt in worship was transferred to give us an excuse to hate others.

I heard a sermon once by a TV preacher that I used to respect where he started out with the gospel and ended up with how all Muslims are evil because a few of them have been radicalized into hatred.

He was doing the same thing and I wrote him a letter asking him to stop.

I am not digressing. But I wonder if a lot of the excitement we see in contemporary worship leads us astray from genuine service.

Don’t get me wrong, I used to be the worship leader in a Charismatic Church and I enjoy the closeness I feel with God in worship.

But Romans 12:1-2 tells us that genuine worship is service to God.

Jesus made it clear that out of our bellies would flow rivers of living water that bring life to a thirsty world.

We have the power inside of us to reconcile people to God.

And it happens, just as God keeps forgiving us, when we keep on forgiving others and inviting them into the love of God in the family of God.

So, it starts with being reconciled to God and then we respond to God in worship. We worship by gathering together and experiencing the joy of fellowship and Christian love because of our common purpose, to see Jesus’ love spread to others.

We also worship, as Romans says, in service to others. Jesus lead a life of worship as He served humanity since the Spirit of God was inside of Him.

Let us also serve through the power of the Holy Spirit.