SPEAKER_01: This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
SPEAKER_00: Good morning and welcome.
SPEAKER_00: I've been out of the pulpit for two weeks, but it feels somehow like a month.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of strange.
SPEAKER_00: Took a couple of weeks off to be able to get some home projects done, be able to take some time off, but most importantly, I had not done any dissertation writing since June.
SPEAKER_00: And I was getting very behind.
SPEAKER_00: So it took some time to get some of that done.
SPEAKER_00: Glad to be back to open up the Bible with you in the Word of God in 2 Corinthians chapter 5.
SPEAKER_00: If you are our guest this morning, we want to welcome you.
SPEAKER_00: We've been spending a few weeks in a few chapters from 2 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_00: This morning we're going to wrap that up with the end of chapter 5 of 2 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_00: We've been looking at what the Apostle Paul has to say about the local church ministry through his defense of his own ministry.
SPEAKER_00: So 2 Corinthians, in large part, is one man's defense of his God-given calling.
SPEAKER_00: But regardless of whether or not it's one man's defense, it's applicable to the Lord's church.
SPEAKER_00: It's relevant because of human nature.
SPEAKER_00: See, our natural sinful human nature, combined with our individual personalities, our individual quirks, and yes, you all have a personality and you all have quirks.
SPEAKER_00: I do too, all of those often lead us to adopt perspectives, desires, attitudes, and all of those things work themselves out into actions that may be based on perceptions and not always entirely accurate.
SPEAKER_00: So in 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul is addressing and correcting the perceptions of him and his ministry that were in the church in ancient Corinth.
SPEAKER_00: There are divisions at this point in time in the Corinthian church.
SPEAKER_00: In his first letter, we read that some folks were loyal to Paul, while others leaned towards Apollos.
SPEAKER_00: Some wanted Peter.
SPEAKER_00: And some took the high road, at least they thought, and said, Oh, I'm only of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So they're fracturing, they're splintered.
SPEAKER_00: And the same thing happens in every church.
SPEAKER_00: Our personalities, our quirks, our perspectives, our attitudes, our tendencies, and the way those work together in the confines of a local church cause us to work those things out in a way that causes disruption sometimes.
SPEAKER_00: So we can't hear the letters to the church in Corinth without knowing that there is a loud segment of that group of believers who thought that Paul was doing ministry wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Even more.
SPEAKER_00: Some had bought into lies and the deception that false apostles had brought with them into the local church.
SPEAKER_00: And they were turning people against Paul.
SPEAKER_00: So people in the Corinthian church were divided on how the apostle Paul was ministering to the churches.
SPEAKER_00: So this letter is in large part written to set the record straight.
SPEAKER_00: Paul defended his ministry and he set the church on a right path by pointing to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: In 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 13, he says, You might think I'm out of my mind.
SPEAKER_00: You might think I'm crazy.
SPEAKER_00: But whether people think he's on target in what he's doing, or whether they think he's out of his mind, he says in verse 14, you need to understand that the love of Christ controls us.
SPEAKER_00: This is critical to understanding what's going on in this section of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Because the Apostle Paul is laying out the apostolic approach to ministry, which is to ground everything in the person of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now we're picking up this morning where Webb left off last Sunday in verse 16.
SPEAKER_00: And as we do so, beginning in verse 16, we need to recall how the people in Corinth were behaving.
SPEAKER_00: They had a particular view of local church ministry.
SPEAKER_00: They had a particular view of teaching and preaching and everything that came with being an apostle.
SPEAKER_00: And they compared their standard to where the apostle Paul was and their perceptions.
SPEAKER_00: They were trying to match Paul up with what they thought things needed to be like.
SPEAKER_00: And they put him up against the so-called superapostles that were in the church in Corinth.
SPEAKER_00: And the corrective to all of these issues, the apostle says, is to look to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus, he says, has instituted a new world order that impacts how we follow him.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to break this section from verse 16 into verse 2 of chapter 6 into four parts by considering how Christ changes in his new world order.
SPEAKER_00: He changes the way we think, he changes who we are, he changes our status with God.
SPEAKER_00: And all of that brought together changes our focus as followers of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You see, Christ is active in establishing his kingdom through people who are controlled by his love.
SPEAKER_00: And it starts in verse 16 by the way we think.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus changes the way his people think.
SPEAKER_00: You remember, I'm sure, from our study of the book of Acts, how the Lord Jesus arrested a man named Saul while he was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians.
SPEAKER_00: He arrested Saul, he sent him into the city of Damascus, and he told a man by the name of Ananias to go to Paul and to heal his vision, for he'd been blinded.
SPEAKER_00: And the Lord Jesus told Ananias, I'm going to show this man how much he must suffer for my name's sake.
SPEAKER_00: So the Apostle Paul speaks much of his suffering in 2 Corinthians chapters 4 and 5, because he was criticized for it.
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine that?
SPEAKER_00: That you're going through all kinds of horrible suffering and you get criticized for it?
SPEAKER_00: You see, for the Apostle Paul, the Corinthian believers were looking at his suffering and say, saying, if you were really an apostle, you wouldn't be suffering so much.
SPEAKER_00: In their minds, suffering didn't align with being an apostle.
SPEAKER_00: Aspects of the health and wealth gospel were prevalent from the very beginning.
SPEAKER_00: That's why he said in chapter 4, verse 7, but we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
SPEAKER_00: Jars of clay are breakable, they're frail and fragile.
SPEAKER_00: So he's defending his suffering by showing that suffering for Christ in frail bodies, and that's talking about persecutions and beatings and imprisonment like Paul suffered.
SPEAKER_00: Or even by lacking the needs of the body, like food, clothing, and sleep that believers sometimes suffer in a fallen world.
SPEAKER_00: God is glorified when his people serve him through things that come with having bodies that break down.
SPEAKER_00: Let me rephrase that.
SPEAKER_00: If you suffer for Jesus because of a broken body, because of a human body, that brings God glory.
SPEAKER_00: It's not something that brings shame and dishonor to his name.
SPEAKER_00: God is glorified because he likes to bring himself glory by showing that the surpassing power belongs to him.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes using bodies that break down is a great way to do that.
SPEAKER_00: The apostle knew that God was preparing an eternal weight of glory for him.
SPEAKER_00: But that kind of faith requires an eternal mindset, which we see in chapter 4, verses 17 and 18.
SPEAKER_00: He says, this light, momentary affliction.
SPEAKER_00: The guy was whipped.
SPEAKER_00: He was put in stocks.
SPEAKER_00: He faced hunger and lack and shipwrecked.
SPEAKER_00: And he calls it light.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I could call that light.
SPEAKER_00: This light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison as we look not to the things that we can see, but to the things that are unseen.
SPEAKER_00: For the things that are seen are transient, they're temporary, they're here and they're gone.
SPEAKER_00: But the things that are unseen are eternal.
SPEAKER_00: Paul was content to endure whatever the Lord prepared for him.
SPEAKER_00: Some argued that he walked with a limp.
SPEAKER_00: Some argued that he had terrible eyesight.
SPEAKER_00: Because in one of his letters he said, Look at what large letters I'm signing my name with.
SPEAKER_00: Still others argue that he he had some kind of speech impediment because he was not able to speak like a skilled orator of the time, like one of the super apostles.
SPEAKER_00: Whatever the case, Paul didn't leave folks with the impression that he was a spiritual giant with a direct line to the throne room of God.
SPEAKER_00: That's why he wrote in chapter 5, verse 12 Look, we're not building ourselves up and commending ourselves to you again.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, we're giving you a cause to boast about us so that you might be able to have an answer to those who look on the outward appearance of people instead of looking at what's in the heart.
SPEAKER_00: You see, a key problem in how Corinthian believers thought of Paul was that they evaluated him on what they could observe about him as a human being.
SPEAKER_00: And so now in verse 16, Paul summarizes that concept.
SPEAKER_00: From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh, it is according to our human nature.
SPEAKER_00: You see, Jesus' death and resurrection change the way God's people think specifically about one another.
SPEAKER_00: The love of Christ controls us, he says.
SPEAKER_00: The love of Christ controls even the way we think.
SPEAKER_00: The believer in Jesus symbolically dies with Christ at the moment of salvation, and they no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was risen again.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 15.
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what he says.
SPEAKER_00: And now, according to the flesh, means a human, worldly way of thinking.
SPEAKER_00: Some in Corinth were looking at the Apostle Paul from a purely human, worldly lens.
SPEAKER_00: They viewed him like non-Christians consider one another.
SPEAKER_00: Much like judging a book by its cover.
SPEAKER_00: But that's an unjust and unrighteous way of thinking.
SPEAKER_00: But you know it's very normal for most of the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's very normal for a non-Christian.
SPEAKER_00: That's why he goes on to say in verse 16, we once regarded Christ that way.
SPEAKER_00: But not anymore.
SPEAKER_00: Before his dramatic encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, the man called Saul viewed the Lord Jesus as a messianic pretender and blasphemer.
SPEAKER_00: His perspective was that a man who was weak enough to be crucified by the Romans could not in any way be the Lord of all and the promised Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: That's a wrong perspective, of course.
SPEAKER_00: But it's normal.
SPEAKER_00: And by normal, I mean it is a standard way of thinking about others when Christ has not yet impacted your way of thinking.
SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't be surprised when the world thinks about Jesus in that way.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Isaiah 53, one of the church's beloved passages, describes that kind of mindset, does it not?
SPEAKER_00: It represents the perspective of those who see God's promised Messiah as one from whom men hide their faces.
SPEAKER_00: He's just, what?
SPEAKER_00: He's a Messiah?
SPEAKER_00: That can't be.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus changes the way people think.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul experienced that change.
SPEAKER_00: He went from thinking that Jesus was a blasphemer to seeing Jesus glorified at the Father's right hand.
SPEAKER_00: He knows and believes differently, and that faith has altered his thinking.
SPEAKER_00: He no longer thought about life through a worldly sinful lens.
SPEAKER_00: Brothers and sisters in Christ, your thinking changes when the love of Christ controls you, and you no longer live for yourself, but for him who died and was raised for your sake.
SPEAKER_00: You no longer think like a pagan because Christ now motivates your mind.
SPEAKER_00: Your mind is transformed as you take in his word and it renews you over and over.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Paul was speaking about how the Corinthian church thought of him.
SPEAKER_00: And he's leading them to understand believers don't think like that.
SPEAKER_00: He's defending his apostleship and his calling to serve Jesus even in the midst of rejection, but his defense enables us to see and to be challenged about how we think of others, especially believers.
SPEAKER_00: If we consider them by their outward appearance, by a human lens.
SPEAKER_00: And they don't simply mean what they wear when they come to church on Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_00: Not judging somebody because they wear flip-flops and shorts in the middle of a North Dakota winter.
SPEAKER_00: Might be weird, odd, but that's not what we're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: We mean everything that comes with being human.
SPEAKER_00: So if we judge them by their accent, by their skin color, by their hairstyle, by their wealth or their lack thereof, their education or their lack thereof, if we judge other believers in those kinds of ways, we display nothing of the mindset of Christ that he gives to his people.
SPEAKER_00: If we display a judgment of others that judges by human standards, that is not the mind of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus changes the way we think.
SPEAKER_00: The standard of judgment now becomes what is in the heart, verse 12.
SPEAKER_00: What does that look like?
SPEAKER_00: We find out in verse 17.
SPEAKER_00: There we discover that our way of thinking must be different than the unsaved world because Jesus changes who we are.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 17 is a familiar and loved verse for many Christians.
SPEAKER_00: But do you realize that it's built on something that the scriptures have already anticipated?
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah chapter 43, verses 18 and 19 is in the back of the apostles' mind here.
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah wrote of God sending his people into exile for judgment, for their sin and their rebellion against him.
SPEAKER_00: But in Isaiah 43, Isaiah's recording God's words of hope.
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote of God coming again as a powerful Redeemer king who makes paths through the waters.
SPEAKER_00: So pictur the redemption of Israel from Egypt, bringing them through the waters of the Red Sea.
SPEAKER_00: And he promises, gives hope that even in your exile there's going to be another coming like that, that is like the path of water through the sea.
SPEAKER_00: And he says in Isaiah 43, verses 18 and 19, don't remember the former things, nor consider the things of old.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, I am doing a new thing.
SPEAKER_00: That's a radical statement for a nation of people who rest their identity in their history.
SPEAKER_00: A new thing can be very uncomfortable and uncertain.
SPEAKER_00: But God says, You're gonna go into exile.
SPEAKER_00: But as you go into exile, I want you to begin anticipating a new work that I'm going to do.
SPEAKER_00: God's promise through Isaiah gave ancient Israel hope as they contemplated their impending exile from the land of promise.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't provide them hope with through some kind of lesson that they had to learn in their pain.
SPEAKER_00: He gave them hope that would come from a new world order established by God's redeeming king.
SPEAKER_00: And God's prophetic promise, declaring that he would do a new thing, became a reality in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That inbreaking, if you will, of God's work to renew his world includes the work of recreating people.
SPEAKER_00: The Redeeming King has come and is conquering work to establish his rule on earth begins through recreation.
SPEAKER_00: And if I accidentally say recreation, you'll have to forgive me because I had a struggle with autocorrecting my computer.
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to do recreation into recreation, and I knew I would mess that up.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 17.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: The old has passed away.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, the new has come.
SPEAKER_00: Now look up at the screen at Isaiah 43.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see the parallel?
SPEAKER_00: The Apostle Paul is pointing back to saying, look, we knew this was coming.
SPEAKER_00: God is doing something new.
SPEAKER_00: This work by the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the King, the Messiah, recreates people.
SPEAKER_00: The old is gone, the new has come.
SPEAKER_00: No one can genuinely come to faith in Christ and remain unchanged.
SPEAKER_00: That is categorically impossible because Jesus takes broken image bearers and he remakes them into new beings.
SPEAKER_00: The old has passed away and it has been replaced by something new.
SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't mean we don't still struggle with sin.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes greatly.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean we are perfected.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean we don't take three steps forward and two steps back in our spiritual journey.
SPEAKER_00: It means that at the core of our beings we are recreated.
SPEAKER_00: So do you see now why our thinking must change when we come to faith in Christ?
SPEAKER_00: If our thinking, point number one, does not change, then it can really only indicate one of two realities.
SPEAKER_00: If we are new creations, but we don't think like new creations, then we are either still infants in Christ who have not made much progress in our growth, or we have not been recreated.
SPEAKER_00: The recreating work of Jesus begins on the inside with the heart, soul, and mind.
SPEAKER_00: We still live in frail, broken bodies that suffer in a fallen world because he has not completed his redemption of the world yet.
SPEAKER_00: But there's been an inbreaking of it.
SPEAKER_00: The king has begun to establish his rule through people that he has recreated to be his new image bearers.
SPEAKER_00: That means we start thinking and processing our world in a different way.
SPEAKER_00: We must consider Paul no longer as a murderer and a blasphemer, but as a brother in Christ, who carried on the sufferings of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus recreated Paul.
SPEAKER_00: So Paul's thinking, his processing, and his living began to change from the moment of his recreation.
SPEAKER_00: The old passed away, the new came.
SPEAKER_00: We gain the mind of Christ, and our lives then begin to demonstrate it.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes very minutely, sometimes at greater steps, sometimes by leaps and bounds.
SPEAKER_00: But we need to notice a few implications before we move on to the change in our status.
SPEAKER_00: And verse 17, notice the if.
SPEAKER_00: There's a what we call a condition there.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, there is a required identification in order to experience this recreating work.
SPEAKER_00: Those are not scare quotes, those are air quotes, because the text focuses on that.
SPEAKER_00: That means being in Christ means you belong to him.
SPEAKER_00: You have heard him calling to you in your spirit to believe in him and to trust him, coming to him for the forgiveness of your sins and dying with him to be raised to new life with him.
SPEAKER_00: Only those who are in Christ are recreated.
SPEAKER_00: This is the essence of so many warning passages to those who claim to be believers in the scriptures, but do not live like it.
SPEAKER_00: You can flip over to 2 Corinthians 13, verse 5, if you'd like.
SPEAKER_00: That's why the Apostle Paul will say to this same church, examine yourselves and test to see whether you are in the faith.
SPEAKER_00: Or do you not realize this about yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you unless indeed you fail to meet the test?
SPEAKER_00: So we need to understand the implication of if.
SPEAKER_00: It means there's a required identification to receive the new creation.
SPEAKER_00: But friends, it also implies that not everyone is a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: Remember the Lord's words on that final day?
SPEAKER_00: He says, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter into eternal glory with him.
SPEAKER_00: Genuine trust and genuine faith are interconnected with this recreating work.
SPEAKER_00: And genuine trust means that you embrace the reality that you are not your own, but that you have been bought with a price, and the love of Christ given to you now controls you.
SPEAKER_00: This creating work, friends, also proves the old statement quite true.
SPEAKER_00: That the ground is level at the foot of the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Small or great, strong or weak, wealthy or poor, everyone must look to the crucified Jesus in the same way.
SPEAKER_00: And it matters not who you are or where you are before that encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: If you've ever wondered if there might be a chance that God, the way to God might be accomplished through any other means, this passage destroys any other option.
SPEAKER_00: The only way to be reconciled and made right with God is through the recreating work of the Lord Jesus Christ by his death on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: It only matters what you do with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And that means our mission is still unfinished, does it not?
SPEAKER_00: Because there are those around us who are not yet in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: This mission of reconciliation, of restoring broken relationships was introduced into our world through sin.
SPEAKER_00: God made humanity to be in a perfect, continual relationship with him, to be his representatives, his image bearers.
SPEAKER_00: But sin ruined what God created.
SPEAKER_00: So the Redeemer King came so that his death and his resurrection, and through that, those who believe in him might die with him and be given new life through recreation.
SPEAKER_00: And so we are now united to him because of his love for us.
SPEAKER_00: This is where we see that Jesus changes our status.
SPEAKER_00: All this is from God, he says in verse 18.
SPEAKER_00: That's the divine viewpoint.
SPEAKER_00: And God determined that reconciliation, people being brought back into a right relationship with Him, would happen through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Sinful, unredeemed, unrecreated beings cannot be reconciled to a holy God without sin being addressed.
SPEAKER_00: The only way to be accepted by a righteous and absolutely holy God and to be able to stand before him without judgment is to be able to stand before him in a righteous state.
SPEAKER_00: There is no other way.
SPEAKER_00: And God has determined the means of bringing that about.
SPEAKER_00: All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself.
SPEAKER_00: Reconciliation is defined for us in verse 19.
SPEAKER_00: In Christ, God was reconciling, restoring the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00: So, what is reconciliation?
SPEAKER_00: Well, reconciliation establishes that there is a standard.
SPEAKER_00: And that trespass suddenly drives a wedge in what God has designed.
SPEAKER_00: That's what the scripture means when it says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: That trespass violated the character of a holy, sovereign God.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine, if you will, the most heinous thing that you have ever encountered in your life that just sickened you and angered you all at the same moment.
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a second.
SPEAKER_00: What was the most sickening and maddening, heinous thing that you ever experienced?
SPEAKER_00: Now multiply that feeling by infinity.
SPEAKER_00: And you have the anger and the wrath of a holy, absolutely holy God, offended by one sin.
SPEAKER_00: That violation required God to demand payment for that trespass.
SPEAKER_00: And payment will be made.
SPEAKER_00: It will be made.
SPEAKER_00: Either by you for eternity or by God's gracious provision.
SPEAKER_00: Through Christ's death, God's wrath against our sin was satisfied so that God can enter into a relationship with human beings once again, not in wrath against their sin, but in love as recreated beings made into the image of the Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00: And it's the sweetest work of God that you can experience.
SPEAKER_00: If you have not experienced the sweetness of God reconciling you to Himself, then you, my friend, may not fully grasp the horror of your sin and rebellion against the righteous and holy God.
SPEAKER_00: If you do not fully grasp the horror of your sin and rebellion, then you will not know the sweetness of God looking at you and saying, My child, my only begotten Son became sin for you, and now you have left off being a sinner, and now you stand in my presence with my righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Look at the text with me.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 21.
SPEAKER_00: For our sake, he, God the Father, made him, God the Son, to be sin who was sinless, he knew no sin.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: So that in him, in Christ, we might become as he is, the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_00: Don't let that opportunity to know that grace go by.
SPEAKER_00: Don't let it go.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you have experienced that sweetness of God's reconciling work, then you have been recreated as God's redeemed image-bearer in a broken world.
SPEAKER_00: You stand out like a sore thumb, as you were designed to be.
SPEAKER_00: You are his representative, taking his rule to those around you.
SPEAKER_00: You are his path of reconciling the world to himself.
SPEAKER_00: It's a change of status.
SPEAKER_00: Once his enemy, now welcomed at his table through the righteousness of his son.
SPEAKER_00: That means that grasping Christ's work on your behalf must change your focus in life.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we see at the end of this text.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus changes your focus.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 20, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, points back, right?
SPEAKER_00: Points back to God's reconciling work.
SPEAKER_00: Because God does this reconciling work through Jesus, we are now ambassadors of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Why would we be ambassadors of Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: Because we have received that reconciling work where Christ has become sin for us, and we now receive his righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: And so we are now reoriented to the essence of the Lord's satisfying work.
SPEAKER_00: He became sin who knew no sin.
SPEAKER_00: The sinless became sinner.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean he sinned.
SPEAKER_00: It means that in the sight of God the Father, Christ became in his essence your sin, my sin.
SPEAKER_00: So that on the cross he might be the sin that received the Father's wrath.
SPEAKER_00: All so that those who receive his recreating work might stand before the Holy God in the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: As recreated image bearers, we grasp this utterly merciful and gracious act more and more fully each day, overwhelmed more and more with thankfulness.
SPEAKER_00: And that change of focus looks like something very particular.
SPEAKER_00: If you are motivated by that thankfulness, you now are motivated to be a participant in God's reconciling work.
SPEAKER_00: That reconciling work may be with those who appear to be Christians.
SPEAKER_00: Or it may be with non-Christians.
SPEAKER_00: You see, Paul was concerned in verse 1 here of chapter 6 that the Corinthians may have received God's grace in vain.
SPEAKER_00: He looked at them and he said, listen, the way you're acting, the way you're thinking, it's possible that some of you may not really have received that recreating work.
SPEAKER_00: He's worried that Christ's new world order work had not genuinely impacted them.
SPEAKER_00: That's why we preach the gospel among Christians.
SPEAKER_00: But we must also recognize that we are God's means of taking his reconciling work to the world.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, verse 20.
SPEAKER_00: God making his appeal through us.
SPEAKER_00: We implore you.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 1, working together with him, we appeal to you.
SPEAKER_00: We recognize that this work must become our focus as we leave our gathering and go out into the world, for this is the day of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: What does this look like?
SPEAKER_00: Many of you are still struggling with the home going of Charlie Kirk.
SPEAKER_00: I would say to you, in your grief and shock, that Charlie lived out the reality of this passage.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus changed the way he thought because Christ recreated him.
SPEAKER_00: The old passed away, and the new came.
SPEAKER_00: Charlie Kirk experienced the sweetness of God's reconciling work, and he embraced the reality of his status change so that he needed to make an appeal to everyone to be reconciled to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: You don't need to agree with Charlie's politics or his methods to see that.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, his death is tragic in the way that he was taken out of this world, and we mourn and long for the fullness of our redemption, of the recreation of all that is.
SPEAKER_00: But it would be far more tragic had Jesus not first reconciled him to the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And so in that we can rejoice.
SPEAKER_00: For he, Charlie, and all who follow in Jesus have passed from death to life before they ever leave life in this world.
SPEAKER_00: The question before us becomes then: will we work together with Christ to appeal to others?
SPEAKER_00: For now is the day of salvation we might not have tomorrow.
SPEAKER_00: Will we give ourselves to the love of Christ for that love to control us and be God's ambassadors to a fallen world?
SPEAKER_00: The essence, friends, of Christian ministry is clear.
SPEAKER_00: All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00: It's a call for all of God's people to join Paul in the humble work of pointing to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus, we give you thanks for your work, for what you've done for us.
SPEAKER_00: May we never lose sight of it.
SPEAKER_00: We ask that by the work of your spirit you would humble us to be more and more like Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That we would be drawn to Him, molded to think like Him, to live like Him.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, give us boldness.
SPEAKER_00: Give us boldness and clarity as we go from this place today, to be ambassadors, to appeal to others to not receive the grace of God in vain.
SPEAKER_00: For all this is from you, to whom belongs all the praise and all the glory.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.
SPEAKER_01: Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.