Reconciliation and Identity: The Power of the Gospel

And then we were thinking earlier on with Dr. Scroll about the heinousness of our sins, and we very much felt the weight of that as Christian men and women, most of us leaders in the Christian church, and then Dr. Lawson was leading us and exhorting us and cheering us on to be faithful to the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ and never to dilute the gospel, to fear God more than we fear man, and to be faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. [00:01:19]

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. [00:05:19]

The apostle Paul is preaching it to Christians. He is, as B.B. Warfield once said about this passage, preaching the gospel into the church fellowship in Corinth as though he was standing outside at the street corner or in the marketplace at Corinth and preaching the gospel to pagans. And of course, the reason for that is, in a sense, I've already reflected, is because the apostle recognized that when anything goes wrong in the life of a Christian fellowship, and much was going wrong in the life of the Corinthian fellowship, at the very heart of that fellowship's need, at the very heart of an individual's need is to be brought back to the gospel of Jesus Christ. [00:08:36]

And in some ways, that rings a bell with modern people in a very obvious way because we live in a world of alienation. People are alienated from one another, husbands and wives alienated from one another, people at work alienated from one another, nations alienated from one another, and this very strange phenomenon of the last hundred years, people who realize they are alienated from themselves. But the apostle Paul is anxious to point out that while that is true, all of these alienations are but the fruit of a single alienation, our alienation from God. [00:12:08]

The word that Paul uses here for reconciliation is a word, a Greek word, that at its root conveys the idea of an exchange being made. We sometimes, if we're going overseas, we will exchange money. We will hand over a certain number of dollars, and we may get a certain number of British pounds or lira or euros or won if we are going further afield, and we understand what is involved. One thing takes the place of another. [00:13:46]

And the measure of his conviction of that comes out in his passion about it. He says to these Corinthians, we beg you, we beseech you, we appeal to you to be reconciled to God. You can sense the urgency of what he's saying, and that's a measure of the extent to which he feels this. But do you notice the little hints he drops as to why it is that we need reconciliation with God? [00:15:13]

And Paul says this is the great symptom of alienation from God because God has a burning passion for the glory of his Son, and if I have no passion at all for the glory of his Son, by definition, I am alienated from God. And in this way, he pulls the blinders off our eyes and the mask off our face and pulls the camouflage from off our hearts and says the truth of the matter is that he or she who bows not gladly before the throne of King Jesus is alienated now and potentially forever from the living God and stands in need of that situation being exchanged for another. [00:18:09]

And he sums it up, doesn't he, here in verse 19. He says here is the glorious message of reconciliation: God was not counting men's sins. Now imagine yourself back with your friend over coffee, and you say, have you ever considered this verse in the Bible? God was not counting men's sins, and I know what they will say to you. They will say, my dear friend, I've always believed that. Isn't that Christianity? That's what I've always believed. I've always believed in a God who doesn't count men's sins. [00:19:29]

It is a perfect statement of the exchange that lies at the heart of the gospel, isn't it? It's a perfect statement of the sheer wonder of the gospel. Indeed, the reformers used to refer to this, you know, as the wonderful exchange, mirafica commutatio, the wonderful exchange that God has made between sinners and the Lord Jesus Christ in which everything that is the sinner's is given over to Jesus Christ, and everything that Jesus Christ has done for the sinner is made over to the sinner. [00:21:23]

Therefore, he says, if anyone is in Christ, in the older versions that I learned as a young Christian, if any was, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, she is a new creation, or in the more modern versions, somewhat, I think, more accurately, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, or more literally, if anyone in Christ, new creation. You see, he's not just speaking about something that happens inside me to change me, although that's wonderfully true. [00:31:20]

And Paul suggests, of course, this is rooted in the fact that we've got a new view of Christ. We once regarded Christ, he says, according to the flesh, just simply horizontally, but now we see him thus, he says, no longer. We once lived for ourselves, but now, he says again, he says we know that he died for us, that those who live, verse 15, might no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. [00:37:39]

And as Paul has, as it were, opened up this whole message about reconciliation by saying upfront what it is that this reconciliation effects in a person's life, no longer living to please ourselves but to please Christ, you notice that in verse 10, he gives us a further explanation of this, for he says it's this important, it is this important, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive what is due for the things done in the body, whether good or bad. [00:43:20]