Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart. If we are “out of our mind,” as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. For he says,
“In the time of my favor I heard you,
and in the day of salvation I helped you.”
I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation. (
Paul’s Ministry: Persuasion
This section of Paul’s second letter to Corinth is all about ministry. Paul calls it the ministry of reconciliation. But Paul himself is not the reconciler. Paul tells us that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ. What an all-encompassing, universal statement! This statement assumes certain things stated elsewhere in Scripture, namely that God created human beings and human beings have fallen short of God’s perfect purpose. But God in his grace has done the reconciling to restore us to a perfect relationship with himself through his Son Jesus Christ, not counting our sins against us.
So, if Paul’s job is not that of reconciling, what is Paul’s ministry? He defines it in one word: persuasion. “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others.”
As we saw last week, Paul is living with the end in mind. He knows that we are all headed to judgment. With that end in mind, he wants to persuade as many people as possible to be reconciled to Christ.
You see, God has given us a perfect gift. He has given us his love, his forgiveness for our sins, and everlasting life, through the life, death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus. But that gift is not fully ours until we receive it. So, Paul saw his job as that of persuading people to receive the gift, to open it, and make it fully theirs. Every one of us has the opportunity to engage in this same kind of ministry.
Now, you may say, “But I am not a pastor,” or, “I am not an evangelist,” or, “I am not Paul.”
I understand. But you have opportunities to persuade others that Paul didn’t have, that I don’t have, and perhaps that no other person has.
You say, “Well what would make me want to be a Christian persuader?”
Ministry Motivation: The Love of Christ
The answer is: the love of Christ. That’s what motivated Paul to be a Christian persuader. He tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:14, “For the love of Christ compels us…”
Paul is not talking about our love for Christ or our love for others. He is speaking about Christ’s love for us. That is very important to grasp because our love for Christ runs sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and sometimes lukewarm. Furthermore, our love for people is variable as well. It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to love one another at times. However, Christ’s love for us, demonstrated in his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and present intercession at the right hand of God, is constant, complete, and continuing for all eternity.
What kind of love does Christ have for us? It is agape. It is the kind of love that is distinctively God’s love. Agape is contra-conditional. Christ loves us, not because of anything in us, but because it is his nature to love us. Agape is an “in spite of” kind of love. Christ loves us in spite of what we do, what we think, and who we are at times.
A little boy once asked his father after he was punished for some wrongdoing, “Dad, do you love me even when I’m bad?” That is the ultimate question is it not? Is there someone who loves us even when we do wrong? Is there a love that even reaches down into the pit of our self-centered, messed up lives, to rescue us? The answer in Jesus Christ is a resounding “Yes!”
I like the way C. S. Lewis described this love in his book, The Four Loves,
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing—or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
What does this love of Christ compel us to do? In short, I think the answer to that question is that the love of Christ compels us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to fulfill what Jesus said are the two great commandments:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:30-31)
Here we find ourselves at the very heart of Christianity. However, it is important that we keep these loves in their proper order. God’s love for us in Christ comes first, and that is what compels our love for him and for one another.
Ministry Scope: All People
How did Paul envision the scope of his ministry? He uses the word “all” three times in verses 14 and 15. “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”
This means that you have never and will never lock eyes with someone for whom Christ did not die. You have never and will never look in the eyes of someone whom Christ does not love. Our ministry in Christ needs to be open to all people without exception.
Ministry Effects: A New Creation
A fourth thing we see in this passage is what the ministry of reconciliation brings about. It brings about a new creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Here we have the best definition of a Christian. A Christian is an “in Christ” person. How do you get to be “in Christ”? All you have to do is ask. Ask the Father to place you in Christ and place Christ in you by the power of the Holy Spirit and he will do it.
Then, from the moment you are in Christ, you become a new creation. Everything from the past is gone. Your sin is gone. Your failure is gone. Everything that holds you back from being all that God created you and redeemed you to be is gone. And you have newness in Christ.
Don’t you love the feeling of getting new clothes? They make me feel like a new person—even though it is the same old me. I look a little better on the outside. I walk with a bit of a spring in my step.
How about when you get a new car? Don’t you love the smell? Don’t you love it when you haven’t eaten anything in your car yet, and there is no sand or dirt on the inside? The outside is sparkling, and the paint job is perfect—no dings. That’s a great feeling.
As great as those feelings are, becoming a new creation in Christ is even better. Now, in a sense, we become new creations in Christ at one particular moment. Therefore, it may seem as though we become old creations after a while. But that is not so. Because the Scripture tells us, “His mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness!” (Lamentations 3:22-23) Every day we can experience newness in Christ.
Ministry Title: Ambassador for Christ
If I have learned anything about what it takes to have a growing ministry, it is this: that every member of the church needs to see himself or herself as a minister. That is one reason why I prefer the title of “pastor” for what I do. And according to Ephesians 4, my job as a pastor is to equip you for ministry.
Maybe we ought to issue business cards for every member of the church with your names on them and the title: Minister.
Or here’s another idea… what about the title “Ambassador for Christ”. That is the title that Paul would give you.
A number of years ago, my friend Tim Hansel was speaking at a Billy Graham School of Evangelism. The first thing he said when he stood up to speak was, “What I am going to urge you all to do today, with all of my power, is to stop witnessing.”
Tim’s colleagues thought he had gone off his rocker. “Why is Tim talking about not witnessing at a Billy Graham School of Evangelism?”
Tim went on to point out that in the New Testament, witness is a noun, not a verb. Witness is something we are, not so much something we do.
Many years ago, Harvard did a study on communication. How many different ways do you think they discovered that human beings communicate non-verbally? They discovered 700,000 different ways that we communicate without words. That suggests to me that if I am trying to communicate Christ to my community only with words, then I am out-numbered by 700,000 to 1.
As St. Francis is reported to have said, “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”
God has placed in us the message of reconciliation. We not only have the message, we are the message. We can communicate the good news of Jesus not only through our words, but through our actions, through the many forms of nonverbal communication, through our very lives.
We are ambassadors of the King carrying a message to his rebel people. In the Roman Empire there were two different types of provinces. There were senatorial provinces and imperial provinces. Senatorial provinces were those areas which were peaceful, and which had submitted to the rule of Rome. Imperial provinces were those which had been taken over by Rome, but which were rebellious and not submitting to Roman rule. Ambassadors would be sent to these imperial provinces to maintain Roman rule and keep the peace.
In the same way, Paul tells us that those of us who are in Christ are ambassadors for an even higher king than Caesar. The King of kings and Lord of lords has commissioned us to carry a message of peace to his rebel subjects.
The tone of our message should be that of the Apostle Paul. It should have the accent of pleading, of urging. Paul said, “We entreat you on behalf of Christ.” William Barclay once wrote, “If we really wish to help and to save men our attitude must not be that of condemnation but that of pleading; our accent must not be that of criticism but of compassion.”
Ministry Message: A Great Exchange
What is our message as ambassadors? It is simple, yet profound. Paul summed it up this way, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Allow me to illustrate the message in this way…. Suppose you are the type of person who overdraws on your bank account. Further suppose that you have not simply overdrawn your account by writing one bad check but suppose that you have written a series of bad checks in rapid succession. Suppose that you have maxed out all your credit cards as well. All your expenditures total an astronomical amount. You’ve lost your mind. You’ve gone on a spending splurge, a buying binge. Not only were you not playing with a full deck, you didn’t even have a deck with which to play.
Now imagine that you wake up the morning after this spending splurge. It’s like waking up with a hangover. You realize you’ve done something wrong, but you are not quite sure you can trust your memory of recent events. Therefore, you go online to check your bank balance. When you do this, you find, to your utter amazement, that all the bad checks you recently wrote do not even appear on your account. In fact, these debts have been transferred to an account number you don’t even recognize, and which doesn’t belong to you. As if that were not enough, you look at your bank balance, and you find that within the last twenty-four hours over a billion dollars has been credited to your account.
In a state of hilarity and disbelief, you call up your bank and ask them what has happened. And the bank tells you that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, heard of your plight and decided to take your financial burden on himself. Furthermore, Mr. Bezos is the one who has placed a billion dollars in your account, with no strings attached.
That, in a very crude and materialistic fashion, gives us an illustration of what God did for us in Jesus. In Christ God has taken on and paid for all our sin and he has transferred into our spiritual bank account the riches of his righteousness.
Ministry Response: Now!
How are we to respond to such a grand exchange? Paul tells us how to respond. He says that all we have to do is receive God’s gift, his gracious exchange. John says the same thing in his Gospel. In John 1:12 we read, “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
That is all we have to do—believe and receive—and God will make us his children—he will make us “Christ in” and “in Christ” people.
When is the best time to respond to God’s gracious gift and receive it? There is only one answer… Now!
Paul quotes from Isaiah 49:8 …
“In the time of my favor I heard you,
and in the day of salvation I helped you.”
I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.
None of us know whether we will have any other opportunity other than this moment right now to respond to God’s grace. But we do have this moment. Let us believe and receive, and in turn God will make us his ministers of reconciliation…
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