Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: A Vital Ministry (2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2)
Date: April 21, 2024
The U.S. Presidency is an incredibly powerful position. For starters, the President is the commander and chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen, and it’s not close. Then there’s the power to veto or sign legislation. That means the President gives the final thumbs up or thumbs down on the laws that govern our nation. And because I know there are constitutional scholars somewhere whose ears are tingling, yes, Congress can override a Presidential veto, and the Supreme Court can declare a particular law unconstitutional, but historically speaking that hasn’t happened very often when a President has signed or refused to sign a particular bill, turning it into a law. A bill is just a bill until it is signed by the President. That’s a lot of power.
But the President has even more power than that. The President is also tasked with staffing a huge number of the most highly consequential government positions. These are the people who do the kind of policy work that can set the country headed off in the direction the President wants it to go almost regardless of what Congress says or does. Well, of all of these different positions the President is tasked with filling so the government can run efficiently and well (stop rolling your eyes), most of these require someone in them who really knows their stuff and who will be able to lead effectively. One of these positions is the post of ambassador to various foreign nations where we have embassies. And while some ambassadorships are fairly politically insignificant and are often given to big donors as political favors, some of them rank among the most significant ones we have in terms of our foreign policy establishment. Ambassadors are pretty important people when it comes to how we get along with our neighbors both near and far. They are tasked with representing the interests of the United States in the foreign nations where they reside. When that ambassador speaks on official matters, it is as if the President himself has spoken. Within the context of their nation of service, their job is to make sure that the interests of this nation are achieved.
Well, the church is the body of Christ. But Jesus isn’t here physically anymore. He left the scene in that sense 40 days after His resurrection from the dead. But He is here spiritually and personally through the lives of His followers. Because He is not here physically, though, and because we are representing His interests as His body on earth, that makes us His ambassadors. An authentic church takes this role seriously.
This morning finds us in the second part of our new teaching series, Authentic Church. For the next few weeks and in conjunction with our Sunday school Bible study series, we are talking about what it is that makes a church an authentic church. The reason we are doing this is that there are all kinds of groups out there claiming to be churches. It is worthwhile to know before getting attached to this one or any of them whether or not we are dealing with an actual church or a social club or community service organization that does some religious activities on the side. Sometimes it can seem hard to tell the difference between one and the other. And yet when we survey the New Testament writings, it becomes clear that there are a few things that are so fundamentally a part of who God designed the church to be that we can say without these things, while you may have a bunch of people who love each other and their communities and even who share similar religious beliefs, you don’t have a church.
We started things off last week by talking about the church’s foundation with the guidance of the apostle Peter. It was his confession of Jesus’ divine identity that Jesus Himself said was going to be the bedrock of His gathering of people called out for the purposes of advancing God’s kingdom, that is, His church. The church is built on the foundation of Jesus. Everything in the church centers on Jesus. Because He is the center of everything we are and everything we do (when we are getting things right), that means we are the primary representatives of His interests on earth. We are His ambassadors. This, though, just raises an important question that I would like to explore with you as we continue our series this morning: What is Jesus’ primary interest?
Well, through the example of Jesus’ own life and ministry, His sacrificial death and resurrection, and His final command as recorded at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, it is as clear as it could be that Jesus’ primary interest was seeing people get into a right relationship with God. Make the connection. If that’s Jesus’ primary interest, then if we are indeed to be His ambassadors on earth, there would seem to be a pretty good case to be made that it should be our primary interest as well. To put that a bit more directly, our primary interest as a church should be getting people into a right relationship with God in Christ. Or perhaps to put that even more simply: Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. This is something authentic churches do.
The two words that best capture this emphasis are evangelism and discipleship. You’d be hard pressed to find two more terrifying or confusing words for followers of Jesus today. When the topic of evangelism comes up we normally head for the hills or else hunker down to endure the guilt trip for not being a “good Christian” we know is coming. And when it comes to discipleship, most of us don’t honestly even really know what that means. These ideas, though, are not nearly as scary as they sound. They’re just big words for telling people about Jesus and helping them to grow in a relationship with Him. In other words, they are simply part of our being His ambassadors on earth. Which is the job of every authentic church. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
Well, while there are several places in the Scriptures that address these two issues, something the apostle Paul wrote in his second letter to the believers in the ancient Greek city of Corinth speaks to the matter at hand in a way that really simplifies just what exactly it is we are to be doing here. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way over to 2 Corinthians 5 with me so we can take a look at this together.
If Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian believers is a hammer, this one is more of a feather. That doesn’t mean Paul’s words here aren’t as important or as challenging as what he writes in the first letter. Rather, that just means that having addressed most of the really challenging issues the church there was facing, Paul was able to focus on somewhat gentler themes such as the hope and help of the Gospel. In 2 Corinthians 5, the apostle starts with a reflection on the hope we have in a life after this one is over. This is a faith-based hope, make no mistake about it, but it is a faith rooted in the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and so it is an entirely reasonable faith. If Jesus rose from the dead, demonstrating conclusively that there is life after this one, then we can indeed have hope in that new life. But this life isn’t for everybody. It’s only for those who are willing to put their faith in Him. Everyone else will face the great accounting coming at the end of history on their own. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:10: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may be repaid for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.”
This kind of news is not something that we should keep to ourselves. In fact, it is something we should actively try to persuade others regarding its truthfulness. If there really is a life after this one, but if that life really is only for those who are willing to embrace it, and if it is the judgment of God mitigated only by our faith in Christ that determines who gets access to that life and who doesn’t, then the world needs to know about this. Thus v. 11: “Therefore, since we know the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade people.” And again in v. 14: “For the love of Christ compels us, since we have reached this conclusion: If one died for all, then all died. And he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for the one who died for them and was raised.”
This is pretty weighty stuff, and it speaks right to this job we have as followers of Jesus. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. In the next several verses, Paul goes on to talk more about this job and just what it means. Take a look at this with me starting in v. 16: “From now on, then, we do not know anyone from a worldly perspective. Even if we have known Christ from a worldly perspective, yet now we no longer know him in this way.” This is one of those verses that makes you go, “Huh?” when you first read it. All Paul is talking about here, though, is that if Jesus really did rise from the dead, and if we really do have this hope in a life after this one, that knowledge should frame out our thinking on the people around us. We don’t look at anyone as “merely” a person. We look at them as either someone who has embraced the life of Christ and is thus a brother or sister in the broader family of faith, or else as someone who has not yet done so and is therefore someone we should pursue with love and gentle persuasion in order to help them see that and why embracing the offer of life in Jesus is something worth their time. In other words, we are to act as ambassadors of God’s kingdom, following His command to invite as many people to be a part of it as we possibly can. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
The next thing Paul says helps to highlight why this new way of thinking is so important. When someone is in Christ, she is not the same person as she was before. Because of that, we can’t think about her in the same way anymore. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!”
This idea of a person being a new creation in Christ reminds us that this God who is making us new now is the same God who created the world and everything in it in the first place. He is a creator God. Creating new things is what He does. When we were stuck in our old ways because of sin, He initiated the process of our being able to be right with Him in Christ. Look at v. 18 now: “Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” Paul here is talking about the work God does in our lives, not outlining some new ministry venture we are supposed to be taking on. That’s what he goes on to explain next: “That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their tresspasses against them…” Now, there’s a whole lot of theological assumptions built into this idea, but riding on those for a second, don’t miss how amazing this first part of v. 19 is. God was looking to make His relationship with every single person in the world right again. That’s why He sent Jesus. Through Jesus, God counts our tresspasses (which is just a fancy word for sin) against Jesus, not us. That’s ridiculously unfair, but it does satisfy God’s justice. Jesus laid down His life to pay that price so we don’t have to. These are pretty foundational Gospel truths here.
The second part of v. 19 now is where things really start to get interesting for us. God did all of this reconciliation work on our behalf in Christ, “and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us.” That is, He did the ministry, and He gave us the message. The work is all His, but the PR work is for us to do. We are the ones who are supposed to tell everybody else what He did. Or, to put that as we already have, our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
And so what does this make us? It makes us ambassadors just like we have been saying. Stay with me in the text here: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.” Do you feel the weight of that verse? Put things together here and you will if you don’t already. God was (and is) looking to make right His relationship with everyone. He didn’t have to do this since He wasn’t the one to break the relationship in the first place, but He’s just that kind of God. This work was accomplished through Jesus. Through Jesus, anyone and everyone can be in a right relationship with Him. To borrow a line from the MercyMe song, that’s the best news ever. And how does God plan to get this news out to the masses so they can hear it and respond? “God is making his appeal through us.” He’s doing it through you and me. He’s doing it through His church. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. Authentic churches are marked by their giving great priority to helping people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
Now, is God limited to us? Nope. Not at all. But He consistently uses us. Even when the work doesn’t start with us, He still uses us. I heard the story the other day about a Muslim woman in Egypt who did not know any Christians and had never heard the Gospel. One day she had a dream in which she went on a walk with Jesus and another man. When she asked Jesus if He would help her learn more about Him, He told her that it wasn’t time for that yet, but that she needed to talk to the man walking with them. The trouble was, she had never seen this man before in her life. A few days later, she was walking through the local market when suddenly she saw the very man from her dream. She rushed over to him and told him he was supposed to tell her about Jesus which caught him rather dramatically by surprise. But as it turns out, the man was a missionary. He told her that he had had a dream in which Jesus told him he needed to go to the market that day because a woman was going to ask him to tell her more about Him. That work didn’t start with this missionary, but God made His ultimate appeal through him.
God consistently does His work through us. As a result, “We plead on Christ’s behalf: ‘Be reconciled to God.’” We do everything we can to help the people around us who don’t yet know the life in Christ come to know and understand the truth: That God loves them so much He was willing to lay down His only Son’s life so that if they are only willing to put their trust in Him, they can be made right with Him and enjoy eternal life when this one is over. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. We do this because “He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” And this idea of our becoming the righteousness of God doesn’t just mean we become right with God in Jesus. We become the righteousness of God. That is, we become the means by which other people can get and grow in a right relationship with Him. This doesn’t mean we save anybody, but rather that we point them to the one who can save them. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
Right at the end of the passage here, which actually gets grouped with the next chapter, Paul does something interesting. He’s spent a whole bunch of time now telling these believers about what is arguably their primary job as followers of Jesus. They were to be God’s ambassadors, persuading people to enter into His kingdom from out of the kingdom of the world through the life-saving work of Jesus on the cross. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. Here at the end, though, Paul comes back around to talk to his audience about themselves. Don’t miss this. “Working together with him, we also appeal to you.” Got that? Again, he’s talking to his audience directly and through them to us. “Don’t receive the grace of God in vain.” Paul continues in v. 2: “For he says: ‘At an acceptable time I listened to you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.’ See, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!”
How could you receive the grace of God in vain? By receiving it and then not living in light of it. By professing to follow Jesus and then not actually follow Him. By signing up to be part of the kingdom of God, and then not doing the work of His kingdom, but instead of some other kingdom which is really nothing more than one variation or another of the kingdom of this world. We receive the grace of God in vain when we look at people through a worldly lens rather than heavenly one. And one of the ways this plays out is that we consider them as unreachable in their unbelief and leave them there rather than doing everything we can—pleading with them, Paul said—to embrace the life that is truly life. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
Wait, wait, wait! So, does this mean that if we don’t actively tell everyone around us about Jesus then we’re not really saved? Not even close. That would be untrue. It does mean, though, that for a church to ignore the fundamental tasks of evangelism and discipleship is a mark of inauthenticity. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. There are a lot of other things the church does and should do. But there aren’t any that are more important than that. If we are going to be an authentic church, then we have to get that much right.
Okay, so how do we do it? Let’s start with the “grow” part of our job, and then we’ll work backwards from there. Growing happens in a few different ways. It starts with our own commitment to be growing ourselves. I’ve been talking about this idea a lot lately, and I’m going to set it before you again this morning. There are three primary things you need to be doing if you actually want to grow in your faith. If you’re not really interested in that, then you don’t have to worry about this. If that is of interest, you should probably write these down. You need to be engaging regularly and intentionally with God through the Scriptures. You need to be engaging regularly and intentionally with God through prayer. And you need to be engaging regularly and intentionally with God through the church. If you do those three things consistently, you will grow. If you don’t, you won’t. It really is that simple.
Your growth, though, is never just for you as far as God is concerned. You need to be pouring that growth into someone else. After all, our job is to help people—that is, people other than us—get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. For some of you, you are in a place where you need to be actively pouring from your cup into someone else’s cup. I can help talk you through what that looks like when you are ready to do it. For now, you need to be praying very specifically for God to put someone on your heart and mind who should be this person for you. This also happens in larger groups, but smaller than this gathering. That means all of us need to be in a smaller learning group on a regular and consistent basis. Many of you are already there, but some of you need to finally take that leap. Others of you are already there, but you really need to be leading your own group. I want you to be praying whether God is calling you to this important work. I can tell you that for some of you He is. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus.
As for that getting part, you need to be sharing your faith with somebody who doesn’t share it. For many of you, you don’t even have to leave your house to do this. Prayerfully seek out ways to have spiritual conversations with that person in your house who doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus. You don’t have to be pushy. You definitely don’t need to be rude or demeaning. But you should be doing this when the opportunity arises. For others of you, this might mean meeting your neighbors. There’s a decent chance they don’t know Jesus and they need to. It could be that your person is someone at work. You need to be sharing the Gospel at work. This has to be done carefully and respectfully, but having those spiritual conversations can literally make an eternal, life or death difference in another person’s life. After all, you are an ambassador of a kingdom that is not of this world, and your King has commanded you to make disciples of everyone in order to grow His kingdom. In coming months, we will talk through some specific ways to do this in order to help you feel more equipped for the task God has called you to as a member of His kingdom. Our job is to help people get and grow in a right relationship with God through Jesus. Getting that right is part of what makes us an authentic church.