Bible Passage: 2 Corinthians 5:14-21
Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: January 21, 2024

Bulletin January 21, 2024

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

Paul was nuts!  That’s what some people thought.  The miles he traveled around the northern Mediterranean countries, the zeal, the focus, the determination with which he proclaimed the kingdom of God, the sufferings he endured.  Who does that?  “He’s not right!”  That was the conclusion of some.  Paul addresses this in the verse before our text.  He wrote, If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God. (2 Corinthians 5:13)

What could explain Paul?  What made him “tick”?  Why did he do it?  Why would he walk, according to the information given us in the book of Acts about his travels, over 10,000 by foot just to tell people about Jesus?  I know!  It must have been guilt!  He felt such remorse for his past sins that he was driven to make amends.  No.  I know!  It was a sense of obligation.  This was “pay-back.”  He wanted to pay Jesus back for what Jesus had done.  No.  Why don’t we listen to Paul tell us what made him tick?  In our text he says, The love of Christ compels us. (2 Corinthians 5:14)  There you have it.  Just one thing explains Paul.  Love.  For Paul, for us, there is at work in our lives one, huge Compelling Love.

Paul calls it the love of Christ. (v. 14)  But that raises a question.  That can be understood in two ways, can’t it?  The love of Christ.  That could mean the love we have for Christ.  Or it could mean the love Christ has for us.  Which is it here?  That seems like an important distinction.  Paul helps us with what he says next.  We came to this conclusion:  One died for all. (v. 14)  Paul is talking about Christ’s love for us!  Paul is talking about the love of Jesus that led him to die on the cross for every person ever conceived on planet earth, past, present, and future.

This love of Christ for us compelled Paul to look at people in a new and different way.  He says, One died for all, therefore all died…As a result, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh. (v. 14, 16)  Paul couldn’t meet a person without thinking, “Jesus died for this man.  This woman.  This child.”  When Paul walked into a new city, Athens or Thessalonica or Corinth, he didn’t see status and station, plebeians and patricians.  That’s the “fleshy” stuff.  He saw souls for whom Jesus died.  And they needed to know this!

Friends, the love of Jesus compels us to see people differently.  And it starts with the person you see when you look in the mirror.  That person who looks back at you, that person who is so imperfect in so many ways, that person who is flawed in so many ways, that person who is broken in so many ways, that person who disappoints you in so many ways, that person who is conflicted in so many ways, that person who sins in so many ways, is loved by Christ Jesus.  Loved so much that he died for that person in the mirror!  Are you able to see yourself that way?  You are a person for whom Christ died!

Consider what else that compelling love of Jesus does!  He died for all, so that those who live would no longer live for themselves but for him who died in their place and was raised again…So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away.  The new has come! (v. 15)  That love of Jesus compels you to be different, to be new.  The old has passed away.  Something, someone has passed away.  There has been a death!  It’s you!   The love Jesus has for you kills you!  It kills the part of you that lives, that loves, to sin.  But the love of Jesus also creates.  It creates a new you that lives only to serve him.  You don’t wake every day and look at the person in the mirror and say, “There you are, you handsome devil!  What do YOU want to do today?”  You wake every day, and look to the risen Lord Jesus in heaven, “What do YOU want to do today?”

That love of Christ doesn’t begin and end with the person in the mirror.  The love of Christ compels us to see the people around us differently, too.  That’s hard to do, isn’t it?  It’s hard not to see people only according to the flesh (v. 16).   But the love of Jesus compels us to see them differently!  The love of Jesus compels you to see that coworker as more than just a person who does poor work and is always complaining about this-and-that.  The love of Jesus compels you to see your neighbor as so much more than just an irritant who lets his dog do his business on your lawn.  I am compelled by Jesus’ love to come to grips with this humbling, wonderful thought:  Jesus was thinking about my rude neighbor when he was hanging on the cross.  Jesus died for my co-worker!  Jesus died for my neighbor!  Somebody must let them know!

The love of Jesus compelled Paul to tell people.  That is why he writes as he does at the end of our text.  He reviews how God has made peace with this world – reconciled this world – to himself through Jesus.  He reviews the “great exchange” that God has worked in Jesus.  God made him who had no sin [that’s Jesus] to be sin for us, so that in Jesus we might become the righteousness of God (v. 21).  That exchange is true for every person.  Jesus became sin for you, and your coworker and your neighbor so that, in Jesus, we could become the righteousness of God.   Paul considered himself an ambassador of Christ to deliver that message to people.

Now, of course, Paul writes as an apostle.  He had a Christ-given, apostolic “ministry of reconciliation.”  None of us have that.  But we do possess the good news of God’s great exchange in Jesus.  We do have the good news of the peace treaty between heaven and earth signed and sealed in the blood of Christ.  We do have people around us who need to hear this good news.  And we have the compelling love of Jesus to get it done!

The world will always think we Christians are a bit “off.”  That we are nuts.  That we are “not right.”  That we “march to the beat of a different drummer.”  That’s okay.  It’s true!  The world will never understand us!  We are not driven or motivated by those things that drive and motivate the world.  We have something far better in our lives:  the compelling love of Christ!

Amen.