Book: 2 Corinthians

Four Distinct Marks of a Baked Dirt Ambassador for Christ, Part 2

In this sermon, Pastor Joe Babij continues examining Paul’s teaching regarding what it means to be an ambassador for Christ in 2 Corinthians 5:11-21. In part 2, Pastor Babij gives the second two of four distinguishing marks of baked dirt ambassadors for Christ. Believers, in order to carry out their ambassadorship from God with confidence and zeal, need not only to understand these marks but also to examine themselves and make necessary adjustments.

Mark 1: Their Disposition (vv. 11-15)

Mark 2: Their Work (vv. 17-18)

Mark 3: Their Message (vv. 19-20)
3a. The Person of the Message: Jesus Christ
3b. The Target of the Message: The World
3c. The Reason for the Message: Sin, Transgression, and Judgment
3d. The Messengers of the Message: Christians
3e. The Earnest of the Message: Urgency

Mark 4: Their Objective Hope (v. 21)

Full Transcript:

This morning we’re looking at 2 Corinthians again. As we look at this passage of Scripture, I ask why were you born now at this time? Well the answer is in 2 Corinthians 5:20; you were left here to be an ambassador for Christ, if you are a believer of course. The verse says:

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

I want you to get in your mind to live out your ambassadorship with confidence while you are here. Ambassadors do not come with their own agenda or with their own authority. We are as aliens to this world and have been called to live in it at this time and to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to a world we know is steeped in spiritual darkness. What do people need more than anything in this life? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The one and only institution that God has called to mandate this message to the world is the Church.

We’ve been called out of darkness into light and the Kingdom of God and because of that we are followers of Jesus Christ and have been entrusted as followers with the message of salvation by grace alone, in Christ alone, and using the Scripture alone. So today let’s continue to note the four distinctive marks of a baked dirt ambassador for Christ. Now of course that baked dirt phrase may throw you off a bit. But if you turn back to 2 Corinthians 4:7, it says this:

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves.

The earthen vessels are us! We are the baked dirt and clay pots. We’re weak and vulnerable and we need God’s power to live the Christian life and to live for Christ. We need His power because we cannot do this on our own, especially as ambassadors in a world that is not welcoming to us. God knows we’re here and weak and He has given us everything to be what we ought to be. So let’s apply this to our own life, evaluate it, and make adjustments as needed. Then we can live out our ambassadorship with confidence and holy zeal.

So just by way of review, the first distinctive mark of a baked dirt ambassador of Christ is disposition, constant integrity, genuine humility, a deep thankfulness for Christ’s love which moves a believer into a new sphere in which they no longer live for themselves. Secondly the love of Christ moves a believer to a place where they no longer look at people in a fleshly way. And the love of Christ moves the believer to a place where they no longer look at Christ in a fleshly way. Christ is now their Lord, Master, and Redeemer. We come to love Him because of what He has done for us. Of course the love of Christ moves us to a place where all these things are becoming new.

So as believers in Christ Jesus, we are ambassadors for Him to bring the gospel to a lost and dying world and the best disposition this message flows through, is one through a constant integrity, a genuine humility, and a deep thankfulness for the love of Christ. The second distinct mark of a baked dirt ambassador is their work. The source of the new creation in 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says:

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

The source of this new creation is God, who brought us into the world and made us believers. Secondly, the source of this new work is God, just look at 2 Corinthians 5:18:

Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

So the source of the work is God, the bestower of the work is God. All the work has been done by God Himself and our Lord, whom we love, has given us the mission as ambassadors to carry out His unfinished business in this world. This business is basically in the form of a message which brings us to a third distinctive mark of an ambassador in Christ and it is the message. They do not preach their own message, but one from God. It is a message that once received, we are to stand in and stay in for the rest of our lives.

Be sure of this, a baked dirt ambassador for Christ must believe the message of Jesus Christ themselves and then they must hold fast to it. You can’t be an ambassador in a foreign nation and not understand why you’re there or the message you’re going to communicate. So what is the gospel? It means good news. What is that? Then you have to ask yourself if you really believe it. Do you live and act according to your belief?

Do you have a life transforming faith? Is Jesus Christ your Redeemer, your Substitute, your Sacrifice, your Lord, your God? Or is He just an add-on to everything else in your life? Some people think they have everything else, they might as well have Jesus too. Are you a true possessor of Jesus Christ or a false professor? Have you received Jesus as your Lord and Savior and have the faith works to prove it? Or have you been the kind of person who comes to church and listens to the word preached over and over again but you do not act upon anything that you have heard?

Now these are very probing, convicting, sobering questions but they need to be asked and more than once throughout our lives. Scripture warns us that there is a faith that does not save. The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as false faith or believing in vain. I read an intriguing story by Pastor D James Kennedy that I thought illustrated well the seriousness of true salvation.

The story happened many years ago in Eastern Soviet Union in a small rural church. The people had come together on a Sunday morning and were engaging in worshipping Christ. They had just finished singing a hymn and they were seated and suddenly, there was a loud crash. Somebody kicked the front door and two soviet soldiers in uniform carrying machine guns stomped down the aisle and faced the congregation.

They said, “You filthy Christians, you are a disgrace to our glorious Soviet Union and we have come today to see that you live no longer.” They pulled the bolts on their machine guns and the congregation was sitting frozen and wide-eyed in their seats when a soldier said, “Some of you may not really believe this stuff, so you have a few minutes to decide. In fact you have exactly one minute to do so.” There was complete silence and then a shuffle of feet until finally a large number of people were scrambling out of the pews and down the aisle, falling down over one another in a desperate attempt to get out the door before the minute was up, about 40% of the congregation was fleeing across the country side for their lives.

One of the soldiers walked up to the door, slammed it, closed it and came back in front of the church. He said to the people who were silent and praying feverishly, “Brethren, we too are Christians and we have come to worship. But first, we had to get rid of those who didn’t believe.” Now of course that is an extreme situation and you wonder how you would react and what group you would be in.

That’s how serious it is to be a Christian. Yes, the gospel must be believed and it must be lived out every day. This is the only message that saves and reconciles people to God. It’s the only one! There are not many, just one. That makes the world mad because they don’t want just one way. So the third distinctive mark of a baked dirt ambassador for Christ is their message.

These are ministers of a message with far-reaching effects in which God is doing this work. He brings reconciliation and pardon to sin to a world of people from every tribe and every nation. There are five essentials to the message found in our passage in 2 Corinthians 5. The person of the message is Christ. This is what it says in 2 Corinthians 5:19:

Namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

The person of the message is Jesus Christ, not just the generic name of God. The One who was sent into the world as the perfect man who became obedient to the Father to the point of death and dying in the place of sinners. This becomes the first essential part of the gospel, in that it always starts with God and His character. God was reconciling through Christ and doing it in Christ. The whole reconciling process takes place in Him. Ambassadors cannot fudge or fiddle around with or side step Jesus Christ as being the essential figure of the message.

This great plan of redemption always centers in on the Lord Jesus Christ. As Paul said in Ephesians 1:10:

Summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.

That means the plan, the purpose, the way of redemption are always in Christ. If someone adds to or takes away from the message, it is no longer the gospel but some other message. So there’s an exclusiveness about who we are presenting in the gospel message. The person of Jesus Christ is the first essential. The second essential the world, which is also in 2 Corinthians 5:19:

Reconciling the world to Himself.

Don’t let the term the world trip you up, because it means the world of people, but not every person. It means the world of the Jews, Gentiles, rich, poor, pagan, barbarian, and people of all skin colors. God gives us a love for all groups of people. That’s not normal or in our flesh. We can’t do that without Him. They may look and speak differently, eat and get dressed differently, yet the have the same problem of needing reconciliation like everyone else.

Just for your information, concerning what’s happening today with the critical race theory and subjects that go with that, I want to share some things. There was a new book out called Christianity and Wokeness by Owen Strachan, that is praised by people like Voddie Baucham, Wayne Grudem, Steve Lawson, Ken Ham, Paul Washer, C.J. Mahaney, Rick Holland. John MacArthur writes the forward to the book and he says, “Wherever CRT is introduced, it deliberately provokes and feeds on disunity. It intensifies ethnic hostility, promotes crass identity politics, imputes guilt or victimhood to people according to their skin color.”

He went on to say that "Divisive effects of such a worldview are now obvious. CRT has not helped much less healed social strife and ethnic division. It has made those problems exponentially worse. Perceptive people have noticed.” See the world is not going to produce unity through their ideologies. They are quaint little information bits that go out and saturate people’s minds until they believe it but they don’t understand what it is.

Just for your information, God has provided our skin with millions of tiny umbrellas that protect us from the sun’s damaging visible and invisible rays. The umbrellas in our skin is darkly colored and it is called melanin. It is typically black or brown and is primarily responsible for the pigment in our skin color. Recently I visited the Ark in Kentucky and Ken Ham was giving a seminar and said that there are no white people. Human skin is never truly white.

Though some people have less melanin than others, surprisingly all humans regardless of shade or color of skin have approximately the same color of melanocytes per square inch of skin. Some people have darker skin than others, not because they have more melanocytes but because they retain a greater amount of melanin after the cells are no longer able to divide. So people with lighter skin break down most of their melanin so in reality, we human beings are different shades of brown.

I say this for this reason: that is not an issue with God and it should not be an issue with Christians! The issue we should have at all times is not to think of people in terms of race but in terms of people groups who have different cultures. In these groups, people have different shades of brown skin color. Remember, we are all offspring of Noah and his family: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

So we should think of people in the spiritual as saved or lost. If they are saved, they are in Christ period. And if they are lost, they are darkness and in bondage to sin, alienated from the life of God and under God’s wrath. People who are in desperate need of a word from God, which is what we should give them. So the term world specifically embraces those who repent and take advantage of the gospel of Jesus Christ and who are reconciled to God. The gospel is to be given to the whole world and God saves some. So you see, the target message is to the world.

If the ambassador has a problem going to a certain group, they should not be an ambassador but go home and deal with their issues. An ambassador cannot look at appearances but at the eternity and soul of a person. We are all in the same boat of being sinners. That brings us to the third reason for the message which is transgression or trespass. Look at what it says in 2 Corinthians 5:19:

Not counting their trespasses against them.

So clearly it indicates in our passage that sin is the problem! As it is recorded in Isaiah the prophet where it says in Isaiah 59:2:

But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.

The gospel message must include the problem of the human heart and that is that we are sinners, rebels, enemies of God. Sin is the cause of alienation of people from God. Pursuing one’s bent to sin usually starts out as a search for freedom and happiness but ends up in slavery, fear, and remaining under God’s wrath. Because of people’s transgressions and sins, they are in trouble with God. Transgression means the result of falling off the side, away from the right road, and going where one is forbidden to go. It was transgression that caused God to drive out our first parents from the Garden of Eden and away from His presence. There has been a barrier between Him and man ever since.

So here in our passage, it says to not count their trespass against them. This word trespass has the idea of glossing over a boundary of right and entering the forbidden land of the evil wrongdoing and crooked living. We’ve all done it and that is where we lived before. We were fine doing it and loved our sin. Our passions and desires drove us and and our actions. We made the necessary adjustments on how to define all that, and yet we did not know we were under God’s wrath and judgment and heading for hell.

You have heard the quaint saying that God loves the sinner and hates the sin. Well this is totally wrong, God does not view a sinner apart from his sins. God’s wrath is upon the sin and the person responsible for them. Psalm 7:11 says:

God is a just judge, and God is angry with the wicked every day.

When people hear the message of Christ, repent, and are reconciled to God through Christ, God no longer charges their sin against them. That is what they are saying and that is the goal of an ambassador who doesn’t want the sins of people counted against them anymore but wants them washed away. The can only be washed away by the blood and death of Christ in their place. See God no longer charges their sin against them as the passage said not counting their trespasses against them.

That is a blessed place to be, when you know your sins are not counted against you ever again. Your slate is clean because of the blood of Christ. Do you realize the freedom and peace you have when that takes place? That is how you can be bold as a messenger, because you understand the message and love the one who gave you the message and died in your place. And you know there is no longer any condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. That’s what an ambassador desires and where his or her focus is.

So the person of the message is Christ, the target of the message is the world, and the reason for the message is sin and transgression and judgment. A fourth essential is the messenger of the message. Look at what it says in 2 Corinthians 5:19-20:

He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

The word ambassador could mean representative on behalf of someone. It is also connected to the word presbas, which also means old man. Old men were often sent but the king or emperor to represent the kingdom. They understood that old men knew the difficulties and tensions that could come up with different countries. In some respects, ambassadors need some maturity and experience. It should be an admonition for us to grow knowledge and wisdom of Jesus Christ so we represent Him well in our lives.

The Apostle Paul and us as the Church are a priesthood of the believers and have been given this ministry. You can’t say it is not your ministry, because we are all ambassadors for Christ’s Kingdom. We are given the ministry of reconciliation and are His mouth pieces. We make an appeal to sinful humanity as if God Himself was making an appeal through us, which is to be reconciled to God.

That brings me to a fifth essential of the message which is the earnestness of this message. Notice what it says in 2 Corinthians 5:20:

We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Sometimes the message is there, but the urgency to tell it is not. It’s not a ho-hum message, brethren.We can’t make this grave mistake because the message must be accompanied by a strong sense of importance and urgency. If you look at 2 Corinthians 5:20, there is a sense of pressure where the people are urged, implored, pleaded with, entreated, and begged for a specific response. What is that thing? It is the command to be reconciled to God.

This command further expresses an urgency and it is an imperative to get reconciled to God and do it now! Take advantage of the peace terms of the gospel and do it now! We keep begging for Christ, which also has to be done on our knees in prayer that God would save our family and children and coworkers.

This urging continues in our context because the apostle wants the hearers to have a proper reception of the urgent message. Look at 2 Corinthians 6:1:

And working together with Him, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain.

This term vain means for nothing or without reason or without proper consideration. In other words it means receiving an urgent message that brings reconciliation with God in a superficial manner. By definition, superficial means “of or being on the surface” and here it means a surface faith that lacks depth and results in a hasty consideration. It means something without pausing to note the details of it. A great example of a superficial response to the gospel is pictured in the parable of the sower where the seed falls on the shallow, rock based soil. The shallow soil is the picture of the heart like Matthew 13:20-21 which says:

The one sown with seed on the rocky places, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no firm root in himself, but is only temporary, and when affliction or persecution occurs because of the word, immediately he falls away.

The soils in the parable of the sower represent the heart of man and how various people receive the Word of God. The heart of the hearer is the spiritual equivalent of the soil like receiving the farmer’s seed to the soil. There is nothing wrong with the sower or the seed. The problem is the condition of the heart! The soil that is not properly prepared will never bear a crop. The important points of the spiritual lesson in this parable is that a person’s response to the gospel depends primarily on the preparation of a person’s heart. A superficial response is a person who receives the Word without fully acting upon it.

Their response is enthusiastic but lacking any thought or counting the cost of following Christ. He is happy to hear the Word of God but his commitment to Christ is superficial. In other words, he has non-saving faith. There is no true repentance from sin, no brokenness over sin, or following Christ for the rest of their lives. So when trouble, persecution, and trials arise or a sacrifice must be paid, they abandon the faith. They have no root to support growth or to endure harsh weather or to bear any fruit at all. Instead they wither away.

Paul was very concerned that people would not receive the grace of God in vain without thinking of the implications for themselves. If they reject this message, where will they go since there is no other message? If they do receive the message, how serious are they in receiving it? Will they repent of their sin and turn from what they were trusting in to save themselves in order to believe in Christ? The Apostle Paul brought the same concern up in 1 Corinthians 15:1-2:

Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.

Then there are no results to your profession of faith. God wants us to make sure we are believers, the real stuff! If they hold fast to the gospel, then that’s what He wants them to do. Of course in 1 Corinthians 15, the problem is that some of them weren’t holding fast to the gospel because they weren’t believing in the resurrection. If you don’t believe in that, you can’t be saved.

You can’t pick and choose what you believe about the gospel. Another translation records it like this in 1 Corinthians 15:1-2:

It is this good news that saves you if you firmly believe it, unless of course you believe something that was never true in the first place.

Unless the basis of your faith was inadequate and excessed without due thought, and in that case it would be a non-saving faith and you’d be believing a false gospel. The old Puritan Matthew Henry wrote: “We believe in vain unless we are continuing and persevere in the faith of the gospel.” It’s not just the initial believing but the rest of your life!

You can say that you believed Jesus ten years ago but don’t do anything about it now or read your Bible or go to church, etc. People can believe simple facts about the gospel and not be saved because there is no real depth in their souls to commit themselves to Christ forever through repentance. Brethren, can you give an enthusiastic yes to the fact that you came to believe in Jesus Christ and that the blessed effects of salvation continue to be evident and present every day in your life? Biblical faith demands and produces costly and radical changes in one’s life. It’s essence is really supreme commitment to Christ.

In our passage, don’t take too long to believe in Christ because it says in 2 Corinthians 6:2:

For he said, “I have answered you in an acceptable time and in the day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold, now is the acceptable time, and behold, now is the day of salvation.

So you always stand at the edge of eternity, never knowing how much time you have left so you need to trust Christ now! Today believe the gospel message, repent of your sins, and transfer your trust to Jesus Christ. By a simple transfer of trust from what you could do to earn eternal life to what Christ has done. It doesn’t matter at all what you have done.

That’s when you receive the free gift of eternal life offered from Jesus Christ. We can’t buy it or offer God anything for it. We can’t turn over our own new leaves but instead just need to come to God with all the sin and baggage and junk. Bring it all to Christ and ask Him to save you. You know what happens? Jesus says that if you come to Him like that, He will no wise cast you out because that is exactly why He came.

So this is an ambassador’s urgent message. As he bears it to people from God, it’s not easy. It is not a friendly message or a seeker sensitive or politically correct message. It is not a culturally woke message. It isn’t a rosy perfect world where Jesus gives you whatever you want. It is hard to believe, which is why you need divine intervention to override everything so you see and are made alive to trust and believe in Him.

So becoming a Christian means becoming sick of your sin and longing for forgiveness and rescue from present evil and future hell. It means affirming your commitment to the Lordship of Christ to the point where you are willing to forsake everything to follow Christ. That’s when you really think about it. There is a cost to being a Christian. This means as baked dirt ambassadors, there are somethings we cannot do.

We cannot retreat and surrender in cowardice. We cannot tamper with the message or manipulate people to get the desired results. Someone offering the gospel wrongly may say things like this, “If you want a better life, marriage, job, financial situation, etc. come to Christ.” That is not the gospel but instead is psychological mumbo jumbo. People will flock to that and will fill stadiums with that message.

You may come to Christ and lose all that but if you are truly a believer and a follower of Christ, you will never lose your soul. You may lose your life and you may lose other things but you will never lose your soul. Plus God, by the Holy Spirit, will transform your mind and your heart so that you will know and want the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. So we need to tell the gospel as ambassadors a hundred percent the way it is. Let it fly! We cannot tamper with the gospel and make it less offensive. We cannot do that because changing the message is useless since no one can believe unless God grants him understanding through the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

It was Johnny Mac who said, “If they don’t hear the truth, cool music won’t help. If they don’t see the light, powerpoint won’t help. If they don’t like the message, drama and video won’t help. The problem is their heart. Not the seed of the Word of God since there is nothing wrong with the message as is. The problem is sin because sinners are blind and dead and they need divine intervention in order to be saved. This comes by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So we must beg and pray for them to repent and submit to Christ Jesus as Savior and Lord. It is a supernatural message, this message of everlasting life which never changes no matter when anybody has every lived. Once we’re gone, the message won’t change. People have refused the messenger and can send that messenger away. For whatever reason, they break off relations with the Kingdom of God, which you represent. They break off relations with Christ Himself. Why is all that important for the ambassador that people’s eternal soul are at stake?

Quickly the last distinctive mark of a baked dirt ambassador for Christ is their objective hope. Look at 2 Corinthians 5:21:

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

This is what God has done for us! It does not say that God made Jesus a sinner. What He did was lay on Jesus the iniquity of us all and that is by charging all, that is sin in us, against Him. The Father let Jesus bear all this burden with all its guilt and penalty in our place in order to deliver us. What happens when that takes place? It says in the passage that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Sinners become righteous before God!

This righteousness is not our own, because we don’t have any of our own. But it is a righteousness reckoned to us by God the moment we exercise faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The death of the sinless one enables God to declare us just. He says that “He is one of mine and his price has been paid already! He can come into My Kingdom.” He makes it possible to for God to set aside His wrath and welcome into a state of peace all who turn in repentance to Him. It’s like what Paul says in Philippians 3:9:

Being found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.

What is the mission of a baked dirt ambassador of Christ? It is difficult, serious, and an extremely important one. It is a difficult yet doable task that we have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not ourselves. No one can take the credit. It is our job to make sure these marks are in our lives. They are marks of a disposition that God can use us as ambassadors.

They are the marks knowing that the work God gives us comes from Him. The mark of a baked dirt ambassador is knowing we have a message that we have to bring from the Word of God to people and not mess it up. That fourth distinct mark is that a baked dirt ambassador for Christ has an objective hope that we are made righteous based on everything God has done and nothing that we have done. Amen?

So here is the takeaway. Go, be growing disciples in Christ and live out your ambassadorship with confidence and zeal. That’s your job description. Let’s pray.

Lord, thank You, this morning for Your awesome Word. It is convicting and knows how to shred us and build us up too. I thank You, Lord, that this section of Scripture is here and in these days in which we live let us be people that are truly growing in Christ Jesus so we can live as ambassadors. Lord, those who have not yet called on You as Lord and Savior, even this morning, today I pray You would beg that they come to Christ and not wait one more moment as they stand on the edge of eternity. I pray that they would call on Christ, repent of their sin, and trust in You wholeheartedly for eternal salvation. Please Lord, use Your Word in a powerful way to build up the saints, and to bring sinners to the Kingdom of God. I pray this in Your Name, Amen.

August 15, 2021
Four Distinct Marks of a Baked Dirt Ambassador for Christ, Part 1

In this sermon, Pastor Joe Babij examines Paul’s teaching regarding what it means to be an ambassador for Christ in 2 Corinthians 5:11-21. In part 1, Pastor Babij gives the first two of four distinguishing marks of baked dirt ambassadors for Christ. Believers, in order to carry out their ambassadorship from God with confidence and zeal, need not only to understand these marks but also to examine themselves and make necessary adjustments.

Full Transcript:

Good morning. Let’s take our Bibles and turn to 2 Corinthians. And while you’re turning there, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, may I have a word of prayer?

Lord this morning, as You bring us here together, Lord, this is Your time during the week that we can hear from You. You know, Lord, that we are bombarded with information day in and day out. A lot of it, Lord, is not helpful to our thinking, to our planning, to our worship. So this morning, Lord, please clear those things out of our minds. Make us available to hear Your truth. Remove the distractions. And Lord, I pray we give ourselves to You as we look at Scripture and we hear Your voice. And bless us because of that, I pray in Christ’s name, amen.

Now last week I asked you a question. I said to you, why are you here? Why are you here? Why were you born during this time? Why not some other time? Well, it doesn’t really matter when you were born. You’re here now. And in our passage, it really tells us, gives us the answer. In verse number 20 of 2 Corinthians chapter 5 it says:

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. As though God were making an appeal through us, we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

That is the most important message that we could ever share with anyone else.

I ran across a story many years ago of a Japanese ambassador. As a boy, his name was Chayun Sugihara. And he dreamed of becoming Japan’s ambassador to Russia. By the 1930s, he was an ambassador to Lithuania. He was just a step away from fulfilling his dream. One morning, though, a huge crowd gathered at his office. Sugihara learned that they were Jews who fled from Poland seeking Sugihara’s help for Japanese visas that would permit them to escape the German Gestapo. Three times, Sugihara wired Tokyo for permission to provide visas. Three times, he was rejected. He was a committed Christian. So he had to choose between his dream and the lives in that crowd. Sugihara chose to disobey orders. And for the next 28 days, he wrote visas by hand, barely sleeping or eating. He was recalled to Berlin. While he was departing, he was still writing visas, shoving them through the train window into the hands of the refugees running alongside him, the train. Ultimately, that decision saved 6,000 lives.

Back in Japan, Sugihara’s remaining days were selling light bulbs. When the story was finally told, his son was asked, how did your father feel about his choice? He said my father’s life was fulfilled. When God needed him to do the right thing, he was available to do it.

So the real task of an ambassador is to, if possible, lead people to salvation in Jesus Christ. He showed what it was to be a Christian ambassador by example. He denied himself his dream in order to save lives. An ambassador of Christ’s disciples, their mission is to go and represent the kingdom of God on earth and lead people with the gospel of Jesus Christ so that they can obtain visas for the kingdom of light and escape the kingdom of darkness.

That’s what our job is. That’s why we’re here. See, Christ’s ambassadors carry out this mission by living out four distinct marks of an ambassador for Christ. That’s what I would like to look at this morning. Probably we’ll only get to two of them. But let’s look at the scripture. But before we look there, I want you to get in your mind, wrap your mind around it, and understand what an ambassador for Christ is so you can live out your ambassadorship with confidence. D. A. Carson defines an ambassador like this, a government representative commissioned to serve in a foreign country for the purpose of accurately communicating the positions and policies of the government he or she represents so that the people in whom he or she speaks will be brought into and kept in good relationship with the government of the country he or she serves. Ambassadors do not come with their own agenda. They do not come on their own authority. They do not come with their own message. An ambassador comes with the agenda of another and on the authority of another. And the authority that’s given to us to be ambassadors is given to us by Jesus Christ.

So in other words, we Christians as aliens in this world have been called by Christ to bring the word of God, the gospel, to a world steeped in spiritual darkness and in particular to our own culture. The baby boomers who are actually turning 65 at a rate of like 10,000 people a day. Baby busters, generation X, Y, and Z, and beyond. I don’t even know what they’re calling them today. So with our culture’s unique characteristics and needs, what people need more than anything else is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the one and only institution who has been mandated by God to bring that message to the world is His church, not the government, the church. Because in the church are to be found the followers of Jesus Christ who has, and He has entrusted His followers with His message of salvation by grace alone through Christ alone.

So today, I want you to take note of four distinctive marks a baked dirt ambassador for Christ should understand. And then apply them to yourselves for evaluation. And then make necessary adjustments in order to live out your ambassadorship with confidence in holy zeal because all believers have been called to be ambassadors to your family, to your neighbors, to the people that you work with, to your enemies. We’re ambassadors. So the first distinctive mark of a baked dirt ambassador for Christ is their disposition, their disposition. Look at verse number 11 of 2 Corinthians chapter 5. It says,

Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men

So one thing that an ambassador for Christ understands from the passage before that is that they understand the fear of God. And that is the reverential fear of the Lord and, yes, the fear that God is a judge and He will hold people responsible for their lives. So we know what it is to fear the Lord as believers, that we will give an account of our lives, as it says in verses 9-10:

Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

So it is the evaluation of Christ that matters. It is the realization that the work of a Christian will be tested with God’s fire. Therefore, we must be careful how we build. The apostle Paul is actually defending his ministry in this particular section of scripture and most of 2 Corinthians actually. And he knew that everything will be brought to light by the Lord Jesus Christ. Every, even the very secrets of the heart. So to live a double life was unthinkable to him. And, of course, to live a double life should be unthinkable to us too.

Therefore, the phrase in our passage in verse 11, “we persuade men”, does not mean what you may think it means. Actually, some people have given various meanings to this phrase in this text. Some say that it’s to persuade people to fear the Lord or to persuade people of the wrath to come or to persuade people to recognize the virtues of Christ or to persuade people of the truth of the gospel. But the only one that actually fits the context is that Paul needed to persuade the people of his own integrity because he was being attacked by the false teachers. He was being maligned by the false teachers. He was being misrepresented by the false teachers. So consequently, Paul wrote to protect his integrity before false accusers who were trying to destroy his reputation. And that would not be healthy for the church nor for the advancement of the preaching of the gospel.

Faithful building includes a ministry of integrity because one day, you and I will stand alone before Christ who has sent us to carry out the message of peace to a world of rebels and given account. Also in verse number 11, it says there, “but we are made manifest to God” and I hope that we are made manifest also in your conscience. So you see, here in this passage, God already knew Paul’s heart. He had called him. He had established him. He had given him a message. He even called him to heaven and showed him things that he couldn’t even talk about and brought him back down to this earth to minister. So God knew his heart. But he hoped that the Corinthians would also be convinced in their own conscience concerning his integrity so they would actually listen to what he has to say.

Integrity goes a long way. It really does. If they listen to Paul, then they won’t listen to the false accusation of his accusers. And the word integrity really means entire or the quality of being. This means that an ambassador for Christ is not to be hypocritical or duplicitous or double-minded. They are to be honest and sincere and genuine and incorruptible in their behavior.

Integrity is part of the character of a genuine ambassador for Christ. Now, just to get the sense of a biblical understanding of integrity, take your Bibles and turn to Psalm 15 for a minute. Psalm 15 verses 1 through 5. In this Psalm, it kind of lays out showing really that a heart of integrity acts a certain way. It says in Psalm 15 verse 1, a Psalm of David,

O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell in your holy hill?

Those are questions, of course. Verse number 2,

He who walks with integrity and works righteousness and speaks truth in his heart, he does not slander with his tongue nor does evil to his neighbor nor takes up a reproach against his friend.

Verse 4,

in whose eyes a reprobate is despised but who honors those who fear the Lord, he swears to his own hurt and does not change. He does not put out money at interest nor does he take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things will never be shaken.

That is a definition of integrity there. In every aspect of this person’s life, if they understand that, integrity will be a characteristic that is hard to argue with. And if we don’t have integrity, then the work of an ambassador is hindered and the message they are to bring to the people is stifled and misrepresented. So that is the first characteristic under this heading of the first distinctive mark of a baked dirt ambassador. The second one is in verses 12 through 13 of 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Let’s turn back there. And it’s simply this, genuine humility. Where it says there in verse 12,

We are not again commending ourselves to you but are giving you an occasion to be proud of us so that you will have an answer for those who take pride in appearances and not in heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are of sound mind, it is for you.

Now he is saying here, he’s really not trying to build up his own power base. He’s not trying to blow his own horn or advance his own selfish agenda. He was not out to impress anyone by some abnormal behavior. He had no self-interest here, Paul. He just wanted the Corinthians to have confidence in his integrity so that they would know how to answer the hypocrites. And notice how he identifies the false critics in verse 12. He says, those who take pride in appearances. It’s always the outward thing false teachers and false prophets emphasize. The externals of ministry, the buildings and the programs and the methods and the numbers and everything they have done, that’s not what God looks at. God looks at the quality of the heart. That’s what he sees and that’s what we ought to see too as an ambassador, that we would have genuine humility as we even look at ourselves, what’s going on in our own heart.

So armed with a proper view of Paul, his supporters would figure out that it was actually the hypocrites who lacked integrity because their concern and focus was outward religious appearances and not the true condition of the heart before a watching God and a watching church and a watching world. Genuine humility always concerns the heart and has a concern for others. It will take humility to represent Christ in an alien culture. Why is that? Because people will say all kinds of evil against you just because you’re a believer, just because you believe the Bible, just because you believe six day creation, just because you believe that the only way to get to heaven is through Jesus Christ. There’s no other way. Those particular beliefs will put you on the sideline and make you, you and I, an attack for those who just don’t believe those things. And we have a culture going completely the opposite direction. So if you feel like you’re swimming upstream as a believer, that’s exactly the way you ought to feel because you are. But it’s very hard to argue against the heart of integrity and humility even if somebody is lying about who you are and what you’ve done. And that’s why he says here in verse number 13, he says,

For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are of sound mind, it is for you.

In other words, to the onlookers, an ambassador may look to be considered a crazy fanatic, a madman. How could you believe such narrow things? Get with the program. This is 2021. You’re old school. Cast off those things. Can’t do that. See, we can’t do that. So you’re going to be looked at sometimes as crazy, you know, a Bible thumper, one of those Christians. And you probably have been mentioned that way somehow by your own family or by somebody at work or by some neighbor that you have or some acquaintance you’ve been labeled. Oh, here they come again. You know, you walk into a room and everybody else walks out. Ever been there? Because they know you’re going to talk about something that they don’t want to hear having to do with the Word of God or the Gospel. So whether people thought him imbalanced mentally or sound in mind, it didn’t matter to him. What mattered was that the truth is being proclaimed. It doesn’t really matter what people think about you. If you are sincere in your heart and you’re humble before God, it doesn’t matter. Don’t be living in the realm where you have to always justify yourself before people concerning your belief in the Word of God and your walk with Christ. God knows your heart. That’s where you ought to walk. Don’t worry about what people say about you. They’re going to malign you. They’re going to talk behind your back. They’re going to leave you out. They’re going to give you a bad review at work. They’re going to write a bad review about you online somewhere. Don’t worry about that. Be concerned about how Christ sees your heart.

There’s a third characteristic of an ambassador’s disposition. And what is the mark that will cause genuine ambassadors to act so differently from among other people? It’s got to be this next one, 2 Corinthians 5:14:

For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died.

So in other words, deep thankfulness for Christ’s love towards you. Christ’s love for Paul had overcome him. Paul knew the love Christ had for him because it was demonstrated to him in the most costly way, the way of death. He knew Christ loved him savingly. And this term here, “controls,” we get the sense that it means to rule something. But there’s a further meaning that was brought out by Robertson and is from an old common verb meaning to hold together. So in other words, here Paul’s conception of Christ’s love held him together to the task, didn’t allow him to step back and quit. Whatever men would think or say about him did not matter. So overtaken by Christ’s love compelled him to serve wholeheartedly and beyond what is ordinary.

That’s why, you know, if you go back to chapter 4, we noted the list. If you remember the list there in verse 8, where in verse 7 he says,

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves.

And then he says in verse 8,

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus also may be manifest in our body.

And then he goes on in chapter 6 and he mentions all these things. He was willing to put up with anything because he knew Christ loved him savingly. So he was willing to go beyond the ordinary. No matter what curveballs are thrown into the mix, nothing can keep a true ambassador from their task. They’re not going to pack up bags and move back to their country. They’re there to represent their country, not to leave. Others must hear about the love of Christ.

So nothing can keep us from taking the message of the gospel to all men everywhere. It is a love that has the power to make alive. So Christ’s love holds believers to the task and puts pressure in their life, which produces results. Everything is changed and different because Christ loves me and loves you if you’re a believer savingly. Everything is different. That Christ died in the place of all who put their faith in Him. He says in verse number 14,

Having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died.

So this is the great proof of His love. His death was in our stead, in our place. It was John Calvin who said that all equal all kinds of classes, rich and poor, high and low, rejecting no class of people, taking some of each of those groups, but not all in the sense of every individual. We know that not everyone’s going to be saved. So this all meant all those who would genuinely come to Christ, call upon Christ as their Lord and Savior. And then once they do that, they realize the depth and the extent that the work of God had done in our behalf to save us. And that’s the point of the ambassador too, that they have such a message that is saving people because their eternal soul will either live eternity away from God in a place called the Lake of Fire or in the presence of God. We want people to be saved.

So Christ’s death fully satisfied God’s justice and propitiated His wrath for all those who would put their faith in Him. The cross was a terribly bloody execution that Jesus’ crucifixion shows us that something had gone terribly wrong with the human race. But it also shows us that there is a solution, that the Bible tells us about what God has done in order to reconcile sinners to Himself. Friends do not need to be reconciled, but enemies need to be reconciled. It was God who sent Christ. It was GodHhimself who took the initiative. And the Lord responded to sinful humanity who had nothing at all whatsoever to offer Him by offering Himself a sacrifice for sin as the gospels tell us, for even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. So His sacrifice was meant to satisfy God, to turn away His wrath. And the result of that was that Jesus died to wipe out the guilt of our sins.

So that is the love of Christ. All this is describing the love of Christ, that this covering of Christ’s blood, this offering of Christ’s body was a vicarious punishment of a victim. In other words, the Old Testament gives us a picture of substitution, a victim was taken and an animal was substitute for the sinner. And this animal then became the one who bore the punishment of that sinner. So the Old Testament sacrifices show that it is because the animal was substituted for the offender, his sin was dealt with in the animal so that his guilt was wiped out. So the effect of such a sacrifice was the pardon of the offender, the forgiving of their sin, and the restoration to communion with God. In other words, sin was dealt with in the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ. And the result of that is that the sins of believers are washed away. That’s the love of Christ.

And that should be always on our mind as a motivator to be an ambassador for Christ. Other people don’t know that. They need to know that. They need to know that a believer can be reconciled to God. So the love of Christ, that is that Christ loved you savingly, this is the driving motive for baked dirt ambassadors.

And there’s four things to consider when we think about the love of Christ. The first thing is this, found in verse number 15, that the love of Christ moves the believer to a new sphere where they no longer live for themselves. Notice what it says in verse 15,

and he died for all so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and rose again on their behalf.

So brethren, before we came to know Christ, all we knew was to live for ourselves. That’s all we knew, selfishly doing what we wanted to do, carrying out our plans, seeking our desires. But then we come to Christ and all of a sudden our desires are changing. Our worldview is changing. Our motives are changing. Everything is changing. So in Christ, believers experience not only death to sin, but also a resurrection to righteousness and a death to selfishness. When we come to Christ, that’s part of the newness of Christ. So there’s a change. We came to be constrained by His love and now to live for the One who died for us. Now we have the authority and the motive to live for Christ, the One who died in our place and rose to give us real life. So our whole life interest should center in on Christ, not center in on ourselves. And for now, believers are spiritually alive to serve Him gladly. And the implication of the cross, the implication of the love of Christ is the end of a life of selfishness. For me to live is Christ, we sang this morning, and to die is gain. For me to live is Christ.

The second thing about the love is that the love of Christ moves the believer to a new sphere where they no longer look at people in a fleshly way. Look at it says in verse 16,

therefore from now on, we recognize no one according to the flesh.

Therefore, it says there, people are not looked at as Jew and Gentile or bond or free or rich or poor or pagan or barbarian, nor are they looked at by their skin color, whether it be red or yellow or black or brown or white. They are looked at as those who are lost in darkness, in bondage to sin, alienated from the life of God and under his wrath, people who are in desperate need of a word from God to give them hope, to shine light into darkness. This is why we’re given the ministry of reconciliation to make our appeal to sinful humanity as if God Himself was making the appeal through us and what is that appeal be reconciled to God. So the love of Christ and death itself brings us to die to all kinds of prejudice toward people. And why is that? An ambassador can’t go into a country and say, I’m just going to talk to this group of people. No, you go into the country and you talk to the whole country. So an ambassador for Christ is someone who cannot say, well, I don’t like that group of people so I’m not going to go to them, or I don’t like that group of people, I’m not going to go to them. No, you go to everybody. You tell everybody. So prejudice must be removed from us if we are going to bring the gospel to all kinds of people and all classes of people. So death to selfishness, death to prejudices.

And also the third thing, the love of Christ moves the believer to a new sphere where they no longer look at Christ in a fleshly way. Verse 16, the middle of the verse says,

Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him in this way no longer.

Many know Christ according to the flesh. He was a great man. He was a religious leader. He was a good teacher. He was a good example. He was a prophet. Some believe He was an angel. Some say He was a carpenter. Some simply are ignorant of Him and ignore Him. But what happens is the love of Christ brings us into the realm in which we understand that our understanding of Jesus Christ was all wrong and the Bible now brings a death to a false understanding of Christ and now we have a genuine biblical understanding of who Jesus is and what He has done, which motivates us to actually live for the Lord.

Some are filled with foolishness and perniciousness and vicious thoughts about Jesus Christ. And just think about the Apostle Paul who’s writing this, this proud Pharisee who had been mad in his efforts to stamp out the name of Christ is writing this. He hated Christ as a false Messiah. But when he was overcome by the love of the One in whom he once hated, he no longer viewed Christ in the fleshly way. Now Christ was the object of his love and service. Christ’s love enveloped and consumed him. Christ was the motive for Paul staying alive and enduring hardships and trouble. Christ was now in his understanding the God-man who rose from the grave to give eternal life and who had a plan for humanity and He is preparing a place for all those who love Him and He is coming back again. He knew that and that motivated him to serve Christ out of love for Christ, not hatred.

So Paul is the perfect example of what happens when an ambassador does his job. He takes a person who hates Christ and brings them to the place where now they understand Christ and now they love Christ, right? And you know what? Believe it or not, all of us were haters of Christ. All of us hated Christ. What did Paul say in Romans 5?

For while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.

See, we were all enemies of Christ. We were all haters of Christ. Now we understood that after we became believers. So yes, believers in Christ, you are ambassadors for Christ to bring His gospel to a lost and dying world. The best disposition this message flows through is one with a consistent integrity, a genuine humility, and a deep thankfulness for Christ displaying His love towards you in a saving way. He saved you, gave you eternal life, forgave your sin, made you right with the Father, preparing a place you’re coming back again. It doesn’t get better than that. It doesn’t. If that doesn’t motivate you, you must be dead, spiritually dead maybe.

A second distinctive mark of a baked ambassador for Christ is their work. Look at verses 17 and 18. There’s a source of this new work and the source of the work is God Himself. Verse 17 says,

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

So this is an important shift of stance, a change into another sphere because the apostle is viewing all people as either in Adam or in Christ. There’s no other groups, either you’re in Adam or you’re in Christ. Now before you became a Christian, you were in Adam. But when you became a Christian, you were no longer in Adam, now you’re in Christ. Those are the groups.

And so, all who are in Christ are a new creation and all who are in Adam are still linked to the old things. And the old things being the old Adamic nature with all its old corruption, its old habits, its old desires, its old sinful enslaving sins that those who are now associated with Christ, who are in Christ, find themselves in a new position, a new sphere. And the whole phrase new creation or new creature points really right back to Genesis in which we are pointed at what God did when he created the world. God did not simply patch up the old but He created a new. The old things are discarded. It says in our text, “The old things passed away,” It means to cast aside as no longer being part of us. We have no need for those things anymore. We have no desire for those things anymore.

We also know that those things, all that they did, whatever sin that kept you in bondage, all that they did was enslave you. And they controlled everything in your life. They destroyed relationships. They brought you nowhere. They gave you no hope. Matter of fact, they bring you down to the lowest point you can be on this earth – discouraged, depressed, no desire to want to live, see no hope in life. And that’s what sin will do in our life. It will actually destroy us. And it will keep us in a place longer than we’ll ever want to stay. And it brings no light because it just consumes you in darkness.

The old things do not become new. At conversion to Christ, they are discarded and other things take their place as newly created. That’s so great about becoming a Christian. It’s not that you leave all the old stuff and there’s nothing else you go to. No. You get the new stuff and you forget about the old stuff. And like some of the new stuff we’re talking about is some of the things that are right here in our text, just the love of Christ, being an ambassador, having work to do. In fact, the term here behold in our text indicates it is a surprising thing that’s happened to me as a believer. With this newfound faith in Christ, everything has changed. I don’t know about you, but when I became a believer, everything changed. I was so surprised myself. I said, something’s going on here. I don’t really know yet because I didn’t know anything. But I started reading the Word of God and I said, wow, this is, you know, when you see a text, all things become new. That has to mean something, right?

When you become a believer, it’s surprising when you really understand the Gospel and what Christ has done for you. It happens to new believers with their newfound faith in Christ. It’s like saying, take a look at what happened. It’s all new to me, new things, new life, new work, new destinations. This new standing, this new worldview God’s giving me and it’s brought about by His doing, by God Himself, not by you. You didn’t turn over a new leaf. You didn’t just drop off an old habit. No, everything becomes new when God does it. People can drop off habits. They can stop sinning in one area. What about all the rest of it? When God calls us to salvation, all things become new, everything. He changes our thinking. He changes our mind. So this new standing is brought about by God. And once we sense the newness we have in Christ Jesus, we also learn we have new work. Okay, now I’m a Christian. What do I do? Well, notice verse number 18. It says,

now all these things are from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ.

So the source of the work God’s going to call us to, He’s getting to an ambassador, that all these new things are from God and it’s because of what God had done and those who are controlled by His love and now live for Christ, not themselves. These new things do not have their source in the flesh but God. They are the byproducts of being reconciled to God, that God’s love provided the means and the basis for man’s reconciliation to God whom he had sinned against. It is sin that separates people from God. It is God who provided Christ’s death to remove sin and guilt. So it is all God’s plan because of His love towards His children. But God’s own sense of justice had to be satisfied and so God gave His son as a propitiation for our sins to remove the separation. So here He is in this passage of scripture, the term reconciliation really has as its root the thought of change to put someone into friendship with God. You see, people are not at peace with God. They are actually enemies of God as already mentioned and God’s attitude toward the sinner is one of judgment and condemnation and wrath. Like John 3:18 tells us,

He who believes in Him is not judged. He who does not believe has been judged already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son.

So the sinner cannot reconcile himself or herself to God on their own. That’s God’s place. It is when the sinner repents and turns to Jesus Christ in faith, only then can God the Father change His attitude toward the sinner from one of wrath to one of peace, from one of not being reconciled to one of becoming a friend of God. That means that all alienation between the repentant sinner and God has ended. That’s the change that takes place and His change is solely based on the death of His Son and the work Jesus accomplished on the cross, that God can set aside His wrath toward that repentant sinner.

So the point here is that God needs no reconciliation but is engaged in the great business of reconciling people to Himself. The term gave us the ministry of reconciliation. God is not only the source of the work but He is also the bestower of the work. Notice what it says in verse 18,

He gave us the ministry of reconciliation

and God has given us the task to reconcile people to Him. Actually, the term ministry is a very familiar word to some of us. It’s the word deacon. It’s used of ministry, service, help, mission. We have been given a mission that is leading others to put them into friendship with God. That’s the mission. So the task of winning the unreconciled to God is committed to us, given to us by God. And of course, when He gives us that task, it’s such a huge task. It can overwhelm you. God gives us all the help to do it. He gives us all the power to do it. It is a high and holy one and supremely difficult because the offending party, the guilty, is the hardest to win over. If the task of making sinful enemies friends of God were solely up to us, no one would be saved. No one could be reconciled to God if it was up to us, our verbal skills, our ability to write clearly. That’s not it. God uses those things. It’s about God. God is the One who will reconcile sinners to Himself by using weak dirt vessels like us. He uses weak vessels. He didn’t call angels to preach the gospel. He called us to preach the gospel, to take the gospel to other people. So all the work has been done by God Himself.

And our Lord in whom we love, He gives us a mission as ambassadors to carry out His unfinished business. This business is basically in the form of a message. And that message is the gospel. It’s not our message, it’s God’s message. It’s not any message, it’s the message that comes from the Word of God and it is the gospel message. Next time we’ll look at that.

So this morning, I do want to admonish you to rethink your life in the sense of the Word of God that you are an ambassador. You are living here. You are the real aliens. You are strangers in a foreign land. You are not home and you cannot go home until God takes you home. So you know what? You’re here. Don’t cry and complain about that. Use the circumstances, the gifts, and the abilities and the relationships you have to be an ambassador for Christ because that’s what God called you and I to do. Amen? Let’s do it.

Let’s pray. Lord, thank You again. Your kindness to us, Lord, in sharing the Word of God and explaining to us all that took place to save us. I pray, Lord, that we would represent the Kingdom of God on earth in an honorable way with integrity, with humility, with the motive knowing that You loved us savingly and all that took place to save our lost souls. I pray, Lord, every day we’d wake up and we’d just pray, Lord, send someone our way that we can share Christ with, being an example of Christ to them, even open up the Word of God to them and show them the message of the Gospel. Please, Lord, use us, knowing, Lord, that it’s not because of what we are or what skills or talents you’ve given us or what kind of mind that You’ve given us. It’s all the power of God. So, Lord, You have called us earthen vessels to display and give Your message to a lost and dying world. Use us for that sake in the glory of the precious name of Jesus Christ. And I pray this this morning. Amen.

August 8, 2021
God’s Power Through Baked Dirt

In this sermon, Pastor Joe Babij examines Paul’s teaching about believers’ resurrected bodies in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10. Pastor Babij explains how God’s amazing promises regarding what he will do with us—who are no more than baked dirt—equips us to serve him with hope while on the earth. Pastor Babij presents Paul’s teaching in four main points:

1. The Future Confidence of Baked Dirt (v. 1)
2. The Present Longings of Baked Dirt (vv. 2-5)
3. The Present Courage of Baked Dirt (vv. 6-9)
4. The Future Evaluation of Baked Dirt (v. 10)

Full Transcript:

Today we’re going to be looking at 2 Corinthians 5. We do have our Lord’s Table after the service so you should have been preparing yourselves for that already. Let’s look at 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, but first let me have a word of prayer.

Father, this morning as we come together as Your people I pray that You would speak to us through Your Word. Convict us of sin and encourage us in our walks with You. Help us to know every day that we are weak vessels but Your power is working through us to get Your work done. We have a bright future because we’re going to spend eternity with You. I pray that You would encourage us in this way in Christ’s Name, Amen.

So today I want to challenge you all who have trusted Christ as Lord and Savior. It doesn’t matter whether you have been a Christian for a short time or whether you have been in the faith for a long time. Consider why the Lord did not take you home to be with Him immediately after your conversion but instead left you here. Why did the Lord allow you to be born during this time in history? Why did He allow you to be raised in a particular cultural setting? Why are you here in such a time as this? It is an exciting time to be a Christian!

He left us here to be ambassadors for Christ. If you look at 2 Corinthians 5:20 it says:

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

An ambassador for Christ takes a very specific message to the world of people with the authority of God behind them and with urgency that asks people to respond. What is the specific thing they ask? To be reconciled to God! This means that people are not reconciled to God but they need to be. The command further expresses urgency. Get reconciled to God and do it now! Become friends with God today through Jesus Christ. Take advantage of the peace terms in the gospel while there is time. We keep begging people for Christ. That is what Paul is saying to us left on this side of eternity.

The message of 2 Corinthians is that the gospel ministry is carried out by the power of God through frail vessels. God puts His treasure in baked dirt. That’s us! Now if you look over in 2 Corinthians 4:7, it says:

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves.

So all of us are like earthen vessels, baked dirt, and fragile clay jars. That’s how God decided to do His unfinished work on this earth. The NLT translation says it like this:

We have this light shining in our hearts but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure and this makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.

Paul explains to the Corinthians that the moment of believing, the saved one is complete. He is delivered from sin, taken out of this lost estate, cleansed, forgiven, justified, born of God, clothed in the merit of Christ, and free from all condemnation. We actually live in the temporal while we desire the eternal as Christians. We believe that we actually live in our weakness while we desire strength. We live by faith when we desire sight. That’s where we live.

Consequently, the saved person is reconciled to God through the death of Christ and then given work to do between the day they get saved and the day they physically die. It starts with the day we trust Christ and are made to be new Christians that start living by faith. To live by faith, the child of God learns to turn his attention on the unseen. Is it better to live by sight of by faith on this side of eternity? It is better to live by faith because faith can see around corners and can see what is not seen. Faith can see into the future and we can do that by God’s Word as it tells us what is going to take place.

So even though Christians are made new, they still remain in this body of humiliation because we have inherited the consequences of the fall. Christians sense something is just not right with a renewed soul living in a mortal body. There is a tension already when we become believers that something is not right or finished yet, so we yearn for something more. Christians sense this because they’re living in a dying body as it says in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18:

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

So living by faith is the practice of seeing the eternal. It is the confidence in what will be and in the promise of God and His power to accomplish all that He said He would. It says in 2 Corinthians 4:14:

Knowing that He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and will present us with you.

So now the Scripture turns our attention to show the confidence, longings, courage, and evaluation of people who are baked dirt while living on this temporal earth. There are going to be certain things the Bible wants us to know and what Paul wanted his audience to know. Especially those who were false converts and teachers and who were coming against his apostleship. The first thing that he says about us being baked dirt is that there is a future confidence for us who are living as earthen vessels.

There are four things about our new bodies that will give us confidence in the power of God. The first thing that he mentions is that our future confidence will be in our glorified bodies. In 2 Corinthians 5:1 says:

For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

Notice first that it says we as believers know something. He is using the perfect tense indicating that the present state of affairs results in a past action which was salvation. The present state of affairs is a future hope in a glorified body. In fact, all true Christians know what is so comforting and strengthening for all of us that our true home is Heaven. But it is more than knowing that Heaven is home. It is knowing that each of us individually have a permanent, glorified body to live in Heaven. If you look again at our verse above in 2 Corinthians 5:1 it says:

For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down.

This also means that we can die, or broken down like a tent. But either way, we have an assurance that we have a Heavenly body that we shall dwell in forever. So brethren, we occupy mortal bodies that are transitory in nature just like a tent, which we use for camping. It’s put up as a temporary structure and can be taken down quite quickly. The idiom in the Greek is to lose completely or to loosen the rope from the pegs that hold the tent so that the stretched canvas collapses and can be rolled up.

So the tent is never meant to be a permanent dwelling. It is temporary. But our new bodies will be permanent. So the contrast in this whole section of Scripture is supposed to illustrate a house not made with hands, but manufactured. The heavens are in contrast with the earthly and the eternal is in contrast with what decays. The second thing he says about this new body in 2 Corinthians 5:1 is that we have a body on reserve. It says:

We have a building from God.

We possess the title deed right now by faith and the title deed to things hoped for is faith. That’s what we find all over Scripture where it says in Hebrews 11:7:

By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

So we possess a heavenly body and we possess it by the eyes of faith. It is waiting for us in Heaven. When people reserve things, they usually call ahead to have someone else put something aside in their name. If someone else tries to claim it, the person who put it aside is going to say that it is on reserve already. The other person is waiting their arrival to pick it up. That’s what God has done. He put on reserve a body for each and every one of us and our names are on them like it says in Luke 10:20:

Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven.

That’s the confidence and encouragement God gives His people while we dwell in these frail bodies. There’s a third thing that builds confidence about our bodies and that is in 2 Corinthians 5:1:

A house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

This building has its whole source in the origin or God. It has no human origin at all and this word house gives the picture of a permanent, very suitable structure too ouse our redeemed souls in. It is not temporary like a tent that can be torn down. God has instead made this durable and He has guaranteed it forever. A tent, like our earthly bodies, is temporary but our glorified bodies will be permanent.

Now why does the Apostle Paul even say these things? This is not a normal way of thinking and people do not think like this. As a matter of fact, there are not many people who actually think about dying. They want to avoid that subject at all costs and I understand why. The reality is that we don’t really want to die. We want life to go on and that’s also something that the Bible teaches us that is real. We want life to take over everything. As we grow in the Lord, we are going to find that this is what God is actually producing in us. All our forefathers were looking for the same things as it says in Hebrews 11:10:

For he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

This is something we all are yearning for: a glorified body made by God into a permanent one. It says in 2 Corinthians 5:2 that our glorified body is eternal in the heavens and we will live in our glorified bodies in Heaven and that is the place where God dwells. The fourth thing that builds confidence is we live in this temporal state as baked dirt. Here we see the example of our Lord’s body when He rose from the dead. He could eat but it was not necessary. He can appear in a room through closed doors, and was free from all the restrictions of space.

He had an immortal and eternal body, free from all limitations through time. It’s also an exalted body raised in honor, no sickness, death, or conception. Neither will people be given in marriage in this new state that we’re in. Mark 12:25 says:

For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

It will also be a body of happiness as it says in Revelation 21:4:

And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.

It is also a body that is conformed to Christ’s body where 1 John 3:2 tells us:

Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.

But until that day, we have some difficult things to go through. It is very natural for baked dirt indwell by the Holy Spirit of God to experience genuine fears while living in a collapsible tent. That brings to the second thing: the present longings of baked dirt in 2 Corinthians 5:2-5:

For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked.

The groaning we have while in this tent is internal within oneself. By faith all believers are hoping for the future. The real cause of groaning won’t be what we think it is, but rather this internal yearning for a glorified body. God does that in us as believers. It is not necessarily the weakness or frailty that we experience on earth in our bodies, nor the sufferings that come our way that cause us to groan. We may groan in these things but for different reasons. The reason we groan here is because we want a new glorified body and we want to be in the presence of Christ. So this verse it is like longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven. Remember clothing is very personal and sits closely on our bodies as if enclosing them.

In a similar way, the dwelling from Heaven will both be a covering and residence for redeemed spirits. We long for the day when we will put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. You gotta admit that as we live in these bodies and time goes on and we get older, it is not so pleasant, right? As we grow older, we should yearn as Christians for our Heavenly bodies. Part of the groaning is that we do not want to be found naked without bodies. As much as we having put it on will not be found naked, the term here naked means to be uncovered, bear, and in need of clothing. For this it is quite definite that we will put it on and not be found naked.

We groan not to put off but to put on. Another translation (NLT) says it like this in 2 Corinthians 5:3:

For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.

This groaning that goes on in the inner person of the believer is produced by the Holy Spirit of God. I guarantee you that people who are not genuine believers do not have this groaning and as Paul is really writing against false teachers, they also do not have this groaning. They want to stay here and be healthy and wealthy here. For a believer who is growing in the Lord, the more we grow in Christ, the more we want to be with Him. There is another burden we have as believers in 2 Corinthians 5:4

For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.

We know we are going to die and we have attended enough funerals to know that when the soul leaves the body, the body becomes lifeless as far as we can see. The body goes into the ground, experiences decay, and completely turns into dust or it is consumed via cremation. Then we wonder what is next after that. We only know what’s next by divine revelation. So our burden is that we don’t want to die. In other words, we don’t want to be without a body or left naked.

The body that we have now is better than nothing but it is a dying, decaying, perishable body that is temporal. There is something unnerving about the soul separating from the body at death. Death is always strange and weird and doesn’t belong here. So we have this tension between dying and dropping off these mortal bodies and taking on something that is eternal. One teacher from Scotland wrote, “Man is not complete without his body, so when death comes and he leaves the body, he is in an abnormal state of nakedness and will remain so until the Lord comes.”

Again in verse 4 it says that we don’t want to be unclothed, but we want to be fully and forever clothed with our new garment and to be done with this death. Still to this day, I hate to go to wakes and funerals especially when I know people don’t know the Lord. Look at the end of verse 4 again:

So that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.

We want life to take over completely so that death is done away with once and for all. That’s what Christ has done. He defeated Satan and death on the cross and nothing shall be left of it. Christians are desirous of the resurrection of their bodies and Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:53-54:

For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable puts on the imperishable, and this mortal puts on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

Therefore the ideal state for the saint is to leave the mortal body and without any interval be clothed by their spiritual body and that is the ideal state. It is good to know these things so we Christians are not in the dark or confused concerning death and the body. My fellow Christians, don’t you think it strange to think like this and to be thinking and feeling in these terms? Groaning and being burdened for a perfect, glorified body that has been planned for us all along by God Himself? The thought that we wish to die that we may live points to the evidence of God’s Holy Spirit working in us.

Try talking about this with someone who has no reference point of that context and they’ll think you’re crazy and insane! It sounds like a sci-fi movie but it’s reality for the Christian. Just follow the Apostle Paul when he says to die is gain. Who even says that? This is very strange language but very important for baked dirt ambassadors to grasp because we’re not home yet. But God has something for you to do until you get there. So what does God do for us? He gives us His guarantee, just look at what it says in 2 Corinthians 5:5:

Now He who prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge.

So our great God has done this by His Spirit which indwells in us and gave us the Spirit as a down payment and all the rest as it is recorded in Scripture. We have it by faith so it’s the idea of ownership and to be sealed as God marked us for His own. Of course the Spirit is the Pledge, the Guarantee, and the Down Payment for what is to come. The first araban means payment there which Paul uses to assure the recipient of the final payment in full. Paul again picks up that same theme in Ephesians 1:13-14 where it says:

In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of the promise, who is a first installment of our inheritance, in regard to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.

So it is part payment on the total obligation that we use the very expression of earnest money. This is the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts and is the witness of the Spirit that we are gods. He is not really talking about those who face eternity blindly or plunge to their doom with no thought of Christ. He is talking about the confidence in the face of eternity that is more real than things that are seen. We Christians have an assurance regarding death and eternity that no one else has. That means that the conduct that Christians are to have are much much different than would be expected. In fact, a third thing he tells us baked dirt people is that we have a courage. It says in 2 Corinthians 5:6-9:

So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. So whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him.

We have boldness and confidence and that is in what God has already said in Scripture. Christians are armed with this revelation and can always be of good courage because truth gives us confidence to live each day. It also tells us that we ought to know as believers that we are only away from the Lord a little while. We as Christians are only on short trips here. We’ll be home sooner than we think.

A second thing a Christian knows is that they cannot go to be with the Lord while occupying these collapsible tents. This body belongs to us in the present state only for the time being and that also means that the only thing keeping us out of the Lord’s presence are these bodies. They have to be removed and they will be. I’m reminded of a true story of a Christian man who just retired from his job as an electrician at age 59. He was enjoying his first day of retirement and said to his wife that his first day was wonderful.

Well, a large branch from an oak tree fell on him and killed him that very day. What are we to think? Tragedy for his loved ones left behind. But looking at this incident through these Scriptures, for this man retirement continued in the presence of the Lord! How amazing is that?! That is seeing clearly but we don’t always see like that. As a matter of fact, our minds sometimes don’t even want to go there. A famous storybook character and I quote, “To die would be an awfully big adventure.” Peter Pan said that.

Brethren, for a believer death is an awfully big adventure. Going from this temporal life to a new dwelling with the Lord in a place He prepared for us with a body He prepared for us is going to be the greatest adventure that we would ever experience. It seems like Peter Pan had good theology, wouldn’t you say? So why is this the way to think about death? Christians who vacate the body have a better portion that’s why. If you notice in 2 Corinthians 5:8 it says:

Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord.

Our portion is that once we leave the body we will be at home with the Lord forever without change. Don’t get me wrong, Christians on the one hand desire to stay at home in the body because we are amongst our people and family and don’t want to leave them too soon. But on the other hand, as long as we remain here we are away from our other home with the Lord. We’re absent and to be away from one own’s people means that we are pilgrims, strangers, and living in aliens surroundings while absent from the Lord’s presence.

After awhile, you don’t want to be there anymore because the Lord is out of sight and we can’t see Him with our real eyes. But we will and that is the hope and encouragement that we have. Until that time Christians ought to know something else that their journey, while away from the blessed existence in the visible company of the Lord, is a faith journey and walk. That’s why it says in 2 Corinthians 5:7:

For we walk by faith, not by sight.

Faith is better than sight while we are here on this earth. God has given us this faith that we are growing in. And we see the things not seen by faith. Someone made a great observation about faith, they said: “For this life faith is everything, the all sufficient substitute for sight.” Isn’t this what Jesus said to the disciples in John 20:29:

Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you now believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.”

Living by faith is the practice of seeing the eternal. It is a confidence in what will be and in the power, the presence, and the character of God. The patriarchs saw these things and it says in Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

In Hebrews 11:6 it says:

And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

In Hebrews 11:13, it says:

All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

They believed in the One who promised! That is what Christians do. All those who live by faith will die in faith and by doing so, they will actually gain approval from God. While we walk on this earth, we actually lack sight. But what is quite amazing for the believer is that faith and sight have the same object: the Lord. By faith we know Him and see Him. We don’t walk around trusting in something that doesn’t exist or someone who doesn’t exist. What we long for will become a reality. What faith now embraces as being unseen, it shall presently embrace as seen. The thought that we Christians are approaching nearer and nearer to the Lord and will soon see Him face to face should make us ashamed to do anything displeasing to Him. It should move us to do everything that would be pleasing to the Lord and that is exactly what our text says, that we are living by faith but we’re also living in a way to please God. Notice what it says 2 Corinthians 5:9:

Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.

Are you pleasing to the Lord? The word ambition is really a good word but it misses something in the original because the original has to do with affection and honor. We’re pleasing to the Lord because we have an affectionate connection to Him. We honor Him and look at Him quite differently than before because we know more of who He is. So have you thought about your life in this way? We all ought to because it should be our driving ambition while we still occupy these bodies on earth for ways we can be pleasing to the Lord. And of course one way to be pleasing is to be ambassadors and witnesses for God on this side of eternity.

It should start right now if it hasn’t already. Christians should live each day knowing they are getting closer and closer to being face to face with the Lord. The next thing after death is the judgment seat of Christ. That’s why he says there will be a future evaluation of baked dirt which impacts all of us. There will be a future evaluation at the bema seat, the judgment seat of Christ. So that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in his body according to what he has done whether good or bad.

So in other words, we must take our Christian life seriously because we will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. While no Christian will endure the wrath of God, because Christ has already done it in our place, our work will be tested by God’s fire. So with all the groanings and burdens we have while here, we must live before the eye of the One who matters the most: our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Of course the phrase the judgment seat of Christ is a picture of the athletic games in the Greek culture in the New Testament world. After the games were concluded, a dignitary or the emperor himself took his seat on an elevated throne in an arena and one by one the winning athletes came up and received a reward, usually a wreath of leaves or a victor’s crown.

All believers will face an evaluation before Jesus. Every day we get up we must say to ourselves that we are God’s servants and it matters what we do in our bodies. We must say to ourselves that we are ambassadors for Christ and while on earth, we represent someone else, Christ in this world and country! We are aliens, foreigners, and strangers on earth while here. We are representatives of Christ’s Kingdom and this evaluation that baked dirt is going to go through is not to determine whether we enter Heaven or not. The issue of our eternal destiny was settled when we believed in Jesus and received eternal life by faith alone through His grace alone.

Also, we Christians will not face condemnation or punishment for our sin when we stand before Him. God has promised that no condemnation will ever fall on those who are in Christ by faith. The evaluation will focus on what we did in life after we trusted Christ and what we did with our gifts, resources, and opportunities. It will focus on what we gave God with our loves and whether we endeavored, though imperfectly, to please Him in all things.

The outcome of this evaluation will be reward or loss of reward. 1 Corinthians 3 tells us that we are a building on God’s construction project. The foundation of the building was set when Jesus died on the cross and each of us is building upon that foundation. Gold, silver, and costly stone refer to Christ honoring motives: personal integrity and joyful obedience. Wood, hay, straw, and stubble are perishable things and sinful pursuits. Selfish motives, pride-filled actions, and underhanded manipulations affect how we run our lives. We want to live in a pleasing manner.

Erwin Lutzer in his book, Your Eternal Reward wrote this, “Imagine staring into the face of Christ just the two of you, one on one. Your entire life is present before you. In a flash you see what He sees. No hiding, no opportunity to put a better spin on what you did, no attorney to represent you. The look in His eyes says at all. Like it or not, this is precisely where you and I shall be someday: standing before the Lord.” So you see baked dirt has burdens, desires, and they live in clay pots but they have responsibilities that God has given every single one of us as believers that we would live for Him.

Now if you today are seeking to serve God with commitment and in obedience, you are building with the right stuff. If you are coasting along with no desire for spiritual growth or demonstration of sacrificial ministry to others, you’re building on God’s house with wrong materials. Now if you are there in a permanent state, you may not be a believer at all. God knows we’re fragile as baked dirt, and He knows we need help that He has provided. He takes us from point A to point B to bring us into His presence. So my fellow Christian, the fact that we will be giving an account of our lives to christ should make us realize how serious the Lord is about how we live our lives as His children, knowing at the same time the promises that He has given us and the power He has given us to live the Christian life.

So God chose to carry out all gospel ministry through frail vessels like you and I. I wouldn’t have chosen that way but God did. He chose that way for one specific reason, that when things get done through our lives, people can’t point towards you but have to point to the power of God to give Him all the praise and glory. That’s what God does! Believe me, it’s counterintuitive to what we think as human beings but that’s what God does. So give yourself to the Lord, serve Him, and make it your ambition to please God in all you do. Believe me you will receive the blessing of God that only God can give and that’s the only way to live. Any conversation I have with believers all say in some way that it is great to be a Christian.

Somebody this morning asked me what their life would be if they weren’t a Christian. I don’t even want to think about that based on where I was when I became a believer. I would end up in a horrible place. God rescued us and put us in a place of blessing, joy, good encouragement, and He has given us a future that is already taken care of. Just serve Him while you are here. Let’s pray.

Lord, thank You this morning. Your goodness to us is beyond measure and Lord these Scriptures really do change our thinking about what’s next and what we ought to do. Lord, every single one of us here today have felt very often the weakness of the flesh. Sometimes we feel like we can’t even go on because of our weakness. But Lord, the burdens are different than we thought and the desires are different. The natural desire of a child of God is to want to be with Christ. So thank You for that Lord. While we are left here, let us be good ambassadors and representatives of the Kingdom of God. Let us do things with the motive of pleasing You. Lord, we know that we do that imperfectly but let us obey Your Spirit and that the Word of God would transform our minds so that we would know the good, the acceptable, and perfect will of God. And that we would go out to serve You with zeal and love. I pray this morning in the precious and great Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

August 1, 2021
Four Unique Marks of an Ambassador for Christ, Part 2

In this sermon, Pastor Babij preaches on the final three unique marks of an ambassador for Christ:

1) The new relationship between God and men
2) The message of reconciliation between God and men
3) The objective hope of reconciliation with God

Pastor Babij calls Christians to remember that they are Christ’s ambassadors and must urgently seek the reconciliation of all men to God.

Full Transcript

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We’re finally starting 2 Peter next week, and it’s a tremendous epistle! We’re looking today at 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 which I started looking at last week, and talking about four unique marks of an ambassador for Christ. I was saying that in light of the new year, I wanted to challenge those of you who have trusted Christ as Lord and Savior to think about why the Lord allowed you to be born now and why you are here. Well the answer to the question is in 2 Corinthians 5:20 which says that we are left here to be ambassadors:

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

An ambassador is someone who represents and is commissioned to serve a foreign country and accurately communicate the positions and policy of that country to the country they are in. While we are in these earthly bodies, as it begins in 2 Corinthians 5 discussing that and the eternal and earthly, we are to live as ambassadors for Christ. An ambassador does not come with their own agenda or authority, but that as well as the message of another. We Christians are the truly aliens in this world and we have been called by Christ to give the Word of God, the gospel, to a world steeped in spiritual darkness and in particular to our own culture or place in which God has allowed us to live.

The one and only institution that God has mandated to give this message is the true church, because in the church we find followers of Christ who have been entrusted with the message of salvation. We know it is through grace alone, by Christ alone that anyone could ever be saved. So last week we looked at the first unique mark of an ambassador of Christ, and today we will look at the rest of the four.

Just by way of review, the first unique mark of an ambassador is found in verse 11 to 14, and this is someone who has a consistent integrity. They are going to take the gospel to the world, and there has to be something there of their character. A second thing in verses 12 and 13, is that they have a genuine humility. Lastly, an ambassador is someone who has a deep thankfulness for Christ’s love.

Christ’s love, as I mentioned already, transports us and moves a believer to a new place. In verse 15-17 it says:

He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf. Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

This means that a believer who is now experiencing the love of Christ, not only in the initial conversion of the gospel, but also in the transformation of their life being sanctified by Christ, they realize they don’t liver themselves anymore. God has left us here for the purpose of living for God and not for ourselves. In doing that, we actually die to ourselves. Secondly, we no longer look at people in a fleshly way as we once did. That also helps us to know that we died to all kinds of prejudices. The race card is obliterated when we come to Christ and wipes out all obstacles so that we will go to share the gospel with all kinds of people and all classes of people, no matter who they are.

It brings us also to not look at Christ in a fleshly way. We have died to a false view of Christ and now understand His work and what He came to do. Now He is the object of our love and service and that moves us to a new sphere. In verse 17 it tells us that the believer is moved to a place where everything is new:

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

Yes, the believer in Christ Jesus is an ambassador for Christ, and that job is to bring the gospel to a lost and dying world. The best disposition for this message to flow to a lost and dying world is the disposition of a good integrity, a genuine humility, and a deep thankfulness for Christ’s love. That leads me to a second mark of an ambassador for Christ and that’s found in verses 17 and 18:

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

Now this is an important shift because now this unique mark of an ambassador is the work that God has given them to do. But we have to understand who is the source of this work. The source of this new creation is God. You’ll notice that it says, “if anyone is in Christ,” which is an incredible phrase that you should never forget. You have been placed in Christ by what He has done and your belief in what He has done.

This is an important shift and stance, and a change in sphere because the Apostle is viewing all people as either in Adam or in Christ. In other words, all who are in Christ are a new creation and all who are in Adam are still linked to the old things, the old Adamic nature with corruption, old habits, and sinfulness. Those who are now associated with Christ and are in Christ find themselves in a new position and sphere that they have a death to self, a death to prejudices so they can take the gospel to all people, have a correct view of the doctrine of the work of Christ, and now are dying to their old nature.

This phrase, new creature, points us right back to Genesis, in which we are pointed when God created the world. God is simply not patching up the old, but is creating the new. The old things are discarded and are passed away, which means to cast them aside as no longer being part of us. The new things do not become new at conversion, they are actually discarded and other things take their place as newly created.

The term behold in this passage of Scripture actually indicates that it’s kind of surprising that this happens to new believers with their new found faith in Christ. It also clearly gives us an indication that when you come to Christ, you are not the same. You don’t go on in the old life that you used to have. God is transforming you from the inside out, every bit of you. It’s like saying to look at how everything is new. You have a new life, new work, new destination, and a new standing is brought about by God Himself on the behalf of His believers.

Once we sense the newness we have in Christ Jesus, we also learn the new work He has given us to do. The source of the new creation is God but the source of the new work is God also. Notice in verse 18 where it says:

Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ.

Immediately, salvation is taken out of the realm of humanity and put distinctly in the realm of man and we had nothing to do with it. God has done everything in order for us to be saved. Those who are controlled by His love and live for Christ and not for themselves, these new things do not have their source in the flesh but in God. They are the byproducts of being reconciled to God. Can you imagine someone coming to Christ and saying they believe but having nothing change? They go on in their life and do the things they used to do. They have no desire to follow Christ or learn what the Bible actually teaches.

That means there was no conversion if that takes place. Many people say they profess Jesus but there is no desire and nothing is new. They just added Jesus on to their philosophy of life. Everyone knows someone like that, just make sure you’re not like that. That’s what the Scripture is bringing to our minds: when we come to Christ, you are new and given a new work by God to not just sit in the pew and twiddle your thumbs. This is a byproduct of being reconciled to God, He works and we work. God’s love provided the means and basis for man’s reconciliation to God, against whom we have sinned.

It is sin that separates people from God. God provides Christ’s death to remove the sin and the guilt that goes along with it. That was the very thing that separated us. It is all God’s plan because of His love, but God’s own sense of justice had to be satisfied so God gave His Son to be the substitution for sinners. So God provides Christ’s death to transform sinners from enemies to friends.

The term to reconcile is actually an old word that was used often to exchange coins so it means a change in mind. The term reconciled has within it, the thought of change and it means here the change in a relationship. To put someone in a friendship with God. That means that if somebody has to be put in a friendship with God, before that they were not in a friendly relationship with God. People are not then at peace with God, but actually enemies with God and His attitude towards the sinner is one of judgment and condemnation and wrath.

You remember the passage from the gospel of John? John 3:18:

He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

In other words we see here that they are in a state of judgment because they are enemies with the Judge. The One who could justify them and set them free, they are actually against. All of us were like that. Now turn back and look at Romans 5:10-11. He brings this out very clearly for us about this whole deal that we were in a sphere that we were against God. People will refuse to be an enemy of God but rather that they are actually friendly with God. When you come to Scripture, you find that you are a sinner and a rebel against God and under His judgment. When you realize that, you realize the greatness of His love. Let’s read this passage in Romans 5:10-11:

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.

This is what takes place, everything is through Christ. We are made at peace with God through Christ. The sinner cannot reconcile himself or herself to God, that is God’s place. It is when the sinner repents and turns to Jesus Christ in faith, can God the Father change His attitude toward the sinner from one of wrath to one of peace. That means that all alienation between the repentant sinner and God has ended. But this change is solely based on the death of His Son and the work that Jesus accomplished on the cross, which lets God set aside His wrath towards a repentant sinner.

So that’s what’s new. This relationship is new that we didn’t have before. Everything that men and women could think of for redeeming themselves and their world, had already been tried and failed before God sent His Son. I mean by this that all kinds of religions are found today on earth. There is an abundance of different philosophies and ideas found regarding justice, governments, and kingships on the earth. They had ample opportunity to experiment with ways to redeem man but every single one of them failed miserably. You ever wonder what philosophers said?

Philosophy has always been interesting to me, but according to R.C. Sproul, there is one word that sums up what philosophers like. They like to ponder things and wrestle mentally through ideas. Think about Plato, who hated the material world. He imagined that these forms in the sky were truly perfect, until matter corrupted them. He didn’t find any answers there.

Aristotle ripped off Plato’s story and shoved all his ethical forms into the logical, deductive, practical thinking system, which many of us have been influenced by. Of course, that’s called Aristotelian logic, and he says a lot of things but concludes nothing.

Hedeigger was a German philosopher, who became a Nazi. Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician. He considered himself to be the little engine that could and he tried to will himself into existence by saying, “I think, therefore I am.” This is basically like saying, “I can, I think I can.”

All their pondering and thinking led to no substantial conclusions that could aid us and they could also not get at the wisdom of God. In fact, when you come to Scripture in 1 Corinthians 1:21, listen to what it says:

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

And what was that message? In verse 23 it says:

But we preach Christ crucified.

These all could be ignored, the philosophers I mean. We could learn more from an ant hill than these. They never really could give us answers. Philosophy ultimately means a trusting of human reason and understanding to get to a conclusion. The only real philosophy is theology. It starts with God and objective truths. There is an infinite Creator who spoke and His Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. So philosophers looked everywhere yet could not find God. And I don’t know if you ever read philosophy, but it will twist your mind in knots. You won’t know what’s up or down once you get through some of the thinking. Some of it’s practical but some of it just seems out of nowhere.

There’s only one solution. We must wait upon God and He must tell me about Himself. God of course acted and revealed unto us His gracious purpose. God revealing and manifesting Himself to us through creation and through a more special way, the Word of God. This is how we know God and we can’t know Him any other way. No matter what a person may think, they cannot know God any other way. Every other way miserably fails to find anything that’s worthwhile. Every other way fails to let you know that when you die you know where you’re going and how you’re getting there.

Only the Bible gives us this information. Redemption and salvation are entirely of God. All of grace, all planned before the foundation of the world. God sent His Son at the exact and proper time into human history to save sinners. The point made here is that God needs no reconciliation. He is engaged in the great business of reconciling us to Himself, which has been done on God’s terms. And this is only made possible though Christ. So not only is the source of this new creation, God, but the work of this new creation that God gives us is from Him. And of course the Bestower of this new work is God also.

If you turn to 2 Corinthians 5:18, notice what it is saying here:

[He] gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

He gave us the task of reconciling people to Him. The term for ministry is a very familiar word to us in the church. It’s the word for deacon. It means here service, help, or mission, that we have been given a mission, that is leading others to be put into friendship with God. The task of winning the unreconciled to God is committed to us. It is a high and holy one, but a supremely difficult one. This is because the offending party, the guilty, is the hardest to win over. We were all hard to win over because we were locked in our own dead selves. We weren’t responding to God, because we were dead. So God had to a divine work in us to be able to open up our eyes to show us that the only way to enter the Kingdom of God is through Christ and the only way to see it is through Christ.

Christ is the center of everything we believe the Bible teaches from Genesis to Revelation. If the task of making sinful enemies friends of God were solely up to us. then I can guarantee you that no one would be reconciled. And no one would have the charges against them removed, and no one would be removed from the slavery of sin. That means that if somebody is not truly reconciled to God, not truly saved and born again, then they are left in the state of being in Adam. So there’s not going to be any change there because they’re just going to be doing the old stuff.

For a real believer, there’s new stuff happening. In Scripture, it does mean something because all the work has been done by our Lord, God Himself. We are in a relationship with love with Him and He gives us a mission as ambassadors to carry out His unfinished business in this world. The Lord didn’t do everything when we He came into the world. He went back to Heaven and gave the rest of the work to the Church to do. The Church cannot lay aside the mandate God has given us to and do our own thing, or be driven by the culture of the world or the winds of teaching that is happening all over the place. Many churches have begun to do that, but we need to stick to what it says in the Word of God because there is unfinished business and work to be done!

God has called us to do it, and this business is basically in the form of a message. We don’t make this message up. He has given it to us and we take it to the world. A third unique mark of an ambassador for Christ is their message. Back in 2 Corinthians 5:19-20 we see that here it is the ministers of a message with far reaching effects that God is doing this wondrous work, bringing reconciliation and pardon from sin to the people of the world from every tribe and nation. So there’s five essentials that are key in these passages of Scripture before us that are important for us to know to understand the message. If you notice in verse 19 the first essential is the person of the message. It says:

Namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.

God was reconciling the world to Himself through Christ. The whole reconciliation process takes place in Him and only in Him. That means ambassadors cannot fiddle around with or sidestep Jesus Christ as being the central figure n the message. This great plan of redemption aways centers on the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s like what the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1:10:

Summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.

The purpose and way of redemption are always in Christ so we can’t mess that up. A second part of the message is the target of the message. Notice what it says in verse 19:

Reconciling the world to Himself.

So the world here means the world of men: Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, rich and poor, barbarians of different colors, and people who are lost in darkness in bondage to sin who are alienated from the life of God and who are under His wrath. These people who are in desperate need of a word from God, but they don’t know or desire that. So when ambassadors bring the message of a foreign land to the land to tell people what the truth is and what the Kingdom of Heaven actually communicates on how to get there.

So the world specifically embraces only those who repent and take advantage of the offer. Only these are reconciled, not everyone is reconciled or saved. There’s a third essential in the message found in verse 19. Notice what it says:

Not counting their trespasses against them.

Another word to describe this is sin. It clearly indicates that sin is the problem, sins were the cause of the alienation of people from God and pursuing one’s bent to sin. It usually starts out as a search for freedom and happiness but ends in slavery and fear and remaining under the wrath of God. Sin always presents to us pleasurable, something the flesh wants and the desires crave. But ultimately we find in Scripture that sin is a breaking of God’s law and a showing that awe are rebels in our heart to God. And because of people’s transgressions and sins, we are in trouble with God. Transgressions mean a result of falling to the side or away from the right road. An English expression describes it this way: going where one is forbidden to go.

Remaining an enemy to God and not a friend of God and you can enjoy your sin and not have a relationship with God. So it was transgression that caused God to drive our first parents out of the Garden of Eden and away from His presence. It has been a barrier between Him and man ever since. Transgression is really disobedience to God’s Word and His way. You have heard the quaint saying, “God loves the sinner but hates the sin.” This is totally wrong. God does not view a sinner apart from his sins. God’s wrath is upon sins and the person who is responsible for them. God sends sinners to hell, not just their sin.

In fact the Word of God tells us that God judges the righteous and God is angry with the wicked every day. So when people repent and turn from their sin and anything they’re trusting in to save themselves and turn to God and believe in Him, then God will take the wrath He has for you and move it out of the way. Now you’re reconciled friend of God. That’s the state that ambassadors want people to be in, as true friends of God.

There’s a fourth essential in our passage and that’s the messenger of the message. Look at the end of verse 19-20:

He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

This passage of Scripture is talking about all who have been redeemed and have been brought into friendship with God. An ambassador again is a representative for someone else. It is actually an old Greek word that means old man. Now what that means is that usually ambassadors that were sent by emperors and kings to represent their kingdoms had to be older and mature. They had to know what the policies of the kingdom were so they can represent the kingdom properly to another country. So that means in some respects a Christian ambassador needs some maturity and experience. And that should be an admonition to us to grow in knowledge and wisdom from the Word of God so we can represent Christ well and know what we believe.

The Apostle Paul said that because we are the priesthood of believers, we too have been given the ministry of reconciliation. We are the mouthpieces. God did not send angels but us. We make our appeal to sinful humanity as if God Himself were making an appeal through us. What appeal is this? It’s right here in 2 Corinthians 5:20. This brings me to the last essential of the message: the earnestness of the message. It says:

We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Sometimes the message is there but there is no urgency to tell it and I think this, my friend, is a grave mistake. The message must be accompanied by a strong sense of importance and urgency. It has to be in our soul or we won’t say anything for Christ but just keep it to ourselves as if we have a private relationship with God and we have to do nothing else or tell no one else. According to the Scripture, we not only have to tell people, but we have to do this with urgency.

In fact the verbs in the Scripture verses are packed and show a real sense of pressure for us to beg, urge, implore, plead, entreat people for a specific response. What is that response? “Please be reconciled to God and this is how you do it.” I wish we can save people but we can’t. But we can tell people what the Lord gave to us to give to them.

Now many of you probably don’t know this, but when I first came to the church I had a radio ministry for seven years. It was actually very good and had contacts and a Bible study we gave out. When people graduated from the study, we gave them a little diploma. But then the radio stations started talking all of the preachers off the air. I got replaced by Billy Graham, but I didn’t feel that bad about it. Then Billy Graham got thrown off and they just replaced it with music. And now they’re just Christian rock stations. And if you find a message somewhere, it’s not on the main ones. It’s gonna be on the AM stations where you have to navigate the static.

But during the radio broadcast, I was in contact with a man named Brother Banes who lived in Bound Brook. He would call me every once in a while and listened to my message on Sunday afternoons. He would tell me how he loved my messages and how the gospel was so clear. Once I found out that Brother Banes was a street preacher. He was already probably 75 to 80 years old when he called me. He used to have this sign on him that simply said, “Turn or burn.” Now you may think that is fanatical, but it does show urgency.

It does show that to get reconciled to God, you have to repent and turn from something so you don’t go to hell. To thinking you’re going to Heaven and actually end up in hell is very bad philosophy of life. But Brother Banes had this urgency and he would be out there on the street with that sign preaching. He would not only have the sign, but he would also preach to people.

I got the sense that this guy is really urgent with the message and is not fooling around. In the short time that he had left, and actually he died not too long after that, he was an encouragement. He called me up at least once a month to tell me what was going on in his life. I never got a chance to meet him, it seemed that we were missing each other often.

So his message was get reconciled to God and do it now! With God today through Jesus Christ, you can take advantage of the peace terms of the gospel. So we beg you to come to Christ. In fact if you look further in the passage, look at what it says in 2 Corinthians 6:1-2:

And working together with Him, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain—for He says, “at the acceptable time I listened to you, and on the day of salvation I helped you.” Behold, now is “the acceptable time,” behold, now is “the day of salvation.”

That is a quote from Isaiah 49 about the gospel going to the ends of the earth. In other words, as ambassadors we can go anywhere and tell people that now is the day of salvation. The Spirit of God may be speaking to you now but it may be the last time. You’re not guaranteed tomorrow so don’t put it off. I came across this other story that just gave the sense of urgency as well. It was a man called Alvin Straight. He didn’t drive a car and he was 73 years old, but when he found out that his brother was dying and had a stroke, he got on his riding law mower and traveled 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his brother. The look on his brother’s face when he realized what his brother had done was so deeply moving that it gave him an encouragement. If that is not a picture of urgency, I don’t know what is.

If we can be like that with the gospel, we will see God do work in our lives that will be very encouraging to us and others. As an ambassador, there are somethings you cannot do. We cannot retreat or surrender in cowardice. We cannot tamper with the message. We cannot manipulate people to get desired results. We know this is a work of God and we have to let Him use us. So we need to tell the message 100% as it is. We cannot tamper with the gospel to make it less offensive. Changing the message is useless since no one can believe unless God grants them understanding, gives them faith and repentance, and makes them alive to believe.

As John MacArthur says, if they don’t hear the truth cool music won’t help, if they don’t see the light powerpoint won’t help, if they don’t like the message drama and video won’t help. And it seems like that is where a lot of people have gone to communicate the message. The problem is right in their own hearts. They need the seed of the Word of God. There is nothing wrong with the message. Their hearts are what’s wrong because they are dead and blind. They are in Adam and they must be rescued by the second Adam, Christ.

He does what the first Adam cannot do: He obeys the Father and accomplishes and finishes the mission so we can be saved and brought back to God. Now that leads me to a fourth unique mark as an ambassador. I want you to notice in 2 Corinthians 5:21, this is the objective hope that all ambassadors have. It says this:

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

There’s the goal and end of it all. That is what God has done for us. It does not say that God made Jesus a sinner. What He did was laid on Jesus the iniquity of us all by charging all that is sin in us against Him. The Father let Jesus bear all this burden with all this guilt and penalty in our place in order to deliver us and reconcile us to God and make us friends with Him. That’s what we remember when we meet at the Lord’s Table. We call it a table because when you sit around the table to eat a meal, you do so with friends and family, not with enemies. The Lord calls us to His Table as friends and we partake in the essential elements of the message of the gospel and that is the flesh of Jesus and the sacrifice of His body in the place of sinners, and the blood washing away the sin so we can have our slate wiped clean and be right with God. That’s the only way anybody can be a friend of God.

So sinners become righteous before God so that we may become the righteousness of God in Him. This righteousness is not of our own, but it is reckoned to us by God the moment we exercise faith. The death of the sinless One enabled God to declare us just, making it possible for God to set aside His wrath and welcome into a state of peace all who turn in repentance towards Him.

I like how Philippians 3:9 says it:

Not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.

Brethren, as we are left here on this earth, let us be what we are. We are ambassadors. We are the voices of God and have the message and everything we need to go and tell people. Our disposition should be that of good integrity, humility, and a deep thankfulness to the love of Christ. Our work comes from God and is for God. Our message is about Christ and it is to the world and should be given from us with urgency. Our objective hope is this that we are reconciled to God. And we don’t have to worry about that anymore, but we have to tell the message to those who have not heard it yet.

Let’s pray. Lord, thank You again for the Word of God. Lord make us people and allow us to live out what we already are. Not only are we believers in Christ and new creation, but we are ambassadors. Lord, I pray that You would not allow us to be silent. But every chance we get, we would pray and ask You to give us opportunities to speak on Your behalf to anyone we meet that we would be ready with urgency to share the gospel. And even with people we have more contact with on a regular basis, that our message would be urgent with them as we give them steps of the gospel. Holy Spirit, we pray that You would take us and use us to be that vessel of honor and flow through to speak to others that they can be friends of God through Christ. I pray this in You Name, Amen. Let’s stand together.

January 12, 2020
A New Creation in Christ

In this sermon, Pastor Mike Riccardi asks and answers the question, “What makes someone a Christian?” Pastor Riccardi teaches from 2 Corinthians 5:16-17 three points concerning what constitutes a Christian:

1) The Christian is a new creation brought to life by God
2) The Christian regards Christ spiritually and not by the flesh
3) The Christian assesses others spiritually rather than by appearance or station

Pastor Riccardi ends his sermon encouraging non-Christians to be reconciled to God and for Christians to live unto God in all things.

Full Transcript:

Good morning and greetings to all of you. I bring you greetings from Pastor John MacArthur and the Elders of Grace Community Church. It’s a delight to be with you, to be back in New Jersey, seeing family, celebrating Christmas, New Years, and all these things. However, it is a wonderful privilege to be with you and minister the word of God to you.

I thank God for this church. I thank God for the pulpit and the Word that is expounded from it. I was speaking about Calvary to someone in the last several weeks and was just saying that when you have a church that knows the Gospel, knows what preaching is, and is eager to hear the Word preached and whatever it has to say, then you have a blessed congregation. You have that, and you are that. We thank God for you.

As Pastor Joe said, we’re going to be in 2 Corinthians 5. It’s New Year’s, right? It’s the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, and as we come upon this new year and season of new beginnings, I want to preach about the New Birth.

I want to begin by asking you: what makes someone a Christian? There is a lot of confusion over the answer to that question even within the church. What makes someone a Christian? At the most fundamental level, what does it mean to be a follower of Christ? How many people would say that what makes someone a Christian is family tradition or heredity? Similarly to how an Irish person is born Irish, those whose parents and grandparents were Christians are born Christian.

Others would say that it’s good manners, politeness, and a pleasant attitude that makes somebody a Christian. Someone who says, “please and thank you.” Someone who says “yes,” “sir,” and “no mam.” Someone who looks you in the eye when they talk to you. That’s what it means to be a Christian.

Others would say that being a Christian means you fight for the betterment of society. Christians fight poverty, they feed the hungry, or they devote themselves to working for social justice. Others identify Christianity with a political party, so if you were for limited government and economic conservatism, and if you’re against abortion and homosexual marriage, then you’re a Christian.

Some people are a little bit more religious in their definition of a Christian. They might say that being a Christian is living a changed life. It is the reformation of our morals. A Christian, they’d say, is someone who doesn’t cheat on their spouse or cheat on their taxes. Someone who doesn’t abuse alcohol or drugs. Someone who doesn’t use foul language.

Other people would say that the fulfillment of religious duties makes a Christian. You’re a Christian if you read your Bible, pray, sing worship songs, and attend church. Others say it’s a matter of fearing God’s judgment and believing that Jesus died on the Cross to save us from hell. Still, others would say it’s feeling bad about your sin that makes you a Christian. Everybody sins, but the ones who feel guilty and know what they’re doing is wrong are the true Christians.

Well, I’m here to tell you that none of those things makes a person a Christian. Now, it’s true that Christians mourn over their sin. It’s true that Christians read Scripture, pray, and are members of a local church. It is true that Christians are faithful to their spouses, don’t give themselves to drunkenness, and they discipline their tongues.

However, not a one of those things makes them a Christian. Christianity is not so natural of a religion that you can be a Christian if you clean up your life, your language, parrot out a few memorized phrases, and show up to church once a week. Man’s problem isn’t that our thinking, our speech, our behavior, or our politics just need to be refined a little bit here and there. Something is so fundamentally wrong with us that Jesus says in John 3, if we are to have any hope of seeing the kingdom of God, then we must be born all over again.

The call of the Gospel is not behavior modification. Sin has so infected and corrupted mankind that nothing less than the wholesale renovation of the soul is required for salvation. As Charles Spurgeon aptly observed, he said:

The Scriptures do not say ye must be improved, but ye must be born again.

What makes a man a Christian and what truly distinguishes a genuine believer in Jesus from those who are unsaved is regeneration, the spiritual recreation of one dead in sin and the divine impartation of spiritual life into the soul of a sinner. God speaks of the reality of regeneration in the New Covenant promise of Ezekiel 36:26-27 when He says:

Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷“I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

What makes someone a Christian is the spiritual heart surgery performed by Almighty God wherein He removes your sinful heart of stone and totally transforms you from the inside-out, so that you’re thinking, desires, tastes, affections, and wills are entirely renewed. Your spiritual eyes, once blinded to the glory of Christ, have now been opened to behold the ugliness of sin and the beauty of Holiness as its comprehended in Jesus.

The sin that once tasted so sweet now brings nothing but bitterness. The sin that was so alluring, enticing, and satisfying now has no pull on your affections. It’s lost on you. The righteousness and virtue that you once had no taste for is now what you hunger and thirst after.

See, the Christian is the one who has been regenerated and has been made an entirely new creation from the inside-out. In our text, the Apostle Paul has something to teach us about the Christian’s experience of regeneration. In his comments, there is a section of his letter that really begins in 2 Corinthians 5:11 where he’s begun speaking about two driving motivations in his life that fuel and empower him for radically sacrificial ministry.

In 2 Corinthians 5:11, the first motivation is the fear of God. He lived his entire life in light of the fact that we all must appear before the Judgment seat of Christ to give an account of our every thought, every word, and every deed. Paul says he conducted every aspect of his ministry in full knowledge that every word on his lips and every intention of his heart lay open to the searching, omniscient gaze of the Lord Jesus. That drove him to live and to minister with the utmost integrity, so no matter what the false Apostles in Corinth were accusing him of, his conscience was clear before the Lord.

Then, the second driving motivation in his life is the love of Christ. He says in 2 Corinthians 5:14:

For the love of Christ controls us…

Paul is compellingly motivated. He is absolutely driven by Christ’s love for His people as displayed in the Gospel. Then, in meditating on that love, Paul goes on to describe key components of the Gospel that so brilliantly displays the love of Christ for His people. He speaks about the doctrine of substitution in 2 Corinthians 5:14:

…that one died for all…

The one man, Christ, died on behalf of, or in the place of, His people as our substitute and the one who extinguishes the righteous wrath of the Father against our sin by suffering that punishment in our place. He speaks of the doctrine of solidarity or of representative headship. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:14:

…that one died for all, therefore all died

That is to say that there exists such a union between Christ, the head, and His people, the body, that when He died to sit on the Cross, so also did His people die to sin. When He rose again to newness of life, so also did His people rise again to newness of life in Him.

Then, he speaks of the doctrine of substitution, solidarity, and sanctification. In 2 Corinthians 5:15, the very purpose of God’s saving grace, by which were justified in Christ, is that we might display His Glory by living a life of practical righteousness and obedience to Him:

and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.

As Paul continues meditating on the theological truths of the Gospel, by which the love of Christ is displayed, he then turns to speak about the doctrine of regeneration. The sanctification that he speaks about in 2 Corinthians 5:15 to no longer live unto ourselves, but unto Christ is the result of this radical inward transformation of regeneration, which he addresses in 2 Corinthians 2:16-17:

Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. ¹⁷Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

When you become united to Christ by faith, one of the results of that union, in 2 Corinthians 5:16, is the way you view other people is entirely transformed because, in 2 Corinthians 5:16b, the way you view Christ has been transformed. Your view of Christ is transformed because you yourself have been transformed. Regeneration transforms the entirety of who you are.

In my mind, it’s easier to reason from cause to effect than from effect back to cause, so I’m going to treat 2 Corinthians 5:17 first where Paul describes regeneration, and then 2 Corinthians 5:16 where he outlines two results of regeneration, which will make a three-point outline.

First, we will consider that the Christian is a new creation. Second, that he has a new view of Christ. Third, that he has a new view of others. First, in view of his union to Christ, the Christian is said to be, number one, a new creation. In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul says:

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.

If anyone is in Christ, if anyone has become united to Jesus Christ by saving faith in the Gospel, if anyone has died to sin and self in union with the One who died to sin once for all, then he is a new creation. There are no exceptions. This is definitional. There is no such thing as an unregenerate Christian. There is no such thing as being united to Christ in salvation without having been totally transformed, from the inside-out, by the work of the Holy Spirit.

The definitive distinguishing mark of every true believer in Jesus is that he is regenerant, he has been born again, and he is a new creation. We need to be a new creation in Christ. Like I said before, something was so fundamentally wrong with us that we needed to be recreated. Apostle John records Jesus’ words that we need to be born all over again. Paul puts it plainly in Titus 3:3:

For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.

This is the natural man’s miserable condition. How are we going to get out of it? Is it to clean up our act, to modify our behavior, or to reform our morals? No. Man, by his nature, is so hopelessly corrupted by sin that he must look entirely outside of himself for salvation, which is precisely Paul’s answer in Titus 3:4-6:

But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, ⁵He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, ⁶whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior

Paul said something very similar in Ephesians 2:1, as he reminds the Church of Ephesus who they were before salvation:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins

Not injured, not sick, but dead. Though we possess physical life from the very moment of our conception, from that very same moment because of our union with Adam, we are utterly devoid of any spiritual life. We are spiritual corpses and we come out that way. He goes on in Ephesians 2:3:

Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

This is what we are by nature. Nothing at all has to happen to us to make us this way. By nature, we are children of wrath. We are born in such a way that if nothing and no one were to intervene, we would be just recipients of the wrath of God against our sin.

This is who we are, and so once again I ask: what is the remedy for such a hopeless condition? Is it a laundry list of religious duties by which we seek to earn the favor of God? That is impossible! What duties can a dead man perform? How can someone dead in trespasses and sins raise himself to life? He can’t. The one thing we need most is entirely outside of our power to perform, and that’s why Paul goes on to say in Ephesians 2:4-5:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)

Sin has so infected the totality of our being, our minds, our hearts, our wills, and all of us that we come into this world spiritually dead. All our faculty is corrupted by sin. We’re spiritually blind as it says in 2 Corinthians 4:4:

In whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

We’re spiritually deaf. Jeremiah 6:10 says:

Behold, their ears are closed and they cannot listen.

Jesus said in John 8:47:

…for this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.

Not only are we blind and deaf, but our will and our affections are disordered and enslaved to sin. Jeremiah 17:9 says:

The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick

We’ve already seen from Ezekiel 36 that Scripture says the natural man’s heart is a heart of stone. It’s cold and unresponsive to any meaning and Glory of divine truth. Sin has so pervaded our nature as to leave no part of us untouched by its corruption. We need to be born again. We need to be regenerated and renewed. We need to be made alive.

In Christ, we find God’s grace perfectly suited to our need. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. In 2 Corinthians 4:6, Paul likens this work of new creation to God’s work of the original creation:

For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Just as in the beginning God said, “Let there be light,” and by the creative power of His word, the galaxies leapt into existence. In regeneration, God’s sovereignly speaks into the darkened and dead heart, “Let there be light!” Instantaneously, He births the light of the knowledge of the glory of Christ and spiritual life where it had not existed.

He cures spiritual blindness. He opens the ears of the deaf with this sovereign call to life. He removes the heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh. He renews the affection, so that the new man hates sin and loves righteousness. Just as depravity was total and just as no part of our nature escaped the corruption of sin, so also is regeneration total. No part of our nature escapes the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.

I want you to notice precisely how Paul talks about regeneration in 2 Corinthians 5:17. The phrase that the NASB translates, “he is a new creature,” is a smoothing out of the original. If you have the NASB, you’ll notice the words, “he is,” in italics indicating that they weren’t in the original language. Literally, the Greek read like this:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, new creation!

It’s an exuberant interjection like Paul could barely contain himself as he wrote. In using that phrase, it’s unmistakable that Paul wants to draw an inseparable connection between the regeneration of sinful individuals and the coming renewal of the entire creation. In fact, if it wasn’t for the very individualizing language at the beginning of the verse, “if anyone is in Christ,” it would have been very natural to hear Paul reference to the new creation as a reference to the new heavens and the new earth.

Those two concepts aren’t unrelated in Scripture. While the concept is spread throughout the New Testament, the Greek word for regeneration is only used in two versus. One is Titus 3:5, which we read already. The other is in Matthew 19:28 where Jesus speaks about the time of His second coming as the regeneration. Furthermore, Romans 8:19 explicitly ties the regeneration of the creation to the regeneration of mankind:

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.

The sin cursed creation is waiting eagerly for the time when the children of God will be revealed to be what Christ has redeemed them to be. Then, he says in Romans 8:20-21:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Just as the curse of creation was intimately bound up with the curse of man where the creation was first one man’s sin, so also is the redemption of creation inextricably tied to the redemption of man. The creation will be freed from the curse of sin when man is free from the curse of sin.

Now, the implications of that are astounding because what is happening in the renewal, recreation, and regeneration of a sinner when he comes to Christ is nothing less than the prefiguring and inbreaking of that final renewal, recreation, and regeneration of the entire cosmos. You see, Christ didn’t come only to save our souls. He came to save the entire creation, so there is coming a day when Christ will return. This entire world will be purged from sin and evil through the judgment of fire and recreated into this most blessed paradise in order to be a suitable habitation for the redeemed children of God.

Revelation 21 says there’s coming a time when the present heaven and earth will pass away, a time when every wrong will be made right, when every ounce of evil will be eradicated, when every tear will be wiped from the eyes of God’s children, where there will be no more death, where there will be no more mourning, and where there will be no more pain. As Scripture speaks of that time. It tells us what God is going to say on that day in Revelation 21:5:

And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

Paul says in our very verse that if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. Salvation, by grace through faith in Christ and regeneration by the Holy Spirit, is nothing less than a microcosm of the redemption of the entire cosmos. Nothing less than the glory of the new heavens and the new earth breaking into this present evil age in the reborn soul of the believer in Jesus. How great a Salvation with which we have been saved?

Just as there is an unspeakable difference between this creation and the next, so also is there an unspeakable difference between the unregenerate sinner and the one who has been recreated in the likeness of Christ. The old things are passed away; behold, new things have come. All of our blindness, all of our deafness, all of our deadness, and all of our uncleanness has been nailed to the Cross. Psalm 103:12.

As far as the east is from the west,
So far has He removed our transgressions from us.

Dear Christian, I ask you: was your life before Christ one of great shame? Was it one of gross immorality? Was it one of uncommon wickedness? Was there fornication and adultery? Was there drug use and imprisonment? Was there sexual perversion? I tell you that if you are in Christ, you are a new creation.

The old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. You have been transformed from the inside out. You have been closed in the righteousness of Christ and are being progressively transformed and conformed into His image? You can, therefore, cut all ties with the past and live in the freedom of the new creation. If you’re outside of Christ, if you’re laboring under the burden of sins such as those, then I just invite you to run to Christ, who opens His arms and says:

Come to me all you who are weary and heavy and I will give you rest.

Turn from your sins and lay them at the Cross of Christ. Trust in Him for forgiveness and for righteousness because it is only by saving faith in Him. If any man is in Christ, then anyone is made a new creation. Well, those glorious truths provide just a glimpse into what regeneration is. It is to become an entirely new creation.

As we move to our second point, working backwards from 2 Corinthians 5:17 into 2 Corinthians 5:16, we want to consider what regeneration results in. We see two results that Paul focuses on in 2 Corinthians 5:16. The first of which is that becoming a new creation necessarily leads to a new view of Christ. Let’s focus on the second half of 2 Corinthians 5:16:

Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer.

What does Paul mean when he says, “we have known Christ according to the flesh?” He means that he once regarded Christ from a fleshly point of view and according to worldly standards, and by paying special attention to the way that things looked outwardly and externally rather than internally and spiritually. There was a time in Paul’s life when he judged Christ in accordance with the standards and values that derive from living life as if physical life in this world is all that exists.

There was a time when he looked upon Jesus as a poor, uneducated, vagrant, and illegitimate son of a carpenter from the no-name city of Nazareth as if anything good could come out of Nazareth, in Galilee of the Gentiles. He saw Him as a self-pointed, pseudo-rabbi, who was an anti-law, anti-Moses, Messianic imposter.

Paul saw Jesus as a weak, suffering criminal and as a crucified heretic, who died deservingly under the curse of God and whose followers were delusional fanatics that need to be systematically imprisoned and executed. Yes, Paul had known Christ after the flesh. He regarded Him and judged Him in a fleshly manner. Yet, he says:

we know Him in this way no longer.

Paul’s own experience of regeneration to come was an entirely new view of Christ when God shone the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ into Paul’s heart. He also shone a light from Heaven into his eyes that knocked him to the ground on the Damascus Road. Though Paul’s physical eyes were blinded for the next three days, his spiritual eyes were opened for the very first time. The scales that would fall from his physical eyes just a few days later, had fallen from his spiritual eyes when he saw the risen Christ.

In that moment, when the Lord God gave Paul eyes to see, ears to hear, and removed his heart of stone and replaced it with a heart of flesh, the first thing that changed about Paul was his evaluation of who Jesus was. Though he knew Christ according to the flesh at the start of that day, now he knew Him in that way no longer. In the blazing light of Heavenly Glory, Paul saw that the Jesus he had been persecuting was the long-awaited Messiah. He was the holy One of God. He was the becoming One, the Savior of Israel. He was not a crucified criminal. He was the resurrected Lord of all creation. He was not the illegitimate son of a carpenter. He was the son of the Living God. He was crushed under the weight of God’s wrath, not for His own sins, but as the substitute and great High Priest for all those who would believe in Him.

He was the supremely glorious and surpassingly valuable Savior, whom Paul would eventually suffer the loss of all things and count them but refuse so that he might game this priceless treasure, who is Jesus Christ. The first result of regeneration is when Almighty God issues His sovereign decree for light to shine forth into the heart that is dead in sin.

When the eyes are opened, and the heart of stone becomes a heart of flesh, the first thing that changes is the sinner’s view of Jesus. The natural man regards Jesus according to the flesh. He’s just a puritanical kill-joy, who threatens to punish you if you don’t do everything He says, or He’s a man who is deified by His followers. He’s a character in a story. He was made up as a psychological crutch, so that weak people could get through the day, or He’s just boring and uninteresting. Whatever claims He makes about Himself, just yawn. I don’t care.

It doesn’t even have to be negative. You can have an altogether positive evaluation of Christ and have it be a fleshly evaluation. So many today conceive of Jesus is a great moral teacher, an exemplary philosopher, an inspired profit, a non-violent, revolutionary, and political protest worthy of imitation, or just a good example of how we ought to sacrifice ourselves for those we love.

However, every one of those evaluations – positive and negative – have something in common: the unregenerate man or woman looks at Jesus and does not see the magnificent and matchless glory of the only begotten son of God. The dead heart looks Jesus, the most glorious person in the universe, and sees no beauty and no divine loveliness. Maybe a little bit of admiration since He’s a great teacher, but not the thrilling, compelling, and satisfying Savior that He is. Regeneration and regeneration alone changes that. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Paul describes the unregenerate person when he says:

in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

This is the sinner’s problem. This is what it means to be dead in trespasses and sins. Not that your motionless or stagnant, but that you were devoid of spiritual life that allows you to see the value of the glory of Christ that is revealed in the Gospel. The essence of spiritual death is spiritual blindness of the glory of Christ. Our spiritual perception is so disordered by sin that we look upon what is objectively delightful namely the glory Jesus and we are repulsed by Him.

Then, we see what is repulsive is mainly the glory of Satan himself and we’re enamored with it. We love darkness and we hate the light. We love filth and we despise Beauty. However, God shines the light of life into the blind heart. 2 Corinthians 4:6 says:

…the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

He gives us new spiritual eyes so that we finally see sin for what it is in all its objective ugliness, and we finally see Christ for who He is in all His objective beauty and glory. With our eyes finally opened, able to see, and evaluate things as they actually are, we turn away and repentant in discuss from the filth of sin, and we cling to our glorious Savior with the embrace of saving faith.

Peter, James, and John went up to the Mount of Transfiguration with the Jesus they viewed according to the flesh. As Christ peeled back the veil of His human flesh and His face shone brighter than the Sun and His garments were whiter than any launderer could whiten them, the disciples knew Him after the flesh no longer. Luke 9:32 says:

…they saw His glory…

In the same way, everyone who experiences the miracle of regeneration beholds a Transfiguration of Christ with the eyes of their heart. Whatever your fleshly evaluation of Him was, the veil over your heart is lifted and you behold Him as glorious. God, our very God, is fully God and fully man, the only mediator between God and man, the Lamb of God, our substitutionary sacrifice, and our merciful and faithful High Priest who has propitiate the Father’s wrath.

Whoever lives to make intercession for us, the resurrected and victorious One, the conqueror of sin and death. Above all, the supremely lovely One, Glorious, and Holiness clothed in the beauty and splendor of divine Majesty. One who is more satisfying than all that life can offer in all that death can take.

Calvary, I ask you: have you beheld Him as He is? Have you seen this Jesus? Has the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ invaded the dungeon of your depraved heart, and opened your eyes to His beauty? Is He your pearl of great price? Is He that treasure hidden in a field? Is He the one for whom you would gladly suffer the loss of all things if Christ should will it so?

Dear sinner, if that is not your heart’s testimony, cry to Him. Get on your face and lift your voice to Heaven that God might be merciful to you. To reveal to you the beauty and Glory of His son. The very first result of regeneration, of being made anew creation in Christ, is that your given a new view of Christ that embraces Him with a whole soul, trust, saving faith, and satisfaction.

The third point in our outline is a new view of others. Again 2 Corinthians 5:16 says:

Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh…

This is so important. If we know much about Christian theology at all, then we know that regeneration results in a changed view of Christ? However, what we don’t often hear, think about, or meditate on is that when we are transformed from the inside-out in regeneration and our assessment of Jesus changes, then so also does our assessment of everyone else in the world.

In regeneration, our entire person has been renovated. The old things have passed away. New things have come in every aspect of our life. One commentator puts it this way:

When a person becomes a Christian, he or she experiences a total restructuring of life that alters its whole fabric, thinking, feeling, willing, and acting.

John MacArthur says:

Old values, ideas, plans, loves, desires, and beliefs vanish, replaced by the new things that accompany salvation. God plants new desires, loves, inclinations, and truths in the redeemed, so that they live in the midst of the old creation with a new creation perspective.

This is what I like to call the wrecking ball of regeneration. When you become a new creation in Christ, all your goals, all your hobbies, all your ambitions, and joys in life are like a building that has been leveled to the ground by this wrecking ball of regeneration. In its place is an entirely new creation built by the spirit of God upon the foundation of Christ.

Now, with new tastes, new affections, new joys, and new ambitions. Along with all of that newness, comes also new ways of assessing other people, new canons of appraisal, and new standards according to which we arrive at our estimation of people. Just as Paul once knew Christ according to the flesh, just as he once esteemed, appraised, or evaluated Jesus according to the world’s preoccupation with outward appearance, so also Paul cognized, regarded, viewed, appraised, or valued other people according to the flesh as well.

However, he says from now on, from this point forward, since the time of his regeneration and conversion to Christ, we recognize no one according to the flesh. The one who is united to Christ and becomes a new creation in Him has put off those fleshly canons of appraisal, which judge men only on the basis of superficial, external matters.

I’m so jealous for us to understand, as a church, the implications of this and to apply them to our lives. Far too often, Christians have not distinguished themselves from the unregenerate in our personal standards of judgment and evaluation of others. We appraise people on the basis of their physical attractiveness. It is more pleasant to be engaging with people that we find physically attractive as opposed to those. We don’t. We appraise people on the basis of their style of dress. We’re impressed with the well-tailored suit or a nice dress, but we are just wondering why the guy in a t-shirt and jeans can’t dress up for church once in a while.

We judge people on their educational achievements. When somebody says, “I have a master’s degree in this… I have a doctorate in that…” Then, you say, “Oh, he’s an expert in his field. Wow.” We judge people on the basis of their social status such as the house, the cars they drive, and the clothes they wear. You judge people on the basis of their eloquence, their athletic abilities, their level of success in the business world, or their political affiliation.

In one of the saddest truths concerning the visible church, is that so many professing believers still allow their opinions of others and their understanding of their own identity to be shaped by their ethnicity and by the color of their skin. Friends, the holy spirit of God, by the inspiration of this text of sacred Scripture, is telling us that none of those things has any place in the mind of the one who has been regenerated and united to Christ. They are not the basis upon which we evaluate others, and they are not the sources from which we derive our own identity. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek. In Christ, there is neither slave nor free.

Think for a moment about what a radical statement that is from the pen of Saul of Tarsus. This was the most promising young Rabbi in Jerusalem educated under Gamaliel, supervising the persecution and execution of Christian. This is the one circumcised the 8th day of the stock of Israel. He is a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, a persecutor, and blameless according to the ceremonial law. His only canon of evaluation was whether or not someone met the strict pharisaical standards of mosaic ceremonialism. If he did, that man was a brother. If he didn’t, he was a dog.

Now, there is neither Jew nor Greek. What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Regeneration happened, salvation happened, and the new birth happened to him. Galatians 6:15 says:

For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

If your circumcised or uncircumcised, it doesn’t matter. Your ethnicity doesn’t matter. Your religious rituals don’t matter. What matters is whether or not there has been a new creation. What matters is whether or not the person that I’m talking to thinking about evaluating. Is this person regenerate or not? Is he United to Christ or not? Is he a child of God or not? In Colossians 3:10-11, Paul says:

and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him— ¹¹a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.

The regenerate man has been so dominated by Christ that it is the only point of reference for his view of anyone – whether or not they’re in Christ. The new view of Christ that’s born in those who have been made a new creation necessarily issues in a new view of others. This reaches even of the level of family. At the end of Matthew 12, Matthew records an incident where Jesus mother and brothers were willing to speak with Jesus after He finished teaching the crowds. Someone lets Him know, “Hey, your mother and your brothers are waiting out there for you,” and His response is stunning in Matthew 12:48-50:

But Jesus answered the one who was telling Him and said, “Who is My mother and who are My brothers?” ⁴⁹And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, “Behold My mother and My brothers! ⁵⁰“For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus regarded no man or woman after the flesh, not even His own family. What mattered was whether or not they believed in Him. So friends, nationalism means nothing. You have a deeper connection to true Christians in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan than to any unbeliever here in America. Ethnicity is nothing. You have a more intimate union with genuine believers who are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or whatever than any unregenerate person who shares the color of your skin, parentage, or lineage of your heritage.

Even family in comparison to Christ is nothing. Jesus says that He has a family with the children of God than He does even with His own mother. Now, family remains, ethnicity remains, and gender distinctions remain, but all of those things are absolutely inconsequential in determining one’s status before God or his place within God’s Kingdom.

We regard no man after the flesh. We are not, as 2 Corinthians 5:12 says, those who take pride in appearance and not in heart. Where that really intersected for Paul was how the false apostles were persuading the Corinthians to do just that. To regard Paul after the flesh, to look down upon him and judged him accursed because of how severely he suffered in the cause of ministry. However, Paul says:

Look, those who are truly united in Christ and have been born again, they have been totally renovated and entirely renewed. As a result, they don’t judge men and ministries on the fleshly basis of external appearance, of outward success, of worldly power, and prestige. If they did, they’d have to judge Christ and His cross to be a failure.

Paul is saying that the false apostles are judging him the same way he used to judge Christ – after the flesh. In so doing, they’re giving away and demonstrating that they have not experienced the transformation of regeneration that that marked all those who are united in Christ in saving faith.

I tell you, brothers and sisters, that you and I make the same error as the false apostles in Corinth anytime we look at a man or woman and allow their appearance, their dress, their financial portfolio, their resume, or their skin color to determine our estimation of them rather than the state of their heart before God.

The man or woman in Christ is a new creation. One who has been totally transformed from the inside-out starting with his view of Christ and reaching even to his view of everyone else. This is what it means to be regenerate. This is what it means to be born again. This is what it means to be a Christian. So friends, the question you need to ask yourselves as you hear these descriptions of the true Christian is:

Have I experienced this radical disruption of everything in my life? Has the Holy Spirit levelled to the ground everything that I sought my identity in? Has He given me new eyes to see the glory of Christ? Has He given the ears to hear the wisdom of divine truth? Has He removed my heart of stone and given me new desires, loves, inclinations, and ambitions? Is He giving me a heart of flesh that hates sin and loves righteousness? Is Christ precious to me? Is sin repulsive to me or am I under its thumb? Have I renounced to evaluating others on the basis of fleshly externals? Have I renounced seeking my own identity in those things as well? Am I a new creation?

If not, dear friend, don’t try to convince yourself that there is spiritual life where there is only death. Don’t try to fabricate this new creation by trying to clean up your life. You can’t engineer the radical, supernatural change that must take place in your heart. You can’t raise yourself from the dead. Come to Christ in repentance and faith. Only He can accomplish what you need. Only He can make you alive. 2 Corinthians 5:21 declares:

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

As His ambassadors, as though God were making an appeal through us, we beg you to be reconciled to God through faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Dear brothers and sisters, if you are a new creation, if you have been reconciled, if you have become the righteousness of God in Him, and if by God’s great grace, you have experienced this glorious gift of regeneration, then, friends, live like it. Live like a new creation in 2019. Think about the salvation that you have been granted. The Heidelberg Catechism, question 60, says:

Although my conscience accuse me, that I have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God, and have never kept any of them, and am still prone always to all evil; yet God without any merit of mine, of mere grace, grants and imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as if I had never committed nor had any sin, and had myself accomplished all the obedience which Christ has fulfilled for me; if only I accept such benefit with a believing heart.

That is amazing and that is ours to confess because of nothing that we’ve done, so I ask you: is that saving God not worth a life of faithfulness? Is he not worth a life of diligent pursuit of Him in Bible reading every morning and maybe every evening in 2019? Is He not worth the disciplined pursuit of Himself in prayer and communion with Him? Is he not worth faithfulness demonstrated in a vital investment in your local church by not just being here, but by investing, participating, and sharpening one another, confronting sin in one another, forgiving one another, confessing to one another, Bible study and fellowship time?

Is this regeneration and new creation, does that not issue in the diligent mortification of sin? John Owen said:

Let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts.

Are you going to use 2019 to get a stranglehold over your lustful corruptions and mortify sin in your life? You’ve been created again to do just that. Is this Gospel not worthy of proclamation? More than proclamation of begging, pleading, and imploring people, like Paul does, to be reconciled to Jesus your friend.

You are a new creation. Go out and tell others of this glorious Gospel. That they might become new creations. As we closed 2018 and look ahead to 2019, to year that God will give us mercy, may we live as new creations in Christ. Let’s pray:

Oh, Father, would You accomplish that very thing in Your people? Would You open eyes to see the loveliness of Jesus? Would You grant the miracle of regeneration even today and even this moment? For those whose eyes You have opened, would You open them afresh? Would You freshly overwhelm and ravish us with the beauty of Jesus, so that all the fuel for all our obedience and all of our discipline is fired by that Glory, so that none of this is drudgery or burdensome, but it’s a delight and a joy to follow Christ and discipleship. You can accomplish this by the power of Your spirit, and we ask You to do it in Christ’s name, Amen.

December 30, 2018
Every Believer’s Calling

Chad Dexter teaches from 2 Corinthians 5 that missions and evangelism are callings for every believer. Chad also explains how the Christian ministry of reconciliation is both privilege and duty.

March 19, 2017
Faith Promise Giving: Missions
In today’s sermon, Pastor Babij encourages Christians to support the work of missionaries and teaches several central points relating to missions:
1. The purpose of the church
2. Biblical reasons to evangelize
3. How believers are changed
4. Reasons to support missions and missionaries
January 22, 2017
A Biblical Model for Giving in Light of God’s Grace

Are you a biblical giver? In this sermon, Khaleef Crumbley examines the apostle Paul’s teaching regarding giving in 2 Corinthians 8:1-7. There, Paul uses the example of the Macedonian believers to encourage and instruct the Corinthian church. Khaleef Crumbley explains how the Macedonians are also examples for us as the Macedonians display ten characteristics of biblical giving.

August 30, 2015
Carnal Christian?

September 27, 2009