Turn with me in your copy of
the scripture to 2 Corinthians chapter 5. 2 Corinthians chapter 5. We're going to continue in our
summer theme of love and focus and all these other things that
are on my mind and heart. And as I said last week, we will
be back in Timothy, and I will also be finishing the teaching
on the book of James that I was doing a couple of springs ago during midweek. Let's read together 2 Corinthians
5, starting in verse 16. I referred to this text last
week and I want to unpack it a little bit more today. I can't start in verse 16, hold
on a minute. It's verse 11. 2 Corinthians 5, 11. Therefore, knowing the fear of
the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God,
and I hope it is known also to your conscience. We are not committing
ourselves to you again, but giving you cause to boast about us so
that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward
appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are
beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are in our right mind,
it is for you. For the love of Christ controls
us, because we have concluded this, that one has died for all,
therefore all have died. And He has died for all, that
those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for
Him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore,
we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once
regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard Him thus
no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation. The old has passed away, and
look, behold, the new has come. All this is from God. who, through
Christ, reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling
the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore,
we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through
us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God
for our sake. He made him to be sin who knew
no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And verse 21 is going to be really
the focus this morning, looking at the love of God and the declaration
of us as his righteousness. But as we get started, I want
to impose some things that you wouldn't get from the text, just
in the context of instruction and oversight. How are you and I to get to the
same conclusions when it comes to theological things or biblical
things? What does it take for us to read
what we just read and then understand it? Does it take a class? Does it take a really smart pastor?
You're in trouble. Is it going to take years and
years and years? I have one smart, not this one
standing here. Sorry about that, brother. Anyway,
is it going to take years and years and years of studying all
the languages? Is it going to take all sorts
of commentaries and secondary sources and tertiary sources?
What's it going to take? Why is it so difficult sometimes
in our culture to grasp, apprehend, and apply the Word of God? I'll
tell you why it's difficult, because we've made it so. We've
made it so. And Paul is talking here, and
this is a hard pretext to pull into the context of 2 Corinthians,
which has a prerequisite of the first letter. But that in and
of itself is too difficult. That in and of itself requires
you to be too well-versed in so many things. Why is it that
the Bible just can't simply be read and then understood? Well,
I think it can. And I think we'd do far better
if we just read it as it's written without trying to impose on this,
wonder what it's meaning, wonder about this, what if, and all
these hypotheticals or all these other inferences or all these
other non-obvious applications to the point that we create entire
systems of doctrine, of teaching. that lay burden on top of the
church and on top of the culture and on top of believers over
and over again to the point that nobody knows anything about anything
except how to be in bondage. And my heart for you is that
you would live freely, authentically, not pretending to be something
you're not, but honest about who you are, and then also knowing
that that honesty is not going to change your position before
God. Do you think we can trick him?
Do you think we can sincerely pose and posture ourselves to
be that which we're not? Do you think that our piety and
our spiritual disciplines get God up in the morning as he drinks
his holy coffee and goes, well, look at those people. They really
got it together down there. And then when he goes back to
bed, it's like, okay. Father's asleep, we can take off the facade. No, for number one, God does
not sleep. Number two, He knows all things
and He's loved us before the foundations of the world. The trouble is, is that we've
forgotten that the greatest love is reconciliation. And the very
attitude that we should have when we hear reconciled is that
if something's reconciled, it was once not with reconciliation. Or it, in a very simple way,
needed reconciliation. Well, when things are good, and
everybody's getting along, and everybody's loving one another,
and everybody's happy, and everything's going well, and everything is
going as planned, and there's no problems, and there's no pigs
in the front yard and chickens in the living room, and there
are no chaotic issues, it seems like, well, what is there to
reconcile? Exactly. What is there to reconcile? When
it comes to us in our spiritual lives, there is much to reconcile.
There's much to reconcile. For we know who we truly are.
We know that although all the good we could muster, it is not
righteousness according to the standard of God. He is righteousness. And we know that God doesn't
look over things and just let them go. There must be recompense.
There must be justice. Any judge that allows injustice
to reign is in himself unjust. God is not unjust. Paul makes
that argument extremely clear in Romans 7, 8, 9, 10. He starts to talk about who we
really are and he knows who he is, yet he would be esteemed
as like the apostle of the apostles and, you know, the called of
God to preach to the Gentiles. But he knew who he really was.
He knew the trials and the chaos inside of his heart and mind.
He knew the struggles of reaching. And see, what we really need
to grasp when we think about Paul as an object of our, as
an example for us, is we need to realize that his unrighteousness
was self-righteousness more than anything. So when we see Paul
talking about, I sin, it's always before me. It's not like he was
kicking his kids and punching his dog and cursing at his wife
and robbing his neighbor and hating everything and complaining
all the time. Paul was fighting the reality
that he had done such wonderful things religiously throughout
his entire life that that counted for nothing. That was Paul's
sin, see. So what in the world does it
all account to? As he says here to the Corinthians,
you know, we don't we don't regard anybody according to the flesh,
but we don't look at who you are and what you're doing and
then judge you based on your value of how you're accomplishing
things. We don't get to say who is and
is not Christ's based on how well they're doing. We don't
get to declare one righteous because they're benevolent and
another unrighteous because they're selfish. Now Paul would say in Romans
3 that all are unrighteous, that all are selfish, that all are
guilty, especially those people of God who for hundreds of years
had the oracles of God and the commands of God and the prophets
and yet still could not accomplish them. The point of it all was
to show the conviction and the guilt. not to establish righteousness. The law was to establish guilt
so that reconciliation was seen in its purest form. That it is
about what God has done, not about what we could do. That
is what sets true Christianity apart from every other iteration
of religion or worldview or spiritualism that ever has or will exist. is that the divine who is the
righteous judge has satisfied his justice in his own flesh
as a substitute for his people, to declare on them his righteousness,
his glory. I read John 17 in the introduction
to our service this morning, and it's the prayer of Jesus
before his arrest. And in that text, Jesus prays
and he says a lot of interesting things. But something that is not there
is a constant theological treatise. There's not all this explanation
of deep things. It's just assertions. I had glory
with you, Father, before the foundation of the world. Father,
you loved me before the world began. Now you love them, and
I love them, and you're in me, and I am in you, and they are
in us, so they are in us, and they are in you, and we are all
one. Let them be one and love each other with the love that
you have for me, and I have for you, and I have for them, and
they have for me, and for one another. And it's just like this
crazy, weird nonsense. And when we put it all out and
we get the whiteboard out and we start diagramming and running
through definitions and looking at grammar and then spitballing
and organizing, we go, aha, we got it. No, it's supposed to
sound ridiculous to the natural ear. And it's what Paul was talking
about in 2 Corinthians 5. I think it's the essence of the
spiritual. When we get to the giddiness
of reconciliation by the divine will of God in Christ Jesus,
it's absolutely ludicrous. And so if we are beside ourselves,
it is for God. If we are in our right mind,
it is for you. So we can't exist in this whirlwind
of, wow, God loves me. Christ is my hope. That's the
sufficiency. That is the sufficient response. That is the sufficient testimony
of someone who is born of God. baloney about, well, there's
not these nine different tenets, or this three different attributes
of election, or this ideology of perfecting justification by
faith, or the imputation of righteousness in the context of the system
of both Bavinck and this and the other. Uh-oh, I used a heretical
name. So there's no way to get around it anymore, and if you
didn't follow that, good, neither do I. That is not salvation. God does not teach that way.
God does not impart wisdom that way. That is a journey that we
have done through millennia that have come to conclude that we've
taken away the divine joy of reconciliation as a work of God.
God the Spirit himself puts in his people as he wishes, when
he wishes, with no other outside influence whatsoever. We preach,
we teach, we share according to the written word Without commentary,
I might add. And when and as God wishes, He
calls His people to believe. And that faith grows. in strength
and then fails. And that faith grows in understanding
and then becomes ignorant. And that faith can be twisted,
that faith can be misguided, and the truth around all that
God has done as we parse it out through our lives can be undone
in a half second because of some well-meaning, absolutely brilliantly
organized minds. I was thinking about this this
morning. 16 years of school. Post high school. That's how
many years I went to school. 16 years. That's a lifetime. God, I wish I had that time back.
And I went to school because I couldn't argue with this nonsense
because I was ignorant of the context of all of these things.
And I love history, and I love theology, and I love language,
and I love historical theology, and I love all sorts of stuff,
and I love anthropology, and I love sociology, and I love
physics. And those don't relate. But they
do to me. And so I studied and I learned
and I loved it. And I'm like, I'm gonna know,
hey, if I take this class, then I'm gonna be able to answer this
issue. And lo and behold, 16 years of just studying the Bible
by itself would have been sufficient. My library is too much, I can't
even dust it. Gotten rid of thousands of books
over the years. Tried to dump it all on Trey
and he's like, no, I don't want all those books. And now I've still got too many.
I think, man, if I just had like three copies of the Bible and
a Greek New Testament, cause it's sort of like I'm a geek
like that, you know, it would have been fine. I didn't need all
that other stuff and I'm not dogging it. Beloved, I am an
intellectual at heart. I love it. I absolutely, if I
could live in academia in the bubble for the rest of my life,
it would be dream. but it would be fruitless, okay? I'd just love it. I'd wear robes,
I'd go back to the old ways. I mean, it would be awesome,
because I just enjoy learning and I enjoy intellectual conversation,
but sometimes you gotta put on your big boy shoes and actually
do something. And that's what the pastorate
is. The pastorate is doing something. The pastorate is watching, learning
and growing, and maturing as we watch out for others who learn
and grow and mature right with us, the same time. I said this
last week, pastors are not these highball secured, you know, awesome,
woohoo, mature people who are so far beyond that all we gotta
do is just sort of go, and then y'all impart wisdom on you. Watch
us as we walk together. And yeah, there are some things
that I understand. There are some things in life that I've just had so
many years and so many hours of unpacking that the application
is so natural to me that it almost looks easy, but it doesn't mean
that it's easy. The turmoil inside my head and
just the friction in my life is just as hard as yours. It's just as hard as yours. And
embracing the simplicity of the love of God, is the hardest thing
we'll ever do. Because that means that we must
embrace without knowing and understanding the absolute, the absolute just
breadth of his sovereignty. It means to understand just like
a child understands that when it wakes up in the morning, you're
gonna be there. Doesn't think it through, it doesn't worry
about what ifs. It just wakes up and goes and
finds mom. It's hardly ever dad. They don't worry about it. And
that's the essence of the Christian life. We wrestle in that knowing
that the promises of God are just that secure. We need to
be that secure. Driving spiritual maturity from
the point of view of the assembly and the oversight of the elders
of the church means that we are trying to push you to what I've
always said, I'm not changing my message, I'm clarifying, to
joy, remember that? And to rest. Those two things,
we rest and we rejoice. We rejoice and we rest and we
repeat. And this is what we're doing,
this is what we're longing for, but it ultimately comes down
to simplifying. and embracing the divine work
of God the Spirit to hold us. And the deep academic intellectual
parsing of the knowledge of the Bible is not the means to that. It's not the means to that. And
I can prove it because the Bible in and of itself doesn't say
it's the means to that. The scripture is sufficient.
And when it comes to the knowledge of Christ, of God, the spirit
imparts that knowledge. Simply, a three year old can
be born again. Through the reading of John chapter
one, verses one through 18, through the hearing of John three, through
the teaching of John chapter 11. I am the resurrection and
the life. How? That's God's business. And I'm gonna tell you something,
beloved, quit worrying about all this other stuff. It will
work itself out as we grow as a church and stand for truth.
Yes, error is inevitable, but do you know where error comes
from? Our thinking. It comes from us. It comes from
us being smarter than God the Spirit. It comes from us thinking
that we can do more than the Bible can. And you know how hard
it is when you realize that you've actually thought that and didn't
know you thought that. You know what, I'm just going
to have a meeting with these people. I'm going to have a meeting with
this guy. I'm going to have a meeting with this gal. I'm going to sit down. I'm going
to teach a lecture. Let me do a three-part series
here and I will fix all this misunderstanding. And what happens? Babble all over again. God's
in the business of showing us we cannot Ascend to the heavens,
for there is only one who has ascended into the heavens, the
same one who descended from the heavens and down into the bowels
of the earth, the grave, Hades, Hades, death, hell, whatever
your translation says. Jesus Christ came from heaven
to the earth and then into the ground in the tomb. That's what
that reference is there in Ephesians. And then rose again and then
ascended back to the right hand of the Father, interceding. This
is the simplicity of it. If we tell our children Hey,
we'll see you in the morning. They know we're gonna see them
in the morning. They don't walk into the kitchen
at mealtime and there's nothing to eat. Where's my food? Sorry, buddy, I decided that's
not gonna happen anymore. Better go outside and eat some
grass. But yet we live like that with
the father. We live like that in our spiritual lives. We think
we've got to get this next theological fix. We've got to get this next
answer. We've got to get this next understanding. We've got to find more. Oh, my
gosh, there are some people here. And then we start dividing in
our own minds. And it's it's it's it's schizophrenia. It's a spiritual sickness. And many people who suffer from
that right now in their minds, if they heard that phrase, they
go, yeah, but, that's the definition. I mean, that's an identifier
right there of people not being, not thinking by the Spirit. Yeah,
but, you mean to tell me any old teaching faults are not okay? Nobody said that. To impose that
upon someone else for saying a statement of truth is false
witness. And it's really extreme infantile
immaturity. And we all have been there, right?
Yes, that's a false gospel. Yes, that's a false teaching.
Yes. Okay, good. But what we're talking about
now is a recipe for meatloaf. We don't need the apple pie crust
problem. Can you please stop? You know,
you hear me say, don't hear what I don't say. There's no such
thing as an exhaustive treatment of any doctrine, of any teaching,
because there's always a can to kick somewhere down a road
that never gets in, that never ends. And lately, if it's a dirt
road, it's full of mud anyway. The bajillion inches of rain
we've had in the last six minutes. It's crazy. That's how I feel
sometimes in my spiritual life. Like I just wake up and I'm like
in the bottom of a mud pit. I'm going, can I ever get out?
You probably have felt the same way. Trying to apply the gospel,
trying to apply the love of God. Listen, beloved, the reconciliation
is the centerpiece of God's love. So let's focus on that for a
minute. Let's hear now again, verse 21 of chapter five of 2
Corinthians, for our sake, He, God, made Him, Christ, to
be sin. Who knew no sin? Christ. So that
in Him, Christ, we might, we, might become the righteousness
of God. Now there's a lot of ways of
understanding some of this. But let me give you the short
10 minute sermon, 10 second sermon, on how to understand this. Read
it again. For our sake, God made Jesus
to be sin who was not sinful, so that in Jesus we would be
his righteousness. Is that hard to understand? No. Kids, is that hard to understand?
Is it hard to understand that God took sinless Jesus and made
him sin in some way, form or fashion, so that in him doing
that, we would become God's righteousness? It's not hard. And that's all
that Paul wants you to know. That's it. There's nothing else
Paul wants you to know. There's not anything else that
you need to understand for that to be true or applied or apprehended
in your life. But what do we do? What does
it mean for our sake? Our sake? What's for me? What's sake mean? I mean, you've
been there, right? Why is there a K in sake? Why
is there no comma there in the Greek? There's no space between
the words either in the manuscripts. It's tough to read that stuff. It's simple. God loved the world
in this way that he gave his son, the only one that he had,
that those believing in him would not perish but have everlasting
life. It's very simple. We understand there's a context
here. We don't need Romans to understand
2 Corinthians. We don't need the Gospel of John
to understand 2 Corinthians, if the Gospel has already come
to us. We don't need cross-references and all these little, you know,
this Bible, there's some stuff down here that I can't read,
even with these transitions on. I can't read that. I don't know
what it says. This is like little ants that have been smashed onto
the page. But I know what they are, because when my eyes did
work, They're cross-references, and there's passages listed out
from every passage down there, and it's like, I don't know,
three-point. You know what's crazy? If you actually follow
that rabbit trail, 80% of those things have nothing to do with
the text that it's actually referring to. A lot of times it just has
something to do with maybe a word that's shared, or sometimes it's
actually a quotation or an allusion back to an Old Testament passage
that the New Testament writers are meaning to do that It's not
even necessary to know. You understand that, right? You
don't read Matthew 28 in light of Daniel 7. Don't ever do that.
Please. Because God, the Spirit, did
not tell Matthew to write his gospel and to record the words
of Jesus teaching about reconciliation, by the way, so that you would understand
the prophetic Babylonian captivity through Daniel. It doesn't matter. It's not important. Is it fun?
Oh my gosh, it's so fun. It's so interesting. And some
of you are going, I'd rather watch paint peel. Although peeling
paint can be fun. Reconciliation. This is the power of God, the
gospel. This reality here is something
that we need to embrace as the love of God. And we all need
to also understand that, as I've said over the last few weeks,
that our love for God is our love for others, which includes
not just serving and being intentional and building emotional bonds,
but also supplying needs. emotional, physical, spiritual
needs, also being available and being present. All these things
that Paul teaches us and that John and James and Peter and
the other apostles teach us that we don't want to hear about because
it sounds sort of psychobabble. No, it's called Bible, not babble. And then we need to remember.
what God has done. We don't have to understand it.
We don't have to apprehend it. We don't have to get all the
dirty details of what justification looks like, what the sacrificial
system imparted and how all the laws fit together. Is it fun? Absolutely. And when we read
the Old Testament, we need to read Christ into every jot and tittle
because that's the point, right? We don't have to read him into
it. He's there. He says that. How do I know that? John chapter
five. You search the scriptures, Jesus
says to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the other spiritual leaders.
I can't remember which ones he's talking to at that specific time
in John, but it's yours to scriptures because you think in them you
have eternal life, but they speak of me. What? You mean I'm doing all this stuff?
I'm knowing all this stuff. I'm living all these things.
I'm practicing all these disciplines. I've got all this security and
my foundations of my theology and they were wrong. And in an
academic world, you can know all the details of everything
correctly. It doesn't make you born again.
It doesn't make you born again.
In my experience, most heady people have no love at all in
them. And thus, as John would say in
his first epistle, they don't know who God is because they
don't know love. Well, love is keeping it real.
I'm a theological dog. No, that's demonic. And I hate to use those words
because they're so callously dogmatic. But I don't know. I've been searching a softer
way. And beloved, I'm tired of trying to figure a softer way
to say hard truth. Do not associate with these types
of people because they will ruin your soul. See? Can you love them? Yes. Can you
be friends with them? Absolutely. But don't go into these conversations.
Don't let these people trip you up in your weakness. Because
they can do it to me, they can do it to you, they can do it
to any of us. Don't let the internet become your theological teacher. Don't let James Tippins tell
you what to believe. Because that guy's crazy, especially
when he talks about himself in the third person. If we back up one verse, we see Paul as he approaches
this deep theology. And there is much to learn. We
can go into every aspect of the scripture and we can learn about
this theological thing, but it's not eternal life. Eternal life is what God has
done in Christ for His people. And that's it. It's a finished
work. We are the righteousness of God. So therefore, Paul says in verse
20, we are ambassadors for Christ. That means we stand for Him,
we speak for Him, we go out into the world and we represent Him.
That's what an ambassador does. We hardly use that term anymore.
We're ambassadors. And that he further says that
God, the Father, is making his appeal, in other words, proclaiming
what he has accomplished through us. And that doesn't mean that
the gospel is an appeal. It's a reference to being an
ambassador. An ambassador takes a message from the person that
they represent to the people who need to receive the message,
and they say, we implore you on behalf of the person sending
me with the message, here's the message. Now, you tell us what
you think, and we'll go back to the person who sent the message.
But that's not a gospel. The gospel is not an offer that
we must receive, accept, or employ. The gospel is a proclamation,
is a message of finished proportions, is a message of the power of
God. The gospel is a good report, literally means good report,
of what has been done, accomplished, and finished on behalf of a certain
people. And when God's messengers proclaim
that, We have no other part of that except that when someone
says, yes, I'm with you, let's go, we walk together forever
until one of those parties decides to sin against the other without
reconciliation. And without reconciliation, we
haven't loved anybody. Yes, there are things that are
irreconcilable in this life. There are damages and harms and
abuses that sometimes cannot, relationships as they were cannot
be reconciled. The reconciliation is still found
in the gospel. But that's not the point, is
it? The point is, we'll never live it out perfectly. It's not
intended for us to, but God's reconciliation is perfectly applied. How's it work? It's a call. It's
an urgent call. Paul says that he and the fellow
apostles, they represent Christ and they've entrusted. They've
been entrusted by God to take the message of reconciliation
and that this message is transformative. How is it transformative? Well,
we'll see that if we got into chapter six. You know, Romans 12, it changes
our minds. That's the whole word. The word
repentance means a change of disposition of the mind. It changed
the way we think. It's something that transforms
us. When we hear that God has reconciled us to Himself and
calls us His righteousness through the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus Christ, that changes us. I mean, anybody can say,
I love you. Anybody can give you flowers.
Anybody can do anything to show affection. You know, the love
languages. Even a good person might die
for a friend. But will God die for an enemy?
Will a righteous person die for the person that makes their life
miserable, that stands in opposition? That's what Christ did. When we know what we've become
in Christ, it changes us. We know God all of a sudden in
a way we never knew God before. It's like some of you, you know,
when you first come to be part of the fellowship and you know
me online, then you know me on the phone, then you know me in
messages or whatever, then you know me in the theological cup,
the tiny little cup. All the theological conversations
is like a little tiny shot glass. And then you might know me a
little bit more here. And then you realize I'm a husband and you
realize I'm a father. You realize I'm a grandfather. You realize
I like to do this. I like to do that. And all of
a sudden the picture gets bigger, but then it's only like a teacup.
It takes a whole lot of knowing to know someone in every aspect,
yet God's Word says that we know God in salvation through the
reconciliation that has come through Jesus Christ, so that
we know Him intimately. And Jesus prays in John 17 that
this is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and
the Son, Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. And then he continues
to pray that that oneness, that that interconnectivity, that
that codependency, that that amazing spiritual work makes
all of us one with Christ and that the glory that he had beforehand
with the Father is now his forevermore. And then we are also glorified
in the same way that we share it. It's not a reflection like Moses
off Sinai that we see in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. It's not a reflection. It's literally a sharing of glory. We become one flesh. This message of reconciliation
is not just one piece of information about the Good Report. It is
the point. It is the love of God. We were enemies, and while we
were enemies, Paul says in Romans 5, we were reconciled to God
by the death of the Son, much more now that we are reconciled
shall we be saved by His life. I want you to take a minute to
think about that. I want you to think about false
values and false judgments and how they capture our hearts.
I want you to think about how many times that we've come to
conclude things about other people without filtering it through
the reconciliation that we have found in Christ. This reconciliation, of course,
is forensic, it's legal, it's something that God has done.
How do we know that? Well, we have other places of scripture
that we know. But for us to apply this doesn't mean we have to
know all those details. We get to them, right? If you weren't
living in Rome when the letter to the Romans was written, you
didn't know about it for a long time. And generations of Christians
were martyred and died before all of the letters began to circulate. And poor John, he was 90-something years old,
nothing but a teenager when he started. It's a long time. You think about when Paul was
called to faith and transformed and given repentance to see Christ
on the road to Damascus. I mean, you think about the decade
plus that he was absent, learning and growing and studying, but
yet you see a lot of young people when they come into the church,
like, I'm going to be a pastor. I'm going to be an evangelist.
I'm going to be a, you know, this and I'm doing that and I'm starting
a blog and I'm doing that. Oh my goodness. And they're like,
they can't tie their shoes. How are they going to walk? And that's my story. Charisma,
humor, enunciation, hallelujah, put him on stage. I would say the first 10 years
of my ministry, I had no business in a pulpit. If I had every brass ring that
was offered to me, I'd have a chain to pull a train with. It's sad. No offense for any
of you men who are part of that, whoever hear this, it's just
sad. It's sad. This reconciliation, I'll explain
it in a minute. It means that we're justified.
The exchange of sin and righteousness, the heart of this gospel, the
heart of the love of God is found here. And I think it encapsulates
the transformative power of Christ. There's a divine exchange. Years
ago I did a youth conference. I was living in California. I
flew back here to the youth conference. We called it the Great Exchange.
And I taught out of Romans 1 and Romans 3. And we showed the exchange
of what God has done. And I look at this text and I
think, well, verse 21 of chapter 5 of 2 Corinthians is actually
a simpler text for such an important doctrine. I didn't need to go
through 60 sentences. I could have just went to one. And in this verse. He talks about
a transfer, an exchange of sin and an exchange of righteousness.
Now, this is where the full context of the full counsel of God's
word is necessary. So I would encourage you to read
Second Corinthians this week. I would encourage you to read
1 Corinthians, then 2 Corinthians, so you can have, if you're not familiar
with it. Because it is very frustrating if we start making application
in our minds to such a degree that we lose the sense in which
the text is trying to speak because we're not familiar with it. And
that may sound like I'm contradicting what I said in the beginning,
but you can't start on page three of a recipe and say, put an oven.
Put what, myself, my shoe, my children? Just the pan, all the
ingredients, going to poof, pop out. Yeah, no, there's some preparation
for that. So we've got to have some common
sense in there. What Paul is saying is actually
starting with therefore. So what is that therefore, therefore?
We've got to back up some more. And then there's another for,
therefore, there. And we go all the way back. We go all the way
back till we get to the very beginning of 1 Corinthians. And
we understand the reason why the second letter was written
to begin with. And the whole point is that Paul
is establishing wisdom in the ridiculousness of the foolishness
of the gospel of reconciliation. That's the point of this writing
because the Corinthians were like spiritual babies, but they
were acting like spiritual elites and they were posturing themselves
to have all these spiritual gifts when they actually had no gifts
at all. They were just a bunch of muddy kids throwing mud around
saying, look how clean we are. And Paul's like, I'm going to
come down there with a stick, and I'm going to whip up on y'all and
get you into shape. You got junk over here and junk over here
and junk over here, and don't even get me started about your
marriages. Don't even get me started about your relations.
Don't even get me started about your lawsuits and your, you know, your greed
and all this other stuff. And this one dude, Chloe told
me all is well. Oh, we're so holy. Chloe told
me what was going on around here. And this dude dating his stepmom
and stuff. I mean, no, we don't do these
things and call ourselves God's people. Let's get to the basics
of living normal lives that just in society seem reasonable. And all you wise folks who think
you're doing it well, let me tell you what you're not doing.
You're not loving God. Why? Because you're not loving
each other. 1 Corinthians 13, right? And they straighten some stuff
out, and then some things happen, and the 2 Corinthians is just
an explanation, a little bit further explanation of the depths
of the sacrificial system, and of the law, and of righteousness,
and of justice, and of wrath, and of reconciliation. You've
been reconciled to God, so let's just make much of that. This
is where love starts, and this is where love ends. So this great exchange. Sin was
exchanged, and righteousness was exchanged. Paul would say something very
profound in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 30. If you start in 25,
you know, the foolishness of God is greater than the wisdom
of man, the strength of, or the weakness of God is greater than
the strength of man, and so on and so forth. It doesn't mean
that that exists, it's just a hyperbolic example, an extreme. But Paul says in 1 Corinthians
1.30, and because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became
to us wisdom from God, who became to us righteousness, who became
to us sanctification, that means being set apart holy, and who
became to us redemption. There's nothing new here, it's
just another way of stating it in the transaction. Sin had to
be handled, and no amount of justice can handle forgiveness.
Understand that. If I rob a bank or I kill a person,
I am a robber, murderer, and I'm found guilty, and I serve
my time. Let's say it's 100 years or 20
years or two years, and I serve my time. I have paid for the
crime according to the law, but I'm still guilty of the crime. I'm still a convicted criminal. I'm not forgiven. I've paid for
it. In the economy of divine righteousness
and justice, there is no paying for it when you're the criminal. So sin had to have an exchange.
The guilt of sinful people had to be placed on someone, a people,
who was not sinful, The Christ, the one holy anointed that come
from God. John 17 all over again, I've
told them that I am the one that come from you because I gave
them your word and they've kept your word. Because you've gave them
to me is why they've kept your word. Nothing can separate us
from the love of God because He gives Himself to you and He
gives you to the Son. You see this transaction? So
this transaction is that for our sake, for the guilty's sake.
He made Jesus to be sin. I love the philosophers of our
day, not to even count the ones of historical tradition and antiquity,
and all the different views on this, especially the people who
are extremely intelligent about English. And that's sarcasm. You know, they take an English
word or a translated word and they go and try to find all sorts
of, this is what it means. Context defines terms a billion
times over definitions. You know, definitions are actually
a culmination or a curation of context and usage. Nobody sits
down and says, we're going to define this word. Definition
one, this word. No, they're like, oh my goodness,
that word means this. Write it down. Oh, they're using
that word this way. Write it down. That's how language
works. So context determines meaning. We know that the Bible teaches
that Jesus is and always has been sinless. Otherwise, him
becoming sin, paying for sin, would be worthless. So anybody
who posits that is just silly. It's not saying that. What is
it saying? For our sake, he became sin. And Paul makes it clear, he who
knew no sin. How did he become sin? God, in
this transaction, satisfies justice, the law, in the killing of Jesus
as a substitute for us. Not as an opportunity for payment,
but as a legitimate currency of payment. When we remember,
when we embrace, when we align, when we are present in the spiritual
sense with the body of Christ and the blood of Christ in our
table at the end of every service, we are able to know and to remember
and to understand that we are reconciled because what Jesus
says, this is my body broken for you, this is my blood for
the remission of your sins, it is because it has been finished,
which is what he says on the cross. It is finished. This is the love of God. Jesus is not sinful. So our sin has been put on Christ. Christ has paid for it. And then
the very next phrase, that we might become the righteousness
of God. Now some people play this out
in the wrong way. Oh, see there? It's an opportunity. Your sins are washed away. Now live rightly. Absolutely. That's a good statement. Your
sins are washed away. Those country preachers say that,
right? So live rightly. That's what chapter 6 is about.
That's what Romans 12, 13 is about. That's what Ephesians
4 and 5, 6 are about. But this living rightly is not
an establishment of righteousness. Matter of fact, all that living
rightly as we mature is never counted as righteousness at all.
But some people believe that. Some people believe that God's
going to move us into such a place that we live a life of near perfection,
but we're still sinful. So let's don't claim perfection.
Oh, sinful me. No, even in that righteousness,
if we count it as righteousness, it's sinful. But because we've been counted
righteous, because our sins have been forgiven, it truly drives
us, it truly pushes us, it truly presses us into a place of worship
and transformation. to love God by loving others,
which is the antidote to sin. I can't murder the one I love.
I can't gossip about the one I love. I can't steal from the
one I love. That's not love. It's the opposite. I can't. I can't. So when I love,
I don't do. When I do what I shouldn't do,
I'm not loving. And when I'm not loving you,
I'm not loving God. Oh, but God still loves me. Isn't that great? See, that's where American Christianity
has lost it. That's where Puritanism has lost
it. That's where all of these hard dogmas have lost it and
why the false gospels are so pleasing because people, the
burden is released. Beloved, let the righteousness
of God be upheld and let God be true, that every man be a
liar, as Paul would say, and let us stand in a place of holiness
because God has made us His righteousness. He has called us His righteousness. How can He do that? Because Christ
paid for the justice required for our sin. And in doing so,
then the perfection of righteousness, the absolute goodness of Jesus
Christ then was credited to our account, just like our sin was
credited to His. And I don't know about you, but
I just want to breakdance when I think about this stuff. As I was sharing with Robin yesterday,
when I was younger, I wanted to be a dancer. And by the age of 14, I was ridiculed
for it, and I never thought about it again. I might start dancing one day,
y'all. Too old to be a dancer. But are you a dancer? If you
dance, yes. If you draw, you're an artist.
If you read, you're a reader. If you write, you're a writer. If you stand in righteousness,
you're a child of God. We are His righteousness. And
one day we truly shall be as He is. Right now, it's just to
our credit. But when we are recreated, we
shall be. And until then, let's strive
to love God by loving others. Let's strive to be the righteousness
of God because we are. We are all one in Christ. We've
been brought near by the blood of Christ. While we were still
sinners, Christ died for us. For in Christ, Paul says this
to the Church of Colossae, in Christ, all the fullness of God
was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all
things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood
of the cross. And you, you, beloved, who once
were alienated and hostile in mind, living and doing evil,
he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in
order to present you holy and blameless and above accusation
before Him. No one can accuse you before
God, even if they tell the truth, because it's been paid. And we
are His righteousness. Self-worth, self-esteem, self-value,
self-love, it starts there. Identity starts right there.
This is who we are. This is who we are. And it doesn't
boil up arrogance in me. It boils over humility with boldness
and confidence to stand before the throne of God and interrupt
the worship of heaven and say, Papa, I'm here. It's beautiful. I know a love
like this and it is the love of God for you. Let's pray. Lord, I cannot do justice to
teach correctly. I cannot be passionate enough
or more emphatic or more direct or clear. No matter what I do,
there's never going to be power to cause your people to see and
to understand and to rest. Only you can do that. So help
us to quit fighting all these other ways and all these other
laws and all this other wisdom and all this other information,
all these other things. Let us rest as we learn and as we live
and as we love. Let us rejoice as we embrace
not our work but your promises, that we are yours in Christ and
nothing, nothing, nothing can separate us from you. Help us to see ourselves in the
light of righteousness that we are, that we are your children. See what kind of love you have
given to us. See what kind of love. You have
given to us. That we might become your children,
and so we are. And we thank you for this, Father,
in the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.