So that's 2nd Corinthians chapter
5 and just three verses reading from verse 17. Therefore, if
any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed
away. Behold, all things are become
new. And all things are of God, who
hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given
to us the ministry of reconciliation. To wit. that God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses
unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this reading from his word. These remaining verses that we
have in this chapter really provide an excellent summary of the gospel
and they draw our attention to a number of really momentous
phrases and insights and revelations that the Holy Spirit bestowed
to Paul and Paul has committed in his epistle to the Corinthians
and thereby to the church of all generations. Really lovely
phrases and verses. And for that reason, I don't
want to rush through them and take them too quickly. And we
have time. There's no rush upon us. So I
thought I would just take, rather than finishing the chapter tonight,
just take these first three verses and leave the last two for next
week. And as I say, they're a lovely
summary of the gospel and they give us opportunity to return
again to the renewing effect of grace. and the source and
the origin of that renewal. So the renewing effect of God's
grace in an individual's life, the change that it makes, the
effect that it has, and the source of that change, the renewal that
Paul is talking about here. and we're going to just touch
upon some thoughts in this today. Paul, you may remember, was talking
about the ministry that had been given to him and he talks in
these verses of the ministry of reconciliation and It's possible,
I suppose, that we become intimidated by language. We don't maybe use
some of our scripture words as frequently today as we once did. But these are beautiful phrases. The ministry of reconciliation. He's talking here about his service,
his service and the message that his service, his apostolic role
and responsibilities have for him and he's showing us here
I think that there are in these verses that there are three aspects
to this ministry of reconciliation that he has been given and the
first one is that What we have received by God's grace is being
reconciled to God. Now if you're reconciled to someone,
that breach that previously had been there, that cause for offence
that had previously been there, that antagonism that perhaps
existed between two parties has been removed. And that's what
we mean by being reconciled, being brought into a state of
friendship once again. And Paul's saying here is that
by God's grace, by God's goodness, by God's favour and kindness,
we have been reconciled to him. We're reconciled in Christ and
thereby we're made new creatures. He goes on to say old things
are passed away, behold all things are become new. So that's the
first of these three things that the apostle is highlighting here.
The second one is that it's God who has done this. because this
is what he purposed, this is what he accomplished, and he
has done it out of love for his chosen people. And the apostle
makes that clear as well. And then he goes on to say, thirdly,
that this message, this ministry of reconciliation, is a message
that we have to share with the world, to share it with all who
will listen to us. And Paul begins by saying here,
so we're going to just touch on these three points in the
time that I've got available here today. Paul goes on to say,
he begins by saying, if any man be in Christ, now that little
phrase, being in Christ or in Christ, There's layers and depths
in the scriptures to that phrase, being in Christ. And first of
all, there's a secret being in Christ. There's a being in Christ
that we don't know anything about in the early stages, if you like. A pre-knowledge, or a being in
Christ which is a secret. It's secret because it's everlasting. And scripture speaks about this
in many ways. For example, the Word of God
tells us that the Lord's people, the elect, those who have faith,
those who trust in him, have been loved with an everlasting
love. Or, to use another way of phrasing
that, we are foreknown by God. God has loved us from eternity. He's always loved us. Before
time, he loved us. Before we were born, he loved
us. Before we knew anything about
loving him, he first loved us. Now that is a reference to our
secret being in Christ, because God loved us in Christ. And here's
another way in which that can be thought about. We're sanctified
or we're set apart in Christ so that as far as this church
is concerned, those who are secretly in Christ, they are in Christ
set apart within the covenant of God's grace and peace. He has placed them in a certain
place and in a certain position. Another way of thinking about
it is that we are chosen in Him before the foundation of the
world. These are all Bible verses, Bible
phrases. And before the world was formed,
before the world was founded, before the world was created,
God had chosen a people in Jesus Christ. And they were secretly,
in Christ, unknown to themselves. We are elect, says Paul to the
Romans, chosen according to the foreknowledge of God. And we
are predestinated, people don't like that word about predestination,
but we are predestinated to be conformed to the image of Christ,
to be made like Christ. And these all speak about God's
purpose to reconcile certain loved, chosen, sanctified, blessed
people to himself. And that he did by the atoning
work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. So Paul says again
to the Romans, when we were enemies, We were reconciled to God by
the death of his son. Now, just pause on that for a
moment and think about it. While we were enemies, when we
were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. That reconciliation traces back
to the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even although we weren't
born, even although we hadn't any knowledge about the Lord
Jesus Christ, because of the death of Christ, we were reconciled
to God. And in this way we can see salvation
to be wholly and entirely a work of God. However, that secret
being in Christ from everlasting doesn't remain a secret. It's
an open secret if you like. Because it doesn't stay hidden. Because God purposed throughout
the ages of this world and the ages of the church to bring those
for whom Christ died to a knowledge of the truth and to a personal
saving faith in the redeeming sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that being brought to faith
brought to Christ in faith is a work of the Holy Spirit in
time. So we can see the three persons
of the Godhead working together here. God is a chosen people
that he placed or sanctified, set apart in Christ before the
world began. The Lord Jesus Christ came into
the world and gave his life for their reconciliation notwithstanding
the fall in the Garden of Eden and our disobedience in Adam,
and then in time the Holy Spirit applies the benefits of that
reconciliation and the atoning work of Christ to the hearts
and lives of individuals when they experience the knowledge
of the gospel and faith in their hearts. They hear and believe
the gospel. And scripture calls that work
a work of regeneration. Or another phrase Paul uses in
Ephesians is to call it quickening. You hath he quickened or made
alive who were dead in sin. Or Jesus to Nicodemus talks about
being born again. And the result of the new birth
is this new creature that Paul is speaking about here in 2 Corinthians
5, verse 17. So the new creature then we can
see is a work of God, the Holy Spirit, ministering this gospel
of reconciliation to the understanding of those who are dead in sin. And what this work does is it
creates within us a new nature, a new heart, a new spirit, new
life with new desires. We've got new eyes with which
to see the Lord Jesus Christ, new ears with which to hear the
blessings of God's goodness and faithfulness to his people, new
feet with which to follow the Lord Jesus Christ where we never
desired to follow him before. new hands by which we are able
to serve him. We've got new delights, things
that never delighted us in the past delight us now and we joy
in things that previously we would have thought were offensive
and boring and nothing that we wanted to be engaged in. So that
there's a newness comes in by the work of the Holy Spirit And
Paul elsewhere calls this, he saved us by, referring to the
Holy Spirit, he saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing
of the Holy Ghost. So this new creation, it is a new creation, which means
that it's not the death of the old nature, but it is a new nature
that has been implanted side by side with this old nature. Now some people find this hard
to understand, but Christians have two natures. We have an
old man of the flesh and we have a new man, a spiritual man. The old man's not transformed
into a new man. the old man remains unchanged
and he will remain unchanged until the day of our death. Indeed,
it is that after the initial shock that the old man gets of
discovering that a new man is now living inside his house,
that old man tries his best to evict the new man from the house. And the ensuing fight and battle
can cause a believer much distress and much soul trouble. And I
think many of us will know what that experience is like. So that
when Paul says the old things have passed away, it's not the
old man that's passed away, but it's a hankering after the old
practices that he's speaking about. And that's what's upsetting
to the old man. The old man wants the old ways. The new man desires to follow
Christ. The old man uses our weak flesh
to make the task of following the Saviour as hard as he possibly
can. And then another thing that this
tells us about this creative work is that not only is it a
new creation, but it is a work that has been performed by God
in the soul of the sinner. Paul says, all things are of
God. That is all these new things,
the new nature, the new heart, the new spirit, the new life,
the new desires. They're all from God. All things
are of God who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ. so that God the Father has reconciled
us by instituting this great plan of salvation. Loving, choosing,
sanctifying his people and the Lord Jesus Christ, by the shedding
of his blood, by coming into the world, by the incarnation,
by the going to the cross, by dying in our place, shedding
his blood, he has paid our sin debts and he's borne the curse
of the law that was against us. And this is the great principle
of sovereign grace. This is what distinguishes us
from so much else that goes in the name of Christianity in our
world today. The salvation of sinners is God's
work and not in any way our own by the things that we do or say
or think. Even our faith is the faith of
Christ. It's God's gift to us. God the
Father purposed our salvation, God the Son accomplished our
salvation, and God the Holy Spirit applies our salvation through
faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that's the gospel
that we preach. Remember what we said, it was
what Paul calls the ministry of reconciliation. the message
of all that God has accomplished for the salvation of sinners
and the reconciliation between himself and those who had fallen
in Adam and yet those that he loved and had chosen and sanctified
and redeemed and regenerated, called through the gospel and
brought to faith. And so in verse 19, the apostle
says, to wit, Now there's a word that we don't use very often,
although it's the word that we get witness from, and we all
know what a witness is. If a witness goes to court, or
if a witness explains what they've seen, or Mary and Malwin were
signing some documents recently, and they had to get a witness
to say that they attested that the signatures were genuine.
Well, That, to wit, is to experience and testify by personal, first-hand
familiarity. That's what the Apostle is saying
there. To wit, to know, by personal experience, that God was in Christ
reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses
unto them, because he is imputing them to Christ, and hath committed
unto us the word of reconciliation, the message of the gospel. The world that we talk about
here is not the whole world of every individual without exception
because that just simply is not the case. The rest of scripture
testifies to that. If the whole world were reconciled
there would be no need for a place called hell. and no one who was
not saved if everybody was going to be reconciled because that's
part of the whole work of salvation. Rather, the world is Christ's
church and people. It's the kingdom of God on earth. It's the whole number of the
elect of God, those redeemed by Christ on the cross. And it's
often used in the New Testament to highlight the inclusion of
the Gentiles as well as the Jews in God's saving purposes. So
God committed to Paul and the apostles and to the church this
ministry of reconciliation. It's the privilege of teaching
and preaching and testifying or witnessing the glorious gospel
of God's grace. And I can't save myself, and
I can't save you, But I can tell you about the triune God. I can tell you what He has done.
I can tell you about Christ's work. I can tell you about the
work of God the Holy Spirit, the Father's choice of a people
to save. And I can tell you all about
the great plan of salvation. that Christ has come to take
away our sin and committed to us the privilege of declaring
that message to those around about us. And that's the ministry
of reconciliation that the Apostle is speaking about. May the Lord
bless these thoughts to us and teach us from these verses all
that he has done for us. Amen.