RECONCILED TO GOD

 

 

 

2 CORINTHIANS 5:16_21

 

16So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

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For those of us who have trusted Jesus Christ as our personal Savior. Being a disciple isn’t a matter of trying harder to be a better person. In stead, it’s a matter of recognizing the work Christ has done in us and then allowing him to work through us.

God works through us because we have been reconciled to him. The term “reconciliation” describes that act by which God brings into his family people who should be his enemies - sinful people like us. Because of our sin, we would have no right to approach God and ask for forgiveness on our own. So God took the first step. He placed our sins on his sinless Son, and then punished Jesus in our place.

But that’s only half the story. After taking away our sins, God offered us the righteousness of his Son. Through Jesus, God collected on a debt that we could never have paid by ourselves. Then he turned around and offered us the untold riches of his love and the promise of eternal life. On an infinitely smaller scale, it’s as though we owed a million dollar debt to someone who not only paid it, but also deposited ten million tax-free dollars into our savings account.

Because we’ve received such an incredible gift, we’ll want to tell others where they too can find it. We’re to carry this message of reconciliation to others as we follow Paul’s example and urge others to “be reconciled to God.”