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Scripture: 2 Cor. 5:14-21
The verses I just read to you are from one of my favorite passages of Scripture. Paul is talking about that great subject that was never far from his thoughts: the reconciliation of God and man through the death of Christ.
A key verse in this passage is the one that’s probably best known from this chapter—verse 17: “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature (or a NEW CREATION): old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” What does Paul mean? He means that the man who has been reconciled to God through Christ has new life, new senses, new faculties, new affections, new appetites, new ideas, and new conceptions. He is like a new man in a new world.
Tonight, I just want to look very briefly at one of the ways in which we are changed when we become a new creature in Christ: The person who is a new creature in Christ has an overwhelming sense of indebtedness to the Saviour. I would go as far as to say that it’s the hallmark of every truly born again soul, that he has this sense of the tremendous debt of love that he owes to Christ; and I would also go as far as to say that anyone who has never experienced this tremendous sense of indebtedness has never truly seen the extent of his sin and has never been born again and never been constituted a new creature.
You find this truth all through Paul’s writings. You find it in this passage in 2 Corinthians. Look at verses 14 and 15 again. “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: And that he died for all, that they which live SHOULD NOT HENCEFORTH LIVE UNTO THEMSELVES BUT UNTO HIM WHICH DIED for them and rose again.”
What is Paul saying here? He is saying that the person who has come into the realization of all that Christ has done for him on the cross, the infinite debt of sin that has been canceled on his behalf, can never again be his own. This is the purpose of Christ’s death–He has purchased us for Himself. When we stand back from the cross of Calvary and see the suffering Saviour dying our death, paying our debt, suffering our penalty, and coming into raw contact with that vast amount of wrath that had accumulated against us and bearing it away, how can we do anything but fall on our knees and adore Him and pour out our lives for Him and give ourselves away completely to Him? We can never be our own again after such a sight. We can never live our own life henceforth. “That they which live, should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them.”
By nature we all love ourselves. We are in love with self. We love our own way, our own desires, our own way of looking at things. But when we become a new creature, we fall out of love with ourselves. Self is no longer the center; instead, Christ becomes the center, because we realize that because of what He’s done for us, we owe Him everything we have. To love someone means that we put them before ourselves. If we truly love our wife or our husband, we gladly sacrifice our rights, our happiness, our desires in order to make them happy, prosperous, and secure. If we truly love our children, we put them first before ourselves. The same is true with Christ: once we come to the full realization of what He’s done for us, we put Him before ourselves; we put His interests before our own; we put His will before our own will.
“Ye are bought with a price,” Paul says in 1 Cor. 6:20. “Ye are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
Then again in 1 Cor. 7:23 he says something very similar: “Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.” In other words, be the servants of God, His bondslaves, his love-slaves. It’s impossible to serve men, impossible to serve self when one has come to the full realization of how much one owes to Christ and His cross.
Matthew 20:28 says that “the son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” He gave Himself entirely for us, and the only possible response is that we give ourselves entirely to Him.
1 Timothy 2:6 also states, “He gave himself a ransom for all.”
Titus 2:14 “Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” He GAVE HIMSELF, and by doing that, He purified us unto Himself! He made us His own!
1 Peter 1:18 “Forsasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ.”
Oh dear folks, how much we owe to Him–what a debt of love! Isaac Watts’ great him says it very well:
But drops of grief could ne’er repay
The debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away,
’Tis all that I can do.
Another hymnwriter sings, “Jesus paid it all: All to Him I owe.”
“The love of Christ constraineth us,” he says in verse 14. What does he mean? “Constrain” is a very expressive word which means to “hold fast”. You remember that when the soldiers took hold of Jesus in the garden that it says they held him fast; well, Paul says this is what the love of Christ has done to him, it has him in a vice-like grip. He is in complete bondage to the love of Christ. You remember also in Luke 19 where Jesus prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem, in verse 43 he says that the invading army will come and cast a trench about Jerusalem and “keep thee in on every side.” That is the same underlying Greek word as the word that Paul uses here translated as “constraineth.” Paul says that he is kept in on every side by the love of Christ. He is compelled to do certain things, and compelled not to do certain other things.
In verse 13 Paul says, “For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God.” He means that sometimes he gets so carried away in his devotion to Christ that he seems to other men to be acting not quite rationally. You remember, too, that there was an incident in the life of Christ where His family and friends thought that he was taking things a little bit too far, that He was sort of overheated. The incident is recorded in Mark 3:21 “And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.” Has anyone ever accused you of being beside yourself because of your devotion to Christ? I don’t mean that we deliberately act silly, but there are times in the life of the believer when we are so carried away in devotion to Him that people may think we are not quite normal, not acting quite rationally.
Are you a new creature in Christ? If so, you are conscious tonight of the tremendous debt you owe to Christ, and you have laid down your life at His feet to be no longer your own, but to be His servant for ever.
Amen.