BRAND NEW

Introduction

-{2 Corinthians}

-Have you ever noticed how, when celebrities grow older, they go through all sorts of surgeries and procedures to try to make themselves new again. They get plastic surgery, they get this nipped and that tucked, they use and promote this cream and that tonic, they add to and take away from themselves all in the hopes of looking new again. (And a lot of times the results are just plain embarrassing.) They don’t want to look old even if they are old and feel old, so they do whatever they can to look like a brand new star that is still relevant.

-But, no matter what procedure they have done, they cannot avoid the inevitable—these things will not keep them looking new forever. They will still grow old and they will still die. And, no matter what they have pulled or pushed on their body, it doesn’t change their heart—it doesn’t change their nature. I mean, if a celebrity is a jerk before surgery, they’re still a jerk (if not more so) after surgery. There aren’t enough procedures or potions that will change who someone is.

-But, let’s face it, in some way, shape, or form, there’s something about ourselves that we don’t like and so we’d like that old in us to just go away and we become something new. We want the caterpillar to hide in its cocoon and come out a brand new butterfly.

-What if I told you that there is a way that you can become a completely new person? All those commercials for gyms or medicines that say you can become a new you cannot guarantee any results. But what if I told you that there is one way that you can become a brand new you and stay that way forever?

-Obviously, I’m not talking about the physical realm. In the physical realm, if God blesses us with years, we are going to grow old and die, and we don’t get any prettier doing it. But the Bible does say that we can become brand new, and it’s all found in Christ. You see, coming to faith in Christ isn’t just about staying out of hell. Faith in Christ doesn’t just deliver you from the penalty of your sin, but it also changes you into a new creature with new motives with a life that is headed in a new direction. And my prayer for you today is that you would live your life out of the treasury of this newness that can be yours in Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:16–21 ESV

16 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. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 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. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

-{pray}

-Let’s talk about this newness that’s available to us. I want you to first notice that...

1) God has gifted us with a new relationship

-Our passage talks about a work of reconciliation that happens between humanity and God. If reconciliation needs to happen, that indicates that some sort of disruption in relationship occurred. It indicates that there is some sort of hostility that needs to be fixed. We know that the break in relationship came because of us, not because of God. When Adam and Eve fell, God’s disposition toward humanity became hostile as we became His enemies because of sin. And now we purposely and willingly sin, adding to the hostility.

-But God did not desire for that hostility to remain, so our passage tells us something amazing. It tells us that God is the one who took the initiative to reconcile sinful humans to Himself. Vv. 18-19 tell us that God reconciled us to Himself through Christ, not counting our sins against us, but instead offering forgiveness. This is amazing. God is the offended party. God has every right to dispense His justice upon humanity, and yet God made a way to restore a harmonious relationship.

-And yes, every bit of it had to be God’s doing. In our sin and sinful nature, humanity would in no way seek for God. Mankind in sin does not care whether or not he is at peace with God. Mankind in sin does not care whether or not he has a relationship with God. And yet God is light and life—apart from him is nothing but darkness and death. So, God is the one that had to reach out to us—and He did.

-There is a story about Don Richardson who was a missionary to the cannibalistic, headhunting Sawi tribe of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Try as he would, he could not find a way to make the people understand the gospel message, especially the significance of Christ’s death on the cross as a way of reconciliation.

Sawi villages were constantly fighting among themselves, and because treachery, revenge, and murder were highly honored in their culture, there seemed no hope of peace. The tribe, however, had a legendary custom that if one village gave a baby boy to another village, peace would prevail between the two villages as long as the child lived. The baby was called a “peace child”. Through the “peace child” there would be reconciliation.

The missionary seized on that story as an analogy of the reconciling work of Christ. He told them that Christ is God’s divine Peace Child that He has offered to man, and because Christ lives eternally His peace will never end. That analogy was the key that unlocked the gospel for the Sawis. In a miraculous working of the Holy Spirit many of them believed in Christ, and they were reconciled to God, and there was reconciliation between the villages.

-Christ reconciles us to God. But how did Christ accomplish this great work? According to v. 21 he who knew no sin became our sin and he died on the cross. And in exchange for our sin, for those who believe, we are given the righteousness of God—that means we are given the same right standing before God the Father that God the Son has before Him. As the church father Irenaeus stated it:

Christ became what we are in order that we might become what he is. - Irenaeus

-But what does this have to do about being brand new? This is the starting point. While we are given a right standing before God through the Son, we are then given the Holy Spirit who does the work within our lives of empowering us to live out of that righteousness. And so, through the Spirit we find that...

2) God has infused us with a new life

-God reconciles us to Himself, and now the work of making us in the image of Christ begins. It starts with our initial conversion where we are initially made new, and then the Spirit integrates that newness into all areas of our life. Or as Paul states it:

2 Corinthians 5:17 “17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

-What we have here is not just some remodeling of the old. God doesn’t take the old you and try to fix it up or pretty it up. He takes the old you and demolishes it, and begins new.

-There is a story about a London businessman who was selling a warehouse property that he owned. The building had been empty for months and needed repairs. Vandals had damaged the doors, smashed the windows, and threw trash all around the interior.

As he showed a prospective buyer the property, the owner took pains to say that he would replace the broken windows, bring in a crew to correct any structural damage, and clean out the garbage.

But the buyer replied, "Forget about the repairs. When I buy this place, I'm going to build something completely different. I don't want the building; I want the site. I’m going to do something completely new with this."

-You know, we might try to fix a window here and put a coat of paint there in our lives, but we will never be able to fix the old enough to make it salvageable. You can’t merely sweep up something that is ready for the wrecking ball. When God reconciles you to Himself through Christ, all He wants is the site. He will come in and do something completely new.

-And now, being new creatures, with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, it gives us the ability to live like new as opposed to the old order of things. This means new speaking, new attitudes, new perspectives, new choices, etc. How exactly does it makes us new?

I'm new in the way that I treat other people, regardless of how they treat me.

I'm new in that I choose not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh, but live in self control by the power of the Spirit.

I'm new in that I choose to have faith and believe God rather than give myself over to worry and anxiety.

I'm new in that I see my life and resources as tools in God's hands for use in the ministry of reconciliation.

I'm new in that the glory of God is more important to me than my own glory.

I'm new in that my love for God and others surpasses my love for myself.

-Old things are gone, behold the new has come. One specific way that Paul mentions that we are made new is in our thinking. He says in 2 Corinthians 5:16 “16 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.”

-What Paul is saying in this verse is that his thinking and perspective on the world no longer comes from merely a human standpoint. Before Paul was reconciled to God he thought that Jesus was a quack prophet and that Jesus’ followers were a threat to Judaism that needed to be exterminated. Even though Paul thought that he was serving God, his thinking and actions were actually hostile toward God. It was quite possible that Paul was in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified and he possibly saw Jesus executed. And if he did, he heartily approved of their actions. We know that Paul was present when Stephen was martyred by being stoned by the Jews, an action that Paul wholeheartedly agreed with.

-Paul hated Jesus. Paul hated Christians. And Paul thought that he was doing God a favor through what he did to persecute them. But then he met the resurrected Jesus. And Paul believed in Jesus. And Paul was reconciled to God through Jesus. And Paul was made new through Jesus by the Holy Spirit. And Paul’s thinking got all turned around, and now he harbored an eternal and heavenly perspective about everything. Paul filtered all the world’s events through the mind of Christ. He thought the thoughts of Christ and applied the life of Christ into every situation.

-And when we are made new, that new life includes a new mind and we look at the world through the lens of Scripture. Our thinking is no longer worldly and fleshly, but it is heavenly and eternal. We take on a biblical worldview and think the thoughts of Christ as reflected in Scripture, and that is what moves us and directs us. When you are made new, you are made new in every possible way. But we aren’t merely made new for ourselves, but in this newness we are given a mandate...

3) God has entrusted us with a new ministry

-Paul tells us that because we have been reconciled to God, we are now given a ministry of reconciliation. This is further defined for us in v. 19 as we are told we are entrusted with a message of reconciliation, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because I have been reconciled to God and made new, I desire that others experience that same grace as I have been gifted. With reliance on my new heart empowered by the Holy Spirit I can offer a ministry of reconciliation as God has empowered and gifted me.

-What a great responsibility. This is part of being new—I want others to become new too. We aren’t made new so that people can look at us and be in awe of how new we are. God doesn’t make us new so that our life can be like what some car collectors do—they restore a car and then put it in a garage or museum or something so that it can be looked at and gawked at and admired, but it is never used. That might be fine for cars, but that’s not fine for Christians. Christians aren’t saved to become museum displays. Christians are reconciled to God so they in turn are used in the ministry of reconciliation.

-So, Paul continues in v. 20 that this means that we are ambassadors for Christ, and through us God makes the appeal to a lost world to be reconciled to Him. Being made new puts us to work for God as His ambassador. An ambassador is a representative of a ruling authority in a foreign land. The ambassador represents the interests of the authority who sent him or her. They do not represent themselves. They do not represent their own interests. They are there to represent the person who sent them and empowered them.

-That’s us. We are reconciled and made new so that we can share the message of reconciliation with others. But it is not a message about us because the gospel is not about us. It is about what God accomplished through Christ. Paul was not there, and we are not here, to do our own thing. As one author stated it:

The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament πρεσβεύω

the authority of the message rests on the fact that Christ Himself speaks in the word of His ambassador, or—and it amounts to the same thing for the apostle—that God Himself uses the apostle as a mouthpiece to utter His own admonition. In the ministry and word of reconciliation the completed act of reconciliation is presented as a summons and invitation to the faith which appropriates this act. An important point here is that the interest of the statement is focused on the (material) authority of the message rather than the (formal) authority of an officer.

-We give the statement of authority from the Authority. The authority doesn’t come from within us. We are the messengers who have been made new by that same message. And so, whether or not people like or accept our message of reconciliation doesn’t matter because it has nothing to do with us. We are merely telling people the truth of the one who sent us.

-There was an article in Politico magazine several years ago that stated that the American ambassador to Germany at the time was not the most popular man in that country. In fact, he was very unpopular. The problem was that he was representing a president who was not popular with the people and his policies were not popular with the people in Germany. But the article pointed out that in German, the word for ambassador is Botschafter, which, translated literally into English, means “messenger.” As such, our ambassador was not to be judged on how “popular” he may have been among the Germans to whom he was sent, but on how faithfully he represented the message of the President who sent him. That is what an ambassador does. He is to represents his leader and convey that leader’s messages to the citizens of the country in which he temporarily serves.

-Therein lies the ministry that we have been given. The world does not like us because it doesn’t like the One we represent. But we are not called to be liked. We are called to be faithful. We are called as ambassadors. Let’s go forth and tell people how they can become new as well.

Conclusion

-There have been a lot of science fiction TV shows and movies where aliens come and look just like humans. There was the TV series “The Invaders” or the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in the ‘70s, there was “V” in the ‘80s, and it was a constant theme in shows like “The Twilight Zone”, “Outer Limits”, “Doctor Who”, and others. In these shows, aliens came and imitated human bodies. They looked like us, acted a lot like us, and talked like us. But they weren't human.

~God says that we have been made a new creation. We look like other humans, in some ways we act like other humans, we talk the same language as other humans, we have to eat, sleep, drink like other humans. But we're not like other humans: We're new creatures. In Christ we are completely new.

-The question is, will we live out of that newness? I think a lot of the spiritual anemia of the church comes from the fact that Christians aren’t living out of the newness, but they’re living out of the oldness. You could almost call it a spiritual amnesia. Christians have forgotten that they are new. But it is a wonderful truth that is very life-changing.

John Newton was the former slave trader who came to Christ and wrote the world’s most famous hymn, Amazing Grace. A few years before he died, a friend was having breakfast with him, which he quite often did. Their custom was to read from the Bible after the meal. Because Newton’s eyes were growing dim, his friend would read the Bible verses, then Newton would comment briefly on the passage.

On one particular day the selection was from 1 Corinthians 15, which is a wonderful treatise on the resurrection. When the words “by the grace of God I am what I am” were read, Newton was silent for several minutes. Then he said, “I am not what I ought to be. How imperfect and deficient I am! I am not what I wish to be, although I abhor that which is evil and would cleave to what is good. I am not what I hope to be, but soon I shall put off mortality, and with it all sin. Though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor yet what I hope to be, I can truly say I am not what I once was: a slave to sin and Satan. I can heartily join with the apostle and acknowledge that by the grace of God I am what I am! [I am new!]”

-Newton recognized that, although imperfect, he was still new. He was not what he once was. The old had passed away, and the new had come.

-Christian, are you rejoicing in the newness, and are you living in the newness? I invite you to come to the altar and ask God to remind you constantly that you are new, and thank Him that you are not what you once were. And ask Him for power to live in the newness.

-But maybe you are not new because you have never been reconciled to God through Christ. You can start a new life today. As one person put it:

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. – Carl Bard

-Come forward today, be reconciled to God, and be made brand new today.