Balance Your Spiritual Checkbook

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2 Corinthians 5:19–21 (NLT)

19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.

20 So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!”

21 For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.

Introduction

I remember when I was a kid how my mom would sit at the kitchen table with a pen in her hand and her checkbook in front of her.

This is where she would sit once a month to balance the checkbook.

That’s not a term that we hear too often today, but before debit cards and online banking—when folks paid with checks— you needed to balance your checkbook when you received your monthly bank statement in the mail.

Balancing a checkbook is sometimes called reconciling.

And that’s another term that we don’t hear too often today, but it means “to make consistent with one another.”

If the checkbook said that Mom had $1,000 in the bank, but the bank statement said there was $500, something is out of whack!

Some dictionaries describe the work Reconcile as “cause to coexist in harmony”

Friends, I’m here to tell you, if the bank said I had $500 less than what I thought I had, I’d be feeling a whole mess of things other than harmonious!

Illustration

Today, if my bank accounts are unbalanced or unreconciled it’s usually for less than 50 bucks.

Lynne went to Target and forgot to log in the receipt in our budgeting software.

Pause for laughter.

And she always knows when I’ve caught her, too, just from the tone in my voice.

“Oh sweetheart?”

Pause for laughter.

“Would you mind logging yesterday’s Target transaction, please?”

Pause for laughter.

But there was a time in my life when the inconsistencies were much bigger.

In my early twenties, before I had a wife, kids, or anyone other than myself that I needed to take care of.

Before I had wised up financially.

There were many times that I can recall waking up and finding my bank account in the negative:

Because I had either overspent without realizing it,

Or because something hit my bank account before I thought it was going to.

I remember the feeling of panic.

How am I going to pay rent this month?

How am I going to make it until the next payday?

I’m sure I’m not alone in having felt that kind of panic before.

Transition

When your accounts are in the red, when things are that far out of whack, you have to take drastic action to get back into the black.

Maybe you need to live on rice and beans or Ramen for a week.

Maybe you need to borrow money from a friend.

Maybe you have to use the credit card.

Maybe you have to declare bankruptcy.

There’s one account, though, that you can’t fix on your own.

The Bible shows us how humanity was out of balance with God.

How you, and I, and everyone who has ever lived doesn’t coexist in harmony with our Creator because of our sin.

In fact, Paul tells us in Romans 3:23 that “Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”

What Does it Means to Be Reconciled with God?

2 Corinthians 5:19 (NLT)

19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.

The wonderful news for you and I though is that God, through his son Jesus, took the radical action needed to reconcile each and every one of us to him.

When you are reconciled with God, our sins aren’t counted against us any longer.

It doesn’t matter how overdrawn our spiritual bank account is.

It doesn’t matter how long or how far we’ve run from God.

When you are reconciled with God, Jesus has wiped the slate clean.

He’s cast your sins in to the sea of forgetfulness

and as far as the east is from the west.

How Does God Use the Reconciled?

2 Corinthians 5:20 (NLT)

20 So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!”

Ambassadors are official representatives of one country to another.

In the first century—when Paul authored this letter to the church in Corinth—an ambassador would have been an elderly man of high rank who would travel to another country with messages from the king of his own country.

We have ambassadors today, too, who speak on behalf of the country that they represent.

What Paul is saying here is that God uses believers to be Jesus’s ambassadors here on earth.

What’s the message that God uses these reconciled, these ambassadors for?

The English word Appeal doesn’t give the Greek word justice.

The original sense of the word is to urge; to implore.

So this message from God’s ambassadors isn’t some passive namby-pamby message.

It’s the ultimate Good News! The Gospel! The Message of Reconciliation!

Come to Jesus!

God wants you back!

He paid the price for you!

His grace and love and mercy are waiting for you!

How Can I be Reconciled?

2 Corinthians 5:21 (NLT)

21 For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.

Paul beautifully sums up the Gospel here in the last verse of 2 Corinthians 5.

Jesus, who never sinned, took our sin upon himself.

He bridged the gap between us and God.

And the Good News today is that:

no matter how far you feel from God

No matter what you’ve done

There’s nothing you need to do to be made right with God except put your trust and faith in Jesus.

You can be reconciled.

Right here.

Right now.

In this moment.