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Sermon Notes: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Posted onAuthorKen Corder

Coming Together Audio mp3                              2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Text: 5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

SERMON OUTLINE

Introduction:  Boy is there some good stuff in store this morning.  I want to use as our launching pad some very important words from C.S. Lewis, who wrote:

“Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has — by what I call “good infection.” Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

This is what Paul is instructing us to do this morning: become little Christs.  And not only that, but to see others as little Christs.  Until we do this, Pau says, nothing changes.  You remain the same old person with the same poisonous, destructive habits who keeps putting in the same information into his processing system, and keeps getting the same results.

So then, it is not option.  You and I should no longer look at each other from a human point of view.  These folks sitting around you are not merely flesh and blood; They are Christ-like, Spirit-filled sons and daughters of God.  Jesus has breathed the Spirit of God upon each of them.  John 20:22, “And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” These brothers and sisters received the Holy Spirit…and they enhaled!  

That means you are a little Christ…at least should can be.  Why wouldn’t you be?  Well, because most of us are a mess inside and don’t know how to get out of this mire of spiritual sickness that we feel inside.  Wouldn’t it be great to be a little Christ?  Sure, but you might say I feel so messed up and confused and anxious and frustrated and angry inside, I don’t know where to even begin. 

This is why there’s good stuff, good teaching today, because we are going to walk through how to become little Christs.  First, to recap a bit of what we talked about last week to set the stage.  We talked about the scriptural notion of repentance.  We found that repentance involves turning inward.  If we are to find God, we will not find him out there somewhere, but here in the heart.  For the Kingdom of God is within you.  When we turn inward we discover there is a power within us, available to us that can transform us into something new.  It is God dwelling in us.  This power is available to everyone who will turn inward and be reconciled to this power within.  So if we want to be made new, to be little Christs, then we must be reconciled to God, who dwells within.  This leads to a few important questions.  What does it mean to be reconciled to God?  How does reconciliation happen?  This morning we will learn what it means to be reconciled to God, to be a new creation, and how that will change your life.

The Mind, Soul, Body Connection

  1. So again, first we come to repentance, realizing that we have we have erred, that we have made some big mistakes in our life’s journey that have hurt others, hurt ourselves and mocked God, our first response is to stop and turn.  Stop going in the same destructive direction and then turn inward.  The first thing we find when we look inward is that things are a mess.  But we also find within a God who has been waiting patiently for us to return to our center.  We become conscious of God, a God-consciousness begins to arise in us, and then, everything changes.
  2. So, let’s first talk a little bit about the mess we find inside and the God we find inside who is ready to sort out this mess for us.  This will require an understanding of what our inward self consists of.
  3. There are three parts to your being:  Your conscious mind, your soul and your body.  In a person who is in good spiritual health, the mind will feed the soul healthy, Christ-like thoughts, and the soul will create or manifest a physical, personal and social body that experiences peace and joy or shalom, a peace that is both personal and extends to our relationships, family and community.  But if these three parts of your being – mind, soul and body – are not being fed spiritually, you are setting yourself up for a life of disappointment and unhappiness. 
    1. Your conscious mind is your reasoning mind.  It is the part of your mind which chooses.  You make all of your conscious decisions with your mind.  It is objective in that it observes objects on the outside and then formulates opinions.  Through your conscience mind your learn by observing, experiencing and receiving instruction. 
      1. A healthy mind is crucial, because what you habitually allow yourself to see, observe and internalize, is what enters into your soul and begins to define who you are. 
      1. You can either let positive, life affirming thoughts enter into your being, or you can let destructive, bitter, jealous, angry thoughts enter into your being, into your soul.  What you think is what you become.  Or as Emerson said, “Man is what he thinks all day long.”
      1. Your conscious mind is that part of you that decides to receive or reject the mind of Christ.  The mind of Christ is the infinite mind that holds all things together.  Colossians 1:17 says, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  This mind of Christ, the infinite mind of God, the Absolute, Ultimate Reality, Truth, Life – call it what you will – is the presence of God in all things.  If your mind rejects the mind of Christ, you reject God’s Truth, Life, and your soul and body suffer.
    1. The second part of your being is your soul.  The soul is a receptive organ, if you will.  It awaits to be fed.
      1. Your soul will take on whatever thoughts you feed it.  If you feed it thoughts of bitterness, envy, jealousy, lust, hate, fear, anxiety, self-doubt, then (guess what?)  you will become a person of bitterness, envy, jealousy, lust, hate, fear, anxiety, and self-doubt.
      1. Think of your soul as a garden and your conscious mind as the gardener.  Whatever habitual thought seeds you entertain in your mind get planted into the soil of your soul.  Whatever habitual thoughts you plant from your mind into the soil of your soul, will produce a harvest that will manifest in your body, your relationships, your outward life.
      1. Your soul takes all of the influences and inputs from your mind, the voices of others, cultural influences, upbringing, and responds by enacting this concoction of inputs into a life, which expresses itself through the third part of our being.
    1. This leads us to the third part of your being, which is your body.  The body is the physical, material manifestation of your mind/soul interaction.  But the body is not only the physical manifestation of your mind/soul interaction, which is wrapped in your skin.  Included in the body is your emotional and social life.  What you habitually think is planted in your soul.  Your soul, being a receptive organ, produces what you feed it.  What is harvested is your outward physical, emotional and social life.
    1. So, because you have all of these inputs and influences pouring into your soul, you can see how vital and critical it is that the right voices, the Truth, True Life, Living Water, the mind of Christ be the single influence on your soul.   The Christ power holds all things together, imbues your soul with divine power, with divine imagination, with divine creativity, so that your life manifests as a little Christ. 
  4. When you, repent, turn inward and start looking around inside, you quickly discover that these three parts of your being are not in healthy order.  You are fragmented, lacking integration of your being.  You are shattered and scattered.  You are a mess.  Your habitual thoughts are not on the things of God.  You do not have the loving, caring, powerful, healing mind of Christ feeding your mind.  Instead, you find destructive thoughts, angry thoughts, bitter, selfish, anxious, fearful thoughts monopolizing your mind.  Of course, these thoughts have been feeding your soul for years and years.  So when you look into your soul, you find that you have become what you have been thinking.  And this sin-sick soul manifests into your physical, personal and social life.  And you find that it is scattered and shattered, broken and fragmented.
  5. So there we have identified the problem.  We are shattered inside and broken off from the eternal mind of Christ, from God.

Transition:  Is there any way out of this poisonous, destructive fragmentation of our mind, soul and body?  Can we ever hope to reconcile with God?

Reconciliation to God

  1. Yes, there is!  Yes, we can!  The fragmentation of Mind, soul and body ends through reconciliation. 
  2. We are in dire need of reconciliation.  To reconcile means to bring the fragments back into a unified whole.
  3. Imagine for a moment your life if your mind, soul and body were integrated in a healthy fashion.
    1. Imagine your mind habitually thinking on positive, life-affirming, hopeful thoughts of kindness, goodness, love, peace, overcoming, strength, power, a hopeful future, an abundant present. 
    1. Then imagine your receptive soul responding to such a mind that thinks and consistently entertains such powerful, affirmative thoughts.  Imagine how your soul would respond to such positive, life-affirming, hope-filled thinking.  You would begin to see and experience the world in a new and different way.  Imagine the peace, joy and love you would begin to experience at the deepest part of your being. 
    1. Now imagine what this dynamic action of a positive mind coupled with an empowered, enlightened, refreshed soul would do for your personal, emotional and social life.  You would begin to experience new energy in your body, a new sense of power and purpose.  You would start to take care of your body.  Your emotions would emerge from a mire of defeatism, loathing for others and self, of dread and be kindled by a fire of energy, hopefulness, positivity and power.  This would immediately begin to transform your relationships from top to body.

Transition:  How does this reconciliation occur?

All of this is from God who Reconciled Himself to Us through Christ

  1. Our scripture lesson says, “All of this is from God who reconciled himself to us through Christ.”
  2. God, who dwells within, is waiting patiently for you to turn inward, and when you do, you find that God has been calling you back to yourself all along through mind of Christ.  You were out there in the world, bringing into your sacred self all of these various destructive, poisonous thoughts, which in turn were squashing and squelching your soul, so that there was no life in you, and it manifested as a body that was sin-sick, lost, lonely, bitter – physically ill, psychologically unstable, and spiritually dead.
  3. What do we do with all of those destructive, poisonous thoughts and attitudes that we have been collecting, organizing and working according to all of these years?  Our lesson says that Christ, who knew no sin, takes on our sin.  He says, “Give all that trash to me.  You don’t need it anymore.  It’s ruining you.  It has given you a negative outlook on life.  It has caused you to hate others and even to loathe yourself.  I don’t count it against you anymore.  Give it to me.”
  4. And what happens?  Christ takes on our sin – our accumulation of sick, sorted, destructive thoughts – so that we might become the righteousness of God.  That we might become new!  For the old has passed away.  There is a new creation.  See, everything has become new!
  5. As a new creation, we have new minds that don’t think in terms of defeatism, jealousy, bitterness, hate, envy, anger any longer.  We have the mind of Christ.  Now we are life-affirmers.  It’s their fault I am not happy…I can’t do that…I’ll never be happy…No such thoughts are habitually in your mind any more.  And, because your thoughts feed the soul, the soul now sings with affirmation, with yes-saying.  Your soul manifests what you have told it to manifest.  Now you can walk through life assured, confident, joyful and successful.  Because the mind of Christ has breathed on you.  Your mind is now Christ-soaked, and what pours from your mind is success, power, goodness, love.  You have become the righteousness of God.
  6. And the transformation from the old self to the new self is completed when we as transformed men and women in Christ engage in the ministry of reconciliation, because now that we are whole and integrated again.  Now that the mind of Christ is feeding our soul and manifesting in beautiful and powerful ways our life, God can make an appeal to others through us, with the same call that you heard:  Come home.  Stop and turn inward.  Be reconciled.  You are an ambassador of Christ.

Conclusion: 

  1.  How does this reconciliation begin?
  2. There is always a direct response from God when we turn inward and begin thinking God thoughts instead of worldly thoughts.    The soul leaps with joy and power and healing when the soul receives the thoughts and voice of God.  It manifests in a joyful heart, a healthy, vibrant attitude toward life, healthy relationships.  Through Christ, you begin to create a new world, a new reality for yourself.
  3. It begins by asking and receiving.  If you ask for bread, He will not give you stones.  Matthew 7:7-8 says, “7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye. shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: 8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh. findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
  4. You must ask, believing, if you are to receive.  Look inward and ask, Lord, give me the mind of Christ.  Declare that through Christ you are a new creation.  Receive only Christ thoughts in your mind.  Reject those that are not of Christ.  Your soul will be fed the nurturing word of God.  You will saved. You will be made whole, as you come together we God and experience reconciliation.    

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