New Creation

Praise God. We thank God for this morning and this opportunity to gather together.

For those of you who watch the NFL or keep up with football, you might know this is the last week of the regular season before the playoffs. And a lot of teams, what they do on this last week before the playoffs begin is they give their starters some rest. And they give some players from the practice squad that time to play to give the starters some rest.

And so we thank God for our starters who minister weekly multiple times. We thank God for our pastors who preach faithfully God’s Word. And we thank God for this time. And I thank God for this opportunity to share from God’s Word. And I pray that this morning that the Holy Spirit speaks to us through His Word.

We thank and praise God for a new year. A lot of things to thank God for. A new year, the first Sunday of this year, to be in the presence of God with God’s people. A new year brings a lot of positive emotions. We think of a new joy, a new hope. We have New Year’s resolutions, new goals. There’s a mantra, new year, new me, with this idea of the past me is gone, the new me is here, this year is going to be different. And we want to leave behind maybe negative experiences or bad habits or bad memories from the year before.

For the next four weeks, God willing, we’ll be going through a series called All Things New, focusing on our status as believers when all things were made new by Christ. And today, in this morning, we’re going to start studying, from 2 Corinthians 5:17, about being a new creation. And I’ll read that. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, this person is a new creation. The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come.

Father, we just thank you once again for this time. We thank you, O God, for your Word. We thank you, O God, that your Spirit has been working in our hearts and our lives as we sing songs of praise to you, remembering your goodness and your grace and the powerful work that you did on the cross. Holy Spirit, I pray that you would work right now in me and in us, Lord. I pray that, Holy Spirit, that you would strengthen, that God, you, a God who uses the weak, to share the mighty works of your hands. I pray that this morning that your Spirit would do just that and that you would strengthen and empower us. We thank you, Lord. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Apple is a company that we’re all very familiar with. Most of us in this room have some kind of Apple device. In fact, this morning I’m using an Apple iPad for my notes. Apple, every year, releases a new iPhone. And they release it, and there’s always things about new devices that you can see on the screen. They always talk about a new size, a new display, maybe a new camera, new features on the phone.

And what Apple does when they sell their product every year, when they talk about this new thing, is they compare it to the old thing. They use the old battery life, the old status, and they say, hey, this new thing is better because it’s better than the old thing.

And for us to understand what this means here of the new creation, new things, it’s important for us to reflect and spend some time on the old things that we read about here in 2 Corinthians. So what are the old things that have passed away?

And there are two ways that we can look at the old things that passed away that Paul mentions here. The old thing one is our status between man and God, and also our personal relationship between us and God. In the old order of things, we read in Genesis—I presume everyone’s been reading their Bible reading plan or are up to date on that—we read this past week about how when man sinned, the effect of that sin. When humanity chose to sin against God, there was a physical consequence of that sin.

And that physical consequence of that sin was that they no longer could walk with God. They no longer could be in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 3:24 says, So he drove the man out, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword, which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life. When humanity sinned, everything about our created beings changed. Sin corrupted Adam and Eve and every descendant since, including us. And physically, God’s creation, who once enjoyed sweet intimacy, walking with God each and every day, was now physically separated from being with God. Think about that. The intimacy that Adam had experienced—and we don’t know exactly how long he had experienced that—was changed in a dramatic fashion. Changed in a fashion that would forever change how he lived his life, and even now, thousands of years later, affected us.

So physically, there became a separation. But also, in a relationship, spiritually, there became a separation. Isaiah 59:2 says, But your wrongdoings have caused a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear. And we’re familiar in the Old Testament about how the Israelite people, or the people of God, would hear God’s word, would know God’s truth, choose to do it, choose to ignore God’s truth, and as a consequence, there would be a separation between them and God.

By God’s grace, the law was introduced in the Old Testament, not to save man, but to help man realize the consequences of their sin and to make them aware of their sin. Hebrews 10:1-4 says, Since the law is only a shadow of the good things to come, and not the reality itself of those things, it can never perfect the worshipers by the same sacrifices they continually offer year after year. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have stopped being offered since the worshipers purified once for all would no longer have any consciousness of sin? But in the sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins year after year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin.

It is impossible for bulls and goats to take away sins. You see, the law required for sacrifices to be made for two purposes. One, to make them aware that there was a cost to their sin. Blood had to be shed to cover the sin. But the sacrifice that they were instructed to make was not enough. The bulls and goats were not sufficient enough to take away their sins. There was a sacrifice required, but it would not actually restore us back to God. Those wrongdoings still, at a level, kept us separate from God. And I think it’s tempting for us to sit here today and think that was them. Those were the Israelites. We’re different. I mean, we’re sitting today in our Sunday best on a wonderful morning in a very comfortable place. We think of ourselves as we’re not sinful people. We’re not of the flesh. But the reality is, sin is not something foreign of us.

The second part is, just as sin created a physical separation between mankind and God, there is also a separation personally between any relationship we can have between us and God because of sin.Romans 3:23 says, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There is no distinction there. There’s no limitation there. It doesn’t matter how morally good you are or how educated, successful, comfortable, talented, good-looking, financially secured, or socially elevated you are. All have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God. Without Christ, our minds were set to the things of sin. Without Christ, our minds and our hearts and our lives are set to the things of the flesh. Now, we’re very familiar with these things, but I’ll read this for us to be reminded.

Galatians 5:19-21 says, Now, the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. The Message translation, I think, also offers us in a very plain way, and I’m going to read that now just to kind of make it very plain to us, the reality of what our flesh and our sin does and what it desires: It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex, a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage, frenzied and joyless grabs of happiness, trinket gods, magic-show religion, paranoid loneliness, cutthroat competition, all-consuming yet never satisfied wants, a brutal temper, an impotence to love or be loved, divided homes and divided lives, small-minded and lopsided pursuits, the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival, uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions, ugly parodies of community.

And Paul writes in this translation that he could go on. Think about that. I mean, we’re holy people, and we’ve all been saved by God, but our flesh desires very unholy things. Our flesh desires things that are very sinful, very broken, very helpless. And in reality, if we evaluate our lives, we probably have those things. If we evaluate our hearts and our lives, there are probably still areas in our lives that we’re holding on to those fleshly desires. Think about it. We live in a generation that’s full of a desire for control. We live in a generation that is constantly anxious. We live in a generation that seeks after whatever is the most convenient thing, whatever is the easiest thing to instant gratification.

So sin in our lives, every single one of us, keeps us from God because it is constantly longing for things that please us instead of pleasing God. It’s constantly longing for us to fill our lives with things that are other than God. Everything that we do that seeks our glory or our pleasure or our comfort and not seeking God’s kingdom, God’s glory, or His Word, are things that keep us separate from God. Right? Those are the old things. And so if there’s anyone here today hearing these words being spoken, it is a time for us to evaluate. We can say, New year, new me. We can say, New Year’s resolutions, new habits. But if we are tolerating, if we are keeping any of these things in the flesh, those old things have not gone away. They are still right next to us.

If we are tolerating sin, if we are leaving a comfortable place to keep sin hidden away, we have not moved away from those old things. Those old things are still with us. We can come here in our Sunday best. We can sing the songs. We can even take communion, and God may give you grace for some time for now. But remember, hear God’s Word in a clear way: These things are of the flesh. These are the old things. These are the things of sin. And these are the things that will keep you from God for eternity. And so sin affects us in a very real way. But there is joy because in Christ there is a new creation. You see, when we read in verse 17 about the new things when we become a Christ, there is a transformation that occurs that makes this new creation. There is a transformation in all of us when we become a new creation.

In the mid-2000s, there was a popular TV show called Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. They would air on most Sunday nights. And the show, the basic premise of this was, if you haven’t seen it, is they would take a story of a family that had gone through a lot of struggles, maybe sickness, challenges, financial turmoil, and oftentimes they would show this home, and the home is always run down. A damaged roof. Flooring is messed up. Maybe one of the windows doesn’t close. Leaks in the house. It looks very dirty and messy. And what this TV show did is they would send this family on a trip away. And while the family is away, they would get to work. They would take the roof off. They would bring the house down to its basic structures. And then they would completely renovate the house, fix the leaks, fix the foundation, fix the walls, fix the roof.

And then on top of that, they would add in all kinds of upgrades. I think some of them, when I was looking for the sermon, it was a completely redone home theater that looks like you walked into a movie theater with a popcorn machine there. Or there was one story of a pilot, and they made the inside of a house look like an actual plane. My favorite one as a kid, I saw, was they put an elevator in the house. And as a kid, I always wanted an elevator in my house just because it just felt cool. I mean, I could walk up the stairs, but this elevator aspect seemed really cool. The point of this is that there is a clear transformation that happens when it goes from the old home, the beginning of the show, and to the end of the episode when it’s a new house. There is a clear distinction that occurs when it goes from the old to the new. And so for us as believers as well, for those who are in Christ, there is a transformation that occurs when we go from the old things to being new creation. There’s a transformation that happens in our lives, and it doesn’t happen on its own.

There’s a quote that N.T. Wright says that I think helps us understand. It says, The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old. A drastic and dramatic birth of a new creation. Before Christ and without Christ, there was a physical separation that kept us from God and a spiritual separation that kept us from God. But as we sang this morning, when Jesus died on a cross, that separation ended.

Matthew 27:51 says, And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth shook and the rocks were split. Then in 2 Corinthians 3:14-16, I think this illustrates it also well. It says: But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the Old Covenant, the same veil remains unlifted because it is removed in Christ. But to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts; but whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. When someone turns to the Lord, that veil is taken away.

That physical curtain has been removed. Mankind has access to God in a way that only happens in new creation. But you have to turn to the Lord so that you can actually have that veil be taken away in your personal lives. It is not enough that you come to church and come to the programs. You personally, in your life, have to change from your old things and turn to Christ fully to be able to have that veil taken away. And the result of that is beautiful.

2 Corinthians 3:18 says, But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. In Romans 3:23, we read, We fall short of the glory of God. But now, when the veil is removed, we reflect the glory of God, going an image from glory to glory. We’re no longer falling short, but in Christ, a transformation occurs. And now, by His Spirit, we’re able to reflect that glory of God as we’re being transformed day after day. We have been transformed in our standing as a new creation, and we’ve been transformed in our personal lives to be more like God.

And so now that we are a new creation, what are the new things that have come? The new things are important. That’s why in the verse it says, Behold, the new things have come. Another translation says, And see new things have come. This is a dramatic moment that Paul is writing. There is a new thing that has come, and the answer is partially in there. It says, Anyone in Christ. Anyone, a word that you can gloss over, but a word that holds so much depth and so much meaning. Anyone literally means anyone.

It does not matter your background. It does not matter your ethnicity. It does not matter if you are rich or you are poor, if you’re educated or uneducated. It does not matter whether you are successful in the world’s eyes or unsuccessful in the world’s eyes. It does not matter where you come from, who your parents are, what your generations had before you. In Christ, anyone can be a new creation. In the old order of things, there was a separation between the Jews and the Gentiles, but in Christ, we are all becoming one body.

Ephesians 2:14 says, For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall. And in that passage, Paul illustrates how separate the Jewish people were and the Gentiles were. Think about it. None of us, I believe, have any kind of Jewish heritage. We were those Gentiles. We were separate from God. We had no access to God. The law was not given to us. We did not have a special revelation to us. But because of God’s love, anyone, including us people of Indian origin, are able to be made one in Christ. It does not matter what your background is. Anyone is able to be made new in Christ. And in Christ, the new things are that we are being reconciled back to Him.

2 Corinthians 5:18-19 says, Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their wrongdoings against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. So in Christ, first, we are reconciled to God. Reconciliation, one person writes, assumes a ruptured relationship, alienation, and disaffection. This is how it was before Christ. We had a ruptured relationship with God. We were alienated from Him. Reconciliation means that the ruptured relationship has now been mended.

If you were to take a glass item—I think this is the easiest illustration—if you take a glass bottle or a glass cup and you were to throw it on the floor, what’s going to happen? It’s going to shatter. It’s going to break. No matter how much tape you use or glue you use, that glass will never be fully mended. That’s what we were in the old days. That’s what our status was in God before He reconciled us. But now in God, God has done a miraculous thing. He’s taken what can never be mended on its own, what can never be fixed on its own, and God, in His great mercy and in His love, has reconciled us to Him.

Reconciliation, though, comes at a cost. It doesn’t just happen on its own. There was a cost for us to become a new creation, and that cost was Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. His body being broken, His blood poured out for us, His blood doing what the bulls and goats could not do, forever taking our sin—the pure, holy, righteous blood of God, the Holy Lamb of God taking our sin. That was the cost of our reconciliation, and we should never take that lightly. We should never take that lightly. That is a powerful, miraculous work in the blood of Jesus that reconciles us, that brings us back to God.

And so now the debt that we owed, the burden of our sin, the consequences of us—the old things—were placed on Jesus. And now what? We are reconciled to God. We are able to approach Him without a physical separation. One day we are able to approach Him without a veil covering our eyes. We are able to approach Him no matter our background. Anyone can be reconciled in Christ.

Not only have we been reconciled to God, but that word of reconciliation has been committed to us. So for those who are in Christ, those who have been reconciled to God, it doesn’t just stop there. That word of reconciliation has been committed to us. That’s the language. It’s been given to us. In another verse, it says, The ministry of reconciliation has been given to us.

What does that mean? It means two things. One, we have a responsibility to share the goodness of Jesus. We have a responsibility, just as the reconciliation of God was taught to us, just as we have been reconciled to God, we have the responsibility now to be ministers of that word of reconciliation. Ministers and people who share the goodness of God, how He has saved all of mankind to Himself for His name and His glory. 2 Corinthians 5:20 says, Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Paul does it right there. He acts literally as an ambassador. He says, I’m speaking on behalf of Christ, and I’m begging you, be reconciled to God. Isn’t that the same thing we should be doing? We should be begging others, Be reconciled to Christ. That’s the same urgency we should have. Be reconciled back to Christ. That is the urgency we should have for our family, our friends, our loved ones. Be reconciled back to Christ. No longer abide in the old things. There is a new creation that is available for us. Let us all abide in Christ. Be reconciled to Christ.

And ambassadors, I think that’s the easiest thing for us to understand. Right now, we’re going through a presidential transition. President Trump will take over in a couple of weeks, and he will have a new cabinet in place. And in every country, as you probably read in the news, there’s an ambassador that he sends, that he appoints, that goes out there. The ambassador’s role there is to communicate on behalf of the country and the president. They don’t speak on their behalf. Their name is not great. Their name is not what’s important. Their status is not what’s important. Their role is what’s important. And the role is to communicate the message of the one that has sent them as an ambassador. Our role in this world is to communicate the word that God has given to us. And that’s what Paul beautifully illustrates here.

On behalf of Christ, I beg you, be reconciled to Him. That’s what the Word of God is teaching us today. If anyone is here today who has not been reconciled to God, if anyone is here today who is still abiding in the old things, the Word of God is urging you: Be reconciled to Christ.

The last verse, verse 21: He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. So that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

In our Lamentations series and encounter, we spoke a little bit about God’s judgment and His character of being righteous. And what we studied there in detail was that the righteousness of God is not just doing good things. It’s two things: it’s being right before God, but also being just towards man. See, what this verse does is that it also challenges us to have relationships with others that are reconciled to them. It’s not merely enough that we are reconciled to God. We must also ensure that we do our part to have reconciled relationships with others. Now, we just studied about how the debt and burden that was on us because we sinned against God has been placed on Jesus. My fear and worry is that in our lives, we hold those who have wronged us, and we hold that debt against them still. Meaning that we have not forgiven them. Meaning that we have not sought forgiveness from them for the things that we have done, and we hold that debt against them.

But as we read in the parables, how can one who has been forgiven of much not forgive of the little that others have done to us? In the grand scheme of things, the wrongs that we have done against God greatly outweigh any wrong things that anyone has ever said to us, done to us, or acted towards us. And if we are not willing to forgive anyone else in a just manner, how can we expect to be forgiven by our God? The new things mean that we do not hold old grudges. You cannot have a new thing here and bring your old grudge along, your old anger towards others along. A new thing means that the old things are gone. The old things have been forgiven. That in Christ, as we have been reconciled to God, we seek reconciliation to others, no matter how much they have wronged us. No matter what they have said, no matter what they have done, no matter the hurts and pains.

I know these hurts and pains are real. I know in relationships they are messy. People hurt you. They say things that make you feel lowered, unworthy, uncomfortable, broken, hurt. But brothers and sisters, my challenge is that for us who believe in Christ, for us whose hope and faith is in Christ, let us let go of those old things. Let us be reconciled in those relationships as well, just as we have been reconciled in God. Now, new creation doesn’t mean perfection. New creation doesn’t mean that from now on we will never sin again. The reality is that as long as we’re on this earth, we live in human bodies that were corrupted by sin. That’s why we go through sadness when we have diseases and pains and brokenness, when we see others go through suffering, when there’s suffering in this world. That is the effect of sin that happened at the beginning, the old order of things.

But our hope is that even though our bodies are decaying, even though we are getting more weary, even though our lives are filled with challenges and our hearts long for the things of this world, even though our flesh longs for those sinful things, we are being transformed. That language is that we are being reconciled to God. We are being sanctified. We’re becoming more and more in His image. And so, although we have become a new creation, that is a complete transformation of our status before God, that doesn’t keep us from continuing to look more and more like Him. That doesn’t keep us from just being okay with our initial steps of our relationship with God. As Paul writes, it’s not enough for you to drink milk like a baby. You have to eat whole foods. As believers, as we are in this new year, as we are new creation, let us take those steps to become more and more like Him, be more surrendered to God, be more aware of our sin, be more in His presence, more in His Word. The beautiful thing in all of this is that it is easy to say all things new. It’s the gospel that is the most beautiful thing in all of this. The gospel in that the blood of Jesus covers all of our sins. The blood of Jesus, we plead when it comes to spiritual warfare sometimes. The blood of Jesus, we plead when it comes to moments of uncertainty sometimes.

We can sing about the blood of Jesus when the music is loud, and it sounds good, and everyone around us is singing. But being a new creation is not just on Sunday morning in our Sunday best. Being a new creation also happens between Monday and Saturday. Being transformed in His image is not just when we’re all together; it’s also when you’re home alone and private. It’s also when you are with friends, when you’re with your classmates, when you’re with your family, when you’re with your co-workers. The way that we act, new creation is not just something we put on a Sunday morning and come. It’s something that we live out every single day because the blood of Jesus is not a cheap thing we can just use on a Sunday morning to wash our hands real quick, to take the Lord’s table. The blood of Jesus is something that completely washes over us and cleanses us purely so that our whole entire lives, Monday through Sunday, we are covered in that blood of Jesus.

So my encouragement to you is that as we are in this new year, that this is not just a New Year’s resolution or something that has kept us for this new year, but that we remind ourselves that in Christ all things have been made new. In Christ, we are a new creation, and that requires us to constantly seek to abide in Christ. And so, as the Word of God says, I urge you on behalf of Christ, Be reconciled to Him.

Father, we just thank you, Lord, for this morning, and we thank you for this Word. Lord, these are words that we are very familiar with. These are truths that we are familiar with. But I pray, Holy Spirit, in our hearts, in our lives right now, that You would do what only You can. That You would convict us, Lord, if there are old things that we are holding on to. That You would convict us, God, if there are old habits and old ways of and our old creation that we are still seeking to fill our lives with. And God, my prayer is that Your Holy Spirit would equip us to live as a new creation, reminding ourselves every single day that our status before God has shifted. Our status before God is no longer the same. We are a new creation.

Behold, new things have come.

We are in Christ. The veil has been removed. And so, because of that, we can approach Your table with confidence. We can approach the bread and the blood with confidence, knowing that Jesus, You have reconciled us to You, and that there is a cost for that. And by the broken body and the blood poured out for us, we have been made new. And so, Father, I pray that as we are about to take this, that we might evaluate our hearts and our lives, and that we are made new and reminded of our newness in You. We thank You, God, for Your Word. We thank You, God, for the way that Your Spirit is working in us. Do what only You can. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.