From Old to New

 DEVOTION

THE 2^ND LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS

FROM OLD TO NEW

2 Cor 5:16-21

16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

NIV

Everything in this explanation is based on the word reconciliation. The Greek word here means to exchange, such as taking some foreign coins and exchanging them for US currency of equal value thus reconciling them. In the same way, we have been changed from the old self or old creation to a new creation. God has changed us, he has done it all, reconciling us to him. Once all our sins were counted against us, but that is no longer the case, at least for us who are in Christ. He has changed us from the currency that was foreign to him and exchanged us into His currency. Granted, we are the same person, we have the same personality, the same appearance, and maybe even the same general temperament, but that old self which was completely focused only on its own pleasures is gone. We have a new direction in life, and it is focused on Christ. Although we have not totally given up wanting certain things in life, both the tangible and the intangible, we are not completely consumed by them. We want to please the Lord and do that which he has called us to. Each of us has an assignment in this new creation life. None of us are useless and should think we are simply to sit around just being content to be saved or be saved and then move along life in the same direction we have been, doing that which gains our goals, our desires, and our security in retirement. Being reconciled to God, being changed from the old into the new must mean something other than simply getting saved from death and given eternal life. Paul says that he was made an ambassador of Christ as though God was making his appeal through him. Are we not also ambassadors? Do we not also represent Christ to the world? If they know that we are a Christian, or maybe if that know we are simply a religious person, not knowing what it means to be born again or saved, or any other of our Christiane’s terms, they watch us. They observe how we act, how we work, how we treat people, and how we treat them. We are Christ’s ambassadors, whether we want to be or not. However, the duty of an ambassador, or the role, is to speak for their sovereign, that is not their own ideas or thoughts, but what does our sovereign want to be said to the foreign county in which we have been sent to live in. Therefore, as His ambassador, we are to go into the world and tell the story of reconciliation, the gospel message. We must remember that we have been reconciled, we have been exchanged from that old into the new. We need to live as being new.