Sermon Tone Analysis

II Corinthians 5:14-21

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Introduction

Today we have come together to remember a death.

Usually when a death occurs, changes happen.

When our car dies, we get a different one.

When a dream dies, we stop thinking about it.

When a person dies, we no longer have a relationship with them.

All of these changes signify loss but the death of Jesus is significantly different.

When Jesus died, it involved a very different kind of change, it involved a gain, not a loss.

What changes have occurred because Jesus died?

As we think about the death of Jesus today, let us consider how significant and profound that is.

II Corinthians 5:14-21 helps us think these things through.

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I.                   The Death We Die

In II Corinthians 5:14, 15 the word “death” occurs 4 times in these two verses presenting us with some profound thoughts about something we often prefer not to talk about.

!! A.                 He Died For All - Vs. 14, 15, 21

First of all, let’s think about the death of Jesus.

When it says “because we are convinced” in verse 14 it means that there is a foundational truth about death that impacts a lot of other things.

When any structure is built the first while of the project is unseen.

Most of the work takes place underground.

It is the time of building the foundation and that foundation is so important that all else that will be built on it depends on it.

The foundation determines the shape, height and integrity of the rest of the building.

That is what we are talking about when it says, “because we are convinced.”

This is foundational truth and it is a foundational truth that impacts all the rest of Christian truth.

The foundational truth discussed here has to do with the death of Jesus.

In these verses there are three statements about the meaning of Jesus’ death.

In verse 21 it says, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.”

The other verses which speak of His death are verses 14 and 15 which are both quite similar.

Verse 14 says, “one died for all” and verse 15 says, “he died for all.”

The key message of all of these words is that Jesus death was substitutionary.

That is that Jesus died in our place.

This is absolutely amazing because Jesus willingly sacrificed Himself.

Although it says that “God made Him,” in verse 21 that does not mean that Jesus was forced.

We see only too clearly in places like His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane that Jesus went to the cross willingly.

Philippians 2 also reminds us that He gave Himself over to death.

So the substitutionary death of Jesus came about by the willingness of Jesus to die sacrificially.

The second implication of Jesus taking our place was that the only way that He could die was if He took our sin upon Himself.

The Bible is very clear that death comes only because of sin.

Yet Jesus was without sin.

In John 8:46 Jesus asked the Jewish leaders to identify what sin it was that they accused him of and they could not answer.

Many other verses indicate that He had no sin. 1 Peter 2:22 says, “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.”

Therefore, the conclusion is that when Jesus died, He died for us.

We read in Isaiah 53:4, 5, "Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed."

If there is no sin, there can be no death.

Jesus did not sin; therefore, Jesus could not die.

When it says “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,” it means that Jesus died in our place.

He died not for His own sins, because He had none, but for our sins and so “died for all.” Bruce points out that Jesus was made sin, not made a sinner.

He writes, “God the Father made His innocent incarnate Son the object of His wrath and judgment, for our sakes, with the result that in Christ on the cross the sin of the world is judged and taken away.”

The motivating power behind this sacrificial willingness to experience the worst possible thing for any human being could experience was the love of Jesus.

Bruce says, “He surrendered His body to death instead of all…This He did out of sheer love for us…”

            This is what we are celebrating today.

Jesus died in our place.

Sometimes when I think about it I don’t know how to respond and all I can do is stop and be amazed.

What did it take?

How profound!

How deep!

God – the sovereign of the universe, came to earth as a human and died in my place.

We must fix that reality firmly in our minds understanding the horrid wickedness of sin, our involvement in it and the tremendous sacrifice by which Jesus has died in our place.

!! B.                 We No Longer Live - Vs. 14, 15

But the meaning of this foundational truth gets very personal when we read about its implications.

In verse 14 Paul makes a powerful connection.

First we are told that “one died for all” and then we are told “therefore all died.”

In verse 15 after saying “he died for all” it says that we “no longer live.”

What does that mean?

It is another way of saying that we have a significant identification with the death of Jesus.

But how significant is that identification?

How have “all died?” Evidently something very important has changed.

In any death a lot of things change.

What was is no more, the life that was is gone.

So if we have died, what has changed?

Since we still live, to what have we died?

            “All died” means that we have died to death.

Death is notorious because it separates.

It separates us from life, from others and from God.

But in the death of Jesus all of us who are in Him have died to death and death no longer has the power to separate us from life, from others or from God.

After we die, we will live on with all those who have gone before and live in the most intimate relationship with God we could ever imagine and we will do it for all eternity.

We “no longer live” also means that we have died to sin.

Sin is no longer our master and sin no longer dominates our life.

Sin is active in a person as long as they are alive, but when they have died, sin no longer has any power over them.

So if we have died, sin no longer is master in our life.

To all intents and purposes the death of Jesus in our behalf and our identification with His death means that we have died to sin.

The most original and most often expressed sin there can be is the sin of self-centeredness and if we have died to sin, it means that we have also died to self.

When we deeply contemplate the reality that Jesus sacrificed Himself to die in our place how can we continue to live a life focused on ourselves?

When it says in verse 15 that we no longer live, it puts it this way, “…those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”

Thus we begin a new life by which we have died to self and live to Christ.

So the question which arises out of this foundational reality is, “have you died?” Sometimes people become Christians because they want eternal life, sometimes because they want to have the blessings of God, but how many of us become Christians because we want to die.

Yet by coming to Christ and identifying with His death, that is exactly what we have done, we have chosen death – death to self, death to sin and death to death.

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II.

The Life We Live

What tremendous gain, not loss comes with that death!

What will our life look like if we have died in Christ?

The rest of the passage tells us.

!! A.                 Christ’s Love Compels Us - Vs. 14

The first implication is that “the love of Christ compels us.”

Whenever we read the word “of” we have to ask a question and that is, “of what?”

What is it that compels us is, it the love which Christ has for us or is it our love for Christ?

In the Greek there is a deliberate ambiguity about this and I think that translations which remove the ambiguity do us a disservice.

The ambiguity allows us to say, “both.”

When we think about the depth of love that moved God to send Jesus to become a human being and to die on the cross for us it is an overwhelming almost unfathomable reality.

That is why we love to sing songs like, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us.”