Recommended reading: 2 Corinthians 5:1-21
Clearly, we all do not interpret our world’s problems in the same way nor do we agree on what can fix them. Depending upon ‘what news we listen to’ it appears Americans are split 49%-49% on many issues. What all is broken and what direction we should go next is quite divisive. The list of broken systems covers almost everything in our society. Poverty, the economy, our ability to be healthy, education, racism, the culture wars, 5-4 Supreme Court decisions, re-interpreting our history and yet another election cycle may bring us to despair.
Nothing seems secure anymore. Our distress is not only about society’s issues but may be much more personal. ‘I am not as young and healthy or confident as I once was.’ So, what can fix all that is broken?
Paul writes the church in Corinth who lived in a wildly unchristian culture several foundational ideas.
It is God who gives us a purpose and a promise. Even though our earthly body is falling apart, we look forward to our heavenly existence.
Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come (5:5).
We put our confidence in God’s eternal plan. We live by faith and not by sight.
So, we make it our goal to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad (5:9-10).
Our purpose is to persuade others to live for Jesus, even if it makes us look crazy.
Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. If we are “out of our mind,” as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again (5:11, 13-15).
Our greatest calling is to help people be reconciled to God. Paul describes it as not regarding anyone ‘from a worldly point of view’, as an enemy or opponent.
If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 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. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (5:17-21).
We may disagree about our society’s problems or solutions, but one thing is sure, living for Jesus is the fix.