A Sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:18-6:2 is part of a verse-by-verse series through 2 Corinthians. Please visit our Sermon Archive for more sermons in this series.
God Made the First Move
Five words open this passage and set the tone for everything that follows: All this is from God. Not just what comes next, but everything Paul has discussed since chapter 2. The boldness, the new creation, the call to die to self, the ministry itself — it all of it originates with God. That truth is the foundation of what may be the deepest theological passage in 2 Corinthians.
The Work of Reconciliation
We are the ones who walked away. God didn’t move; we did. Adam and Eve looked at God’s commands and said, I don’t think so. Every human being born since has inherited that same rebellious image (Genesis 5). When God seems far away, it’s not because he retreated. We turned our backs and ran.
And yet God is the one who acted to repair the relationship. That’s what makes reconciliation such stunning grace. The one who was wronged did the work of restoring it. He did so by “not counting our trespasses against us” — a legal and accounting term. Picture a balance sheet: everything we owe God sits on the liability side. Left to ourselves, we are bankrupt before him.
This leads to the deepest moment in the passage: Verse 21. God made Jesus “to be sin who knew no sin.” This doesn’t mean Jesus became a sinner; Hebrews 4 is clear he was tempted in every way yet without sin. But as theologian Murray Harris puts it, so complete was Christ’s identification with our sin — our guilt, our separation, our punishment — that Paul can say God made him to be sin for us. Jesus absorbed everything our rebellion deserved. Every bit of it. Completely.
The result — the second half of verse 21 — is one of the most important statements in Scripture: so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. This is imputation. Your sin transferred to Christ’s account. His righteousness transferred to yours. God remains perfectly just — sin was punished, fully — and he justifies the sinner, fully. Both at once, in Christ. That is how God reconciles the world to himself.
The Ministry of Reconciliation
Because God has reconciled us, he now sends us with that same message. Paul calls himself an ambassador — a representative of a ruling authority, carrying a message of peace. His authority isn’t his own. His eloquence isn’t the point. He carries a message that doesn’t belong to him, from a King who sent him.
That ministry, Paul says, belongs to every believer — not just preachers. Every Christian carries the message: be reconciled to God. And Paul issues a specific warning alongside it: don’t receive the grace of God in vain. He identifies two ways this happens.
The first is hearing the gospel repeatedly and deciding it doesn’t apply to you — sitting in church for decades while the message of salvation rolls past without landing. The 18th-century minister Charles Simeon once broke down weeping mid-sermon when it hit him that people in his congregation had done exactly that for years.
The second comes from 1 Corinthians 3. Every believer builds into God’s temple, but some build with gold and stone, while others toss in straw and stubble. Both make it in, but one barely survives the fire of God’s judgment on our works. Don’t sleepwalk through the Christian life. We don’t work to earn salvation; Christ secured that. But we do work because we have been declared righteous, and that declaration calls us to something.
Now is the Day
Paul closes by quoting Isaiah 49 — God promising his servant a favorable time of salvation. Then Paul adds a prefix to the word favorable in Greek, intensifying it: now is the truly, really favorable time. Why? Because everything necessary for reconciliation — justification, redemption, adoption, salvation — has already been accomplished in Christ. There is no better moment. There is no waiting for conditions to improve. The door is open now.
Key Takeaway
God made the first move. He absorbed the punishment our rebellion deserved, transferred his righteousness to our account, and sent his people into the world carrying that message. The only question left is whether we receive it — and whether we carry it with the seriousness it deserves.
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