For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died;

and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.

Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. 2 Corinthians 5:14–17

During the height of Covid and since, we’ve been hearing politicians float the phrase “Build Back Better”. I think it’s supposed to mean something like, from the devastation that the politicians themselves inflicted upon the world, let the politicians now build a better world for us. Build back better. So far, it’s looking more like “Double-Down on Destruction” or Trash Things Triple-Time, but who can blame politicians for seizing upon a crisis to create a slogan. Deeper than any cliché of the day, however, is the desire of people for a better world, a different world. Every political party claims that they will bring that world. In fact, every religion claims it will, in some way, bring that better world.

The Bible also promises a better world, in fact a perfect world is coming. But the Bible does not say it will come through political revolution, or social justice, or psychological innovations. The Bible makes the surprising claim that a new world began, in seed form, many years ago. In fact, it was this day, Easter Sunday, nearly two thousand years ago, that the start of a new world began with an empty tomb.

Jesus of Nazareth was more than a sage, more than a remarkable teacher, more even than a healer. He claimed to be the Promised Messiah, and He claimed to be God in the flesh. He said the main sign that would prove this was that He would die and rise from the dead. On Sunday morning neither the friends nor the enemies of Jesus found His body in the tomb, and through that day and the next forty, those who knew Him saw Him alive.

The resurrection of Jesus was not just the restoration of Jesus’s body. The resurrection of Jesus was the defeat of death, and the beginning of the end of this old, cursed world. This world drowning in its own sin, sinking into its own evil has an expiry date. The resurrection of Jesus is the firstfruits of a new world with new life and new people.

But God’s way is not to make a new external world and then populate it with the kind of people we are and have in this world. If you take evil people and put them in a perfect place, all they will do is ruin that place. Stage a black tie event in a high-end restaurant with crystal chandeliers, and make your guests 1000 chimpanzees in tuxedos: the evening is not is not going to end with refined chimpanzees. Perfect environments do not make perfect people.

Rather, the Bible tells the story of the resurrection of Jesus first changing people from the inside out. It begins with new inner life, a whole new kind of living. One day, it will include a new body, and one day beyond that, a new heavens and a new earth. But the first thing the resurrection of Jesus does is transform individuals, people.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you,

who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter 1:3–5)

Now in this section, Paul describes the absolute newness of a Christian’s life. In these few verses, Paul gives us a description of the kind of new life that the resurrection has brought to some people. This is not merely a new approach, or turning over a new leaf, or new resolutions. This is a new quality of life, a new life altogether. It is an implanted life that was not there before.

Verse 17 makes that clear: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new. Now the language here is unmistakably the same as the language in Revelation 21. Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…

Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Put simply, God first remakes people, one at a time. All those who are remade are ready to be citizens of a remade world.

Baptism is symbol that the resurrection of Jesus, this new life and new creation has begun in someone’s heart. It is an outward sign, of an inward reality. It says, old things have passed away, all things are become new.

This passage is going to give us three things that are new in the Christian, three ways that Christ’s resurrection has brought an altogether new life into the soul.

I. New Motive For Life

For the love of Christ compels us,

Paul says, as a Christian, and as a minister of the gospel, what compels me, what drives me on, what urges me to do what I do is the love of Christ. He doesn’t mean his own love of Christ, Paul’s love for Christ; he means Christ’s love for him. We know that because his next words explain how Christ lovingly died for us. He tells us: he died for us and rose again.

Paul says, “the love of Christ compels us”. Compel here means to press, to push, to pressure, even control. All that Paul accepts and embraces and performs, at the root of it, is the motive of love.

The thing that drives Christian life for Paul is God’s love for him in Christ. The love of a Saviour who died and rose again for him is what gets him up the morning, and pushes him through, and keeps him going. God’s pleasure in Paul, God’s delight in him is what gives lift to his wings and the spring in his steps. Knowing he is loved is the ground on which he stands, the foundation on which he builds.

He ends his great Romans 8 with an almost hymn-like ode to the security of being loved by God:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?

…..

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come,

nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31–39)

Nothing can shake or dissuade or conquer or destroy the one utterly convinced that the Creator, the true God, loves him. Convince me that God loves me and there is nothing you can threaten me with. Convince me that God loves me and that I will spend eternity with Him and death loses its sting.

Now there are countless other motives that can drive people. You can be motivated by success: to succeed at business or your career, to get to the top, be recognised, beat the competition. You can be motivated by money and material goods. Have enough, get more, get bigger, better. You can be motivated by family and social life: relationships, children, family. You can be motivated by comfort: diet, good food, exercise, nice clothes, nice car, great medicine, great house, good music and movies. You can be motivated by safety and stability and security: predictable salary, enough insurance, enough retirement money, enough bars on the windows, enough lawyers on standby. But none of these motives belong to the new creation. If these things constrain you, if they compel you, if they are what gets you out of bed in the morning, then you might be a nice person, but you are not a new person. You might be pleasant, easy-to-get-along with, but you are not yet new.

And if you want to know what kind of world, what kind of culture, what kind of life is created when people have these as motives, then just look around you.

Missionary Hudson Taylor interviewing some youths for Christ’s work. He asked them: “Why do you wish to go as a foreign missionary?” One replied: “because Christ has commanded us to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” Another said: “because millions are dying without ever having heard of Jesus.” Others gave similar answers, but not what Taylor sought. He replied: “All of your motives are good, but I fear they will fail you in times of severe testing and tribulation— especially if you are confronted with the possibility of having to face death for your testimony. The only motive that will enable you to remain true is stated in 2 Corinthians 5:14: “Christ’s love constraining [compelling] you will keep you faithful in every situation.”

A Christian’s motive is God loves me, that’s why I serve, and obey. I don’t go to church and talk about the Bible and pray and live differently because I feel guilty or condemned or because I’m trying to impress. I do this because I am loved, and so I love in return.

Does that mean true Christians are always motivated by love? No, those other motives compete with the motive of God’s love. But a true Christian knows that this should really be why we do what we do.

And if you want to imagine a world, a culture, a city populated by people compelled by the love of Christ, look at Revelation 21.

Now you have met people motivated by fear, motivated by envy, motivated by greed, motivated by man-pleasing, motivated by resentment, motivated by anger. And the motive actually affects the manner of life. So the second mark of newness is the new manner of life.

II. New Manner of Life

because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died;

and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.

Paul here states the great truth of the gospel: Jesus died for us. He died in our place and then rose again. This is the message of the Bible, that we broke God’s Law, deserved the death penalty, but Jesus took the death penalty in our place. He substituted for us, when He had done nothing wrong. Because He was an innocent, because Jesus was God in the flesh, His death could become a death for others. His death could pay my death and your death. It means we could actually be included His death, and not only was He paying the penalty for my sin, but He was putting to death the old life in me, the old selfish way of living.

Everyone who is a new creature has received the Lord Jesus as his or her death and new life. If you have turned away from sin and self and the world’s way of life and believed that Jesus is the Son of God and Saviour and trusted in Him to save you not only from the penalty of sin in Hell but from the power of sin right now, save you from yourself, then that death on the cross begins changing you now.

Paul tells you how: that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. If you are a new creation, your manner of life no longer revolves around serving self, pleasing self, protecting self, enriching self. Your manner of life no longer is about the unholy trinity of me, myself and I.

Why? Because to be a new creature is to have had a spiritual chemotherapy that has neutralised the cancerous cells of self and selfishness. You are set free to live no longer in the windowless prison of self, but you look upward and outward. You live for God, and you love others. You no longer live for yourself.

Life for a believer is Godward. Our lives are dominated by what pleases God, what God says, what God wills, how God guides. Our lives become increasingly about loving what God loves, hating what God hates.

“If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”―C.T. Studd

“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.” -C. S. Lewis:

When you meet a new Christian who is always talking about God and always speaking about the love of Christ, and maybe you say, “I’m sick of all this God-talk, I’m sick of all this new religion you seem to have got”, understand, he or she has for the first time been freed from living for self.

Now I don’t have to tell you about how the old world lives. It is the opposite. The motto under the badge of the world would be dog eat dog. Eat or be eaten. Winner takes all. No prizes for second place. Look out for number one. To thine own self be true. That’s the natural way, the normal way of the world. As Paul puts it, “For all seek their own”.

Are we saying that new creations, truly newborn Christians are perfectly unselfish? Far from it. In fact, we feel our selfishness more than ever before.

But that’s the point. We now feel our selfishness no longer as our natural selves, like our skin. Instead, it feels like an old itch we can scratch if we choose. We can choose the selfish way of life like everyone else; but we have been freed not to.

If all you know is one way of life, where there is really only one master to please, yourself, and even religion and the things of God just fit into that orbit, then you haven’t yet tasted the new creation. To be new is to no longer live for self. Paul’s famous words in Galatians 2:20 summarise it:

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

The new life springing from Easter Sunday gives you a new motive for life, it gives you a new manner of life, but it even changes your whole attitude toward others.

III. New Mindset On Life

Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer.

This seems like a strange verse, but it simply means this. Since we are now living by the love of God, and living for Him, we no longer evaluate other people and see them as we used to, by earthly, worldly standards. We no longer see people with the same old, selfish standards, evaluating people by externals, by physical appearance, by social status, personality, wealth. Those are all externals, temporary, worldly matters that don’t matter at all.

It’s the Johannesburg size-up. You know the moment when another Johannesburger gives you the once-over and tries to size you up and sum you up based on your clothes, the brands you’re wearing, the jewellery you’re wearing, your phone, your car, the colour of skin, or your hair. And then they decide where to place you in the pecking order, if you rate higher or lower than them.

The old way of evaluating people is to decide how to rate people by how nice they are, are they cordial, humorous, reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent. And if they are nice, then thumbs up! Or perhaps they’re poor, and brusque, abrupt, socially awkward or odd, maybe they dress badly or smell bad, maybe they’ve clearly messed up their lives with addictions or destructive relationships. And then its thumbs down! Or maybe they’re religious or non-religious, and we decide on them as good or bad.

But all of this is evaluating people according to the flesh. Once you are a new creation in Christ, the most important thing to you is this: is this person also a new creature in Christ? What is my neighbour’s spiritual state? Where does my neighbour stand in relation to God? Our primary question is, does my neighbour belong to the old creation or the new creation? Has he or she shared in the resurrection of Christ?

Maybe that sounds really binary and really judgemental. But actually nothing could be more loving to your neighbour than to drop all the foolish things people use to rate each other and exclude each other, and to make it only one important thing: does my neighbour know God?

New creations judge using these eternal standards, not the old ones. In fact, we no longer use that old standard to evaluate Jesus Himself. When you are in the world, you evaluate Jesus using those standards. You ask, was Jesus really powerful, good-looking, wealthy? Did He command an army? Did He write a best-selling book? If you judge Jesus by the standards of the old world, then Jesus is not very impressive, He doesn’t seem like a Saviour. But if you are a new creation, Jesus is so obviously, so manifestly the answer, the mediator, the chosen one, the solution, the Saviour.

If you meet someone who is mostly concerned about the spiritual state of everyone else, you are meeting someone who belongs to the New Jerusalem, the new creation, the new city. Imagine a world where the only way we really evaluate each other is by how our spiritual state.

Who is this new creature? Who has had the old passed away? Verse 17 tells you, “if any man is in Christ”. He doesn’t say if any man attends a Christian church. He doesn’t say if any man was baptised. He doesn’t say if any man has tried to be moral. He doesn’t say if any man has not committed the worst sins. He says, “if any man is in Christ”. That means you have changed position from living in the old world, by your own strength, to yourself, compelled by old motives, evaluating others by externals. Instead, you have embraced that Jesus died and rose for you, and asked and trusted Him to die your death, take away your sin, and give you this altogether new kind of life: His life, resurrection life, new creation life. That’s not, I’ve built back better. That’s I died, and in Jesus, I’m a new creation.

Today, these three are testifying to us, I am a new creation. I have a new motive in life. I have a new manner of life, I have a new mindset about life. I belong to a new world that’s still coming.