2 Corinthians 5

My first hermeneutic efforts were with this passage, more or less. I read it as a benediction tonight after we talked about what happens when you repent and turn to Jesus, the change that happens and how you are released from sin and guilt, filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered and in general, made new. It's such a charge from Paul, first to the church in Corinth, and then to us. You have been made new--now you are an ambassador from the Kingdom of God to the world--you bring the King's regards and wishes.

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.

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. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 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 men'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.