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.
2 Corinthians 5:19 (NIV)
God Did the Reconciling
God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. He did the reconciling and he did the not counting, and the whole thing was settled between him and his Son before anybody was asked to think about it. Then he committed the message of it to people who’d had nothing to do with arranging any of it.
A man of sixty-three is three weeks into learning the freezer side of a cold storage warehouse. The fans run flat overhead and never change pitch, and frost grows white along the racking where the pallets don’t reach. He keeps the aisle numbers on a strip of tape across his glove, because his glasses fog the minute he comes through the plastic curtain. A kid a third his age walks him through the reach truck again without making anything of it, and on the fourth try the forks go in clean. Three times wrong and nobody is keeping the number.
We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. An ambassador says sentences he didn’t write. He can’t soften the terms to get a warmer room and he can’t improve them if he thinks they sound thin, and everything he has to offer was settled before he walked in. His whole standing in that room comes from the one who sent him.
We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. Implore is a strong word to use about your own talking. Paul uses it anyway, and he says whose appeal it is. God makes the appeal, and he makes it through a human voice, because he arranged it that way.
So the appeal is still going out, and it goes out in a voice: in kitchens and parking lots, on the phone, on a loading dock in the four minutes before a truck pulls away.
God did the reconciling in Christ. Paul wrote be reconciled to God to a church, to people who were already sitting inside it.
Out on the dock there are four minutes before the truck pulls away. He tells the kid he had a year once when he’d have been no use to anybody, and that somebody carried him through it, and that he’d like to say who. It comes out worse than he meant it. The kid says something about the cold, and then, after a second, asks him who.
A Prayer to Remember
Put the words in my mouth on a day when I don’t want them, God. The thing I’m carrying was settled without me, and I can’t make it sound better than it sounds. Let me say it plainly to the person in front of me. I’d rather say it badly than not say it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
