Ugonna was nineteen when his father and his uncle stopped speaking. The quarrel was over land: a plot in the village near Nnewi that the two brothers had inherited together. His uncle sold it without telling anyone, used the money to rescue a failing business in Onitsha, and lost it all within a year. The money that would have paid Ugonna’s first year at university went with it. He spent that year selling phone accessories in Computer Village instead, and he never quite forgave the man.
For twelve years the uncle’s name was hardly mentioned in their house. When it was, his father would go quiet and leave the room.
Then, one Saturday in November, his father called him to Enugu. He was sitting on the veranda with an envelope on his knee. “Your uncle is sick,” he said. “Kidney trouble. He has been in hospital in Onitsha for three weeks, and the bill has been growing. I paid it on Thursday. All of it.” He held out the envelope. Inside was the receipt from the hospital and a short letter in his father’s careful handwriting.
“I want you to take this to him,” his father said. “Tell him I am not coming to collect anything. The land is finished. The debt is finished. Tell him I want him home for Christmas.”
Ugonna took the envelope. On the bus to Onitsha the next morning, he found himself rehearsing what he would say. He would deliver his father’s message, of course. But he would also make sure his uncle understood what it had cost. He would mention the lost year. He would let the silence after the words do some damage. By the time the bus crossed the Niger Bridge, he had a speech prepared, and very little of it was his father’s.
PunchlineUgonna had been given a message of reconciliation. The question was whether he would carry it as it had been given to him.
That is the question every believer faces. The New Testament says that God “hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). We carry a message we did not write, from a Father who has already paid what we could never pay. The way we carry it matters.
The love that compels the messenger
Paul’s words about reconciliation come in the middle of a passage where he is explaining why he does what he does. The Corinthians had questioned his motives. Some thought he was unbalanced, others that he was self-promoting. Paul answers by telling them what drives him:
For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again. Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.
“The love of Christ constraineth us.” The Greek word means to hold together, to press in on every side, to control. It is used elsewhere of a crowd pressing in on Jesus and of a fever gripping a sick person. Paul says he is hemmed in by Christ’s love. He means Christ’s love for him, displayed at the cross, which has taken hold of his life and set its direction. His own love for Christ is real, but it is the answer, never the engine.
Then Paul gives the reasoning: “if one died for all, then were all dead.” Christ’s death was a death on behalf of all, and it shows the condition of all. Nobody was in a position to save himself. And Christ died “that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves.” The reconciled life is turned outward, towards the One who died and rose, and therefore towards the people He died for.
Verse 16 is often passed over, but it is essential for anyone who would carry this message. “Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh.” Paul had once assessed people by outward standards: race, religious pedigree, social rank, usefulness. He had even assessed Jesus that way, and concluded that a crucified carpenter from Galilee could not possibly be the Messiah. Now he sees differently. He looks at people in the light of the cross.
That changes how an ambassador looks at the people around him. He cannot see a man first as Yoruba or Hausa, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, useful or useless. He sees someone for whom Christ died. Ugonna’s uncle was, in his nephew’s eyes, the man who stole a year of his life. That was true, as far as it went. But it was knowing him after the flesh.
A new creation before a new assignment
Before Paul describes the ministry, he describes the minister: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The order matters. The ambassador is first a reconciled person. Before God gives you a message for others, He gives you a new life in Christ. You do not earn your place in the ministry of reconciliation by being a good speaker or a bold witness. You enter it because you have been made new.
This guards us against two errors. The first is the idea that evangelism is a duty performed by people who are still anxious about their own standing with God. A believer who is not sure whether God has really received him will find it hard to tell others that God receives them. His message will carry the sound of his own uncertainty. The second error is the opposite: treating the ministry of reconciliation as a badge of spiritual superiority, as though the messenger stood on a higher level than the people he addresses. Paul rules out both. You are a new creation, so you can speak with confidence. You are a new creation by grace, so you have nothing to boast about.
“Old things are passed away.” That includes old ways of seeing people. The prejudices and resentments we carried before Christ do not belong to the new creation. They may still linger, and we may have to deal with them deliberately, but they are part of what God is making new.
All things are of God
Now Paul comes to the heart of the matter:
And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
“All things are of God.” Every part of reconciliation begins with Him. This is one of the most striking features of the Christian message, and it sets the gospel apart from much religious thinking. In many religious systems, the offended deity must be approached, appeased and persuaded. The worshipper brings sacrifices, performs rites, makes vows and hopes that the god will be pacified. Paul turns that picture upside down. The offended party takes the initiative. God “hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ.”
The Greek word for reconcile, katallassō, comes from the world of exchange. It means to change a relationship from hostility to friendship. In ordinary life, when two people are reconciled, both usually have to move. In the gospel, the movement begins entirely from God’s side. He was the one wronged. He is the one who acts.
This has been God’s way from the beginning. When Adam and Eve hid among the trees after their disobedience, it was God who came looking for them: “And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9). God knew where they were. His question was the call of a God seeking the people who had run from Him, and Jesus would later describe His own mission in the same terms: “the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.” To impute is to count or reckon, the language of an accountant entering figures into a ledger. God did not enter our trespasses against us. Where did they go? Verse 21 answers that question, and we will come to it. For now, notice how Paul describes the content of the message: the trespasses are not being counted against the world. That is the word of reconciliation. It is good news before it is anything else.
NuggetThe offended party moved first. Reconciliation is something God has done in Christ, and the ambassador’s message begins with what has already been accomplished.
“And hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.” This is astonishing. The God who reconciled the world through His Son has entrusted the announcement of it to people like us. He could have written it in the sky. He chose to place it in the mouths of forgiven sinners.
What an ambassador does
“Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us.” The word Paul uses for acting as an ambassador was the term for an envoy sent by a ruler, usually a senior and trusted man, to speak on his behalf. An ambassador does not represent himself. He represents the one who sent him. He does not invent the message. He carries it faithfully, in the language and spirit in which it was given. When an ambassador speaks, the authority of his sovereign stands behind his words, and he is careful not to say anything his sovereign has not authorised.
Paul uses the same picture in Ephesians, where he calls himself “an ambassador in bonds” (Ephesians 6:20). He was a prisoner in Rome, yet he still represented the King. An ambassador’s dignity comes from the One he serves, whatever his surroundings.
An ambassador also lives in a country that is not his own. He learns its language, respects its customs and builds real friendships among its people, while his citizenship remains elsewhere. Paul tells the Philippians, “our conversation is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), using a word that speaks of citizenship. Believers live in Lagos, Kano or Port Harcourt as resident representatives of another kingdom. Our conduct in the office, the market and the estate meeting either honours or embarrasses the King we represent. An ambassador who is rude to his hosts, who cheats in their markets or mocks their customs, damages his country’s name long before he delivers any message. Peter makes the same point when he urges believers to keep their “conversation honest among the Gentiles” (1 Peter 2:12), so that people who watch their good works may glorify God.
Notice the tone of the message. “As though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” Beseech and pray are words of earnest pleading. Paul pictures God Himself appealing to people through the voices of His messengers. The King has every right to command. In the ministry of reconciliation, He pleads.
That is the tone an ambassador must carry. It is possible to preach the right words in a voice that contradicts them. A message of reconciliation shouted in anger, or delivered with contempt for the hearers, misrepresents the God who sent it. If God beseeches, His ambassadors cannot sneer.
The prophet Isaiah saw the beauty of a messenger who brings this kind of news:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!
Picture the scene. The city has been waiting anxiously for word from the battlefield. A runner appears on the distant hills, and as he comes closer, the watchmen can see from his stride that the news is good. His feet are dusty and tired. They are beautiful because of what he carries. Paul quotes this verse in Romans 10:15 when he writes about those who are sent to preach. Your feet, as you carry the gospel to your office or your neighbour’s house, are beautiful for the same reason.
The exchange that makes the appeal possible
How can God refuse to count trespasses against us and still be just? Paul answers in the most compressed sentence of the passage: “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
Christ, who had no sin of His own, was made sin on our behalf. He took the full weight of our guilt. And in exchange, we who had no righteousness of our own are made the righteousness of God in Him. Our trespasses were not ignored. They were reckoned to Christ, and He bore them. His righteousness is reckoned to us.
Paul gives us a small, human picture of this exchange in his letter to Philemon. Onesimus was a slave who had run away from his master Philemon, possibly stealing from him, and had then met Paul in prison and come to faith. Paul sends him back with a letter, and in it he writes:
If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself. If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account; I Paul have written it with mine own hand, I will repay it : albeit I do not say to thee how thou owest unto me even thine own self besides.
“Put that on mine account.” Paul offers to take Onesimus’s debt as his own and to have Onesimus received as though he were Paul himself. That is exactly what Christ has done for us, at an infinitely greater cost. He took our account. He gives us His welcome.
This is why the ambassador’s appeal is not a demand for self-improvement. We are not saying, “Be reconciled to God by cleaning up your life first.” We are saying, “God has already dealt with the debt in Christ. Come home.” The appeal to be reconciled is an invitation to receive what has been done.
Reconciled while we were enemies
Paul develops the same theme in Romans, where he describes the depth of the gulf that God crossed:
For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only so , but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.
Look at the four descriptions Paul gives of us. “Without strength”: unable to help ourselves. “Ungodly”: living without regard for God. “Sinners”: having broken His law. And “enemies”: in active hostility towards Him. Each description is worse than the last. And at each stage, God acted. “In due time Christ died for the ungodly.” “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
Paul points out how unusual this is. “Scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.” People occasionally give their lives for those they admire. Nobody dies for his enemies. “But God commendeth his love toward us,” literally, He demonstrates or proves it, in exactly this way.
Then Paul moves from the past to the future with two “much more” statements. If God reconciled us when we were enemies, much more will He keep us now that we are His friends. The reconciled person is secure. And the result is joy: “we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.” The word translated atonement here is the noun form of the same word for reconciliation. We have received the reconciliation as a gift.
This matters for the ambassador, because it tells us what kind of people we are speaking to and what kind of people we once were. We were enemies too. Every person you speak with about Christ stands where you once stood. That leaves no room for contempt. If God loved you while you were hostile to Him, then the hostile colleague, the mocking relative and the neighbour who wants nothing to do with your faith are all people He is willing to reconcile.
One new man: reconciliation that crosses walls
Reconciliation with God has a horizontal dimension. Paul shows this most clearly in Ephesians, where he writes to Gentile believers about their relationship with Jewish believers:
But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us ; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.
In the temple in Jerusalem there was a literal wall separating the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts. Inscriptions warned that any Gentile who went further would be responsible for his own death. Paul may have had that barrier in mind when he wrote of “the middle wall of partition.” Christ has broken it down. Through the cross, He has reconciled both Jew and Gentile to God “in one body,” and in doing so He has made them one new people.
Notice that the horizontal reconciliation comes through the vertical one. Jew and Gentile are not reconciled by a peace treaty negotiated between them. They are reconciled because both have been brought near to God “by the blood of Christ.” When people from hostile backgrounds both come to the Father through the Son, the hostility between them loses its foundation.
In a nation like ours, with deep divisions of tribe, region, religion and class, this is a powerful word. The church in Nigeria should be the place where the walls come down: where an Igbo trader and a Hausa civil servant and a Yoruba student kneel at the same altar as brothers, and where the wounds of past conflicts are brought to the cross. When churches divide along ethnic lines, or when believers speak of other tribes with contempt, we contradict the very message we carry. An ambassador of reconciliation who will not be reconciled to his brother is a strange kind of ambassador.
Jesus was clear about this: “if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother” (Matthew 5:23-24). Worship does not excuse us from the work of making peace.
A word of care belongs here. Reconciliation between people is not the same as pretending that serious wrong never happened. Where there has been abuse or violence, forgiveness may be offered, but trust is rebuilt slowly, and sometimes safety requires distance. Nobody should be pressured to return to a dangerous situation in the name of reconciliation. Scripture calls us to seek peace “as much as lieth in you” (Romans 12:18), and some situations require the help of church leaders, the authorities or qualified counsellors. God’s reconciliation through Christ was costly and truthful. Ours should be too.
Carrying grace in a graceful way
The focus of this whole passage is that the message we carry must reflect the grace from which the ministry arises. Paul received mercy. He was reconciled while he was an enemy. And he carries the message in the same spirit: beseeching, pleading, persuading.
This has practical consequences. It means our evangelism should sound like an invitation home. There is a place for warning, and Paul himself writes in this passage of “the terror of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:11). Yet the warning serves the plea. The ambassador warns because he wants people to come home.
It means we must not add conditions to the message that the King did not add. Ugonna was tempted to tell his uncle that he could come home once he had apologised properly. His father had said no such thing. Believers sometimes do the same, telling people that they must first stop drinking, leave their partner, dress differently or join a particular church before God will receive them. Repentance is real, and new life brings change. But the change flows from reconciliation. It is not the entrance fee.
What does that sound like in an ordinary conversation? Perhaps something as simple as this: “You know I am a Christian. What I believe is that God is not waiting for you to fix yourself before He will have you. Jesus has already carried the debt. The door is open, and He is asking you to come.” That is a plea. It respects the other person’s freedom to answer, and it puts the weight where Paul put it, on what God has done.
And it means the ambassador must keep receiving the grace he gives. You cannot carry reconciliation for long while nursing bitterness. The message will begin to change in your mouth. The person who announces God’s forgiveness needs to keep living in it himself.
Ugonna found his uncle in a ward on the third floor of the hospital, thinner than he remembered and older than his years. The man recognised him slowly and then tried to sit up. His first words were, “Has your father sent you to tell me what I owe him?”
Ugonna had his speech ready. He told me later that he opened his mouth to begin it, and then he looked at the envelope in his hand. It was his father’s handwriting on the front. Not his.
So he simply said, “Uncle, my father paid the bill on Thursday. All of it. He said to tell you he is not coming to collect anything. The land is finished. The debt is finished.” He handed over the envelope. “He wants you home for Christmas.”
His uncle opened the letter and read it twice. Then he put it face down on the blanket and covered his eyes with his hand. For a long time he said nothing. When he finally spoke, it was in a whisper: “After what I did?”
Ugonna said that was the moment something broke in him too. He had come to deliver reconciliation to his uncle, and he realised he needed it himself. “Yes, Uncle,” he said. “After what you did.” And then, to his own surprise, he added, “And I am sorry for how I have spoken about you all these years.”
PunchlineThat Christmas, the two old brothers sat together on the veranda in Enugu, eating rice and talking about their mother. Ugonna watched them from the doorway.
You carry a message that is not yours. It is written in your Father’s hand, and it says that the debt has been paid. Do not add your own conditions to it. Do not deliver it with your own resentment. Let the love of Christ constrain you, and say what He said: Come home.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- How does 2 Corinthians 5:16 challenge the way you see the people around you, especially those who have hurt you?
- Have you ever added conditions to the gospel that God did not add? What were they?
- Which of Paul’s four descriptions in Romans 5 (without strength, ungodly, sinners, enemies) most helps you remember where you once stood?
- Is there a person you need to be reconciled to before your witness can carry its proper tone?
- What would it mean for your church to be a place where the walls between tribes and classes come down?
This Week
Read 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 slowly every day this week. Then identify one relationship in your life where there is unresolved hostility. Pray about it, and if it is safe and appropriate, take one step towards peace: a message, an apology, a visit. Separately, write out in your own words a short explanation of “be ye reconciled to God” that you could share with a friend, making sure it sounds like an invitation home.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that You moved first. While I was without strength, ungodly, a sinner and an enemy, You reconciled me to Yourself through the death of Your Son. Thank You that my trespasses were put on His account and His righteousness on mine. Make me a faithful ambassador. Let Your love constrain me. Keep me from adding my own conditions or carrying my own resentment. Where I need to be reconciled to others, give me courage and wisdom. Let my words sound like Your invitation: come home. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.