Paul writes to a church in Corinth that had a great deal to say for itself, and he tells them something that takes the achievement out of their hands entirely: God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. Notice who is doing the work. Not us. The reconciling is God's, the initiative is God's, and the accounting is God's to waive. In the same breath Paul says God has committed to us the message of reconciliation. The rescued are handed the message. They do not generate it.
That phrase about not counting sins is worth sitting with. The word carries the sense of a ledger, of entries being tallied against a name. Paul's claim is that in Christ God is not running the tally. This is not because the debt was small or the sins were minor, but because the reconciliation was accomplished at God's own cost and not ours. Anyone who has kept score with someone for years, or knows what it is to be the one scored against, will feel the weight of that.
Then Paul goes further: we are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. An ambassador does not speak on his own authority or represent his own interests. He carries another's words into a place where he does not naturally belong. That is what reconciliation does to a person. It does not simply settle your standing; it gives you an errand. Sy Garte was baptized and became active in a church, and that is the ordinary shape of it: the one who was found becomes the one sent, not with polished arguments but with a life that can say, honestly, here is what happened to me.
You may feel that your own story is too unremarkable to be an embassy. It probably is unremarkable in the way most real rescue is, quiet, slow, full of things you only understood afterward. But the appeal God makes through you does not depend on the drama of the telling. It depends on the One who is speaking.
✝️Salvation
Rescued Into an Ambassadorship
We did not climb to God; He came, and then He sent us
October 21, 20265 min readNIV
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. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
— 2 Corinthians 5:19-20 (NIV)
Ambassadors for Christ
Today's Story
📖True Story
Sy Garte was a biochemistry student when a question began to follow him around. He loved science, and he had been raised to believe it settled the matter: three generations of his family had been atheists and communists, and he had absorbed the conviction that God was not merely unlikely but impossible. Then he found himself studying the machinery by which a cell reads DNA and builds proteins out of it, the translation of a code into a living thing, and he began to wonder whether materialism could really explain what he was looking at. Around the same time he encountered ideas in quantum physics that unsettled his assumptions about determinism. The ground he had stood on since childhood started to feel less solid than he had assumed.
He did not become a Christian. He became an agnostic, which is its own kind of unsettled country, and he lived there for years. There was also a dream he could not explain, a vivid one about letting go, which stayed with him without resolving into anything he could name.
He was forty-six when he walked into a Catholic church with a Christian friend. He came in as an outsider and expected to be treated as one. What met him instead was a welcome, and a sermon about love. Something in him recognized it.
Looking back, Sy came to understand those scattered pieces, the questions in the laboratory, the dream, the welcome at the door, as the Holy Spirit drawing him to Christ. Not one dramatic collapse but a long, patient pulling toward home. He was baptized. He became active in the church, no longer a visitor reading the room from the back but a man with a place among God's people.
What strikes me is how much of his rescue happened before he knew who was doing it. God was at work in a biochemist's questions, in an unexplained dream, in a friend's invitation, in a stranger's welcome, long before Sy had a word for any of it. He did not find God by following a trail he had mapped. He was found.
Source citation: The Side B Stories – Sy Garte (C.S. Lewis Institute, n.d.) / https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-side-b-stories-sy-garte/
Reflection
Think About It
• Paul says God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting sins against them. Where in your life do you still assume God is keeping a ledger, and what would change if you believed the tally is not being kept? • Sy's rescue happened through ordinary things before he had words for it: a question, a dream, a welcome at a door. Looking back, which small moments do you now recognize as God drawing you? • An ambassador carries someone else's message in a place where they do not naturally belong. Where has God placed you this week, and what would it look like to speak there as a representative rather than as your own advocate?
Prayer
Father, thank You for the questions that would not leave us alone, for the welcome we did not deserve, for the ledger You chose not to keep. Thank You that You did the reconciling while we were still far off, and that You did not wait for us to find the way home. Lord Jesus, we declare our faith in You: You are the One in whom God was reconciling the world to Himself, and we are among those brought in. Make us faithful ambassadors of that news, in our homes, our work, and our quiet conversations. All glory to You, now and forever. Amen.
Live It Out
Write your salvation story in three short sentences: before, the moment of rescue, and after.