Christ Controls Us

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 (NIV)

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.

Devotion:

Every life runs on some engine of motivation — fear, ambition, the need to be needed, the fear of being forgotten. Paul names his own engine plainly, and it isn't any of these.

"Compels" translates the Greek synechei — a word with real physical weight. It's used elsewhere in the New Testament for a crowd pressing in on Jesus from every side (Luke 8:45), for a fever gripping a sick man (Luke 4:38), for a traveler hemmed in on a narrow road with no way to turn aside (Luke 19:43). Paul isn't describing a gentle nudge of sentiment. He's describing something that has closed in on him from every direction and left him nowhere else to go. For Paul, Christ's love isn't a feeling he occasionally accesses. It's the walls of the corridor he now lives in.

But look at why this love holds him so completely: "we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died." This is the logic of representation, not mere example. Paul doesn't mean Christ's death simply inspired a kind of dying in us. He means that when Christ died, we — all who are united to him by faith — died in him. It's the same logic Paul unpacks at length in Romans 6: our old self was crucified with Christ, so that the record against us, the tyranny of sin, the claim self-interest had on us, all died there with him. His death becomes, by grace, our death. What happened to our representative is credited as having happened to us.

And that's the hinge the whole passage turns on: because his death counts as ours, his life now claims ours too. "That those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him." Notice Paul doesn't say we're forbidden from living for ourselves, as though this were merely a new rule bolted onto the old self. He says the old self-directed existence has already ended — died — and something else has begun in its place. The command to live for Christ isn't pressure added from outside; it's simply naming what's already true of everyone who has died and been raised with him.

Prayer:

Thank you, Jesus, that you died and rose again, that we may live for you and in you forever. Open our eyes that we may live our lives following your way. Grant us the courage to lay down our lives for you, as you laid yours down for us. May we always pray in the Spirit so that we may receive your direction and care. Help us to bring your love to our hurting and dying world. Amen.