Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The text on which this morning's message is based comes from our Epistle lesson (2 Corinthians 5: 14-21).

In March of 1972, over thirty years ago, NASA launched one of its most successful missions ever when a giant Atlas launch vehicle sent Pioneer 10 hurtling into space. Its mission, to go farther than any manmade spacecraft had ever gone, to explore Jupiter and its moons, and to send back important information on its magnetic fields. To get there, however, it would have to pass through the dangerous asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is about 170 million miles wide and is made up of material ranging in size from small dust particles to rocks the size of the state of Alaska travelling at about 720 miles per minute!

Pioneer 10 made it through the asteroid belt safely, and proceeded on to its mission of exploring Jupiter. However, what is so amazing about the Pioneer mission is not that it made it to Jupiter and completed its mission, but that it keeps going. While the spacecraft was designed to function for 3 years, in fact it continues to travel further into space. It has now gone some 8 billion miles and has continued to send signals with information 30 years later! It just keeps going, beyond anyone's wildest expectations, impelled by the initial rocket blasts that sent it to Jupiter (NASA Website).

God, much, much more than NASA, is able to accomplish great things – things beyond our human ability to even dream of. He even can make us useful for his purposes, as he did the Apostle Paul, who wrote our sermon text today. Paul had been an enemy of the church, he was an accomplice when Stephen was murdered by the angry mob (Acts 7: 58; 8: 1), he was convinced that the Christian movement had to be stamped out, and so he persecuted Christians, dragging them in chains to prison (Acts 9: 1-3). He later admitted that he interrogated believers, trying to get them to blaspheme, and that he voted for the death of many (Acts 22:4).

And yet we see here how things turned around for Paul. He, who had been an enemy of Christ and a terrible persecutor of God's people, was called by God and dedicated himself to proclaiming the message of salvation in Christ Jesus. But in doing so, he confronted many obstacles, he suffered much physically – attacks by angry mobs, beatings, shipwreck, imprisonment as well as the emotional stress and strain of the criticisms and opposition that were coming from within the church at Corinth. Yet he just kept going forward with his task, he continued to do his work of proclaiming the gospel. He did not allow himself to get sidetracked, even when many might have thought he would have given up. Why? How was Paul able to remain firm in his faith and steadfast in his mission? What kept him going in the work to which God had called him? In our text, Paul explains it when he says, "For Christ's love compels us."

"For Christ's love compels us." This is the theme of the LWML Sunday this year, for it helps us to understand something about the things that motivate us as people of God to do what we do, and certainly points to the underlying motivation for the mission of the church. We are compelled by Christ's love. And Paul makes two important points that help us to understand how all this works. He points out, first, that Christ died and rose again for all, and secondly, that therefore we live for Him.

1. Because He died for all – Perhaps the most well-known passage in the Bible, the "gospel in a nutshell" as it is called, is John 3: 16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." This is a powerful and meaningful passage that demonstrates just how deep God's love runs, that he even was prepared to hand over his own Son to die for us. His love for fallen humanity is so profound that he was willing to make what most of us would say is the ultimate sacrifice to give the life of his Son Jesus Christ as the payment for our sinfulness so that, as Paul says here, "those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."

This is really the problem of humanity, isn't it? Paul says "those who live should no longer live for themselves" but for God. The problem is that we do live for ourselves, don't we? We do put ourselves first. We have a difficult time putting the needs of others before our own needs. It is called egoism or egocentricity. Even children are guilty of it. Some of the first words of a little child are "mine" or "me." We tend to think of little children as innocent, but even secular psychological theories teach that little children and older children and teens and adults tend to think and act egocentrically.

It is played out at every level of human existence, from the individual, to the local level, and to the international level, to the points of self-centered slander, and self-centered adultery, and to self-centeredly hurting others, even to the point of war.

It all starts with human sin, with the desire to live for oneself, to put the self at the center. In one sense, the concern for self is only normal and not evil in-and-of-itself. Of course we need to "take care of ourselves." However, when we let that concern for self override concern for our neighbor, or the good of others, or the will of God. That is when jealousy, dishonesty, deviousness and greediness creep in, and spread. The story of Cain and Abel is a good example. Out of greediness, Cain withheld the first fruits of his harvest, not pleasing God the way Abel's sacrifice did. When Cain looked at Abel with jealousy, the Lord said to Cain "sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you." Cain's sin began internally, with selfishness and greed, then jealousy.

Then deviousness and dishonesty led to Cain murdering Abel in cold blood.

If we were to analyze all the sinfulness, all the violence, all the hatred and animosity in this world, I believe it would all boil down to this: A love for self above a love for God and neighbor.

And yet God's love is so profound that he provided the means to overcome this situation in which we find ourselves, to overcome the self-centered sin that entraps us at birth and daily since then. Paul says "we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died." The fact is that all are spiritually dead apart from Christ and in need of reconciliation with God. And God provides the means of that reconciliation, by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, God Himself, to live the perfect life that we are unable to live, and to suffer the punishment of our own selfishness. All who die with Him in baptism, and who continue to persevere and trust him in life will live with Him for their eternal life, starting as a new creation right here on earth. No sin is too big, too heinous that can not be paid for by the death of God's son Jesus Christ. That is sometimes hard for us to believe.

Once some missionaries were sharing the story of Jesus through a movie to a Caribbean coastal village. The missionaries then told them the message of Christ's salvation for ALL. Afterwards one woman stayed around to talk. She told the missionaries "What you are doing here is good. This is good for these people to hear this. But it is not for me." You see, she was a bruja, a witch doctor of the village, someone involved in spiritism an occultism, casting spells, foretelling the future and the like. She saw the importance of the Gospel, of Jesus Christ activity in the world, but she could not believe it was for her. She thought she had strayed too far.

But Christ did die for all. His salvation is meant for all, and he provides the means for us to get beyond our own selfishness, when by faith his death becomes our death, and his resurrection becomes our resurrection.

That is what happened to Paul. The man who once persecuted Jesus becomes convinced and therefore compelled by Christ's love, Paul was able to begin a new life, not for himself but for Christ. He says "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." Who do we belong to, and why are we here? It is true, unfortunately, that many people, even some Christians, do not see Christ's purpose in their lives. They wander through life, getting by from day to day, but without a sense of what it all means.

For many years, astronomers were unable to make sense of the elliptical orbit of the planet Mercury. As it revolves around the sun, sometimes it is as close as 28 million miles, sometimes as far away as 42 million miles. Astronomers could not understand this, and even theorized that another unseen planet was causing the odd orbit. They even named the hidden planet "Vulcan." But Vulcan was never discovered. It wasn't until Albert Einstein's theories of physics were applied to Mercury's orbit that the mystery was solved and made sense.

Sometimes life has things that happen that we simply cannot explain. But just as there is order in the universe, we can be confident that God, in Jesus, has our lives in his hands, even if we cannot for the moment explain all that happens. We can always know that we belong to Christ because of his great love demonstrated on the cross. And now we know that we can live, not just for ourselves, but for Him "who died for us and was raised again." Christ's love becomes a compelling force, something irresistible, giving meaning and purpose, and carrying us forward in service to God and to our family and to our neighbor. Christ's love makes all this possible. Like Pioneer 10, which has stayed the course 10 times farther than planned, Christ's love made it possible for Paul to continue on his mission. And Christ's love makes it possible for us today to stay the course and continue in faithfulness, to live not for ourselves but for Him and for those He has placed around us. Christ's love compels us to carry out His mission as a church by announcing his love, so that the exclamation of our Psalm today becomes a reality:

"2 The LORD has made his salvation known; he has revealed his righteousness to the nations.

3 He has remembered his steadfast love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. "

(Note: This sermon was modified from, but highly dependent on, the LWML Sermon Study provided for this day)