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Are You a World Class Christian?

April 24, 2005                                                                                       Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

An ambassador is a person who comes from another country and brings a message from that person, and that’s us. We are people who are citizens of another land, bringing the message of hope and love, God’s message that He loves us. We are ambassadors.

I’ve chosen to read the whole chapter of II Corinthians 5 and it will be a little long but I think it fits together. I’d like to ask you to listen very carefully as Paul builds up this case and makes these comments and ends with talking about how we are ambassadors of Jesus Christ. Let us listen carefully to God’s word…

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart. If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 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. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’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. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

He had this recurring dream about Adolf Hitler. His name was Martin Niemoller. Martin was a high ranking pastor in the German Lutheran church before, during, and after the war. In his position he had many interviews with Adolf Hitler. Hitler had tried many things, including the abolishment of the church. And after the war, Niemoller had this dream in which Adolf Hitler was standing before Jesus Christ in His judgment seat and He was asking Hitler, “Why? Why did you do such things? Why were you so evil and cruel?” And Hitler with bowed head said, “Because no one told me how much you love me.” Niemoller would wake up at this point in a cold sweat, he said, and realize that in all his interviews with Adolf Hitler he not once said, “Fuhrer, do you know that God loves you? That he loved you enough that he died for you? Do you know that he loved you that much?”

We are Christ’s ambassadors, missionaries if you will. Sent by God, each one…not just apostles, not just preachers, not just those special gifted people, but you. Sent by God where you are in your place as a messenger. And the message is not complicated, it does not require a seminary degree. It doesn’t require you to be an incredible speaker. It is just this, that God loves you. He sent His one and only Son to die for you. You know that. We’re all sent by God, there’s no denying this. You know sometimes theologians do this or that or the other and people talk about it, but all we have to do is read three sentences of the New Testament. It’s all there. “Go therefore and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” It’s all there, go share the faith. Be missionaries. People need Jesus. They need to be close to God.

And the fact is that even though this message is simple and we’re all sent, the church – not just Faith – is not doing a very good job of it. I shared with you a couple of weeks ago that the Presbyterian Church has lost half of its membership, 40,000 a year for the last 40 years. It doesn’t take a math wizard to understand that we won’t be here in another 40 years. But even in the U.S. or the developed world, things are not going very well. The last statistics I read is that in the un-developed world 70,000 people per day are becoming Christians. In the developed world (Europe, the United States, all the places where people have a higher standard of living), 53,000 people are leaving the church every day. Why is this so? I think that we have forgotten some things listed in Paul’s scripture. We have forgotten some things.

To begin with, we have forgotten that the world is not our home. Paul says in the first verse that, “We know that if the earthly tent we live in,” that’s the body we have, “we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven.” He’s saying that this body, yours and mine, will all go to dust but God is going to give us a new one, eternal, that will never die, that will never get sick. We are in fact made for eternity. I love what he says in verse 5, “It is God who made us for this very purpose.” That this life is not all there is…it’s not the end of the story. And yet we live like that. We live as though this life is all there is. All we have to do is look at our checkbooks to see that, all we have to do is look at our stuff, our goals, the way we live and use our time, what we think about. We have to remind ourselves everyday – and it doesn’t mean that this life is not important, it most certainly is, it is important in fact because it is not the end of the story. If there was nothing else beyond this life, this life wouldn’t mean a nickel. You might as well eat, drink, and be merry. But because God has made life to stretch into eternity, this life means more than we can imagine. Imagine, if you will, one of those big water towers and how many millions of gallons of water are in those towers and imagine one drop. That drop is like our lives today and the rest is like eternity only it’s even more. There’s no comparison and yet we live our lives as though this is all there is.

This story I like to tell, most of the time in memorial services, about a jester who was given a wand by a king. The king said to the jester, “Give this wand to someone you find who is a greater fool than you.” Well, time passed and the king grew old and it was time for him to die. The jester came to him and the king said, “I’m going on a long journey and I’m never coming back.” And the jester asked him, “What preparations have you made for this journey?” And the king said, “I have made none.” The jester handed the wand to the king and said, “Sir, now I have found a greater fool than me.” This life is not the end of the story.

But we also, I think, like being comfortable. Paul says, “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in this body we are away from the Lord.” He’s actually saying that if we treat our lives as all that there is and we are at home here, we are actually distanced from God. God doesn’t want that. As a matter of fact, I believe God has rigged this world so that we aren’t terribly comfortable. Even when we get comfortable, something is going to go wrong. You know I wasn’t trying to be negative but I was talking to a couple a while back who were getting married and I was trying to tell them that marriage is a wonderful thing but there are some hard parts about it too…when your spouse gets sick and you have to take care of them or something happens and you can’t pay bills, your child gets sick, all kinds of things can happen. There are a lot of things in life that can just happen. As a pastor there are hardly anyone who goes through life just as happy as can be, I have found that almost everyone has some sort of issues, either emotional or physical, somewhere along the line. If they haven’t happened yet, it seems like they will happen. It’s just the process of living life. But we like being comfortable, we like being at home in the body. But when we are, we’re away from God and He does His best to get us out of our comfort zones.

Many years ago, I told you how I went to Uganda on my first mission trip. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone. Well, we got there and we were doing lots of things; one of the things we did was work in a medical clinic. We were actually way out in the boonies and some other people were there and two or three hours a day they would open a place where they did medical work. They asked me if I’d like to help and I said, “I don’t know.” My wife will tell you that blood and I don’t get along, especially my own. She never lets me forget that I fainted on her one time (she’s a nurse). But in this clinic, in a world without antibiotics, without basic bandages, these people had all kinds of ailments. I saw things, open sores, I know one guy had gangrene, all kinds of things that they would stick out at you and say “Fix.” I’d only had advanced first aid and I was being a doctor. But I had more knowledge than most of the people there except for the folks that ran the clinic. I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget a couple of days later…we were living about two or three miles from there, down working with some migrant workers. One of them probably had seen me at this clinic and came up and wanted me to bandage a pretty nasty looking sore. So I got out my little first aid kit and was working very intently on it and when I looked up there were fifteen people in line. God gets you out of your comfort zone. I want to tell you something though…God does that because we don’t grow unless we’re uncomfortable. That’s just a principle of life. C.S. Lewis, oft-quoted, said that “Pain is God’s megaphone into a deaf world.” And it is for us as well. I want people to go to mission trips. I believe that every dollar we can spend to send somebody somewhere else, to get them out of their comfort zone, is worth it because they almost always come back changed. You need to go somewhere sometime. I know some of you can’t because of physical problems or other reasons, but you need to go sometime. I know the kids who went to Costa Rica came back changed; I’ve been to those places, I know. You can’t go there and not see how the other ninety percent lives and not come back changed. We’re just too comfortable sometimes.

Thirdly, we don’t like to be embarrassed. Paul says that too right here in this scripture. Paul is so honest; people thought he was crazy because he just went around preaching the gospel. He said, “If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God.” If are in our right mind it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us. People are portraying Christians these days as “weirdos”. They think we’re strange. My view is let them, let them. You know there is a story about a man who had one of those sandwich signs in one of the big cities and on the front it said, “I’m a fool for Christ.” Everybody snickered until they saw the back which read, “Whose fool are you?” We don’t like to be embarrassed; we don’t like people looking at us strangely when we try to tell them something about our faith. But we need to put that aside. It’s a simple message…it really isn’t a big deal.

I think last but not least, maybe we’ve forgotten the story or the message or at least its power. I mean, how powerful is this? All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s or women’s sins against them. How powerful is that? We’ve gotten used to it. I heard somebody once say, “Oh, it’s God’s business to forgive.” Well it is but it’s not quite as nonchalant as that. God does forgive, let that wash over you again, that God has reconciled you to himself through Christ. Imagine what that means in your life, how wonderful it is, how incredible it is. Imagine if you had a cure for cancer, you had the cure, and you didn’t tell anybody. What would that mean? It would be terrible. And it’s terrible that the church doesn’t witness any more than it does. And it does say that we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ. You see, God expects us to use the gifts we are given. Let it wash over you again, one more time, the fact that we are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. How amazing is that? And we implore you on Christ’s behalf be reconciled to God because God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us that we should no longer live for ourselves but for Him who died for us and for them and was raised again. Let me encourage you, be reconciled to God and take that message wherever you are to whoever you know. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.