Rev. Dr. M. Taylor Bach

2 Corinthians 5:11-21 John 17:13-24

In the epistle read this morning, Paul says that we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. What is an ambassador? How are we ambassadors for Christ? I looked up the word “ambassador” in Webster's Dictionary and it said that an ambassador is a special messenger sent to a particular place with a special message. So we are special messengers and we are sent. In society, there are ambassadors of great stature, the ones who are sent to Russia or China or some place like that. Then there are ambassadors of lesser status, someone sent to Honduras or Sri Lanka or some place like that. Obviously, there is status connected with being an ambassador. All of us are sent to the whole world. We know this from the Great Commission. “Go therefore and baptize all nations and tell them to obey what I have commanded of you.” So all of us are ambassadors to all people. We have a special status just as an ambassador to a country would have special status. We are extremely important. We are His message bearers. We carry His Word to the world.

In the scripture read today, we also hear that Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” How had the Father sent Jesus? What was Jesus' message? The lame are healed. The poor have good news. Our sins are forgiven. The Good News is that we are redeemed because of the cross of Christ. We as special ambassadors are saved. Therefore, as I Corinthians says, “We were once sinners and now we have become friends of Jesus Christ. So we are sent that others may also be friends of Him.” That is why we are ambassadors. We are ambassadors to help others become friends of Jesus.

For the last four weeks, I have been focusing on our purposes so we would all recommit to them. The very first purpose was that we should have a close personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, that we become friends of God, sons and daughters of God and have that special relationship which is really celebrated in worship. This morning we will have communion where we experience God dwelling within us in a very intense way.

The second purpose is that we become the family of God where all of us together seek a unity of belief, a unity of repentance and a unity in mission.

Then the third purpose is that we become disciples of Christ trying to make ourselves more like Him, to live a life just as Christ lived. If He was forgiving and loving and yet challenging, then we too need to become forgiving and loving and yet confront sin and challenge others. It reminds me of an e-mail that my wife received this week. It is kind of cute so I wanted to share it with you. There was a Scottish painter named Smokey McGregor. He painted houses and buildings. The church needed the external part of their building painted. Smokey was always out to make an extra buck so he would thin his paint. It would look good but it would not last. He put in a bid for the church job and because he didn't spend much money on paint, he won the bid. He got his scaffolds together and as he was standing near the roof painting the trim on the church, suddenly there was a thunder clap and he was thrown off the scaffold. He found himself lying on the ground in puddles of thinned-out paint. He knew what he was doing wrong because he had thinned the paint with turpentine and was cheating the church. He said to God, “I am so sorry. What can I do? What can I do?” A booming voice from heaven spoke and said, “Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!”

Smokey is the exact opposite of the example of being an ambassador for Christ. Ambassadors for Christ will not cheat others. Ambassadors of Christ will do excellent in their work. Ambassadors of Christ make Christ known through their going the extra mile, through their sharing, sometimes doing things for free and giving of themselves and never holding back. So we need to be ambassadors of Christ in that sense.

Bill Hybels, the preacher of Willowcreek Church, said to think of it this way. Imagine you were excited because you were going to start a car dealership and you were going to make your car dealership better than anybody else's. You were going to go the extra mile. You were going to have an upscale loaner car that was given to customers to use when they brought their cars in to be repaired. You would give free oil changes for the first year of a person's possession of a new car. Not only that, you would have your staff make follow-up phone calls to everybody just to make sure that they were treated with courtesy and respect when they came to your dealership. Then you hired your first group of employees and they did none of these things. That is a lot like the church that Jesus founded. Jesus had a vision, a dream, of how the church should be. It was to be exactly how He was when He was on the earth. He was responsive to people's suffering. He confronted sin. He cared and loved and gave of Himself. But is that what happens in most churches? Don't most churches, the volunteers, the members, fall short of the vision of Christ like employees who fell short of the vision of the car dealership owner? He says that Christ gives the vision very clearly but don't most members fail to live up to that vision? If we really live that vision, wouldn't we draw people into the church like a magnet? Wouldn't that be how that would work?

Rev. Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, the book we studied about four years ago, gave an example in his book of how he received the vision. He received the vision from his father who was also a minister. He said on his father's death bed as his father entered that stage which in hospice they call terminal restlessness (It is a stage approaching death where a person just can't be still. They can't lie still in their bed. They want to move about.), his father kept trying to get out of bed. Finally, his mother, his father's wife, said, “Jimmy, what are you trying to do?” Jimmy, the father, said, “I have to save one more for Jesus. I have to save one more for Jesus.” Rick Warren said, “He must have repeated that a thousand times.” In his final moment, he reached out to grab Rick's hand; he put his hand on Rick's hand and said to Rick looking him straight in the eyes, “Save one more for Jesus.” You know the rest of the story. Rick Warren has been driven by that commissioning that his father gave him. His father shared the vision of people being saved from their sin and the world being converted to Christendom. Rick Warren has brought many into the church. They estimate now his church has about 23,000 members if you can imagine that. Not only that, his books have reached over 30 million people. Rev. Rick Warren is driven by a passion to save one more for Jesus. That should be our passion, too. We should be driven by the passion to save one more for Jesus. It is tough, though. It is scary to get out of our comfort zone and speak about our faith, to invite someone to church and introduce them to Jesus Christ. I remember when I was in seminary; I think I shared this with you on another occasion& Out of the thousand plus students in the seminary where I was sent, there was a group called the Christian Evidence Guild and it amounted to only about fifteen of us who volunteered to go out and street preach. We went out and passionately preached on street corners. Only fifteen of us out of a thousand would do it! It took courage. It took getting out of our comfort zone. In fact, the first thing we had to do was to convince everybody we preached to that we weren't kooks because they were used to seeing strange people with sandwich board signs on them saying, “Repent! Repent! For the kingdom of God is at hand.” We had to convince people that we were not kooks like that. Secondly, we had to have a message with some content that held people's attention. We had portable stands that we would stand on that put us above the crowd. We would go to bus stops where we would stand in the direction where everybody was looking to see their bus coming. It forced them to see us. We captured the audience! The fun thing about it was that we would challenge each other. Can you give a talk that was so good that people would be willing to miss their bus, skip their bus on purpose, and then get the next bus because they wanted to hear the end of your talk? It never happened& Right in the middle of your talk when you were reaching the climax of it, a bus would come and the crowd would get on it and leave you standing there stammering. But it was fun and it was a challenge. Back in those days, we were all young. I think I was about twenty seven at the time. I felt the passion. “I want to be like Christ!” “I want to speak like Christ.” We felt that passion so intensely that we were willing to get out there and make a fool of ourselves doing street preaching. Hopefully, we brought some to know Christ.

It is many years later and I know I am still called to be that passionate. I know that I am called to try to get you to be that passionate too, so that you go out to the highways and byways and act and speak like Christ. You know when Christ began his mission, he was only twelve years old. He said, “I must be about my Father's business.” Then He went to city and town. He went into temples. He spoke and He shared His faith. He would share it one-on-one and He would share it with crowds that gathered  big crowds, small crowds, and individual people. Then on the cross, He said, “It is finished.” So like book ends, there was a beginning and an ending. We all have our beginning and our ending. But in between, if we act like Christ, we will share the Good News with someone. We can do that by telling our own story. I just told you my story of street preaching. You, too, probably have a story of when you became a Christian and how much Jesus Christ means in your life. It is hard for people to argue with your story. They can argue your theology. They can debate you formally. But if you simply share your story, who can argue with that? It is your life experience. So I want to urge you to not be afraid. Get out of your comfort zone. You are ambassadors of Christ. Jesus said, “Go into the world teaching all that I have commanded you, baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”