Anyone who believes in Jesus – is also meant to be an Ambassador of Christ. Now – that’s not an easy role. Sometimes being Ambassador requires some tough talk. Other times it’s about diplomacy – the question is, knowing when to call a spade a spade, and when to be more … circumspect.

One of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen as a Christian and I’ve seen it a few times, is some guy standing up on a soap box in the mall or on the street corner or, as I shared a few weeks ago at Saturday morning markets, screaming out the so called good news of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes they’re preaching about hell and damnation and other times there’s something esoteric or apparently esoteric to the casual passer by. And sometimes I have absolutely no idea what they’re ranting on about.

Now I’m a Christian and so I’ll sometimes stop and see if I can understand where they’re coming from and truly I can’t figure out what it is most of the time. But they stand there on their soap box with a Bible in their hands and surrounded by some pretty tacky placards normally screaming the Gospel at people.

Now do I think that God can use that? Well sure, He seems to use the foolishness that I preach sometimes in people’s lives so why not the guy on the soap box on the street corner?

But do I think that this is the most affective way of dealing with the issue of sharing the good news? Is it the best way to communicate the incredible love of God and the grace of Jesus Christ? The riches available to those who put their faith in Him. Is it the best way to do that?

No, not by a long shot. Not by a very long shot. And yet it’s easy, so easy for us to imagine that telling people about Jesus, it’s kind of like that. That it’s about two equal and opposite ideologies, God’s and the world’s, butting heads and locking horns.

Last week and again this week on the program we’re having a chat about living our lives out as ambassadors of Christ, His emissaries if you will. If I believe in Jesus, if you believe in Jesus then one of the things that we have to do with our lives, one of the main things is to communicate His love, carry His love out into a lost and hurting world.

That’s what the Apostle Paul said in writing to his dear friends at the Church in Corinth way back in the 1st century. In the letter 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20. He writes:

So we are ambassadors of Christ since God is making His appeal through us.

And I guess much of what we chatted about last week had to do with us being ambassadors. Looking and being and walking and talking like Jesus because if we’re going to be His ambassadors, well we better just do that. We better look like Him and walk like Him and talk like Him and be like Jesus.

Each one in our own way of course but unless we do, how can we possibly claim to be His ambassador? How can God make His appeal to this world to be reconciled with Him through someone who looks nothing like Him, who behaves nothing like Him, who talks nothing like Him?

Now that kind of presents us with something of a dilemma, does for me anyhow. Because what I see is that sometimes Jesus stood up and berated people. Not too often granted but sometimes he did. He called the religious leaders of the day hypocrites, a brood of vipers and a whole bunch of other things.

In fact it was that attitude towards them that got Him crucified. And yet other times He dealt with people with such tender love and compassion it almost moves you to tears when you read about those times. Like the woman caught in adultery, you can read about her story in Johns Gospel chapter 8. I mean He pretty much put himself between her, this sinner, and the angry mob who wanted to stone her to death. Now go figure that out.

So how do you reconcile these two things? How do you or I know if we want to be like Jesus, how to speak into this world the way that He did? When do we speak with tender love and when do we stand up to be counted and call a spade a spade no matter who it’s going to offend?

I guess that’s kind of where we are going on the program this week. Looking at how, as ambassadors of Christ, we communicate the message, Gods message, to a world that sometimes doesn’t really want to hear.

How do we speak into this world like Jesus did? How do we connect His message of love and forgiveness and a new and abundant life to the needs, often desperate needs in the lives of the people around us? Do we call a spade a spade and get right into people’s faces like Jesus did sometimes?

Or do we speak with compassion and love? And if it’s both of those at different times, how do I know, how do you know when to use one and when to use the other?

Now these questions, as you can imagine, are questions that I’ve mulled over just a bit because most of what I do with my life is I try to communicate Gods love with you and with countless other people who need to hear about His love. That’s my shtick. That’s my gig in life. And whatever your gifts and your abilities are, if you believe in Jesus in one shape or form it’s your gig too in your own particular way.

Well, as I look at how Jesus communicated, He only got upset, really upset with people on a handful of occasions. In other words, it was the exception rather than the rule. He didn’t see His role as God in the flesh as being one half of a shouting match most of the time and so far as I can see He reserved His anger for His own people, Gods own people. For the people who should have known better. For the people who said they believed in God, for the religious leaders. Have a read of Matthew chapter 23, I’ll just read a couple of verses, verses 12 and onwards:

All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted. But woe to you Scribes and Pharisee’s, you hypocrites. For you lock people out of the Kingdom of heaven. You do not go in yourselves and when others are going in you stop them.

Woe to you, you scribes and Pharisee’s, you hypocrites for you cross a sea and land to make a single convert and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Or when He went to the temple, John chapter 2, verse 15:

Making a whip of cords He drove all of them out of the temple. Both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and over turned their tables.

The only time He really got stuck in was when He encountered hypocrisy amongst religious people. When they actually held themselves to be clean on the outside but they were filthy on the inside. When they oppressed the people. When the powerful stood over the weak. When the rich exploited the poor. When the judges were dishonest to the detriment of the ordinary folk.

You know when Christians, at least here in Australia where I live, sometimes stand up to politicians and publicly speak out against injustices and wrongs and decisions being made and laws being passed that just aren’t in the interest of common people like you and me.

The most frequent response you get from politicians is that Christians don’t belong in politics. Keep your nose out of politics. I couldn’t disagree more. When we see wrongs and injustices and can I say especially when we see those things in the Church, especially when we see the hypocrisy amongst God’s own people.

I believe it’s time to stand up and to say so. This isn’t a clash of ideologies. It’s not a slanging match or a shouting match. It’s not some irrelevant person standing on a soap box on the street corner ’cause you know something, the truth, the truth rings out clear as a bell.

Sure people with vested interests won’t like it. Sure there’ll be a cost but Gods heart, Gods heart is for justice for the poor and the oppressed.

If someone believes in Jesus – they’re called to be an Ambassador of Christ. Now – the stock in trade of an Ambassador is diplomacy. But what does that mean and how do we use it – when God is making His appeal to a lost and hurting world – through us.

Now I don’t know about you but most of us have blind spots. In fact the reason they’re called blind spots is that we can’t see them. I know that in just about every car that I’ve ever owned between the rear vision mirror and the side mirrors it’s easy to get the idea that you don’t have to look over your shoulder before you change lanes on the road.

You just quickly scan the three mirrors, don’t see anything so you change lanes. Problem is we have blind spots between those mirrors. They might be small ones, the sort where you wouldn’t miss a truck but you could easily, for instance, miss a motor bike zipping quickly between the cars in the traffic.

The number of times I know I would have had an accident if I relied just on the mirrors instead of quickly looking over the back to cover the blind spots, well there’s dozens of them.

The reason they’re called blinds spots is we can’t see the things that are going on in those places. And when it comes to our own blind spots in life what’s amazing is even though we can’t see them ourselves, we get so defensive and so touchy about them. It’s almost somehow that we hold them sacred.

If it’s anger that’s our blind spot and we’re prone to flaring up quickly and someone points that out to us, well you had better watch out. Or if its low self esteem and someone tries to help us with that we kind of crawl further back inside our shells.

Those blind spots actually have another name, a much shorter name. They’re called quite simply by God, sin. And oooooh aren’t we touchy about that.

So the question is, how do you help someone with their blind spot? Because my blind spots, if I don’t deal with them, will end up hurting you and stunting me. And your blind spots, if you don’t deal with them, will end up hurting the rest of us and stunting you.

That’s what sin does and before we get all judgemental, sin, what century does this guy come from? Let me read out to you a succinct list of the sorts of things that I’m talking about, just so there’s no mistake. This comes from Galatians chapter 5, verses 19 to 21 in the New Testament and I’m reading here from The Message translation so it’s a contemporary translation:

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time. Repetitive loveless cheap sex, a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage, frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness, trinket gods, magic show religion, paranoid loneliness, cut throat competition, all consuming yet never satisfying wants.

A brutal temper, an impotence to love or be loved, divided homes, divided lives, small minded lopsided pursuits, the vicious habit of depersonalising everyone into a rival, uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions, ugly parodies of community. I could go on (writes Paul).

This isn’t the first time I’ve warned you do you know, if you use your freedom in this way you will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that this sin that Gods talking about here through Paul is exclusively the stuff that hurts us. It causes pain, it hurts other people. And the thing we want to do when we’re on the receiving end of that sort of sin in people’s lives, when someone else’s sin is causing us pain, is we want to give them what for.

We want to tell them exactly what we’re thinking. Hold them to account and if needs be, have a shouting match with them to get our own way. We do because what we’re driven by is the desire to stop the pain that their sin is causing in our lives.

But here’s the thing, if what we want to do with our lives is to live our lives as ambassadors for Christ then we need to handle these incredibly difficult issues with His wisdom. And the best way I know of discovering His wisdom is to read about it for myself in His word. Particularly in the four Gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. The eyewitness accounts of Jesus own life.

And time and time again when Jesus encountered people whose sin was ruining their lives he dealt with them with such incredible compassion it just blows you away. Tax collectors, back in Jesus day, they were a grubby lot. They were dishonest, they rorted the system, they applied extortion. And this behaviour was sanctioned by the Romans who occupied Israel so long as the Emperor got his taxes.

So the common Israelite, well they considered these tax collectors to be the worst amongst the worst of sinners. Let me read you some of Jesus wisdom how He handled it. Matthew chapter 9, beginning at verse 9:

As Jesus is walking along He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth and He said to him, ‘follow me’, and he got up and followed Him. And as He sat at dinner in the house many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Him and His Disciples.

But when the Pharisee’s saw this they said to the Disciples, ‘why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ But when Jesus heard this he said, ‘those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice. I have come, not to call the righteous but the sinners.

You know what I learn here from this simple story? Jesus was living His life out as Gods ambassador. That’s why the Son of God became the son of man. He became one of us. He came to you and to me just the way He came to Matthew that day.

You and I, when we see people whose sin offends us or hurts us. When we’re on the receiving end of their sin, the thing we want to do naturally, it’s a natural human response, is to cut them off, to cut them out of our lives. That way we’re protected, that way we don’t have to deal with them.

But what Jesus is saying here is that it was for them that He came and so He went and ate a meal in their house. Here He was, a veritable rock star, crowds flocking to Him. He comes into town, He decides to go and eat with the Mayor, the governor, the Church, the Synagogue leaders, the Bishops?

No, no – the tax collectors. Do you see the huge, huge symbolic act that’s going on here? He knew that it would do two things. Firstly draw the vocal criticism of the religious nuts and confer honours upon the sinners. And by conferring honour on them He was building a relationship with them. He was accepting them just as they were without a word of condemnation or judgement.

And my hunch is that completely changed their attitudes towards Him. You know something, they had their blind spots. They were rationalising away their extortion and dishonesty and sin and if Jesus had come and berated them or condemned them or ignored them nothing would have changed in their lives.

Instead He came and ate with them and drank with them and listened to them and took the criticism that everyone heaped on top of Him for that and He built a bridge by honouring them. And so powerful was this that one of them, Matthew, becomes one of His disciples. He wrote the first book of the New Testament.

You want to be an ambassador for Christ? Then we need to learn the language of an ambassador. Being an ambassador is, as we saw last week on the program, about building relationships and bridges so that when difficult issues have to be dealt with there’s a connection of a relationship and trust there through which to deal with the problem.

Think about it. Who are the people in your life to whom you give a license to talk to you about your blind spots? I know who they are in my life, it’s the people who’ve honoured me and stuck by me and who’ve proven themselves to be wise and trustworthy. They’re the ones with the license.

And as I look back on it, it was through people just like that, people who’d eaten with this sinner and loved this sinner and coped with this sinner’s sins, it was through those very people that I encountered the transforming love of Jesus Christ. They were His ambassadors into my life. They treated me the way He treated those tax collectors and without them I wouldn’t be with you right here, right now.

Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?

Have you ever met someone and … all they do is talk. They never seem to stop long enough to listen – only to figure out what they’re going to say next. They’re … well, boring. Sometimes I think though when we’re telling others about Jesus, we think we have to be like that – all talk. If only we could learn to preach with our ears.

It never, never, ever, ever ceases to amaze me how differently two people can see the same thing. We can be in the same situation or experience or read the same words on a page or hear the same thing on the radio or watch the same thing on television and react to it, perceive it, respond to it, be impacted by it in totally, totally different ways.

A while ago now I wrote a book about our different God given personality types called My Personality GPS and as part of that I interviewed one person from each of the personality types. Perhaps you heard some of those interviews on air a while back.

Now here’s the thing, I asked each of these people exactly the same questions and I was utterly blown away by the differences in their answers. They saw the world so differently. And on top of our personality types there’s generation, there’s culture, there’s up bringing, there’s life experiences.

All of those things make us who we are and all of those things forms the lens, if you will, through which we perceive the world. Now we kind of know that I guess but a lot of the time we don’t live and behave as though we know that. Our default position is, if you like, is that everyone sees the world the same way as we do. But that’s just not true.

So if we want to communicate something to someone then one of the things we need to do is to understand how they see the world. In a sense we need to learn to speak with our ears.

Over the last few weeks on the program we’ve been chatting about what it means to be an ambassador of Christ. To live our lives, if we believe in Jesus, as one of His ambassadors. If you’ve been with us you’ll have heard me read this particular verse more than once or twice. It’s by the Apostle Paul, he said in writing to his dear friends at a Church in Corinth way back in the 1st century.

The letter is 2 Corinthians in the New Testament, chapter 5, verse 20. Paul says:

We are ambassadors for Christ since God is making His appeal through us. We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.

Now one of the things that strikes me here is how strong the differences are across cultures. We’ve had a man recently join our team here at Christianityworks, his name is Gregory. Now you may not have noticed but we Australians are fairly direct in the way we speak.

Gregory’s an American and American’s on the other hand are less so. We often joke about it. Gregory will ask where the bathroom is where as I’ll ask where the toilet is. We Australians are much more direct. But even more than that, Gregory grew up, spent many of his childhood years in Japan.

And so he has a lot of the Japanese culture on the inside too. A culture that is very much about politeness and face. And even though we’ve known each other for a long time, now that we work together every day we’ve both been learning that we’re quite different in the way we behave.

When I ask him what he thinks I want him to actually tell me what he thinks. If he thinks I’m off with the pixies on some issue I actually want him to tell me so, so I can fix it. Forget hierarchy, I just want his direct honest input ’cause that’s how we’ll get results, that’s how we Australians work.

He, on the other hand, can find that a bit confronting because that’s not the cultural background that he’s come from. That’s just one example but it’s a good one. Imagine if I, as direct and as blunt as I can be, were sent as Australia’s ambassador to the US or to Japan, well frankly, I’d have to learn about culture before I could communicate effectively on a diplomatic level in those countries.

I’d have to find different ways of saying the things I want to say. I’d have to listen carefully to what their diplomats were saying to make sure I actually hear what they mean.

You know something, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with people around us is exactly the same. I, after 15 years of walking with Christ, have a whole different perspective on success, on joy, on happiness, on sin, on pain and all sorts of things from someone who doesn’t have that relationship with Jesus.

Why would I ever imagine I could talk to them as though they had the same perspective as me? You know for a long, long time in my life I was not ready. I was just not ready for anyone to tell me about Jesus. Get lost. I couldn’t stand those God botherers.

I had a totally different perspective to theirs. I just knew life was about making lots of money, being recognised and successful in my field. I just knew that I would find my pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. I had, back then, a whole bunch of misconceptions about life and where I wanted to head and where I wanted to be and what would make me happy and I didn’t need anyone to preach at me.

What I needed was someone to listen to me. What I needed was someone to understand me and help me so I could understand myself. I needed someone to preach to me more with their ears than with their mouth if that makes sense.

An ambassador from one country who’s about to be sent to another country has to learn about the culture and the language and the issues and the aspirations and the concerns of the people in the country to which he or she is being sent. Someone who lives in one country and is going to be a missionary in another country, well we have to do exactly the same.

I believe the most important asset an ambassador can have are his ears and eyes. To observe, to perceive, to listen to understand.

Jesus, He grew up in the Hebrew culture of the first century Israel. He attended school. He knew how to speak. And He spent a lot of time listening. He spent a lot of time eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. He spent time living with His Disciples.

I remember when I was working in a retail buying group, quite some years ago now, the Chairman of our board was a man called Stan Brown. He owned a menswear store in Sydney. I remember him saying that a shop attendant who walks up to a customer in a store and opens up with, ‘Can I help you?’ Well he’d say it’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date.

First, he said, you need to find out who they are, why they’re here, what their taste is, what they’re looking for. First you have to find that point of connection. He had a lot of wisdom there. And as I look at the people who God brought to me, the ambassadors whom He sent in my direction when I didn’t want to hear.

What I realise now is they preached for the most part with their ears. They listened, they understood, they laughed, they cried with me and once they understood, once I knew they understood then I was able to relax. Then I let them into my thoughts and into my heart and into my life. Then they had the opportunity to show me who this Jesus really was.

The stock in trade of an ambassador is diplomacy. It’s about trust and communication and understanding and if you and I, if we’re going to be ambassadors of Christ then that’s something I believe we’re going to have to learn. When I take the time to get to know you and understand you, whether or not I agree with you, I have just built a bridge into your life that honours you.

When you do the same for me you’ve just built a bridge into my life that honours me. And when we feel understood we feel secure and we experience trust. And this is something that travels in both directions. It’s not rocket science, that is the bridge that one day Jesus will walk across.

Trust me, that’s the bridge. It’s the bridge of trust and relationship and love and care that Jesus walks across time and time again. And it all comes, not so much from preaching with our mouths but preaching with our ears. Go figure.

When we have a need – a real need – something we can’t do or fix or resolve for ourselves – what we need, is a helping hand. And of we get that helping hand – the person who’s attached to that hand, well, they go up in our estimation. They earn the right to say things that others can’t to us. Funny thing happens through a helping hand.

Whenever there’s a disaster somewhere in the world, a tsunami or an earthquake or a cyclone or a tornado, it seems to me that wealthy countries like my own, the countries with the logistics and the equipment and the resources to help, it seems that we take forever to mobilise.

When people are buried under the rubble they have only days, perhaps hours to live. And what they need right then is specialist search and rescue teams with sniffer dogs and listening equipment. And the survivors, what they need straight away is medical help, food, water, shelter, clothing.

And the last thing I want to do is to be critical but it seems to me that it takes so long for the wealthy countries to mobilise their resources. We know these disasters happen every year, they just do and I’m always left scratching my head as to why it takes us so long to respond.

What those poor people need within the first 24 hours is a huge influx of capability to save lives. And these days you can pretty much fly from anywhere to anywhere in not much more than 24 hours and yet time and time again these disasters happen and it takes weeks for us to mobilise. Does that strike you as odd?

You know as a taxpayer in a relatively wealthy country albeit a smallish population but nevertheless a wealthy country, when I see the way public monies are spent the last thing I have a problem with is my government setting aside some serious money to establish and maintain some sort of rapid response capability to help other nations when disaster strikes.

But as easy as it is to sit here and criticise a government I wonder whether this lethargy in responding to need isn’t something you and I experience in our personal lives as well. I read about an extreme example in a newspaper article recently. Have a listen to this short article:

A south Korean couple addicted to online games let their baby starve to death whilst raising a virtual daughter. Parents Kim You- Chul and Choi Min-sun spent up to 12 hours a day at a internet cafe tending to their avatar child in the online game Prius. But they left their real baby home alone and fed her just one bottle of milk a day. Police have charged the couple with child abuse and neglect.

Now it’s pretty bizarre and as extreme as one might think, ‘got nothing to do with me, I’m not like that, I don’t neglect my children like that’. Well I hope not but what about our friends? What about our extended family members? What about our neighbours? What about the couple next door whose marriage is falling apart?

We hear them screaming and arguing but we never invite them over for a barbeque to share in their lives and for them to share in ours. What about the person in Church? You know the one, single, overweight, their life’s a mess, they talk a bit much and no one ever invites them anywhere to their place on a Sunday for lunch.

What about that man at work? You can see he’s a workaholic. Ruining his marriage, neglecting his children, ruining everything. All for want of a friend who can show them a better way of living. Where are we then, you and I? I’ll tell you where we are, we’re online like that Korean couple. We’re watching television.

We’re doing all the things we want to do in the comfort of our own homes and our own lives. The more affluent we become the less we care for one another. But we justify that, we rationalise it away. We sit in our homes with more than enough, many of us more than enough, telling ourselves, ‘We worked hard for it and now we need a rest’.

We’re living virtual lives. Watching TV shows about cooking instead of cooking for our friends and ourselves. TV shows about travelling instead of travelling to see our families. Raising our virtual lives, our virtual gods and ignoring the real world. I know it sounds harsh but sometimes we need to be direct. Sometimes we need to call a spade a spade. God does that too. Have a listen. 1 John chapter 3, verse 17:

How does Gods love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or a sister in need and yet refuses to help?

Now, I know that’s hard because there’s such a need out there in the world. Sometimes we look at the news and see the misery and we just turn it off because you and I, we can’t make a difference. Okay, I understand that although we always can make a difference, a small difference.

But there are so many people closer to home. Sometimes even in our homes or next door whom we have the opportunity to serve. To heal, heal with our hands with our service. Heal with what we do as well as what we say.

Speaking first hand here there is nothing, absolutely nothing that speaks more about Gods love into someone’s life than when we step in to help them with that one thing that they need help with. Sometimes it can be the smallest thing, a word of encouragement, a meal to someone who’s just out of hospital, a visit, just a phone call.

Sometimes it’s loving them over the long run, being there for them. Whatever it is, when we have a need and someone just comes along and meets that need there is nothing that speaks more about the love of Christ than doing that. Believe you me, I know, it was the people doing just that who played such a powerful role in me coming to faith in Jesus Christ.

In fact, their investment in meeting my needs bears fruit every day as I sit down behind this microphone. Listen again to what Paul writes about how he sees his role and ours in this world. 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20:

So we are ambassadors for Christ since God is making His appeal through us. We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.

Imagine now an ambassador of a really wealthy country who’s taken up his or her post in a poor country. And one day that poor country suffers a tsunami or a devastating earthquake. And that ambassador from the wealthy country moves heaven and earth to quickly mobilise rescue and medical capabilities.

They come quickly, they meet the desperate need and then finally when the crisis is over what do you think the ambassador’s actions have just said to the people of that poor country about the wealthy country that the ambassador represents? That ambassador’s actions will have spoken volumes to this poor nation about how much the rich nation cares for them.

This simply isn’t rocket science, it’s true on a macro scale and it’s true on a micro scale. It’s true on a national scale, it’s true on the individual scale. Do you believe in Jesus? I do and anyone who does is called to be an ambassador of Christ. And as the Apostle Paul writes it is through his ambassadors dotted all over the planet that God is making His appeal for people to be reconciled to Him.

His appeal to give them a new life. His appeal to give them an eternal life. And we don’t have to look very far, you and I, to find people who need that. It’s often right under our noses. And we can spend time in prayer and at Church and in worshipping God and all those good and wonderful things while babies starve, while marriages next door fall apart.

While people right next door to us or across the street live in fear. Or we can go, we can go and be ambassadors of Christ.

For how does Gods love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or a sister in need and yet refuses to help?

It’s one thing to be an Ambassador of Christ – that’s what those who believe in Jesus are called to be. Ambassador. But there are Ambassadors …. and then there are Ambassadors. You know what I mean. And the thing that makes the difference – is what’s going on in their hearts. In fact, it makes … all the difference.

Over the last almost two weeks I guess, what we’ve been doing is taking a look at the different aspects of the Apostle Paul’s assertion that he, and by implication you and me if we believe in the amazing, loving, compassionate, powerful Jesus, that we’re ambassadors for Christ.

Have a listen again to how he put it. 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20. He says:

So we are ambassadors for Christ since God is making His appeal through us. We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.

We’ve talked a lot about what it means to be an ambassador through whom God would make His appeal to a lost and hurting world. We’ve looked a bit at the way that Jesus was an emissary of God into this world when He became a man. How He communicated Gods message of grace to the blind and the poor and the diseased and the needy and the outcasts.

I wish we could spend weeks, months more taking a closer look at that. Maybe we’ll come back to that in a little while. Because at the centre of everything everything is Jesus. The Son of God, the maker of the heavens and the earth.

So as we draw this series together today with so much more left to talk about, I had to decide on one thing, the most important thing and that most important one, the one that Paul at the end of 1 Corinthians chapter 12 calls, ‘the yet more excellent way’ is love. That’s what we’re going to finish up with today, love.

Had a friend who several years ago now was called into Christian ministry out of Australia into the UK. Now the particular place where he went to live and to work was, well it was part of the UK that was really depressed economically.

His job wasn’t to work directly with the people but when I went to visit him, a few years ago now, and I’d wander around town I could feel the depression. There were derelict factories, rusting decaying remnants of the industrial age. There was high youth unemployment in this place.

And as I spoke with the people there seemed to be a hopelessness, a lostness, an emptiness in this part of the country and it really hit me between the eyes. See we Australians, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, are by and large a pretty optimistic lot. It’s in our natural character. We have this “can do” attitude that sometimes comes across to other cultures as being a bit brash.

And so when I was confronted with this sad community spirit it really leapt out at me. As I chatted with my friend over coffee late one night, he too confessed that he was finding it really difficult. Moving from one culture to another is never easy but the sadness and the listlessness and the hopelessness all around in this place, particularly coupled with a very long, grey, cold winter, was really getting him down.

Now please understand me, I’m not knocking the Brits. I love travelling to England but there are parts in that country and any Brit will tell you this, there are parts of the country where there’s high unemployment particularly amongst the youth and its tough going. This was one such place.

Anyhow a year or so later I was chatting with this same man over Skype. He’s a great guy, I love keeping in touch with him and so I assumed he was still doing it tough in this unfamiliar culture and I started empathising with him. And his response, his response really shocked me.

He said in affect, ‘No, no, no, we love it here. Absolutely love it here. This is where God means us to be and it’s really great’. Now, it’s quite a turn around so I asked him, “What’s changed? You’ve shifted your position a long way from where you were and what you were feeling a couple of years ago.”

And I had a listen to him talk and it clicked. I could hear it in his voice. He had fallen in love with the people. God had touched his heart and he had a real compassion for the people out there. The unemployed, the people with that sense of hopelessness and listlessness and no future.

He’d become part of a local Church, he was part of the local community and he realised that the joy and the enthusiasm and the optimism that he had in his heart could be a light in that place. He had fallen in love with the people.

Sometimes we Christians feel like misfits in this world. There’s a reason for that. As Jesus said in His prayer just before He was crucified in John chapter 17, He said:

That we are in the world but not of the world.

The Apostle Paul makes the point that we’re citizens of heaven not citizens of this earth. We’re misfits just like my friend the Aussie felt as though he was a misfit in his new surroundings. And when we’re misfits the easiest thing to do is to criticise and to poke fun and to belittle them and to complain.

“I know Jesus. I have my life sorted. I know what’s right and all those other people out there where somehow they’re less than me.” We criticise, we argue, we demean, religious superiority. You see it often happens between races and cultures. One race looks down on another because of their skin colour or their traditions or just who they are.

And I’ve seen people get this wrong over and over and over again. I love it when the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, it doesn’t matter what gifts or abilities you have or what you do or how much you give to the poor, if you don’t have love you’re nothing.

And the love that Jesus showed, it was more than just love, it was compassion, it was empathy, it was kindness and gentleness. It was reaching out and touching the leper, not just healing him but touching him. It was having compassion for the hungry crowd and then feeding them.

There are two letters in the New Testament, 1 and 2 Timothy and they’re written by Paul to his young protégé Tim. And in the 2nd one Paul writes these words. 2 Timothy chapter 2, verses 24 to 26:

And the Lords servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone. An apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth and that they may escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will.

See the bit I love most in there is the bit about God perhaps granting they repent and come to know the truth, that they might escape the snare of the devil to be set free. It’s so easy for someone who loves Jesus and who’s passionate about Him. Who wants to see people’s lives transformed, to start getting an idea that it’s up to us.

You know we see many, many, many lives transformed through these radio programs all over the world. But let me tell you this, with all that I am nothing that I can do, nothing that I can say can change a life. Not a single one.

Just yesterday I received an email from a man in another country who wrote about a particular program he’d listened to over the New Year. He said, “One small thing you said, God took that and changed my life.” He was an alcoholic and he had stopped drinking.

I can’t do that, only God can do that. When by His Spirit He takes His Word and brings it to life in our hearts. That’s Gods job. And when you or I become arrogant or pushy or superior in our attitude, we’re working against God and God always, always, always opposes the proud but He gives grace to the humble.

I don’t care what gift you or I have, how hard we work for Jesus, how much cash we contribute to His work, unless we have love my friend we are enemies of God and enemies of our fellow men and women and children.

These three things remain (writes the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13). Faith, hope and love. All really good but the greatest among these is love.

Whatever we do, however we do it, if we do it in love God can use it. Kind, gentle, patient, tender, that’s what Paul writes to Timothy, the wisdom of a man towards the end of his life after many years of difficult, tough ministry. Bound in chains he is when he’s writing this, about to be executed, writing to his young protégé just starting out in his career.

Kindness, gentleness, patience and love.