2 Corinthians 5 11 thru 6 2

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1 “Ambassadors for Christ,” 2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2 (February 8, 2015) 11

Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. 12 We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. 13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. 16

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. 2 For he says, “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. PRAY We are in our series on evangelism in the month of February, where five local churches are all coming together and teaching on the same Scripture and trying to answer the same questions on this topic each Sunday of the month. Evangelism by the way means telling the good news of Jesus Christ to someone else, that Jesus Christ, out of his love for the world, came to earth, died the death on the cross we deserve, so that we might be reconciled with God and live forever in perfect love and harmony with him. Last week we looked at 1 Corinthians 15 and just tried to explain what the good news is. But this morning we will look more closely at evangelism, and we’ll try to answer this question: who is it exactly that is charged with telling the good news of Jesus? And in 2 Corinthians 5:20, Paul tells us who is charged with telling the good news: he says that “ambassadors for Christ” are to share the good news of Jesus with others. Ambassadors. And if you understand what it means to be an ambassador for Christ, then you’ll know what God wants of us when it comes to sharing the good news of Jesus with others. We’ll try and answer three questions: first, who are Christ’s ambassadors? Second, how do Christ’s ambassadors share the gospel? Third, what powers Christ’s ambassadors to do their work?

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

2

First, who are Christ’s ambassadors? If you’ve ever visited or lived in Washington, D.C., and walked down Massachusetts Avenue, you’ve seen dozens and dozens of embassies from other countries, and each one of them has an ambassador who lives there. Now the ambassador is not a citizen of the United States. He is a citizen of his home country, and he is the official representative of his country to the United States. He really has one job: to faithfully communicate the policies and the interests of his government to our government. His job is not to make policy, his job is not to argue about the wisdom of the government’s policy, it is to represent and communicate the policy of his country’s government to our government. According to Paul, the high king of the universe, God Almighty himself, has ambassadors as well. He has sent these representatives down to earth to communicate his message to the people of this world. And who are these ambassadors? If you are a Christian, you are. Paul, who wrote 2 Corinthians, doesn’t say, “I alone am the ambassador for Christ. I am his representative on earth.” No, he says, “20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.” 2 Corinthians 5:20. Peter, in his first epistle, puts it a different way. He says we are all, in new covenant, priests. In the old covenant, in the Old Testament, some people of God were priests, some were called to communicate the gospel, and others weren’t. But in the new covenant that’s not true. In the new covenant, we are all priests. We all communicate the gospel. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” 1 Peter 2:9. This refers to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. If you are a Christian, if you have trusted in the gospel of Jesus Christ which we discussed last week, then Paul says, the Bible says, you are an ambassador for Christ. That means you are not a citizen of this world anymore. You are, primarily, a citizen of heaven. This world is not your home, that’s Philippians 3:20. You are here as a representative of your king, your Father, in heaven. You are an ambassador and have been entrusted with the very serious, very grave, very great responsibility of communicating his message, his gospel, to the people around you. And this has a couple of implications: first, if all Christians are ambassadors for Christ, then we must reject a culture of consumerism in our spiritual life. What do I mean by that? Modern, western, American culture is the most consumeristic culture that’s ever existed. And I know that word has a lot of negative connotations, “consumeristic,” but I don’t necessarily mean it negatively. Consumerism has been forced upon a lot of us that don’t necessarily want it. I’m not trying to beat up on anyone by using the term. A few years ago Arlie Hochschild [HOKE-schild] wrote a book titled The Outsourced Self, with the very interesting subtitle What Happens When We Pay Others to Live our Lives for Us. And in the book she notes that in our modern, individualistic culture, we

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

3 are now forced to pay others to perform services that, in previous generations, our family or community helped with. For example, she says now it’s not at all uncommon in cities to hire a dating coach, to help you find, attract, and enter into a relationship with someone. Remember the Will Smith movie Hitch? Where he helps Kevin James get a date? Now, in big cities, that’s standard procedure. In previous generations this would happen more organically as mutual friends within a community would introduce a couple, but that can’t happen in some cities where real community has completely broken down. We have to outsource that service. Another example she gives is, of course, caregiving – whether for children or for the elderly. In previous generations this was almost never something that was paid for because there was a community built in and set up to help meet that need. But as the extended family (grandparents and uncles and cousins all living in the same community) has all but disappeared in some areas and the nuclear family is under such stress, people find themselves in a position where they must outsource child and elder care. It’s just about impossible for a lot of families to do one or, certainly, both. Modern Americans must become consumers across a lot of different areas because they don’t have a choice. So, if that’s you, I’m not criticizing you personally. You probably must outsource these services. I just want to point out that when you become accustomed to being a consumer in a lot of areas of your life, pretty soon you’ll be a consumer in all areas of life, including your spiritual life. There is a real danger that you will view the church as the place where the professionals, the paid staff members, do all the work. And you begin to say, “You know, I just go to church so they can teach my kids some good, moral truths, so that I can get my dose of spiritual uplift, and hopefully feel a little better about myself. But don’t ask me to do anything. Don’t ask me to serve, and certainly don’t ask me to share the gospel with other people. I pay the professionals to do that. That’s their job, they’re the experts, I’m not just here receiving my goods and services that I spend my hard-earned money for.” Never has this been a more prevalent attitude among Christians than right now. But don’t you see? If you are an ambassador for Christ, then you can’t be a consumer. You have a role to play. You have been commissioned by God to go out and share the gospel with others. You must be an evangelist. You can’t say, “Don’t ask me to do that – I don’t have the time or energy for that. That’s for the experts.” No, you must do it – you’re an ambassador, so you can’t be a consumer. Second implication: if Christians are ambassadors for Christ, then we must be faithful to the message given to us. An ambassador does not have the freedom to modify the message of his government back home to make it more palatable to the country he’s sent to. Say that the Obama administration really wanted to push the government of Saudi Arabia to outlaw the wearing of burkas in their country (you know, the garment that covers a woman’s entire body). So they tell the ambassador there in Riyadh to really press the Saudi’s hard on this, and tell them how demeaning the burka is to women, and how in the name of human rights they need to make wearing them illegal. The

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

4 ambassador hears this, and he thinks this is a horrible idea. It won’t actually help women, it will only make the Saudi’s mad, they’ll take it out on women, it will only make him look bad for delivering the message of his government. He thinks it’s a horrible idea. What can he do? The answer: he doesn’t have a choice. No matter how bad an idea the ambassador thinks it is, no matter how much he would like to modify the message to make it more palatable to the Saudi’s, he must deliver the message. He’s got to tell the Saudis what his government wants them to hear. And friends, if you are an ambassador for Christ, there will come times when you don’t want to tell the whole gospel message to others. You’re going to want to leave out the parts about sin, about judgment, about God’s wrath on sin, about hell. You’ll be so tempted to alter the gospel message somehow to make it more palatable and politically correct to the people around you, make it easier to swallow. But you can’t – why? It’s not your message. You are an ambassador of the high king of the universe to this world. You don’t get to make the message, you deliver the message. You must be faithful to it. I can’t tell you how many times over the years as a preacher I’ve been so tempted to change the message of the Bible. We’re working through some part of the Bible and I know this part is going to offend people. I know it’s going to be hard for people to swallow. I know there’s a real chance people won’t come back. And I don’t like that. I don’t like having people mad at me, I don’t like people leaving offended and not coming back. But, you know, I don’t have a choice. Paul says in verse 12: “We are not commending ourselves to you again ….” 2 Corinthians 5:12. Paul says that Christians are ambassadors, and we can’t worry about whether the recipients will still like us after they hear our message. Christians, we are ambassadors. We serve at the will and pleasure of the High King of Heaven. And we have one, primary responsibility: be faithful to the message. In the book of Jude 3, we read this: “Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” We are to contend, to work hard, to make sure that the message that was delivered to us once for all will in turn be delivered unchanged to the world, throughout all generations, until our king returns to establish his reign on earth. That’s what ambassadors do. Second, how are Christ’s ambassadors to share the gospel with others? Three things we need to know: first, there must be urgency about our evangelism. If you’re here today, and you’re not a Christian, we are very glad you’re here. Obviously this series about sharing the gospel with others is mainly geared toward those who already believe, but I hope you’re learning about Christianity through this as well. And maybe you are here this morning and the gospel makes sense to you, it’s attractive to you, and you want to believe it … but you just don’t feel like today is the time. You’re thinking about all the

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

5 conversations you’d have to have with your family and friends. You’re thinking about all the changes you’d have to make in your life if you really started following Jesus. So you’re holding back – you really like the gospel but you haven’t committed to it. You say, “Maybe in a few months I’ll accept Christ but not today.” If that’s you, then you must know that you do not have the power and the control over your heart you think you have. If right now, you’re feeling open to do something and you know you should do it but you’re afraid to do it … you really ought to get to it but you’re not really getting to it … don’t you dare think that window is going to say open forever. “For he says, “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 Corinthians 6:2. Now! Why is Paul so insistent here? Why now? Because Paul knows how the human heart works. You do not have the kind of control over your heart that you think you do. Ten days from now, 10 months from now, and certainly 10 years from now, you may very well be incapable of doing the thing that right now you know you ought to do. You will not become the person who is capable of it. You’ll become a person who is incapable of it unless you act now. Now! Oh, friends, if you’re here today and some part of you wants to give yourself to Christ don’t wait – there may not be another chance. So, Christians, there is an urgency about the gospel message. Second, there must be earnestness about our evangelism. Why this urgency? No analogy is perfect in trying to illustrate Christian things, and the ambassador analogy is no different. If we have too much of a modern notion of ambassadors, we’ll miss something of what Paul is trying to say. Today all countries have ambassadors in the capital cities of countries with whom they have diplomatic relations. But the Roman Empire did not – the Vandals and the Visigoths did not have an embassy in Rome. The Romans did not recognize any other power with whom they could co-exist peacefully. Yet they did have ambassadors. But here’s how they used them: when a Roman army defeated its foe, the commanding general would send an ambassador with the terms of surrender. But the ambassador did not negotiate with the vanquished enemy. His message was “Submit to these terms, or perish.” When Jesus Christ came into the world, he didn’t say, “I am here to negotiate with you about how much you’d be willing to serve God. I’ll give a little, you give a little, and we’ll meet in the middle.” Jesus comes to his enemies, he comes to sinners who have been in rebellion against him, and he says, “I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6. Submit to me, give your life to me, Jesus says, or you will perish. That’s our message to the world, Christians, and we must never forget it. When we share the gospel, at a fundamental level we are saying to others, “Submit to the Lord Jesus or die.” In our sins, we have committed high treason against the king of the universe, and that treason merits not just the death penalty, but the eternal death penalty in hell.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

6 Christian friends, the thought of what we’re doing when we evangelize should stagger us. When you share the gospel you are preaching, as it were, as a dying man or woman to a dying world. Therefore, you can’t be flippant about it. You must, you must, have a deadly earnestness about you in evangelism, because this is deadly serious business. Yet, third, we must remember that evangelism is an art form. I don’t want anything I’ve said so far this morning to give the impression that because we must be earnest and urgent in our evangelism that somehow when we try to share the good news with others about Jesus we must have this look of panic on our face, or never smile when we do it. Nor do I mean that because the message is not our own that we must only quote Scripture when we share the gospel or we must rigidly adhere to some prescribed form. Not at all. I grew up in a church environment where telling others about Jesus Christ was very, very encouraged, and I am so thankful for that. From an early age, our duty to tell others about Jesus was impressed upon me. However, I somehow received the impression that real evangelists were the people who pulled out a tract (like the Roman Road, which is a wonderful summary of the gospel message straight from the book of Romans, it’s been very helpful to me in so many ways, and I’ve used it), and walked people all the way through it, and tried to get that person to pray the prayer of salvation on the spot. If you weren’t doing that, well, you weren’t really doing evangelism. Somehow I came away from that thinking that evangelism was a science, it was formulaic, so you had to follow the prescribed forms. It really surprised me as I got older that no where in the New Testament do we see a prescribed gospel presentation (like the Roman Road). In fact, I think it’s accurate to say that in the New Testament, the gospel is never presented in precisely the same way twice. The authors are always putting a new spin on it. And that makes sense, because evangelism isn’t a science – if it were, there would be precise steps you’d take each time you share the gospel. Also, you could reproduce it in a laboratory, and what worked in sharing the gospel with one person would always work in sharing it with another. Science means you are able to repeat the experiment over and over again and get the same results, right? Is that how evangelism works? Of course not. What works with one person almost never works with the next person. With some people, you meet with them just a few times, and then they believe the good news of Jesus. Others, you share the good news with them for decades and still they won’t believe. With one person, presenting the good news this way knocks them flat on their backs. With another, you do the same thing and they yawn. Why? Evangelism is not a science; rather, because you are always dealing with different people, evangelism is an art. 2 Corinthians 5:11: “Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others.” See, if evangelism is a science, if it’s formulaic, you don’t need to persuade or try to make it attractive. You just push the buttons and repeat the experiment. But Paul says persuade. In verse 20, we read this: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” Therefore, telling others the good news of Jesus involves skill,

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

7 creativity, thoughtfulness, patience, emotion, and it is often unpredictable – just like art. And because it’s an art you can and you should work to get better at it. You can learn, study, and practice it to develop your skills, just like any other art form. Because it’s an art, it means that some people will be more gifted than others at it. Our job in telling others the good news is not just to perform an information dump on someone else, and walk away satisfied that we’ve done our job because they’ve “heard” the gospel. No, evangelism is an art form, because every person we share the gospel with is different. So, to do it well will take lots of work, lots of creativity, lots of patience, lots of energy, and it will always be unpredictable. Now, that’s really hard – urgent and earnest with our evangelism, but with the patience and skill that comes from knowing that there’s an art to it? That’s a difficult balance to strike – how can we? Third, what powers Christ’s ambassadors to do their work? When you’re doing evangelism, when you’re being an ambassador for Christ, really all you’re doing is introducing Jesus to other people. You’re not forcing people to form a relationship with Jesus. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job; it’s above your pay grade. Evangelism is introducing Jesus to other people. And think about it: you are way more effective at introducing people you know really well than people you don’t. So say, for some reason, I was given the responsibility of introducing someone to you on the spot that I barely knew; a stranger. I might stumble through – hopefully I wouldn’t call him by the wrong name, maybe I could say one or two interesting things about him, but that’s it. And if I didn’t know the person well it would be hard for me to be genuinely excited about getting the two of you together. But if I had the opportunity to introduce someone I loved to you – my wife, my kids, my closest friends – people I knew very, very well, then it would go differently. You’d see how much I care about them. I’d know all kind of things about them that could make them seem interesting to you. I’d be more effective at it. Now, what powers those introductions? What’s makes my introductions of the people closest to me so much more effective? I love them. And that’s what Paul says should drive our evangelism: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died....” 2 Corinthians 5:14 [the old King James says, “the love of Christ constraineth us”]. We’ve sung about it this morning, when we prayed through song that God would bind our wandering hearts to him. The more you love Jesus, the better evangelist you’ll be. Maybe you can fake it, and not really love Jesus but still introduce people to Jesus – I’m convinced there are those who can – but why try? Friends, love Jesus and you will be a good evangelist. I said it last week and I’ll probably say it every week: you talk about what you think about, and you think about what you love. If you love Jesus, he’ll be on your mind all the time, and if

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

8 he’s on your mind he will be on your tongue. You won’t be able to help it – you’ll want to talk about him and introduce him to others. And why should we love Jesus? 2 Corinthians 5:21 deserves a sermon all by itself. It is the best one verse encapsulation of the gospel in the whole Bible. “21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God, very God of very God, on the cross became sin – he didn’t just take our sin on him, but he became sin – good became evil – the blessed one became a curse – so that we might be… what? Acceptable to God? Tolerated by God? Grudgingly allowed by God into heaven? No – so that we might be “the righteousness of God.” That’s an astounding phrase. Just think how righteous Jesus was when he was in heaven, the second person of the Trinity, before he came down to earth to live as a human being. Can you imagine how righteous he was? So righteous, so perfect, so loved by God, so holy and happy, that you could rightly have called him “the righteousness of God.” But friends, if we trust Jesus now, that he died for us, that for our sake he who knew no sin was made sin, then we become just like that – “the righteousness of God.” And when you see that, to the degree you see that, you’ll love Jesus. You will fall on your knees and worship him. And you’ll want to tell others about him. PRAY Friends, we’re going to take the Lord’s Supper now, and we invite all baptized Christians to take part. To help us understand what we’re doing in the Lord’s supper, I want us to read a question and answer from the Heidelberg Catechism, which is an old, 16th century, Christian document – “How does the Lord’s Supper remind you and assure you that you share in Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross and in all his gifts?” “In this way: Christ has commanded me and all believers to eat this broken bread and to drink this cup. With this command he gave this promise: first, as surely as I see with my eyes the bread of the Lord broken for me and the cup give to me, so surely his body was offered and broken for me and his blood poured out for me on the cross. “Second, as surely as I receive from the hand of the one who serves, and taste with my mouth the bread and cup of the Lord, given me as sure signs of Christ’s body and blood, so surely he nourishes and refreshes my soul for eternal life with his crucified body and poured-out blood.” If you’re here today and not a Christian, again, welcome. We are so thankful you’re here. Would you take this time to reflect on the following, that the Lord Jesus, you claim to be the way, the truth, and the life. Grant that I might be undaunted by the cost of following you as I consider the reasons for doing so. If what you claim is true, please guide me, teach me, and open me to the reality of who you are. Give me an understanding of you that is coherent, convincing, and that leads to the life you promise. Amen. Ushers, if you’d come down, they will pass out bread, then come back and pass out the cups, then we’ll take the Lord’s Supper together. Please place your cups in trash cans in the lobby when finished (not in buckets). © 2015 J.D. Shaw