First a Citizen, then an Ambassador // Living Life as an Ambassador of Christ, Pt 1

Most of us are immersed in the cultures in which we live. And that’s as it should be. But there’s a risk for the person who believes in Jesus, in getting to thinking that they’re a local … a citizen of this earth.  They’re not – they’re a citizen of Heaven and what’s more, an Ambassador of Christ.

Right now and depending on how you count some of the smaller ones, there are just over 200 countries in this world. One source I read lists 223, another 192. So lets say there are around 200 countries.

Some of them are huge and powerful. China, the USA, some of the European countries and some of them are huge and relatively poor. India, although that's a country on the move, Indonesia. Many of the countries are in that big middle ground. Medium size, medium wealth but little practical power on the world's stage.

And then there are lots of tiny little countries, about 30, with a population under 100,000. The Marshall Islands, population 62,000. Nauru, 10,000. Right down to the smallest country in the world. Do you know what that is? It’s the Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific, population, well 50 is the official figure. Imagine one plane load of tourists could overwhelm the place and quadruple the population.

What a huge variation, China population 1.34 billion at one end of the scale right down to the Pitcairn Islands population 50 at the other end and everything you can imagine in between.

Now anyone who's had brothers or sisters knows that siblings don't always get on and the history of humanity is a history of wars, invasions, conquests, dominance, exploitation. In fact right now, this very moment there are 30 recognised wars going on around the world not to mention the other, quote "lower level conflicts". So how do you manage all that? How do countries manage to get on?

Well hopefully these days most of the time when there's a disagreement or an issue, instead of fighting wars as the first step in the process, countries use a thing called diplomacy. They have diplomats and so they use diplomatic channels to discuss and resolve most of the issues between them.

The head of the diplomatic mission is usually called The Ambassador. So in my country we have an American Ambassador or a Chinese Ambassador, an Indian Ambassador and so on. And here's the thing, none of those people are Australians. The American Ambassador is American. The Chinese Ambassador is Chinese. The Indian Ambassador is as we would expect, Indian.

So, not only is the Ambassador a citizen of the country which he or she represents. They look like they come from that country, they talk like they come from that country because, you know what, they actually do come from that country.

Now all of that, I would hope, is pretty much blindingly glimpsingly obvious to all of us and the job of the Ambassador of each country is to be his or her country's representative with a foreign government. The channel through which their country raises issues with other governments and vice versa.

Sometimes, many times, those are difficult issues. You can imagine, for instance, the exchanges that occur between Indian and Pakistani diplomats or, at times, between China and America on trade issues or between the various European countries with other countries in their union. Ambassadors are there to represent their country, the country of their citizenship in a foreign land. Now the Apostle Paul had this to say on this issue. Have a listen:

From now on therefore we regard no one from a human point of view even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view. We no longer know Him in that way. So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away, see everything has become new.

All this is from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is,