Loving With Our Hearts // Living Life as an Ambassador of Christ, Pt 10

It’s one thing to be an Ambassador of Christ – that’s what those who believe in Jesus are called to be. 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 y