The Diplomacy of an Ambassador // Living Life as an Ambassador of Christ, Pt 7

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.