Ambassadors of Christ
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Today, we are going to continue our two part series on Christianity and Politics. Over the last month, I’ve read as much as I could about the intersection of Christianity and politics and realized there is a wide variety of opinions. Some Christian leaders consider the church to be apolitical and should deal as minimally as possible with the politics of the world. And I do agree that the Christian’s highest calling is to worship God and share the gospel of Christ but it seems unreasonable to remain so detached from political affairs. In fact, some of the greatest errors that the church has made has been because we’ve tried to avoid dealing with the problems of society. An example that comes to mind is the church in South Africa who largely avoided the problem of apartheid and stood silent in the face of so much oppression and injustice. Certainly that can’t be right. A real life application of the gospel has to mean getting politcally involved to break the yoke of injustice. Other pastors beleive Christians should be heavily involved and exert a strong influence in the political realm especially in a democracy like ours where citizens have both the right and the responsibility to be as involved in politics as they want. They beleive that Christians should shape the political policies of the nation as much as they can so that it aligns to the will of God. Don’t stop at just civil rights, we need to help pass legislation for all the wrongs of society. And again I understand that Christians should be the moral conscience of the government but I wonder if expending so much of our efforts for merely political change will bring about the gospel transformation that God requires. Aftere all, Jesus taught us that we do not measure greatness and exert power like the rulers of this age. In my quest to find a happy medium, I was really blessed by the work of Mark Dever, who is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, and one of his elders, Jonathan Leeman. After decades of ministering in the heart of Washington D.C to thousands of men and women working professionally in politics, they have built a solid biblical understanding of subjects that most Christians are just getting interested in and they’ve married that to years of pastoral experience serving a congregation that is so politically involved. This is their jam and I would recommend visiting the 9 Marks resource page and reading “How the Nations Rage” along with “Political Church” by Leeman. Many of my own thoughts have been shaped and borrowed from what I’ve read in these resources.
For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 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.
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. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 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. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Three Main Points
Three Main Points
There are three main points, we will discuss as we go through this passage:
Our political identity is as ambassadors of Christ and citizens of His kingdom.
Our political purpose is to bring the world into reconciliation with God
Our political method is love that flows from the righteousness of God.
On this Sunday before what some are touting as the most important election of our lifetime, we find ourselves in the middle of a nation that is bitterly divided not only politically but also morally, ideologically, racially, and socially. It seems that Americans can’t agree on anything and that we are getting even further divided as a society. This week I was shocked to find out that in 1986, which for me at least is recent history, the confirmation vote for Antonin Scalia for Supreme Court Justice was unanimous, all 98 senators voted in favor of this conservative but fair judge. It wasn’t as if Roe vs Wade didn’t exist or that there wasn’t racism and social inequalities, in fact there was probably more injustice then but the leaders of this nation instead of adding fuel to these fires of division, worked hard to be bipartisan where they needed to be and understood the importance of keeping the nation together for its citizens and for the state of the world. I remember in 1989, watching the walls of communism fall across Eastern Europe and being proud of the country I called my home for its part in helping dismantle such a evil political system. That seems like a completely different time and different world. Now the walls of our once great democracy seem to crumbling around us and people from both sides of the political spectrum are accusing each other of being fascist. There is so much division! Think about what we have experienced with the confirmation of our newest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Barrett, which was completely divided on partisan lines, 52-48, despite her notable professional and personal record. No matter where you stand on the timing of her nomination, to attack someone for the adoption of two children from the horrors of living in Haiti and then accusing her of a form of colonization, that is nothing more than bold-faced divisive politics disguised as a defense for racial justice.
Unfortunately, that summarizes the current state of America where families, friends, churches, even married couples are divided by their politics, driven more by their anger and agenda rather than by reason and rationale. I found out this week that there is even a Facebook group called the Wives of the Deplorables, which is a support group for women who are questioning their marriage because their husbands are Trump supporters. It’s not surprising that we have come to the point where people will even consider divorcing over political opinions. So how did we get here? In two short words, one of the driving forces of the rage that we find in our nation is identity politics. Jonathan Leeman writes that:
“Identity politics, broadly speaking, begins with the common-sense observation that our lives and beliefs are shaped by the groups we occupy-whether those groups are based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or something else. And then it makes moral and political claims based on those group identities.”
This makes a great deal of sense, every human being has a core identity that they believe is the essence of who they are and we are naturally inclined to support anything that builds up our identity and to attack anything that is seen as a threat to our identity. We have clearly seen both sides leverage the power of identity for political gain. Joe Biden famously stated “That you are not black if you don’t vote for him.” Donald Trump, held up a bible to identify himself with the Christian right and some Christians have taken the bait and proclaimed, “you are not Christian if you don’t vote for Trump.” And this division based on identity cuts through seemingly all levels of society. If you identify as gay or non-cis, you need to vote blue. if you are a working class white male, you need to vote red. If you are a college educated, liberated female, you have to be a democrat and this list goes on.
And the root of the problem is fairly obvious, everyone has to have certain groups that they identify with, there is no way of getting around. In fact, the person you identify as yourself is simply a mixture of the values and beliefs held by the groups that you occupy. But the main problem is, in a nation that is now post-Christian, post-truth, and even post-natural law, all of our beliefs and morality come from these groups that we identify with. There is no longer a source of a fixed objective reference point on what is good versus what is evil so every tribe is allowed to determine that for themselves. The benefit of this in a peaceful society is that every group even the most marginalized are heard and that is a good thing from a Christian perspective. However in a turbulent society, when those definitions of good and evil clash, as they are now doing in our country, each tribe accuses the other of the root injustice that is keeping them from living out of their identity. This explains why things have become so heated and there is no easy solution for a society without God or religion. But for those of us who are Christian, who have a fixed moral reference point outside of ourselves, what is our root political identity? This passage teaches us we are ambassadors of Christ, citizens of his kingdom.
Ambassadorship is a decidely political term which refers to a diplomat from a foreign country that has taken residence within a host country for the purpose of representing the interests of the sending nation. Therefore, Christians are first and foremost, representatives of Christ and we are given the task of promoting His interests and his kingdom before our own opinions, our own agenda, and our own personal biases. This may seem like a heavy burden on our shoulders but we have the privilege and honor or representing a nation that is free of all injustice, whose main law is to love, and where all people dwell in peace and unity. And you might be telling yourself, Pastor Mark has lost his mind because that’s no country that I know presently and at the risk of sounding even crazier, it’s because you are an ambassador from the future. You represent a country that is separated from our present reality largely by time.
When the apostle Paul says, those in Christ are a new creation, he is extrapolating things into the future. No one who becomes Christian is made completely new in this life, there is still a lot of the old that is left in us but the Bible always projects what we will be in the future with 100% certainty. And its from this unwavering future hope in God that Christians can derive their sense of confidence in the political future of the world. According to Romans 4:17, we read that God calls into existence the things that do not exist currently but according to his word, there will be a day when swords will be turned into plowshares.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.
The problem that I find in many believers is that they are so bound by the current state of the world that they can’t see past the social problems that we have and so their politics are swayed by this movement or that, this trending issue on social media, followed by another and we forget who we are: ambassadors of a King that will one day judge the nations and bring them to peace. Placing our political identity in Christ, allows us to maintain hope in the face of what seems hopeless. It allows us to find peace in the middle of all this political turmoil. It gives us objectivity in the face of so much bias. Most importantly, it allows us to love while the world rages with hatred. And for the life of me, I cannot understand why Christians are ashamed to represent the ways of God to the world as if the world has a better plan for the future. Do you see the state of the world, clearly the politics of man are not working . And it is vitally important that we understand that as ambassadors of Christ, we are first and foremost citizens of an eternal kingdom with no end while everyone else is staking their future on nations, governments, and leaders that will rise and fall.
For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,
For now we are dual citizens so to speak, but let’s not forget where our ultimate citizenship lies, it lies with the glorious future of our king and we have been sent to proclaim his kingdom come.
Now I know that some might think that this is still too high level and keeps us from making a difference in the world but it’s out of this political identity as representatives of Christ where we can better understand our political purpose which is to reconcile the world to God. And it is this ministry of reconciliation that serves as a blueprint for not only our spiritual lives but also our political ones. I think we would all agree that we live in a fallen world that is very far from God and if God gave His only Son as a means of reconciling the world to himself, then the ultimate purpose we all have is to live for that exact same purpose. This should color everything we do up to and including our politics.
Some years ago, when the gay marriage movement was just starting here in California, there was proposition that was brought up for vote to legalize gay marriage. Surprisingly in our deeply liberal and progressive state, that proposition failed quietly by a couple of percentage points. The LGBTQ community decided to fight the results by dumping in a lot more money for advertisement and campaigning to reintroduce the proposition a couple of years later and I think this is where Christians made a tactical error by matching the LGBTQ community dollar for dollar and to hold huge political rallies to vote down the proposition. I remember sitting at one of these large rallies thinking to myself, this is not going to go well because we look like this big Christian political machine trying to flex its muscle against an entire group of people that disagrees with it morally. We can say hindsight is 20/20 but my fears were certainly realized as the issue of gay marriage became the center of the culture wars here in America. In a situation like this, what is the best possible way for us to bring these people who are far away from God to consider reconciling their relationship with God. How does that purpose dictate our politics?
If our political purpose is to reconcile people to God, then we cannot compromise the truth of sin. The starting point of the gospel and being reconciled to God is repentance from the sin that separates us from God. If we capitulate on these matters of sin, and I am not pointing out homosexuality as some special category of sin, I’m including it in the same realm of all other sexual sin, if we compromise on these matters that are clearly spelled out in the Scriptures, we rob people of their opportunity to repent and to reconcile their relationship with God. Captitulating and compromising any definition of sin has never brought someone closer to God. We think we are so loving and gracious by not upholding the truth of sin in our own lives and in our society, and all the while people get drawn further and further from God. I would ask you to look at the number of gay men and women who attend churches that affirm gay marriage and you would see that it is not many. It is a lie of the enemy to think that letting go of the truth of sin will draw more sinners to God. It doesn’t happen that way.
However, if our political purpose is to reconcile people to God, then we cannot compromise grace and love in the pursuit of that truth. Holding a political rally against gay marriage may uphold truth but it does so in an ungracious and unloving manner. It sends the not so subtle message that we are at war with your moral beleifs and we will not serve you, love you, or care for you. In the end, it is a very poor way to implore and appeal to a person’s moral conscience that they need to be reconciled to God. It’s almost antithetical to the gospel that we proclaim to believe which is profoundly summarized by Paul in verse 21, “For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin...” If there was every anyone who was more diametrically opposed to our own ethics and morals, it would be be Jesus who knew no sin but becaue of his great love for us, he became sin for us and entered into our corrupt, broken, and fallen world. He did not campaign against us or hold rallies to defend his moral high ground. He came to show us a better way.
Brother and sisters this is who we represent and whose ministry we are honored to carry forward. I love how Leeman describes the political purpose of believers: “A Christian’s political posture, in a word, must never be withdraw. Nor should it be dominate. It must always be represent, and we must do this when the world loves us and when it despises us.”
And this brings us to our concluding point which is our chosen political method is love that comes from the righteousness of God. The two bookends of this passage are love that contrains our lives and righteousness that has its source in God. In this passage Paul talks about the controlling ethics of his life, love that is modeled in the gospel and the righteousness that comes from God as a result. And as Paul explains, how the old has passed away and the new has come, he writes something interesting.
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.
When Paul was a Pharisee, persecuting the church, he was driven by a zealous anger towards this new religious sect that also threatened the political future of Israel. In John 11:50, you realize how politically motivated the religious leaders were in having Jesus crucified.
But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.”
Jesus was seen not only as a religious threat, the main impetus for his execution was that he was a political threat. Either he dies or the nation dies. This explains why Paul was so enraged because in the place of one Christ, you now had thousands of Christians running around. It was highly likely that Paul was familiar with Jesus during his time in Jerusalem and he obviously did not have a favorable opinion about him. But on the road to Damascus, Paul had a powerful encounter with the risen Christ and he understood that Jesus died even for him despite the fact that Paul had lived his entire life opposing Jesus and his followers even to the point of death. And all the while Paul believed that he was in the right, he was driven by his own self-righteousness. That describes much of our nations politics, rage driven by self-righteousness.
In some ways this was inevitable. America is one large social experiment to see how a nation dedicated to the principles of equality, freedom, and natural rights will turn out in the end. In all likelihood, the founding fathers drafted these governing principles assuming that there would always be a baseline of truths that would be self-evident. In many ways, they assumed too much and didn’t see how a post-Christian, post-modern nation would divide itself over different definitions of equality, freedom, and rights. These principles devoid of the unconditional love of Christ and the righteousness that comes from God, serve only to further divide us rather than bringing us together. A nation whose citizens don’t know how to tolerate and even love those who are their enemies and who don’t understand that there is a standard of righteousness that lies outside of themselves, will eventually turn on one another in order to defend their own ideas of these founding principles. And according to Psalm 2, all the nations of the world will rage and set themselves against the Lord and his anointed One. As we have witnessed over the last year, America is not exempt from this rage, and you can believe the rage comes from all the injustice in this country, and that may be true on the surface but the foundational source of that rage is because the nation is in the throws of trying to set itself against God and His appointed King.
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
The church was meant to be a refuge from the rage found in our nation and not part of the problem. One way of looking at the church is if we are ambassadors of Christ, then the local church is like a foreign country’s embassy wherever it is located. An embassy provides the protection and confers the authority of its ruler to any citizen that steps into the
Mark Dever:
“Before and after America, there was and will be the church. The nation is an experiment. The church is a certainty.”
Conclusion
Conclusion
And it is for such a time as this, that true Christians understand the biblical imperative to put our differences aside and recognize what it is that unites us as believers. Again, this message was largely an in house discussion for believers and my apologies to anyone who might not be a Christian yet but I hope you have understood the true heart of Christianity. In this fractured world, the church must be the one place where people with different opinions about who should be the next president, which political party should run the country, and what social issues ought to take priority, can live together in the bond of love because they recognize that something infinitely greater than these temporary issues unite us together.
Communion
Communion
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
The sacrament of communion is something that is reserved for those who are citizens of the kingdom of God because only the citizens of heaven, wait with great anticipation and hope for the day when we will drink of the fruit of the vine in the Father’s kingdom. This is a reminder to the church, one day the Kings of kings and the Lord of lords will return and establish his kingdom for all of eternity!