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.

But here's the thing, if what we want to do with our lives is to live our lives as ambassadors for Christ then we need to handle these incredibly difficult issues with His wisdom. And the best way I know of discovering His wisdom is to read about it for myself in His word. Particularly in the four Gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. The eyewitness accounts of Jesus own life.

And time and time again when Jesus encountered people whose sin was ruining their lives he dealt with them with such incredible compassion it just blows you away. Tax collectors, back in Jesus day, they were a grubby lot. They were dishonest, they rorted the system, they applied extortion. And this behaviour was sanctioned by the Romans who occupied Israel so long as the Emperor got his taxes.

So the common Israelite, well they considered these tax collectors to be the worst amongst the worst of sinners. Let me read you some of Jesus wisdom how He handled it. Matthew chapter 9, beginning at verse 9:

As Jesus is walking along He saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth and He said to him, 'follow me', and he got up and followed Him. And as He sat at dinner in the house many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Him and His Disciples.

But when the Pharisee's saw this they said to the Disciples, 'why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?' But when Jesus heard this he said, 'those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice. I have come, not to call the righteous but the sinners.

You know what I learn here from this simple story? Jesus was living His life out as Gods ambassador. That's why the Son of God became the son of man. He became one of us. He came to you and to me just the way He came to Matthew that day.

You and I, when we see people whose sin offends us or hurts us. When we're on the receiving end of their sin, the thing we want to do naturally, it's a natural human response, is to cut them off, to cut them out of our lives. That way we're protected, that way we don't have to deal with them.

But what Jesus is saying here is that it was for them that He came and so He went and ate a meal in their house. Here He was, a veritable rock star, crowds flocking to Him. He comes into town, He decides to go and eat with the Mayor, the governor, the Church, the Synagogue leaders, the Bishops?

No, no - the tax collectors. Do you see the huge, huge symbolic act that's going on here? He knew that it would do two things. Firstly draw the vocal criticism of the religious nuts and confer honours upon the sinners. And by conferring honour on them He was building a relationship with them. He was accepting them just as they were without a word of condemnation or judgement.

And my hunch is that completely changed their attitudes towards Him. You know something, they had their blind spots. They were rationalising away their extortion and dishonesty and sin and if Jesus had come and berated them or condemned them or ignored them nothing would have changed in their lives.

Instead He came and ate with them and drank with them and listened to them and took the criticism that everyone heaped on top of Him for that and He built a bridge by honouring them. And so powerful was this that one of them, Matthew, becomes one of His disciples. He wrote the first book of the New Testament.

You want to be an ambassador for Christ? Then we need to learn the language of an ambassador. Being an ambassador is, as we saw last week on the program, about building relationships and bridges so that when difficult issues have to be dealt with there's a connection of a relationship and trust there through which to deal with the problem.

Think about it. Who are the people in your life to whom you give a license to talk to you about your blind spots? I know who they are in my life, it's the people who've honoured me and stuck by me and who've proven themselves to be wise and trustworthy. They're the ones with the license.

And as I look back on it, it was through people just like that, people who'd eaten with this sinner and loved this sinner and coped with this sinner's sins, it was through those very people that I encountered the transforming love of Jesus Christ. They were His ambassadors into my life. They treated me the way He treated those tax collectors and without them I wouldn't be with you right here, right now.

Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?