Activists or Ambassadors?

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Transcript:

Well, this morning we’re going to be in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, 2 Corinthians chapter 5. And for those who weren’t here last week, we started a new series where I’ve been just listening and observing and reading over the last few months and seeing and hearing and reading more and more that a lot of people in our world have no use for the church. And I don’t think that comes as any surprise to us, but I just hadn’t really thought about it much.

And so I’ve been doing some listening and trying to discover what are some of the reasons why people have such a problem with the church, why people outside have such a problem with the church. And that can be people who have no Christian background whatsoever. That can also include Christians, people who claim to be born again and have trusted Christ as their Savior, but at one time or another have drifted away from the have not returned.

It can be a whole spectrum of people who’ve just said, you know, this is not an important part of my life, and what are some of their objections? And we’ll hear those objections, and sometimes we’ll get defensive, and I’ve had to fight very hard to read and listen to these things and talk to people and not get defensive, but to think, whether they’re right or wrong, is there anything that we can do while still being faithful to the scriptures, which is absolutely essential to this. Is there anything that we can do while still being faithful to God’s word that we can do differently that will remove some of the obstacles so that people can hear and respond to the gospel?

Because we live in a society where people don’t listen to each other anymore. Really, we don’t talk to each other anymore. If anything, we shout at each other or we type at each other in all caps, but we don’t listen to each other anymore.

And we’ve gotten to the point where you can come in and say one thing and people just shut down. Is that wrong? Yeah, it’s wrong when they do it.

It’s wrong when I do it. But right or wrong, whether they’re right or wrong, if we can remove as many secondary obstacles as possible to where people will actually be willing to listen to the gospel, I think that’s part of our job. And so last week we talked about the fact that a lot of people aren’t interested in the church and aren’t interested in the Christian faith because they’ve been hurt in the church or they’ve been hurt by Christians.

And so we looked at God’s word and said, What are some of the things that God’s word says we can do to address this topic? And there’s about seven topics that I’ve started outlining that we’re going to go through over the next few weeks. Today we’re going to look at the second, which is people saying the church is too political. And I’ll admit to you, I’ve been nervous all week about bringing this to you.

Now, hopefully you know me well enough that if you take offense to something, you’ll realize maybe you misunderstood or maybe I misspoke, that I’m not trying to be offensive here. This is kind of one of those topics that it’s like fighting off a wild dog. You may come out on top, but you’re liable to get bit in the process.

So I’m going to try to be very careful in the way I approach this. But there are people out there that say the church is too political. And I think I understand what they’re saying. I do.

Because there are pastors that I can name, pastors that I have looked up to, that defend everything Donald Trump does or says. And I’m not talking about policy. I’m talking about some of the nasty stuff he said on the campaign trail.

And I’m thinking you wouldn’t have let Bill Clinton get by with that for a second, but now it’s okay because he’s got an R after his name. I say that’s too political for the church. On the other hand, there are people, there are pastors that I can name who talked about Barack Obama like he was the second coming of Christ for eight years.

It happens on both sides. We tie ourselves too closely to one political party or another or one candidate or another, and it’s dangerous. I mean, most of you in here know me.

Most of you know that I’m politically active. But I try to be very careful to separate the church stuff from the political stuff. Not that my Christianity doesn’t influence my politics because it does.

But I try to make it very clear that when I do something or when I speak, I’m speaking on my behalf and not on behalf of Trinity Baptist Church. because Trinity, I think under the First Amendment, we can endorse candidates, but I think it would be a stupid thing for us to do, because as soon as we endorse the guy or the lady, he’s going to go up to 23rd and Lincoln, or he’s going to go off to Congress and do something that we’re on the hook for defending that has nothing to do with our values, and some of the guys that I’ve thought were great. In the last year, there was somebody that I have known, that I have known since I was 16 years old that I thought was a solid Christian guy and evidently had some problems, some skeletons in the closet that I didn’t know of that was caught.

It was all over the news that he was caught in a hotel in my hometown with an underage male prostitute. And I thought, I’m pretty sure I publicly endorsed that guy back in 2014. So I went back on Facebook all the way back to 2014 and hit the delete button on whatever I said.

We’re just going to clear that up. But we don’t want the church to be on the hook. well, y’all supported that guy.

No, that’s not the role of the church. Or I’m not going to come there, or I’m not going to listen to what you have to say about Jesus because you’re too this or you’re too that or you support somebody I don’t like. That’s just a dangerous place to be.

And a lot of churches are pushing that line. A lot of pastors. I believe the church should be active on issues where the Bible speaks.

But those aren’t political issues then. Those are right and wrong issues. But the church should not have a political agenda.

It should have a kingdom agenda. And I tell you that hopefully, again, you know well enough my political involvement to know I’m not telling you to not have your opinions or to stay out of it. I’m saying we’ve got to treat the kingdom as if it comes first. As a church, the kingdom must always come first. We should not be known as a Republican church.

We should not be known as a Democrat church. We should not be known as a libertarian church. We should be known as a church that exalts Jesus Christ. And I believe the pulpit should not be silent on, again, those political issues that are really not political issues.

There are places where the Bible says this is the way it is and this is the way it should be. The pulpit has been way too silent for too many years on the issues of right and wrong in our society. But as we preach on things like marriage, abortion, all the things the Bible speaks to.

I mean, I sat down and just made a list off the top of my head, and I know this is not an exhaustive list. But the Bible does speak to all sorts of topics that people feel strongly about. Abortion, capital punishment, corruption, education, gender roles, immigration, marriage, parenting, refugees, sexuality, war. All these things are covered in the Bible and many more.

And these are some of what we call political issues in our world. They’re not, and they never have been their right and wrong issues. And the church should speak on those things.

But when we leave out of here, the thought shouldn’t be, man, that pastor sure is conservative, and it shouldn’t be, man, that pastor sure is way too liberal. It should be, that’s what Jesus said about that. See, the focus has always got to come back to Jesus, and that’s what we’re going to look at today. The answer to the church being too political isn’t, oh, well, let’s just keep our mouths shut and only talk about salvation.

We’re supposed to preach the whole counsel of God, and so there’s a long history in Christianity of saying, No, we have to speak the truth, even if it’s unpopular. In the apostles’ day, they were beaten and arrested multiple times because the authorities didn’t like them preaching that Jesus had risen from the dead. And in Acts chapter 5, it says, When they had brought them, they set them before the council, and the high priest asked them, saying, Did we not straightly command you that you should not teach in this name?

And behold, you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us. And they were looking at it as a political issue because they were causing political problems. They were causing unrest in the city by preaching the resurrection, so the authorities didn’t like it. They said, didn’t we tell you not to preach this?

It’s unpopular. You’re upsetting the people. And here’s what they said.

Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, we ought to obey God rather than men. And that’s good advice for us all. If God says one thing and man says another, we have to listen to God.

Within the confines of what God says, we should obey the law of the land even if we don’t like it. But when God says one thing and man says something totally opposite, we have to side with God. But God’s word also tells us to speak the truth in love.

It says that in Ephesians 4. 15. We’re told to speak the truth, which can sometimes be sharp, but you have to temper it with love.

And not just say I love you, but show it, not only in your tone and in your word choice, but in your actions. Show people that we love them. So the problem is not that the church speaks on controversial issues.

The church was built on controversial issues. The idea that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead and that he is king of kings and lord of lords is still a controversial issue for a lot of people. We were built on controversy.

If you saw the campaign video I made a couple weeks ago, you’ll also know that Christians early on were challenging the Roman emperor over things like abortion and infanticide. Christians challenged the Roman authorities on the role of women and women being treated as second-class citizens. They challenged the empire on the issue of slavery.

The church was built on controversial issues. We have this long history going back, and it’s when the church drew clear moral lines, clear biblical lines on things like that, that the church grew by leaps and bounds. When we cower and say, I don’t want to offend anybody, nothing gets done.

Nothing gets accomplished. The church exploded in the years when it was illegal, and we spoke out anyway. And so if they don’t like the church because it’s too political, because we speak biblical truth and we don’t sugarcoat it, that’s not something we can fix.

We can address that maybe in being more loving in the way that we say things, but we can’t change what we teach. So that’s, we cross that off the list. That’s not an option. But some of the things that I’ve read that people object to are that we accept the view that some topics in the Bible are off limits because they’re political. Oh, we can’t preach about marriage because it’s political. We can’t preach about abortion because it’s political. We can’t preach, do you know at one point we couldn’t preach against slavery?

because it was political? Nowadays, we look at that and we say, that’s clearly a right and wrong issue. Well, it always has been.

But 150 years ago, you need to lose your pulpit and maybe your life for preaching in certain parts of the country that God has created all men in his image. And we’ll say some issues are political. If the Bible comes down on one side or the other, folks, it’s not a political issue. It’s a right and wrong issue.

Okay? Am I alone in thinking that? If the Bible comes down on one side or the other clearly, it’s a right and wrong issue, not a political issue.

We can disagree all we want over tax policy, although I think the Bible does address that in some ways. It’s maybe not as clear as other things in black and white, but we can disagree about tax policy. We can disagree about trade policy.

We can disagree about all sorts of things that are political, but there are places where the Bible speaks and speaks clearly that are right and wrong issues and not political. Or the world will object when we apply biblical principles only when convenient. And we probably all do this to an extent. We have things that we see in the world that bother us when other people do them.

And there are things that the Bible speaks against that we do that, oh, that’s, you know, that’s okay. We all do this to an extent and we need to be careful about that. If the Bible says that it’s true, whether I’m doing it or you’re doing it, biblical principles apply across the board or we’ll apply biblical principles only to certain groups or parties or candidates.

And oh, this guy, your guy, do you know what he did? We got to rake him over the coals. He got to be run out of town on the.

. . Well, what about your guy?

He did the same thing. Well, you know, you’ve got to understand the circumstances. We’ll give people a free pass if they have the same letter after their name as we do.

You got to stop it. The Bible’s either true or it’s not. Biblical principles either apply or they don’t.

The world objects when we deal with these issues and we fail to show love toward others in the way we approach issues. And I have seen this more in the last two years. And you’ve seen this more in the last two years than we have in a long time.

I know of two Christian ladies. I know them through church and they don’t go here. So don’t try to figure out who it is.

One was died in the world Trump supporter. Another was died in the world Hillary supporter. They don’t speak to each other anymore.

They used to be friends and they don’t speak to each other. I voted for a third guy who wasn’t particularly great either. So they both talk to me, sometimes about each other.

I know of Christian families that do not talk anymore over the 2016 election. And I think, really, of all things to get upset about, I know we all made hard decisions and, you know, oh, I’ve got to vote for this one or the other one. None of them were all that great.

I mean, from a moral standpoint, I can think of much more important things to argue about in your family and these people who wouldn’t even know you, wouldn’t even be able to pick you out of a lineup and Christians and families are dividing over these things. We’re failing to show love to others in the way we approach issues. We scream at each other.

We talk at each other. We type in all caps and here’s the problem. We focus, here’s the bottom line, we focus on winning the argument rather than winning the person.

We focus on winning the argument rather than winning the person. And the problem here is not changing your politics. We’re not going to all agree on everything.

We’re just not. I don’t know that Charla and I agree on everything. I don’t know that I agree with everything that Jared thought in 2016.

Nor will I agree with myself in another two years on everything. We’re not all going to agree on everything, and that’s okay. Because it’s not what really matters.

The little political issues and the letter we have after our name isn’t what matters. Here’s what I want you to understand. The country is very important.

The country is very important, but the kingdom is more important. The kingdom is more important. If we get those two out of order, heaven help us.

We’re not going to be able to show love to anybody. We’re not going to be able to keep things in proper perspective. It is very important, the country, and to have our views and to promote things that we think are right and we think that are going to be the best for the country.

But ultimately, the kingdom is even more important than the country. Let’s look at what the Bible says about this. 2 Corinthians chapter 5.

Now you’ll notice that this is not a passage dealing explicitly with politics, because in the Roman Empire, they didn’t necessarily have politics the way we have politics. But there are some principles in this passage that I think apply to our situation today. We’re going to start in verse 16, and it says, Wherefore, henceforth know we no man after the flesh, Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.

Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new.

And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. to wit that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and have committed unto us the word of reconciliation. You’ll notice twice in here, he says that God has made reconciliation our job.

Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ. We, not just the church at Corinth, not just Paul. He’s speaking of believers here. We are ambassadors for Christ. This morning, if you are someone who has trusted in Jesus Christ for your salvation, You’re somebody who’s been bought with the blood.

You’ve been indwelled by the Holy Spirit. You belong to Jesus Christ. You are an ambassador. And as important as the country is and as important as it is for us to be active and involved on the things that we think are right and the things that we think are best, our job as an ambassador is more important than our role as an activist. We are ambassadors for Jesus Christ. We represent him in this role.

Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God did beseech you by us. It’s like God was speaking to you through us. We pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.

For he hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Let’s look at a couple things in this passage, and we’ll get to the points here in just a moment. He says, first of all, in verse 16, we know no man after the flesh.

He’s not saying we don’t know anybody. We don’t know anybody in person. What they were talking about, about knowing somebody after the flesh, was looking at people through an earthly lens.

It says, this is who he is. This is what group he’s part of. This is what he can do for me.

And in the church, and particularly the church in Corinth, there were some divisions and had been for a long time because you had groups of people from a Jewish background, groups of people from a Greek background. You had divisions between the rich and the poor. You had divisions between I came from this certain branch of Judaism or I’m more prominent in the community.

you had people that were divided over where they came from. And there was almost sort of a pecking order, where some in the church were looking at some others in the church and deciding, okay, you’re more valuable than so-and-so. That is a recipe for disaster.

That is looking at people after the flesh. And to give you a modern-day example, if I were to find out who the wealthiest person is in town, and I don’t even know, I couldn’t even begin to tell you. But if I were to look at who is the wealthiest person in town, and I was to start courting them, because I want them to come to our church, not only to give more money, but to increase our prominence and maybe other people will start coming.

And I was to totally ignore those who didn’t have two pennies to rub together because I was constantly courting the rich guy or the mayor or the prominent business person. That’s what was going on. Oh, we want to reach out to these people because, well, they’re just better.

And we want to avoid reaching out to these people because they really can’t do anything for us. They were dividing people into groups and categories. And folks, I will tell you that in America in 2018, we are dangerously close to doing exactly the same thing.

Maybe not in our church, but in the culture around us. And if we as Christians don’t put a stop to it, it will begin to infect our thinking as well. We divide people into groups.

They’re rich, they’re poor. They’re part of the in crowd, they’re not part of the in crowd. They’re, you know, they’re the wrong skin color.

They come from the wrong background. They And we form these impressions of people, and we’ll either listen to them or not listen to them based on what category they are. Or we will concern ourselves, we will care about them or not care about them as much based on what category they are.

That is a dangerous place to be. Paul said, we know no man after the flesh. He said, we are not even concerned about these earthly perspectives and these earthly categories that people fall into.

He says, yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. He changes up what he’s saying a little bit because there apparently were some people in Corinth who had seen Jesus in the flesh. Maybe they’d been in Jerusalem.

I don’t know. But the context lends itself to there were some people who had actually seen Jesus during his earthly ministry, and they thought, hey, we are more important. We are more spiritual because we’re in this category of people who have seen Jesus.

And if you’ll remember, the Apostle Paul didn’t walk with Jesus during his earthly ministry. I think he may have been around Jerusalem at that time, but he didn’t walk with Jesus during his earthly ministry. And when Jesus called him, it was in a vision.

Jesus steps down out of the clouds, but it wasn’t part of Jesus’ earthly ministry. So there were apparently some who even thought, we’re better than Paul because we’ve done this. We’ve been here.

This is our spiritual resume. This is our background. And Paul said, even if we’ve seen Jesus in the flesh, we don’t see him anymore.

He’s saying all these things that you’re looking at and saying some are better than others. Some are more important than others. He said these things don’t matter.

These things really don’t matter. And he points in verse 17 to what really does matter. If any man is in Christ, he’s a new creature.

And that’s true for us today. If you are in Christ, you are a new creature. The old things are passed away.

Behold, all things are become new. And you know, that stupid devil. he likes to get in your ear and likes to remind you of all the things you’ve done in the past he likes to remind you of who you were before you came to christ oh you’ll never amount to anything don’t you I remember what you used to do I remember who you used to be oh god could never love you god could never forgive you makes you start to doubt that god would love you makes you start to doubt that god would forgive you makes you start to doubt that god would call sorts of things because of the old man.

And sometimes people around us will do the same thing. And we get down on ourselves and think, you know, God can never use me because of X, Y, and Z. When the word tells us, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature.

The old man, the old guy is dead. All things are made new. You are a new person.

You are a new creature in Jesus Christ. Now that doesn’t mean that all the consequences of sin go away. And we may need to go back and make amends with people, be reconciled as it talks about in this passage. But the bottom line is the thought that God could never love you or never forgive you or never use you because of what happened in the past is a lie straight from Satan.

And he said, that’s why it doesn’t matter what category somebody is in, because there are really only two categories. There really are only two categories. There are those who have trusted Christ and those who have not.

And that doesn’t need to be an us versus them thing. Oh, we hate them. No, that needs to be where we reach out in love and compassion to the people who are in the not having trusted Christ category and plead with them, as one Puritan minister said, as a dying man to dying men, to get them to realize the imminent judgment of God on sin, the eternal consequences of sin, the danger that any unsaved person is of falling into hell and plead with them to trust in Jesus Christ as their only hope.

It’s our job to throw out the life raft, the life preserver, and plead with them to reach out and take it. God will rescue them, but they have to receive the rescue. They have to receive that free gift of salvation, and so we plead with them.

And all things are of God. Folks, the whole world belongs to God. The whole world we live in belongs to God, and I know we forget that sometimes, and the world around us doesn’t realize it, but all of this belongs to God, and people can mess it up, and people can do the wrong thing, but God’s eventually going to straighten it all out.

All of this belongs to God anyway, and that’s a reminder sometimes I need in my political involvement, because somebody votes the wrong way on some little thing, and I come unglued, because, you know, it’s, can’t you see, clearly this was, what is wrong with you? You know, I’m sputtering out half sentences, and Charla knows. And anybody who’s ridden with me when I’m listening to the news knows.

But I have to be reminded, God’s in control of all this. All of this belongs to God anyway. The country’s still important, but the kingdom is more important.

All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself. This God, who is in charge of everything, could have looked at us in our rebellion and said, good luck with that, enjoy hell. He could have, and he would have been justified.

And he could look at us and write us off because of the categories we belong to. But instead, God, who’s in control over everything, took the initiative to reconcile us to himself by Jesus Christ. Is there more than one way to God? Not according to my Bible.

God has done all the work of reconciling. By the way, that’s politically incorrect to say, too. You get in trouble for that in some quarters.

Some people won’t like that. But the Bible’s very clear. God reconciled man to himself by Jesus Christ. Well, that’s awfully, and I’ve told you before, I don’t understand those who would say, well, that’s awfully narrow, that’s awfully narrow-minded, that’s awfully unfair of you to say that God would only allow one way to heaven, and I think it’s not fair that God would even allow one way to heaven.

We don’t deserve even the one way, so if you want fair, I don’t want what’s fair. I want what’s gracious, and thank God, through his grace in Jesus Christ, he offers us salvation that we don’t deserve it. He said, all things are of God who has reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

So we have received reconciliation, meaning God has put the relationship between us and him back where it should be and where it should have been all along. He did that through Jesus Christ, and now God has sent us out with that ministry of reconciliation to help men be reconciled to God and to each other through the cross. Because the cross can affect reconciliation anywhere.

I’ve heard missionaries to the Middle East talk about, I heard one missionary in particular telling a story about a former member of Hamas and a Jew. They sworn enemies. The Hamas guy would have killed the Jew before, but they were believers in the same church somewhere in the Middle East, and remembers them standing arm in arm singing praises to Jesus Christ together, because not only were they reconciled to God through the cross of Jesus Christ, but they were able to be reconciled to each other through the cross of Jesus Christ. And he says, that’s the ministry we’ve been given.

And I think that’s where some churches miss it. And not that I consider them a church, but the Westboro church in Topeka that comes and pickets every little thing. I’ve said they’re not Baptist, they’re not a church, and they’re not even in the Westboro neighborhood of Topeka, so the whole name is a lie.

But they miss it. Yeah, does God hate sin? Absolutely.

Is God going to judge sin? Absolutely. Is homosexuality a sin against God?

Yes. Is all the other things that they claim are sin? Yes, they’re sin.

But God didn’t give us the ministry of just irritating the living daylights out of people for no reason. God gave us the ministry of reconciliation. God in Jesus Christ called us to call out sin so that men would be reconciled to God and reconciled to each other.

We have that ministry. The same thing that God did with us, God calls us to be a part of in carrying that message out to the world. And far too often, I think part of the political problem of the church is that when we talk about issues, it’s about winning the issue instead of pointing to the issue, whatever it is, the sin problem that is at the heart of that issue, and calling men to be reconciled to God in a loving way.

This is where I changed my views quite a bit a few years ago. I used to be involved in pushing for all sorts of legislation. Make this illegal. It’s wrong.

Make this illegal. It’s wrong. Make people do this. This is what the Bible says.

And then I realized we can pass all sorts of laws and make people behave like good little Christians and they’ll still go into hell. They’ll still blow the gates of hell wide open because they’ve never been. It doesn’t matter how they’ve acted on here on earth.

They can act good and their heart can still not belong to Jesus Christ. So what’s more important is not winning the argument, not winning the issue, but winning the person. We’ve been given the ministry of reconciliation. And I think we can, in a loving way, tell people, whatever the issue is, that sin is at the heart of this issue.

And it’s not that we hate you. It’s not that we want to legislate you out of existence. It’s that we see this the way God has shown it to us, and that God loves you, and God wants us to convey his love to you, and that sin you’re engaged in, whatever it may be, will hurt you, will harm your life and will lead you to an existence apart from Christ in eternity in hell.

And plead with people in a loving way, not as holier-than-thou Christians who want to make them act like us, but as fellow sinners who’ve been reconciled to God when we didn’t deserve it through the blood of Jesus Christ. We plead with them as one sinner to another and beg them to find the reconciliation that we’ve found. And he talks about how God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, not counting their sins against them, and have committed the word of reconciliation to u