LifeFlow: Ambassadors for Christ

LifeFlow: Ambassadors for Christ

2 Corinthians 5:18-21

Pastor Miles

June 8, 2014

What is the most valuable thing that God has entrusted you with?

This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. (1 Corinthians 4:1 NIV)

If I preach voluntarily, I have a reward; if not voluntarily, I am simply discharging the trust committed to me. (1 Corinthians 9:17 NIV)

1. Paul understood his ministry as a stewardship of the Gospel.

So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. (2 Corinthians 5:9-11a NIV)

- we need to be persuading others about the truth of he Gospel.

For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:14-17 NIV)

- what matters most is whether they are a new creation or not.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:18, 19 NIV)

2. God has entrusted you with the message of reconciliation.
- to share it with others: family, friends, neighbors

We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:20 NIV)

- God Himself is speaking through us

3. God has made you an ambassador for Christ.

God made him [Jesus Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV)