I think I want to start a national come as you are Sunday. One Sunday a year, churches across the nation just come as you are. Some of you are thinking, Russ, they already got that several churches down the street. No, they don't. Not what I'm talking about. You roll out of bed. You don't brush your hair. You don't brush your teeth. No makeup. Maybe you grab a bite to eat because you got to make it through. But you come just like you are. Spider-man pajamas? Come on. Now, there are several problems with that, but let's imagine it catches on. Pajama Sunday. Think about 10 years down the road. What's that going to look like? The Saturday before Pajama Sunday. I don't think that's going to be a standard Saturday night. If you haven't already, during the week, gone and found some new stylish pajamas because you know you're not going to wear that old mess you've been wearing. Before you go to bed, you print, maybe put on some kind of overnight makeup, I don't know. You get ready so that technically you can roll out of bed, but you know. It's kind of like when the in-laws are coming to town, I mean, you know they're family, but you still clean the house. If we can't be real on earthly things with our earthly family, how about going to be real about the deep matters of the family of God? We're worried about maybe some awkward birthmarks or unsightly cellulite, but God's calling us to reveal our souls to one another. Who's ready for the Pajama Sunday where you come dressed in your souls attire? I mean, people might look and say, I mean, they might actually see who I am. What then? Let's hear from God's words. In Corinthians 5, page 966 in your pew Bible, begin in verse 16, let's hear from the Lord. 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 newest 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. God's word, let's pray. Lord, we ask this morning, show us your love. Show us the joy of participating in that and your name we pray. Amen. Three things, problem, solution, application. How we fight, how God fights, kingdom fighting, number one, how we fight. You know what this is before we're doing this morning? The Bible calls this church. Literally, the Greek word means called out ones that we are called out, just think about that with me for a minute. You're called out from the places where you naturally are. You're called out from the places where there are people like you, where you're comfortable, from the places that are maybe pretty homogenous. People look a lot like you. We are called together, what does that mean about this body that gathers together? We are not naturally friends. As a matter of fact, there may be some people here that naturally you count as enemies. This is how DA Carson puts it. The church is not made up of natural friends, it's made up of natural, born enemies. It binds us together as not to common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of the sort. Christians come together not because they form a natural coalition, but because they have all been saved by Jesus Christ and owe him a common allegiance. Jesus put it quite simply. You will know my disciples by their love. How does that work? Natural enemies loving one another. People the world walking along and they see something over there, it doesn't make sense. Those people should be fighting, but look at how they love one another. What's that about? Maybe even I want in on that. The unity of the Christian community legitimates its proclamation when enemies love one another. It says something else is going on here, but we got a problem. Look at verse 16, formerly we lived life according to the flesh and the problem is we're still tempted in that direction. Whether it's outright pursuit of it, like the prodigal son we talked about last week or it's more subtle. We breathe this stuff in, we swim in it, we drink it in like fish, whether it's the man looking at the computer late at night at things he shouldn't be watching or a woman flipping through cosmopolitan or just walking down the mall or culture we're saturated with it. We breathe these things in. Tim Keller puts it this way, he said, pornography trains us to view things oppositely, to value things oppositely from how God does. That's what it is to live life according to the flesh, that we value things oppositely from how God does. I mean, there's plenty of examples of it in Scripture, remember Samuel? He's coming, he's been told the kings in the house of Jesse. So he goes to Jesse's house, he walks in, here comes the oldest son. He's good looking, ruddy, he's tall, commanding presence, clearly this is God's man, this is the new king. And God says, you silly little man, you look at the outside, I look at the inside, see you're appraising things by the surface, but I look at substance, I look at the heart, it's very different. Just think about Peter with me, Peter in Matthew 16 has this great confession that Jesus is the Christ. Jesus says, who do you say that I am? You're the Christ. Jesus says to him, flesh and blood did not reveal us to you, but my father who's in heaven. In other words, you didn't figure that out by looking at the outside. That is a spiritual truth, which comes from the Father. It's a substantive thing, it's true. But the problem is, Peter gets that answer right, but before the chapter's out, Christ is rebuking him as Satan. I mean, he gets the fill in the blank portion of the test and fails the essay section. I mean, this is us, 10 weeks, authentic community, authentic relationships. You've got new tools, you've got new vocab, you're going to use it to do the same old things, or is it heart level? Has there been substantive involvement? They come to arrest Jesus, Peter picks up his sword and laughs off this guy's ear, and Jesus says, wait a minute, hold on. That's how the world fights. See when you value things on the surface, that's how you fight. Third, external coercion, behavior modification through consequences. I'm going to make you do what I want you to do. That's not how I fight, Peter, put your sword away, watch how God fights. Watch this. Number two, solution, how God fights. Look at this with me. Verse 19, God is not counting men's sins against them. Now you need to notice something here. It doesn't say God stops counting. It doesn't say that God is not counting at all. It says he doesn't count their sins against them. It's important, especially in our world where it just says, you know, God's really loving. He just says, oh, forget about it, just come give me a hug. I had a philosophy professor who was a liberal Christian in college. Your class one day, you could tell I was barking about something that he said and he said, Russ, you're not one of those guys who believes in a score keeper, God, are you? It took me several years. I wish I had turned around to him and said, you believe in the cross, don't you? I mean, what's God doing there other than keeping score? He has a different kind of economy instead of making us pay. He pays. And it's not meant to be a guilt trip, he really wants to get rid of it for us. But God's mercy doesn't come at the expense of his justice. God's mercy comes on the edge of his justice. They come together. There is cost here. And man, who wants a love that doesn't cost? That's not real love. There's no embrace. What's God doing? Look at verse 21. If you're not a verse memorizer and it hasn't been enough testimony to have kids to come across the stage here, this is a verse to memorize. This is unbelievable. It's the burning heart of God. Paul's taking us to the edge, theologically. Listen to this. God made him who knew, no sin to be sin. What does that mean? God took a sinless man and made him to be sin. Let me try to put this on the map for you. About two weeks ago, Joseph Fritzel, a 73-year-old man in Austria, took his 19-year-old granddaughter to the hospital. She was unconscious. It was that singular act of mercy through which the truth began to unravel. Doctors asked questions, things that Joseph didn't want coming out began to come out. And as the news spread, it rippled out through Europe. See, a while back, when Joseph's daughter was just 11, his daughter, he began abusing her. He was violating her and by the time she was 18 and getting ready to leave for school, he knew he was in trouble because if she got out from his authoritarian hand and the way he ran that household, the truth would probably come out. So he decided to drug his daughter, take her down to the basement and build what amounted to a prison cell for her. I mean, he even put a keyboard so he had to have a code to get into it. And he told his family, basement is off limits. You can't go down there for 24 years. That woman did not see the light of day until two weeks ago. He fathered seven children by her. Three of those children until two weeks ago had never seen daylight. The other three, he brought up stairs as they were born. He forced his daughter to write letters to her own mother, lying saying that she was wandering Europe and she was abandoning these children because she couldn't take care of them and the grandparents should take care of them. So these three kids and their grandmother grew up in this house, not knowing that their relatives were downstairs the entire time. There was a seventh child who was still born and to get rid of the evidence, he brought it upstairs and incinerated it in the oven. Europe looked at this, the world looked at this and shutters at that kind of evil. It's reminiscent of the Holocaust. Let me ask you this. If Joseph Fritzel becomes a Christian, is the cross big enough? Is the cross big enough to redeem even that? Well, we're here this morning, aren't we? We believe that. We say, yes, of course it is. Let me push on that a little bit. We've been talking about it for a couple of weeks. How we tend to let our goodness come between us and God. I don't know about you, and I see something like that, a story like that. It disgusts me, but at the same time I look and I say, I'm glad I'm not as bad as that. I mean, you know, I'm not that bad of a person, and it's as though the response comes and says, well, Russ, didn't Jesus have to die for your sins, too? So here's the problem. The same act, the same act is applied to me along with every other Christian in history. To save us. And it's not that, you know, if Jesus would have just had his finger prect, it would have been enough for me. Capital punishment was necessary. I mean, I deserve death. Let me put that a different way to you. This is like me coming along and saying, you know, I need Jesus, but I'm no, I'm no fritzel. I'm no Hitler. I'm no bin Laden, but Christ comes to the Father. And he says, Father, so that they might come in, treat me like fritzel, treat me like Hitler, treat me like high tower. And my name gets right there on the list with the criminals on death row. The cross is a mirror. It's a mirror, whether we like it or not, it says, you are worse off than you want to believe. If we're going to talk about reconciliation, it has to start there. If we can't be honest as a family, we're in trouble. But the cross doesn't stop there. The reason I love this verse, the reason I think it's the burning heart of God is the other half of what this says. Not just that he made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God. You understand that? That means the cross is not just a mirror. It's also clothing. I put it a different way, Jesus is saying to the Father, treat me like what Russ deserves so that Russ will get what I deserve. Some of you have heard that before, you've heard, yeah, yeah, clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. His good deeds on me. Think with me. What does that mean? C.S. Lewis put it this way. We're gathered here this morning. If you could look around and right now see your brothers and sisters in Christ like they will be in God's presence. When they are robed with Christ's goodness, he said, we would be tempted to worship one another. And I'll put it as sin-clair Ferguson said, it's almost like I spend my time getting so angry at people, just I hate this guy. But if we were seeing them as God's making them, I mean that day's going to come and I'm going to say, I'm sorry. I just, I didn't know who you are. I didn't know what God was doing with your life. The cross is both a mirror and clothing. And until we get that good news, until we understand the trade that God is making with us, we're always going to look down our nose to other people, we're always going to be alienated. But if the cross lays us low to bring us high, the world says you can't be confident unless you're not weak. If you're weak, you're humble, you're humiliated, you can't be confident. The cross is the one place where we are absolutely humiliated and we are absolutely confident. To the degree that you get that and only to the degree that you get that, we'll be ready to apply this. So let's look at that number three. Kingdom fighters, look at verse 17. New creation. What does it mean to be a new creation? If anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation. I love how Scotty Smith points this out. Originally, the pronoun in verb aren't there. It says, if anyone's in Christ, new creation. In other words, we normally think, well, if you're in Christ and you're in Christ and you're in Christ, you know, you individually have been transformed and that's great. It's saying something so much more than that. God is about the project of redeeming all of creation, not just you individually, not just psychologically, naturally, sociologically, ecosystems, governmental systems, spiritually, all of existence, to bring his kingdom forth. I mean, what is a kingdom? But the place where the king has his reign and rule. Christ came to usher in his kingdom, to usher in his reign and rule because there's anarchy and suffering without the rightful king. We are called to be agents of the kingdom. As we receive his love, we begin to go out and bring the kingdom to the world. Look at us, verse 20, it says, as the gods making his appeal through us as ambassadors, ambassadors. If George Bush calls you this afternoon and says, hey, you know what? Need an ambassador in Trinidad? That sounds pretty good. You go down to Trinidad, you're in a foreign country and you represent the full authority of the office of the presidency of the United States. You are the representative of the executive office of the reign and rule, the sovereignty of the United States. This isn't colonialism, this isn't rule over people. It isn't just knock the door down, it isn't Peter pulling out the sword. What does it mean for us to be ambassadors? What method do we use to bring his kingdom forward? Same one he used, not counting men's sins against them. You want to know how well you understand the cross? Let's push on this a little bit. When somebody wrongs you, do you keep the tally back of your mind? Do you keep the tally angry at them? Do you want to make them pay for how they've treated you? That's the opposite of what the kingdom's about here. When Jesus tells basically creates an image, remember a couple weeks ago I told the funny story about turning the other cheek, but literally that image in Scripture is one of two men in the public marketplace. One man open handed, smacks the other right across his face, humiliation, shaming him in public. And when Scripture says, turn the other cheek, it's not saying defiantly or arrogantly. It's saying you return to the same position, which allows you to be struck again. This man has come full force across his face, but in order for him to hit him again, he's got a backhand him. It's a whole different category, it's a whole different level of shame. How is the kingdom fought for? Christians, we are called to make ourselves vulnerable, not to build up our own name, our own reputation, but to make ourselves vulnerable for the sake of the kingdom. You know what that looks like? When are we most vulnerable? And what has Christ called us to do to repent of our sins? I mean, if I recognize, I might as well be fritzel when it comes to me and God. Then I lead the world in repentance. What does that look like? Donald Miller tells a story in blue like jazz of being at this liberal campus in northwestern United States. And there was the big party week every year, and on this, they put party out of this one section of town, and he and his friends decided they were going to put a confession booth out there. And they put a confession booth out on these drunk college students are coming by and they're saying, what is this? You think I'm going to confess my sins to you? And he said, no. No, we want to confess our sins to you. They were stunned. Students came in and they confessed what the church had done wrong. They confessed what they individually were doing wrong. They were blown away. These people weren't pointing at themselves. It wasn't some secret trick to self-aggrandize or self-serving love. There was nothing in it for them except the glory of Christ, a point people to God's love. Why? Because that's what he did for them. See, the word reconciliation literally means exchange. Think of a currency exchange. If you go to another country and you've got a trade currency, what kind of currency is Christ trading? The world's currency, nails and thorns, and Christ takes those and he gives his currency life. And that's the trade that we would go out and deal in that currency because we've been given life. We take nails and thorns and we pass out life. George Whitfield's a famous pastor, the great awakening. But when he was a little boy, he said, one time he wrote in his journal he got a pot and a spoon. And in the middle of the church service, he ran around the outside of the church, beating up this thing, purposefully tried to disrupt the church service. And elder was sent out to deal with him. And you can imagine this elder coming out and grabbing him, boy, looking in the eye, are you out of your mind? That's not what he said. This elder was a kingdom fighter. He understood his heart was broken for this little boy because he saw his own sins and how he deals with God. He looked at him and he said, son, I can't wait to see what God does with that passion when he gets a hold of it. It's a whole different ball game. When instead of making them pay for their mistakes, we return with the love of Christ. We pay the cost. I don't really want to apply this. You know, we kind of been jokingly making fun of Clay here because he's going to London. And I went to London last year, you know, mission trips. If you haven't been on one, or even if you've been on one, you hated it. It's a unique gift. And what is a mission trip? You are putting yourself out there. You are losing vacation, pay, time, maybe a break that you would have. You were willingly giving that stuff up. Who would do that? We put ourselves out there. You put yourself out there in a position where you have to trust God. I mean, who wants to do that? A couple of years ago, four boys in the youth group wanted to go to Uganda. I didn't want to go to Uganda. I knew it was going to be hard. But how can a youth pastor not be willing to step up? It was shame to me. We went. I hated it in the first few days. It was awful. It was hard. By the end, my life was transformed by what God did and something I didn't want to do and something I knew I wasn't accomplishing. Three weeks of my life that I wouldn't trade for a million dollars because I grew more in those three weeks spiritually than I'd only grown a year. Who puts themselves in a position to depend on God? I mean, this is why the world stops. You ever seen, imagine you're out in the country. You ever seen a turtle on a fence post just sitting there on a fence post. What do you know if a turtle is on a fence post? Didn't get there by itself. Jump right up there, you know? Somebody picked it up and put it there. That's the Christian calling. We are turtles on fence post. There's no way we can do this. We put ourselves in a position where it's God or it's nothing. I can't take credit for this. When we get kingdom fighting, we might lose our reputation. We might lose our job. We might lose everything that the world says matters. So the people would look and say, what is that? And how are you enjoying that? Charlie Hangline, ruling elder at Coral Ridge Presbyterian. Say, if you know him, he would tell you, I'm just an old boy from Kentucky, which meant you better watch your wallet and watch yourself when you're around him. Because he was the kind of guy who set goals and he was tenacious. He went after it. He was part of the church's prison ministry and he was always there serving ministry because he had a hard life. The one point in that life, his daughter was kidnapped and murdered and they found her body floating in a river. And when the authorities finally caught the guy and he was brought to justice and put in that prison, Charlie didn't avoid him. He didn't go right up to him and say, I hope you right. He made it his number one agenda to love his daughter's murderer into the kingdom of God. Who does that? I mean, wouldn't Revenge be just to let him rot in hell? For this life and the next, I mean, who wants to spend eternity with the man who murdered your daughter? Charlie Hangline got it at a gut level, wasn't just Vokab, wasn't just a small group series. He wanted to know. He understood the church is nothing but natural-born enemies that God has called together. He understood that God takes natural-born enemies and he makes them into family. Not just family, into the very bride of Christ. You will know my disciples bought their love. What does a bride look like going to a wedding? Elie Vizel, the Romanian Jew, famous Nobel Prize-winning author, who lived through Auschwitz, wrote that the most amazing thing he saw in the Nazi death camps was when a group of Christians who knew they were going to the gas chamber, saying, hymns of joy all the way there. Why? Why would somebody sing knowing that they're going to their death? Who doesn't sing on the way to their wedding if we understand life is about giving it away and not clamoring to keep what little we can try and grab? Life is about the trade and that's how you become a turtle on a fence post. As Flannery O'Connor put it, you show no the truth and the truth will make you odd a turtle. Here I stand. I can do no other. Let's pray. Father, we struggle to see the wedding, Lord. I know there are people here this morning who know their natural-born enemies and they, it's irreconcilable differences. There's no way. There's no way. Or melt our hearts. Melt our hearts like for that elder seeing a little kid run around with a pie. Or melt our hearts that we would know our brothers sin as the same as ours. That we would rejoice that you redeem us out of the pit and set our feet on the rock. Or bring us in. Brothers and sisters, give us this ministry of reconciliation from now until you come back and your name. Amen.