Good morning, everyone. I'm glad I see you this morning. Thanks for coming out on this rainy day. I drove back to Jackson last night. It was raining the whole way. It was the nightmare. If you have a Bible, you want to turn with me, please, to the book of 2 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians chapter 5. It's on page 966 in the Bibles in front of you, page 966. I'm going to read to you from this passage beginning in verse 16 of 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Here now the word of God. 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. 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 Christ's behalf, 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. May God add His rich blessing to the reading of His Word. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray together. Our Lord Jesus, we've just read words that were written by your Apostle thousands of years ago. And we live in our day facing our own challenges, our own needs, our own desires. But we believe that this Word from your Apostle is for us even today. We turn to you because we call no one our teacher but you. We hope in no one like we hope in you. We long to see no one like we long to see you. And we're asking you now to send Holy Spirit to us. May your spirit come and may He fill each heart in this room during this time, so that we may see your truth, that we may hear you speak, and that our hearts may be softened and responsive to your Word. And as you do that, we promise you. We promise you the praise and the glory for it. Amen. This weekend, the theme of your mission's conference has been that the mission of Christianity is a call to war. Now, that might have seemed a little strange to you if you saw that announced in the Bulletin last week. But in the heart of the matter is this, we are called as followers of Jesus to be in conflict, in conflict with the world around us. And as we face that conflict as followers of Christ, there are certain things we have to remember because it's not an ordinary kind of conflict, not an ordinary kind of battle. But it is our mission. It's the mission of every man, every woman, and every child who has been called by Jesus to himself to engage in a battle for the world. Now, if you've ever met anyone that you had a conflict with, you know how natural it is to react to that conflict in one of two ways. First way we usually do, when we have a conflict with someone who gets mad at us or stops us from doing something we want to do or objects to something we want to do, the first thing we normally do is we become angry. And we lash back at them. Is that ever happened to you? Yeah, okay. Good. So I happens here in Columbus, Mississippi, too. Yeah, it's normal in your family, in your marriage, in your friendships, even in the church. People will become angry and they'll lash back at someone who opposes them. Then there's a foot side of that. There's a second way we often respond to opposition or to conflict with other people. And that is to shut them down, to just cut them off and to leave them alone. I don't know what it's like for you, but in my home, when we sit around and watch the news, my wife, so funny. It's supposed to be my job to do this, but my wife has decided it's her job to yell at the television. You have anybody in your home that yells at the news? I keep on telling her, nobody can hear you. Only me. And I'm sitting right next to you. Turn the volume down a little bit. No, the reality is, is that's natural. You look at the news, you see things you don't like, and so you just want to lash out at somebody. And so what we end up doing in our home after a few minutes of that is, guess what? Turn the TV off. I mean, that's the natural reaction. Either you lash back, you strike back, or you just turn it off. And act like it's not happening. Doesn't that happen to you all the time? Well, in this conflict that we're involved with as followers of Jesus, it's natural. It's normal for you either to lash out at the world around you, or simply to turn them off and act like they don't exist anymore. Like the problems aren't there anymore, but there is a third way. And that's what we want to explore today. There's a third way to deal with the conflicts in your personal life, a third way to deal with the conflicts in Columbus, in this church, in the world. And even a third way to deal with the conflict that arises between the Christian faith and the world that refuses to follow Jesus, a third way. And this passage we just read promotes that third way. Now, this is a passage in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, where the Apostle Paul is opening his heart up in ways that he normally doesn't. Normally he sort of keeps things pretty close to the chest, but right here he's been talking in the previous chapter about how hard his life has been, and how everywhere he's gone, he has faced conflict. It did not matter where he went, what he did, what he said to people, they would beat him up, they would throw him in prison, they would reject him, they would leave him for dead. And that even happened to him as he dealt with churches, much less with the world around him. And so as he talks about the opposition and the conflict that he faced, he opens his heart up to say how it is that he keeps from lashing out at people, and how he keeps from turning them off and acting like they're not there anymore, and finds a third way. And maybe if we can see what he did in his own life, and follow his example, we can discover how you and I right now today can actually follow that third path as well. There's several things that I want to suggest to you that are in this passage, you're just going to touch on a few things here, but they're ever so important, and for the mission, but even just for your own personal life, whether you're engaged in some kind of outreach or not, whether you're just dealing with your own kids or not, the third way applies to all of those kinds of situations where you come into conflict. Well, here's the first thing the Apostle Paul said, the way I deal with the conflict, the battle of the mission of Jesus Christ is I remind myself that I'm a changed person. I'm changed, and that gives me a third way. Listen to how he describes that in verse 17. We've all heard, verse 17, if you've been around the Christian faith much, you've heard this verse before, chapter 5 verse 17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. Now, the Christian faith teaches this, it teaches that if men and women and children will just come to Jesus, they actually become new creatures, they become new creation, they enter into a new way of life, and that change can sometimes be very dramatic. It changes your priorities, when you come to Jesus, your priorities change, it changes your moral condition, the things that you think are important to do, the things that are not important to do, it changes your life and sometimes the most radical ways you can possibly imagine. And some of you here can remember when that happened to you. I can remember in my own life, having heard the truth of Jesus having even been in the church my whole life, then suddenly one day the word about Jesus became alive for me, and I was changed from the inside out.
But the apostle Paul in this passage has a particular kind of change in mind. Yes, it's true that when you become a new creature, a new creation in Jesus, all kinds of things change, but his focus is on one thing in particular, and it's in the verse that comes just before it, verse 16. Listen to what he says, he says, 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. In effect, this is what Paul is saying, when you come to Jesus, you change. But one of the ways you change is you change in the ways that you look at other people. And you know what he has in mind, because just think about what it means. When you say, how does the world, or how does according to the flesh, or the worldly point of view, how do people look at other people? Well, if you think of the human race like a big pie, you know what we do with it. We start slicing the pie. We slice it between people who are rich and poor, and people who are like us and not like us, people who go to church, you don't go to church, people who have education, and people who don't have education, people who are healthy and well, and those kinds of things, we start slicing up the pie. People who are close to us, and people are far away, and the reason we slice it up this way is because it's our way of evaluating just how important those people should be in our lives. That's looking at the world, that's looking at people according to the flesh to use the language that this passage. And in fact, the apostle says, you know, before I became a follower of Jesus, I actually looked at Jesus that way, according to all those different categories that we normally put on other people. And then think about that for a minute. Jesus, how does he measure up to the ways you and I normally think about the people around us? I hate to tell you this, but he was not an American. He did not speak English. I really don't want to tell you this, but he didn't have a penny in his pocket. He did not dress well. He was not well kept. He was not the kind of person that you would expect to walk into a church like this on a Sunday morning. He was not respectable. But you and I are people who are now changed in the ways we look at Jesus because the one that we would naturally reject and say is unimportant has suddenly become the Lord of our lives, the master of everything, the king of the universe from our point of view. Why? Because we're changed people. And we've changed the ways we look at people. And what the apostle Paul is saying here is that if you've changed the way you look at Jesus, you need to be changing the ways you look at other people too. You know, think about the ways even that biological change in you changes the way you look at people around you, you know, toddlers. When toddlers think about the human race, how do they think about the human race? Well, they think about other toddlers and then they think about all the big people that are always saying no, right? That's the human race for a toddler. You become a teenager. What do you think of the human race? You think in terms of boys and girls. How do you become a single adult? What do you think about? Well, married and unmarried. That's the whole human race. You become a parent. You're thinking about people that have kids and people that don't have kids. That's sort of the way you look at the world. You become a grandparent. There are only two kinds of people in the world. Grandparents and grandchildren. Nobody else counts. Nobody else exists as far as we're concerned. I can tell you that right now. But the reality is, as you go through biological changes, your views of the human race change. If that's true, if the changes that go in biology, as you just grow up in mature, how much more should our attitudes and our outlooks toward people change when we become new creation in Jesus? How much more for those who have now said, Jesus is my Lord, should our attitudes and outlooks toward the human race change? Think of that big pie called the human race again. And rather than slicing it a million ways, start slicing it the way Jesus did. Slice it like a person who's a part of a new creation in Jesus. And when you do that, you slice it once and once only. Those who are in Christ and those who are in need of Christ. Those who are in your Christian family and those who ought to be in your Christian family, it's as simple as that. Now, unfortunately, when you enter into the conflict with the world, when you actually refuse to turn them off or to lash out at them when they resist you and resist the ways of Christ, we often fall back into the old ways, don't we? We often think to ourselves, well, you know, they're having all those troubles over there in the Middle East and they're just all crazy anyway. And so you either lash out at them or turn off the TV. You think about the problems here in the state of Mississippi and you say to yourselves, well, either you lash out at them or you turn them off because I'm just not going to deal with them. And often that is because, rather than identifying ourselves as followers of Jesus and distinguishing ourselves as followers of Christ and the world as people who be Christ, what we're doing instead is thinking much more in terms of, are they Americans or not? Do they speak my language or not? Are they of my ethnicity or not? Do they dress like me? Do they go to the same social circles that I go to? Do I want their kids around my kids? Do they have as much money as I have? Do they speak proper English like I do? Are they educated like I am? And so long as you think that way, you're going to be forced into lashing out at them or turning them off and ignoring them. But the call of Jesus is to a third way and the third way begins with you and me being changed in the ways that we look at people. The people you see as you walk down the streets here of Columbus, as you go to Starkville, as you go to the mall, the people you see with your eyes are of two categories and you need to change to believe this. They are either in Jesus or they are in need of Jesus. The third way begins by you and me being different than what we naturally are. But the apostle goes on, he says, okay, in this world of conflict I'm a part of just because I like Jesus and just because I follow him, I have to remind myself constantly I'm a changed person and I've changed in the ways I look at other people. But then he says something else about himself. He says, yes, I'm called. I'm changed. Yes, but I'm also called called to something. Listen to the way he describes his calling. It begins really or comes up in a big way in verse 20. He says, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. God making his appeal through us. The apostle says, I'm an ambassador. I've been called to something. I've been put on a mission. I've got a role to play in this role. I've got a job to do. And the best way to describe that is I am an ambassador. Now in the verses that come just before that in 18 and 19, he also says that this ambassador ship that he has. He describes it as a ministry of reconciliation, a ministry of reconciliation. Wow, that's a big title to have. Ministry of reconciliation, you can think of it like this. A minister of reconciliation is somebody that stands between two enemies like in a family therapy session. The couple comes in. They're all mad at each other. And the minister of reconciliation stands in the middle and tries to establish peace between the husband and the wife. That's what the apostle Paul says. He's been called to do but not establish peace between people. No, that's not his job. He's an ambassador for Christ. God speaking through him. And so the reconciliation he's talking about is making peace between God and people. God and people and him in the middle of all of that. You see when people turn away from God, they actually make themselves the enemies of God. When people rebel against Jesus, they make themselves the enemies of Jesus. And they actually become the objects of God's judgment. Both here in this world and in the world to come. And the role of a follower of Jesus, the calling that we have every single one of us is to understand that we have been put into place of bringing reconciliation. Reconciliation between the God of heaven and earth and people who rebel against them. Now when I hear that and I think about what that might mean for my life, do you know what my response is? Yuck. No, thank you. I don't want it. I mentioned last night that I don't like to get my hair cut because people always ask me what I do. And that brings up the subject of Jesus. I also do like to write an airplanes because if the person sitting next to me, I've got this deal with Jesus that if the person sitting next to me speaks to me, I have to speak back if they don't speak, I don't have to. So I'm walking in there please don't sit next to me, please don't sit next to me. And if they sit down and take please don't talk, please don't talk, please don't talk. But often they do. And when that happens, what I don't want to do, what does not come naturally to me, what's strange to me, embarrassing to me, hard for me, is that I have to start talking to them. And I have to look for opportunities to let them know what I believe. You know sometimes on our day-to-day lives we sort of reject this idea that we should get in the middle of God and people because, well, that's the preacher's job. Or that's the expert's job, but really, it's not that hard of a thing to do. All you have to do is just open your heart up just a little bit and let people see what's important to you. What you value, you don't have to have all these great arguments, you don't have to be able to outsmart the person sitting next to you, all you have to do is just open your life up to them a little bit and let them know what you do with your life. Hey, how are you? Well, I'm good, how are you doing? Where are you from? Columbus, Mississippi? What do you do? Well, I do this and I do that. It's pretty good. Ole Miss did pretty good this year, didn't they? Yeah, they did great. Mr. State did great today. Yeah, they did great on that football game. Plains landing, hurry up, please. Plains landing, hurry up, please. Because I don't want to talk about anything else. Is that what your life is about? Is that who you are? Did you live in Columbus, Mississippi? Did you care about what happens to the Mississippi State football team or the Ole Miss football team or role tied Alabama? I mean, is that really who you are? Or is that a cover-up? So you don't have to open up your life to let somebody know what's really important to you and by that I mean Jesus. You see the Apostle Paul says, there's a third wave for me. I'm not going to lash out at them. This strange person sitting next to me. I'm not going to turn them off and ignore them either. What I'm going to do is be at a minister of reconciliation and ambassador. I remember the first time I ever met an ambassador. It was Shirley Temple. Many people don't know this, but Shirley Temple Black, that was her married name, the little movie star Shirley Temple. She was an ambassador to Czechoslovakia. It was called at the time and I was there on a short-term mission trip and Senator Trent Lott and Mississippi had arranged for us to meet her. So we're all going there and I don't know why they asked me this, but the group I'm sitting in the back of the car putting on my shoes and socks because we're in a hurry. And they said, Rich, what are you going to say? I said, I'm not going to say anything. They said, no, no, you got to say something. You're the professor. Well, I know what I'm going to say. I'm going to ask her to sing Good Ship Lollipop. You don't know me very well, but that's exactly the kind of thing I would do. Well, would you sing Good Ship Lollipop for us? So I'm going through trying to remember the words of the song on the Good Ship Lollipop because I'm going to capture when she messes up the words. I got it in my head. And I walk up to that embassy and behind this big, plexiglass window is the meanest, biggest, ugliest marine I've ever met in my entire life standing there. And I'm still doing this Good Ship Lollipop and he stares me down and stares me down and stares me down until I, like this, meek and mild. They march us up to her office. Her office is as big as this half of this room here. It was an amazing office. She wasn't in the room. Everybody else was from Mississippi, and I'm not. And so they all knew how to be polite. So they all sat down and put their hands in their laps and just waited for the ambassador to come, not me. I went around the room looking at things. And what I realized was, as I went around the room, that there were photographs of her. And photographs of her with Ronald Reagan and with George Bush and with the clean of England and with Mount St. Dong and people like that. It wasn't like she was purchasing before the clean of England. They had their arms around each other drinking champagne. And as that happened, I began to realize, wait a minute, this woman is really important. And about that time the big French doors opened up like this and in walked little Miss Shirley Temple Black. Teenie tiny little woman walked in and there was this big parting of the Red Sea. The crowds stood up and they opened up the pathway for me because I was on the other end of the room. And I was just to walk down this path and meet Miss Shirley Temple Black. And as I did a couple of students from the seminary were doing this, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard. They wanted that good ship lollipop thing so badly. I walked up to her and I put my hand out and I said, how do you do Madam Ambassador? It's a privilege to be here today. I did not dare say would you sing the good ship lollipop. Because I realized that I was talking to a woman who's talking to the leaders of the world, who's a friend of presidents and kings and queens and dictators around the world. I knew she was someone important and that what she did with her time and energy was something that was significant to the history of the world. Well, here's some good news about you. When you get in that airplane, when you're walking in the mall, when you're sitting down and talking to this person here and that person there, you're not doing something that's insignificant. You have been called as an ambassador for the king of the universe. Shirley Temple Black has nothing over you. That's for sure. She was the ambassador of a country that's going to come and go like every other country has ever come and gone. But you are representative of the one whose kingdom will never fail. What more honor could you possibly want than for someone to sit down with you and start a conversation with you and give you the opportunity to tell them about the way of reconciliation with God? It is as if God himself were speaking through you and all you have to do is open your heart. So the next time you have a barbecue in your backyard, don't just invite people from Main Street Presbyterian Church. Invite someone that you know does not know Jesus and bring them into it. The next time you have a Christmas party, the next time you have a concert here at this church, the next time you do anything that's social, make sure that you're going to be in a spot where you can open your heart up to someone and say, I know something that's important for you to know. It's what I believe about Jesus because you have been called to be an ambassador of Jesus to the world. That's where the mission begins, you see, is with you realizing first that you've changed your attitudes toward people, a second that you've been called to actually tell people, tell them about Jesus. You see if you can realize that you are called by God to this great honor, you won't lash out at them anymore for being different from you, for having different values in you, for looking different and talking different. You won't lash anymore and you won't turn them off, you'll find the third way. But then the apostle goes on, he says, yes, I've been changed and that put me on a path for dealing with this opposition that's solid and a third way. And also, I've been called to something that's unbelievable and ambassador for Christ, but then he says it's the third thing. I've learned to care about people. This is the way he describes that caring about people, verse 20 again. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us, we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. Now, when I was a child, I learned that verse, that last verse there in King James and some of you probably did too. It says, we besiege thee, be reconciled to God, say yes somebody. Uh-huh, there you go. You can actually do it if somebody asks you to, can't you? Yeah, we besiege thee, be reconciled to God, be siege, okay. Employ, this Bible says, others will say plead. What does he not say? We tell you, be reconciled to God. We share with you, be reconciled to God. We command you, be reconciled to God. We yell at you, be reconciled to God. No, it's not what he says. What he says is, we implore you, we plead with you, we besiege you, be reconciled to God. And what does that show? That shows the attitude that he has. It shows what he's feeling for the person sitting next to him in that airplane. What he's feeling about the person who's at Starbucks with him. What he feels about that next door neighbor that you waved to a thousand times and never spoken to about Jesus. It's what he's feeling about them is that he cares about them. Think about it this way, you know what happens when you have rebellious teenagers. If you've had a teenager, you've had one, okay. And you know, if they start doing things that are really bad, you know the normal natural reaction. The first thing you do as a parent, as a good parent, is you're getting mad at them. And you'll lash out at them. Yes? And if they don't change, then what do you do? Well, you turn them off. All right, let them go on. We'll see what happens. But after a while, if those two approaches don't work, you come to a third way. Because as they drift further and further from Christ, as they further and further into self-destruction, you know what starts happening to any parent that cares about his or her child. You know what will start happening. You'll begin to plead with them. Please don't do this. You don't know what's going to happen to you if you continue following this path. Please stop. Please come back. You see, that's what loving kind parents do. Because they care about their children. And that's what loving kind neighbors do also. That's what loving kind Presbyterian churches do as well. That's what loving kind employers do. That is what loving kind employees do. That's what children do to their parents. And that's what parents do to their children. It's what next door neighbors do to their next door neighbor. Is that they care enough about the other person to risk actually going to them in the hopes that they will come to Jesus. You see, when you don't care about people, and they do something that comes into conflict with your values and your hopes and your dreams for the world, then it's natural just to fight back as hard as you can. Or it's natural to just shut them off and ignore them. But the third way in Jesus is to treat other people the way Jesus has treated you. Where would you be today? If Jesus lashed out at you, where would you be today? If Jesus just turned you off, where would you be today? If Jesus was not a minister of reconciliation who cared about you. Well, if you have seen Jesus do that to you, it's time now for you to do it to others. The mission's conference like this. The nice flags, the displays in the back, they will remind you that this church has a far reach that you are helping people who are serving Christ in very distant lands. But the reality is the battle, the call to war, the mission is not just out there. The mission is right here. If you want to help out there, it begins with you, with you deciding today that you want to be in the battle. And that you're not going to lash out anymore. You're not going to ignore them anymore because you're a changed person. You've been called by God to speak His words to people. And because you care, let's pray together. Our Lord Jesus, we delight in the fact that you are new creation. We delight in the fact that you are the ambassador of God. We delight in the fact that you care. Holy Spirit, our prayer is simple. We just can't do this to ourselves. We can't muster the strength to go to battle in the third way. But we're coming to you now, Holy Spirit, with a simple but life-changing prayer. Make us like Jesus and bring glory to your name. Amen.