May 7, 2023
Share Christ
2 Corinthians 5:18-21
This week we are finishing our sermon series entitled “We Exist to …” in which we’ve been looking at how First Baptist Church here in Bloomfield, NM carries out the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. This mission is carried out by following the simple mission statement “Gather, Grow, Serve, and Share”. We have seen that this process looks a lot like a funnel with many people taking part in the first step of gathering worshipers, fewer people participating in growing as disciples, and we see even fewer people serve others. Today we are going to be looking at the very last step - the step that we see the fewest people participate in and that is “Share Jesus”. We have talked about sharing Jesus many times from the pulpit. We’ve talked about “Who’s your one?”, “Who’s next?”, and here at FBC “It’s all about the Gospel”. Today I want to take a little different look at how we are to share Jesus. When we think about this step of sharing Jesus with others, it might seem that few people participate because sharing Jesus with others could be scary. It is possible we are worried that we won’t know what to say when sharing, that they will ask us a question that we won’t know the answer to, or maybe we are just uncomfortable with bringing it up as a topic. I think the reason so few people participate in really sharing Jesus is not because of an intellectual worry entirely. Rather it is because of our understanding of everything that encompasses sharing Jesus. This morning I would like to look at 2 Corinthians. Paul shares the call to "Share Jesus" in a way to help those at the church in Corinth understand not only it's significance but church members importance and role in God’s great calling to every christian - the call to "Share Jesus".
Our Experience - 2 Corinthians 5:18a
18a And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ.
The first thing we must understand is that in order to share Jesus (or evangelize) we must have experienced the saving work of Jesus Christ in our own lives first. This might go without saying, but Paul mentions it here as a point of importance so we need to look at it as well. Paul starts off in this passage by saying that “all this” is a gift, but what is “all this”? We see words like “all this” or “therefore” many times in scripture and when we do we always need to look back at what we have just read to make sure we understand what point the writer is getting at. Paul here is referring to the blessings we get from making Jesus the Lord of our lives. Paul talks about those blessings starting at the beginning of chapter 5. He talks about the new bodies we are going to get once this body wears out. In 2 Corinthians 5:4 he uses an amazing phrase to describe this when He says “... these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life”. He speaks of the Holy Spirit being given to us giving us confidence about these new bodies which are awaiting us. He speaks of the judgment of Christ on believers. This is not a judgment of condemnation (Romans 8:1), but rather a reward for how we have stewarded things God has entrusted to us in this life. Paul speaks of Christ's love that should control us since our old lives are gone for Jesus has brought us into new life. Lastly, he mentions that our new life has brought us a new viewpoint of things in this world. This is very important because it’s this new viewpoint that we look at "Sharing Jesus". It’s all because of Christ that we get to experience these amazing blessings (and this isn’t an exhaustive list of the grace and mercies God lavishes on His children). Then Paul mentions exactly how God brought these blessings to us - He did so through Christ Jesus. He used Jesus to bring us back to Himself, or reconcile us to Him. This reconciliation is something that is the basis for our call to "Share Jesus" so let’s take a moment to explain exactly what it is.
Romans 5 tells us that we were enemies of God, we have all sinned against Him, and we all (at some point) loved the things of this world more than God. That made us His enemies (James 4:4). This created enmity between God and us (a chasm if you will) and something needed to be done. That’s where reconciliation comes in, and somehow this enmity had to be dealt with. Outside of scripture we can see throughout history that man has tried for millennia to make things right with God. They’ve come up with all sorts of man-made religions to try to remedy this problem, but none of them can fix the problem that we created between God and ourselves. Romans 5:10 tells us that God reconciled (made things right) with us through the death of Jesus and that we are saved through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as well. Jesus' death wasn’t automatic reconciliation for everyone, but rather it made a way for us to be reconciled with God. We are reconciled with God when we make Jesus the Lord of our lives (Romans 10:9). It’s the only way to be made right with God and it’s only when we have experienced reconciliation with God that we are going to be able to share Jesus with others. In order to testify to what God has done in our lives as well as what He can and will do in others' lives too, we must have experienced it first, we must be born again.
Our Mission - 2 Corinthians 5:18b - 20a
18b And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. 19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. 20 So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us.
It is in light of what God has done in us through the work of Jesus Christ, that we are given the Great Commission. It’s not just a commission for the church at large rather it’s for every one of us who makes up the church as well. On the surface this might seem like an overwhelming assignment, but rest assured God knows what He’s doing when He gave us this task. In order to understand the gravity of this assignment, we need to look at Paul’s title for us as we carry out this task: He calls us Christ’s ambassadors. What an honor to be Christ’s ambassadors. Everyone and every method God could have chosen to take His message of reconciliation to the world He chose us. He chose us to tell the world that through Jesus, God would no longer count their sins against them. The fact that He chose us is hard to fathom because throughout the entirety of Scripture God’s chosen method to deliver messages was usually through angels (The greek word for angel literally means messenger). That’s not what He chose when it comes to delivering the most important message to all of mankind - the message that we can be reconciled to God. God wanted someone who had experienced it themselves so they could tell of the new life they had experienced themselves through Jesus. Jesus didn’t die for the angels, but for all mankind. That’s why He chose us. God didn’t command us to go out and just hire a group of smooth talking salesmen to share this message either. It’s not something that can be read from a card or from a script. It's a message that is to be proclaimed by those who have experienced it first hand. This title of ambassador goes way beyond just the message that we bring (even though that’s what we are talking about specifically here). It’s about the life we live, the attitudes we have, and all of us representing all of the Kingdom God has appointed us to be ambassadors for. It’s possible that living out the life of an ambassador is a reason so few people make it this far along in the process of the mission here at FBC.
Learning how to share Jesus is not hard - it’s really not. There are many different ways to share Jesus with people. We just need to find the one that suits our skills and giftedness and start sharing. We can get over being nervous about sharing by practicing. Remember how nervous you were when you first got behind a steering wheel? Now look at you. You don’t even think twice when you get in a vehicle to drive. There must be something else that keeps us from following the call to share Jesus. Maybe we don’t think we can live up to the calling of an ambassador of Christ and all that it entails (our entire life). We need to understand that no matter if we think we can do it or not, God knows we can. That’s why He has entrusted this precious message into our hands. It’s also in this calling that we find our worth and our purpose in life. God knows we were valuable enough to send Jesus to die for us. That in and of itself defines our value forever. We are priceless to God, but just to add to our view of how God sees our worth, we need to know that God trusts us because He has given us the most precious and powerful message that any man, woman, or child will ever hear. That’s how God has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ. That trust and the fact that He has appointed us ambassadors should show you how much God values you. It’s in this assignment that we find our purpose in life as well. To be an ambassador for a country you would have to know the leader whom you represent very well in order to be entrusted with the message he wants to deliver. You must know that it’s not your authority that you are carrying this message with, but the ruler you represent. You must know them, their values, their reasons, and you must have a healthy relationship with them in order to be able to be an effective ambassador. That is not all, you must actually carry out the mission and deliver their message to everyone you are called to share it with. This is why we are called ambassadors. This is our purpose in life - to know God more and more and to share His message of reconciliation with those who are still His enemies. It can be a scary thought, but we need to realize because we are ambassadors, it’s not our message that we are carrying to the world. It’s the message of the One we serve, and it’s in His power that we share when we share Jesus.
Our Message - 2 Corinthians 5:20b - 21
20b We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” 21 For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
Once we understand what we experienced when we were saved (including that new viewpoint God has given us) and our appointed position as an ambassador for Christ, there is only one thing left to do - to deliver the message. Our message can be delivered in many different ways, after all, God equipped us all differently. While the methods may change, the message never does because the Gospel never changes. We have all rebelled against God and turned our backs on Him, but God has never moved. We must tell others to come back to Him through the only way possible, the way God prepared Himself, and that’s through the way of the cross. We must tell people that we have all sinned (rebelled) and have fallen short of God’s standard (Romans 3:23). We must make it known that the wages of those sins is death (Romans 6:23), and that there is nothing we can do to redeem ourselves (Psalms 49:7). How can someone come back to God? Look at verse 21, Jesus took the punishment that we deserved so we could come back to God. It can only happen through Christ. Romans 10:9 says If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. This is the message of reconciliation that was entrusted to Paul to preach, it is the message that was entrusted to John, to Peter, to the many brave missionaries that we read about all throughout history as they spread the Gospel throughout the entire world, and it’s the message that’s been entrusted to you and to me. We must be diligent as ambassadors to carry out our mission (a mission of peace) with honor, persistence, and the power of the One we represent. We are ambassadors of Christ.
That’s it. That’s the mission statement of First Baptist Church in Bloomfield, NM. It’s to Gather, Grow, Serve, and Share. It seems to be extremely simple, yet when we looked closer there is more to this mission than meets the eye. My prayer for our church is that more and more people will continue along this journey - to take the next step in our walk with Jesus, to not forsake the gathering of worshipers, to be intentional as we grow as disciples (and help others grow as well), that we will serve selflessly just as Jesus did, and that we will step up into our role as ambassadors and take the message of reconciliation to the entire world. When we do, we will add more and more people into the first step of the process and God’s Kingdom will continue to grow, not because of what we have done, but because of what God has done through our faithful obedience to Him.
