ambassadors

“...he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors,
as though God were making his appeal through us.”
2 Cor. 5:19-20 NIV

I can’t help it. I watch people at Kroger’s and Lowe’s and at times it fills me with a curious sadness tinged with despair. So many people pass by looking so ordinary and even their demeanor communicates “ordinariness.” And many are obviously submerged in despair and unhappiness or are burdened down with afflictions of multiple kinds. To travel down past the homeless shelters and missions in town these days brings a definite sadness as I see figures in doorways or sitting on street corners waiting, forever waiting but never seeking. The sadness creeps into my bones until I cannot think about it, and I must simply pass on. My theory is that 95% of us are so terribly ordinary, totally undistinguished in any way, and would probably never qualify as one of “the beautiful people.” Every morning my mirror reinforces this theory with alarming force. Our talents, intelligence, and charm are usually quite ordinary, as well, leading many of us to come to the frightful conclusion in our more daring moments that we, indeed, are quite average. This combination of the commonness of the common man coupled with the overwhelming spiritual lost-ness of so many people in general can be depressing if it were not for the promises of Scripture.

First of all, I must constantly remind myself that we are created in the image of God. It is a concept that will change any life if properly and fully understood. A friend in ministry to inner city children writes, “Ronnie is an example of how God is freeing some of our teens from ( those) labels. He has been bitter towards his dad (and let me say he has reasons) but the bitterness has made him angry at everyone. At camp a counselor spoke into his life, “Your dad gave you his name, but God gave you His image. You don’t have to be like your dad.” Those words set Ronnie free. He’s not angry any longer. His summer has been amazing! He even felt the need to apologize to his dad for the way he felt. That action was a “God” thing—I know many adults who would not do that. Ronnie is allowing God to mold him into His image.” It also changes the way I look at people, even that balding man shuffling his way across Lowe’s in his ugly shorts with the protruding waistline and the aimless look on his unshaven face. There is something God-like there if I will but look closely.

Secondly, there is available to all who would choose to walk in it, a high and holy calling as ambassadors for God and given the ultimate mission of helping reconcile the world unto Himself. Look up any ambassador on-line and you will see a polished person of impeccable credentials who epitomizes the best of the best. They are addressed as “His (or her) Excellency,” “Mr. (or Ms.) Ambassador,” to recognize their position of prestige and power as representatives of a whole nation. It is an exciting job with much honor. So, we too, are called to be ambassadors of Christ to a lost world. There is no more awesome calling or mission in life than this. Christ wants to operate through us as his vessels to accomplish his continuing work on earth. Whether it be from a polished pulpit or through a cup of cold water given in His name, the work of Christ is world changing, and we get to be a part of it!

The good news is that there are no mean or obscure lives. Or at least, need not be. “Average” need not describe our lives nor those of our children. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, all can achieve the rank of ambassadorship fueled with a life mission that will propel us throughout our years with a sense of purpose and excitement. And credentials? We have them in spades. We are seated with Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). We are completely new creatures in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). We are the children of God, joint-heirs with Christ, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Rom. 8:15-17). Talk about connections.

There is no reason for anyone to live a common, non-descript, obscure life if they walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. In this sense, there are no average students at River’s Edge nor should you have any in your household. They are all bound for the rank and office of ambassadors for the King. I pray we awake in them this year their destiny in Christ and fire them with a vision for what they can be through Him who strengthens us for all things.

Dignity I

Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; ASV Heb. 2:14

For all you word fans out there, Christmas is a time where we celebrate the Incarnation; God with us. Like no other, our God chose to come near and inhabit our world with us in human form. Incarnation literally means “in flesh.” It derives from the Latin word, caro, from which we derive all sorts of words such as carnal, carnivorous, and even carnival which harks back to the celebrations that would take place before the “doing away with meat” during Lent. The Incarnation of Christ in our world has been the source of much holiday meditation of mine and is a concept that both appalls me and thrills me.

On the appalling side, I can get quite queasy when I dwell on the weaknesses of the flesh. I could never be a doctor or especially a surgeon. Once the body is opened up, I am easily sickened by the sights of quivering, bloody tissue. I prefer to picture each of you as freshly washed and groomed persons in your Sunday best beaming smiles from your Christmas pictures. That you are spirits wrapped in flesh that is subject to a thousand corruptions and quite capable of emanating the foulest of substances is a fact I choose not to dwell upon. And our Lord stooped to take on this mantle of weakness? It is hard for me to imagine a more bizarre scenario. How could he do this?

On the thrilling side, the very fact that Christ did take on the form of human flesh with all its concomitant weaknesses and frailties is incredibly ennobling. Christmas forever puts a stamp of extreme value upon all human flesh as God himself chooses to take it on for the purpose of redeeming all humanity. He shares in our universal weakness, our suffering, and our pain to accomplish His plan of salvation for a broken and lost creation. But not for all, not for the plants, the animals; just for man alone. All creation stands as a mere backdrop for this drama of redemption for people such as you and I.

This is what changes everything when we look at creation and all the world. Mankind has a dignity and worth because of the price tag God put upon it. This idea has previously infected all of western civilization through the ages but now is in grave danger. Our modern world is attempting to maintain the old values regarding the dignity of man apart from the underpinnings of Christian faith. Pity on those who try for it is hard to do. Many hang their hopes on focusing on the rationality of man and his free will to choose. This is a threadbare hope at best and one which will wither away, but surely it will never resist the onslaught of a determined attack. Even now there are those who talk about defending new born life only when a certain “viability” is attained. “Choice” is, in fact, championed as a supreme act of the free will in terminating the unborn. And the loss of rationality is becoming dangerously close to justify the ending of “unmeaningful” life.

When we talk of critical thinking as a worthwhile and virtuous activity, I would urge you to examine with your children this whole idea of the dignity of man as we have traditionally come to presume upon it. It is in poor health in our society, and we Christians are the only folks that have the gold standard antidote. Do your children know what is at stake here? I would plead with you to take time and effort to discuss and teach them in very concrete terms the ramifications of the incarnation. This can be a Bible lesson or one seen in literature or History. The stark test of it is to visit a nursing home and wade into rooms full of the feeble, the broken, the incontinent, the mentally absent, the less than sweet smelling, and to touch their translucent skin in a way that says that they have great value because God said so. The fate of our society as we know it depends upon it.

Significance

“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” - Psalms 56:8

Just how special are you? A clue comes from modern pathology science which has discovered the unique, special mark that each person carries within their DNA. A recent crime story took this simple fact one step further as investigators solved an abduction and murder case involving a 5 year old girl by analyzing the tear stains on the passenger side of her killer’s car. There, within those stains, was found the unmistakable proof of the little girl’s DNA identity. How poignant that this little girl’s tears solved her own murder case. How incredibly powerful is the knowledge that our tears are uniquely laced with our own one-of-a-kind personhood.

In ancient times, we are told that mourners at funerals would collect their tears in little bottles and place them with the body upon burial. Evidence of this has been found in tombs in Rome and Palestine sometimes in great profusion. From this we can flesh out the picture of Psalm 56:8 where God is said to collect our tears in His bottle; or as the indelible stains upon the pages of our record. Our tears are uniquely our own, and our God knows them all.

Two lessons come clear to me upon reflection on this truth. One, each one of us is completely different from all other persons who have ever walked on the earth or will take breath in this world. When the Scriptures talk about a victim’s blood crying out from the ground for justice, we know now that every drop of our blood has our name on it. We are imprinted from birth with a mark that sets us apart from all others. When lost in a large crowd of thousands or imagine ourselves swallowed up amidst the millions of China, we need never lose track of our own unique significance in the eyes of God. And, in fact, He has numbered the very hairs of our head. He sees the sparrow fall but proclaims we are of far greater worth. Such knowledge is too high for me. I cannot attain to it. Yet it is sweetly comforting.

Secondly, God has ordained that we live such lives where tears are inevitable. Sorrow and grief follow in our steps as surely as death follows life. Ever since our expulsion from the garden, pain and suffering are an endemic part of our lives. At one time, my immature thoughts considered pain as either the result of my own poor thought processes or someone else’s. If we were just smart enough, pain could be avoided altogether. Either that or pain was just a result of some bad luck which, like lightning, strikes without cause or warning: a twist of cruel but random fate. I see pain and suffering now as more a constant part of the fabric of our lives: as destined for us as earning our bread by the sweat of our brow.

Yet God, Himself, stepped into our world and took on the limitations and pain of man. Dorothy Sayers wrote, “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine… He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”* We, too, can walk this vale of tears and find it all worthwhile. Especially as we know we are uniquely significant. Not only that, but we are hovered over by the lover of our souls, one who has experienced all the limitations of the flesh, who keeps a record of all our tears until the day when all sorrow shall cease; no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying when He will wipe away every tear.

*Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 4.

Mom

“When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.” - Joshua 4:21-22

I have heard them and so have you. They are those stock-in-trade, generic, one-size-fits-all, funeral sermons that abound in clichés and clichéd scripture passages that tired pastors pull out of file cabinets. There is little or nothing said of the deceased, but instead, flowery phrases fill up the time and space as the clergyman attempts to perfume the air with feel-good nothingness. In many cases, such perfunctory phraseology is the only alternative because there is nothing much to say about some non-descript lives that have floundered halfway between here and nowhere, registering not even a blip on God’s kingdom view screen. Pity the poor pastor who has to stand and officiate over such a one when to tell the truth would be in plain bad taste or uncomfortable to say the least. But many times, pastors fumble to find concrete terms with which to describe the lives of even good people because there is no hard evidence to tap into. Nothing frustrates a biographer more than to attempt to tell the story of someone who leaves no written record.

I had feared that in the rush to generate a funeral message for my mother that the pastor, who had not known her long, would pull out one of his stock sermons and give it his best generic shot. To try and head it off, I placed in his hands a journal that my mother had written in her latter days. It was really just a daily planner, and her entries were without form and scattered throughout the book in no particular order. Most of her entries were comprised of quotes from other people from books and sermons and wherever. But she had copied them laboriously by hand in her faltering style, and they instantly betrayed her heart and deeply held values. There were quotes from Max Lucado and C.S. Lewis, Charles Swindoll and Billy Graham, plus others not acknowledged. They covered topics such as the role of the Holy Spirit, how to study the Bible, and the amazing story of the change wrought in the HMS Bounty survivors of Pitcairn Island through the discovery of a Bible.

I was pleasantly surprised the evening of the funeral to discover that the pastor had found the journal entries compelling reading. He basically used little but these various entries to paint a picture of my mother’s life for they revealed the things she held most dearly. There were not that many pages of writing in this simple book, but it offered ample evidence with which to obtain a verdict and a conviction. Her’s was a life centered on the things of God. Little else needed saying. In death, we look for the essence of a person’s life, what interested them, what drove them, what made them who they were. I was amazed how little it took to accurately, I thought, reveal the simple and all-consuming direction of her life. For those who looked at her to admire certain character qualities and traits, here was explanation enough for everything found admirable within.

It need not be long, it need not be eloquent, it need not be profound, and it need not even be original. I left there that night wanting to tell everyone to be sure to leave something behind that will reveal to all who pause and wonder just who you are and why you lived the life you did. Leave tracks, so that others may follow. It may be margin notes in a Bible, a simple journal, a life story, or heartfelt poetry. Whatever the means, make it clear and make it loud if you want folks to know that God’s love compelled you to follow Him and that He did, indeed, change your life.

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” -C.S. Lewis (found in mom’s journal)

Haiti

“I spoke to you in your prosperity; but you said, ‘I will not listen.’” –Jer. 22:21

Several weeks ago, a riveting photo was run in the newspaper of Haitian women making mud cookies for their hungry children. Scarcity and inflation were pushing these poor to turn to a mixture of mud, salt, and vegetable oil, baked on a hot roof, to satiate the hunger of themselves and their little ones. I cringed with that photo burned in my mind as I stood and scraped leftover food into the garbage can after our Wed. night church dinner. The disparity between our two countries is beyond belief. How can this happen? I think the more appropriate question is, “How did this happen?”

Anyone at all familiar with the history of Haiti knows of its dance with satanic voodooism. When the sugar plantation slaves rose up in rebellion against the French, the rebels actually met and made a pact with the devil telling their dark lord that their new country would serve him for two hundred years if he would help them throw off the French yoke. They were successful, and the French sailed off leaving them to their ways. Cultural anthropologists tell us that if you want to know what Africa looked like 200 years ago, travel to Haiti, not Africa. They have preserved all the raw and primitive practices of that formerly “dark” continent.

Jeremiah says that those who turn away from the Lord will be like a bush in the desert and will not see prosperity. Their dwelling place will be a stony waste and a land of salt (Jeremiah 17:5-8). If that is true, Haiti is exhibit “A” with the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children, generation after generation. They stand in marked contrast with the other half of their same island, the Dominican Republic which boasts a decent standard of living by comparison and a modern economy. I am convinced that Christian values and morality bring prosperity in their wake regardless of the blessing or curse of natural geography. For that reason, the gospel is the most radical form of economic aid we can give.

The trouble with this is that once affluence abounds, we become self-satisfied and our hearts grow cold. We have no needs. Today, the church of America tortures itself with trying to find new strategies to reach the lost; a source of endless debate and huge investments. Family life centers, seeker-friendly services, contemporary music, electronic wizardry are tried in endless variety to entice the un-churched to come in and to make them feel comfortable. The ironic truth coming out is that while we are trying everything new under the sun to make church attractive, the persecuted Christian church in China and the Sudan is growing exponentially. In the midst of Southern Sudan, a predominantly Muslim country, there are, by some accounts, four times as many Christians today as there were before persecution broke out 20 years ago. World Magazine published a photo of a thatched hut where 500 people were now meeting at Daga Post where only 5 years before there was no church at all.

In the midst of pronouncing blessings and curses upon those who either followed or rejected the Lord, Jeremiah also complained about speaking to his generation in their prosperity but they said, “I will not listen.” Let’s see, now. The gospel brings prosperity, prosperity brings unbelief, unbelief brings suffering, suffering and persecution bring people to the Lord. When will we ever learn? (Need to write a song about that.) What has this got to do with families and children? I am going to deliberate a little before going there. But for now, I would invite you to consider the question and see where it leads you.