When we have a need – a real need – something we can’t do or fix or resolve for ourselves – what we need, is a helping hand. And if we get that helping hand – the person who’s attached to that hand, well, they go up in our estimation. They earn the right to say things that others can’t to us.  Funny thing happens through a helping hand.

 

Healing with our Hands

Well, welcome to the programme this week – the last message in a series that I’ve called, “Living Life as an Ambassador for Christ”. And today... today I would like to share with you how you and I can be real ambassadors ... ambassadors with a difference; ambassadors that really stand out from the crowd.

Whenever there’s a disaster somewhere in the world – a tsunami or an earthquake or a cyclone or a tornado – it seems to me that the wealthy countries like my own; the countries with the logistics and the equipment and the resources to help – it seems we take forever to mobilise. When people are buried under rubble, they only have days, perhaps only hours to live and what they need right then, is specialist search and rescue teams, with sniffer dogs and listening equipment and all that stuff. And the survivors, what they need, is medical help, food, water, shelter. And the last thing I want to do is be critical but it seems to take so long for the wealthy countries to mobilise their resources.

We know that these disasters are going to happen every year – they just happen and I am always left kind of scratching my head as to why it is that it takes us so long to respond. What those poor people need, within the first twenty four hours, is a huge influx of capability to save lives. And these days, I mean, you can pretty much fly from anywhere to anywhere in not much more than twenty fours and yet, time and time and time again these disasters happen and it takes us weeks to mobilise. Does that kind of strike you as strange?

You know, as a tax payer in a relatively wealthy country – all be it a smallish population, but never the less, a wealthy country – when I see the way public monies are spent, the last thing that I’d have a problem with is my government setting aside some money to establish and maintain some rapid response capabilities to help other nations when disasters strike.

But as easy as it is to sit there and criticise a government, I wonder whether this lethargy in responding to need isn‘t something that you and I experience in our personal lives. I read about an extreme example of this in a newspaper recently. Have a listen to this short article.

A South Korean couple addicted to online gaming, let their baby starve to death while raising a virtual daughter. Parents, Kim You-Chul and Choi Mi-sun, spent up to 12 hours a day at an internet café tending to their avatar child in the online game Prius. But they left their real baby home alone and fed her just one bottle of milk a day. Police have charged the couple with child abuse and neglect.

Pretty bizarre, pretty extreme, one might think, "Got nothing to do with me; I’m not like that. I don’t neglect my children like that." I would hope not but what about our friends; what about our family members; what about our neighbours; what about the couple next door whose marriage is falling apart? We hear them screaming and arguing but do we ever invite them over for a barbecue, to share in their lives and for them to share in ours?

What about that person at church – you know the one – single; overweight; they’re life’s a mess, they talk a bit too much and no one ever invites them to their place on Sunday for lunch? What about that man at work – you see he’s a workaholic; he’s ruining his marriage, neglecting his children – ruining everything, all for want of a friend who can show him a better way of living?

Where are we then, you and I? I’ll tell you where: we are like ‘online’ that Korean couple, watching TV! We’re doing all the things we want to do in the comfort of our own lives and our own homes. And the more affluent we become the less we care for one another. But we justify that; we rationalise it away; we sit in our homes with more than enough – many of us – more than enough, telling ourselves, "We worked hard for it and now we need a rest." We are living virtual lives, watching TV shows about cooking, instead of cooking ourselves; watching TV shows about travelling, instead of travelling ourselves. Raising our virtual lives, our virtual gods and ignoring the real world.

It sounds harsh doesn’t it? Well, sometimes we need to be direct. Sometimes we need to call a spade a spade. God does that too. Have a listen to this – First John chapter 3, verse 17. If you have a Bible, open it up – towards the end – the First Letter of John chapter 3, verse 17:

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has all the world’s goods and yet sees a brother or sister in need but refuses to help?

Now, I know that’s hard because there seems to be so much need out there in the world. Sometimes we look at the news and we see the misery and we just turn it off, you and I – we can’t make a difference; it’s too big. Okay, I kind of understand that, although we can always make some small difference, but there are so many people closer to home; sometimes even within our homes, that we have the opportunity to serve – to heal with our hands; to heal with what we do as well as with what we say.

Speaking first hand here, there is nothing ... absolutely nothing that speaks more about God’s love into someone’s life than when we step in to help them with that one thing they need help with. Sometimes it’s the smallest thing – just a word of encouragement; a meal to someone just out of hospital; a visit or a phone call. Sometimes it’s loving them over the long run; being there with them and for them.

Whatever it is, when we have a need and someone just meets that need, there is nothing that speaks more of the love of Jesus than that. Believe you me, I know. It was people doing just that in my life who played such a powerful role in me coming to faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, their investment in meeting my needs bears fruit every day, as I sit down behind this microphone.

Listen again to what Paul writes about how he sees his role and ours in this world. Second Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20:

So we are ambassadors for Christ; since God is making his appeal through us we entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.

Imagine now, an ambassador of a wealthy country who has taken up his or her post in a poor country. And one day that poor country suffers a devastating earthquake and that ambassador from the wealthy country moves heaven and earth to quickly mobilise rescue and medical capabilities. They come quickly; they meet the desperate needs and then, when finally the crisis is over, what do you think the ambassador’s actions have just said to the people of that poor country, about the wealthy country that the ambassador represents? That ambassador’s actions will have spoken volumes into the poorer nation about how much the richer nation cares for them. It’s simply not rocket science!

Do you believe in Jesus? I do! And anyone who does is called to be an ambassador of Christ and as the Apostle Paul writes, it is through His ambassadors, dotted all over the planet, that God makes His appeal for people to be reconciled to Him. We don’t have to look very far to find the need, do we? Often it’s right under our noses. And we can spend time in prayer and at church and worshipping God and all those wonderful, good things while the babies starve; while the needs go unmet; while marriages next door fall apart and people right across the street are living in fear. Or we can go ... go and be ambassadors of Christ.

For how does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or a sister in need and yet refuses to help?

 

Loving with our Hearts

As I said at the beginning of today’s programme, this is our last message in this four part series, “Living Life as an Ambassador for Christ”. And as we draw to the end I always find myself thinking of so many other things we could have talked about. Over the last three weeks I guess, what we have been doing is taking a look at the different aspects of the Apostle Paul’s assertion that he and by implication, you and me - if we believe in this amazing, loving, compassionate, powerful Jesus – are ambassadors for Christ. Have a listen again to how he put it – Second Corinthians chapter 5, verse 20:

So we are ambassadors for Christ; since God is making his appeal through us, we entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God.

We have talked a lot about what it means to be an ambassador through whom God would make His appeal to a lost and hurting world. We’ve looked a bit at the way Jesus was an emissary of God into this world when He became a man. How He communicated God’s message of grace to the blind and the poor and the diseased and the needy and the outcast. And I wish we could spend weeks and months more, taking a closer look at that. Maybe we will come back to it in a little while because at the centre of everything ... EVERYTHING is Jesus, the Son of God; the Maker of the heavens and the earth.

So, as we draw this series together today, with so much more left to talk about, I had to decide on just one thing – the most important thing – and that most important thing; the one thing that Paul, at the end of First Corinthians 12 calls, "the yet more excellent way", is th