Ambassadors

So a few years back, I was watching a television show. I don't really remember what it was and it's really inconsequential doesn't matter. But I was watching the show and they had all these guests on there, contestants I think. And they were, kind of at the bottom of the screen, it would state their name and where they're from and what their occupation was, so that you got to know them a little bit. And I still remember seeing on the screen, some guy who, whatever his name was and wherever he was from, and then it said occupation, and it said influencer. And I remember this a few years back, right, and I was like, "I don't even know what that is. What job is that? I have no idea what that means." That's before. We all kind of know what it means now. And so they asked the guy, they were like, "So what do you do for a living? I see it listed here as an influencer. What exactly is that?" And he said, "Well, I'm a social media influencer." And so there's just dumb me watching the show. And I'm like, "I don't even know what that is." So I'm looking up like what's a social media influencer. And it's apparently somebody who has a big platform on social media. A lot of people following them. They're kind of famous. They could famous for any reason. Some people are just famous for being famous and some are famous for things they created. And so there are these people and they leverage their platforms because you've got people, they basically monetize their famousness. That's what a social media influencer does. They monetize their famousness. And so you've got businesses or product lines or whatever that want to utilize their platform to be able to get their message out. And they get a bunch of free stuff and get paid to do it and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, "Okay, I get it. So I understand kind of part of the new economy and I get it." Out of that grew some other jobs, one of which can be for anybody. Social media influencer is often for people who are kind of famous, but the rest of us can do other stuff. And so there's other jobs that grew out of that, like being what's called a brand ambassador. So a brand ambassador is somebody who's working in what we call the gig economy. The gig economy just simply means that it's usually a temporary job for an on-demand service that you have. Like if you're an Uber driver, that's a part of the gig economy, or you're an independent contractor hired by an online marketing firm to do some set of things for a very brief time. That's a part of the gig economy. In other words, you've got a gig and you do your gig and your gig is over, right. That's kind of part of what it means to be in the gig economy. So somebody who's a brand ambassador may get, company A may say, I'm gonna give you $20 an hour. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to rep our product either at a show that we're doing at the convention center, or maybe even online. So for $20 an hour, you get paid to show up at the convention center and be like, "Everybody, this product is incredible. You're gonna love it." Now you may not have used the product, whatever, but you're just getting a hire to be a brand ambassador, right? That's your job. You're to pump up the energy, you're to make people want to buy the product, or you use an online platform to be able to do that as well. So there's a number of different ways that that can be the case. So when I use the term ambassador, depending on your age, you may understand that term a little bit differently than others. People that are on the younger side of living, when they hear the term ambassador may be thinking about being a brand ambassador because in their world, everybody's an ambassador of something. Like in a younger world everybody's an ambassador of something because they're representing something online, whether it's what they wear or where they go or what they like. They're being an ambassador, they're representing something. And so sometimes when we hear that term, depending on your age, you may hear it in a different way. Well, obviously ambassador is not a new term. It's been around a long time. And the Apostle Paul used that term when he was writing some letters to the church at Corinth. Now he wrote a couple that we have, he wrote more than that, because if you read the letters you find out, he actually wrote letters that we don't have, right. But in the second letter that he wrote to the church at Corinth, we're gonna pay attention to where he talked about this idea of being an ambassador. It's in the second book of Corinthians, not the first one. And it's in chapter five. If you're new to the Bible or new to church, then just know this, kind of, if you cut the Bible in half, you've got the Old Testament on one side and you've got the New Testament on the other side. The Old Testament is kind of everything that led up to prior to Jesus. And the New Testament is kind of Jesus' life and ministry forward from that time. So if you go into the New Testament, you'll just have to travel down five or six books, and you'll run into the letters to the church at Corinth are called first Corinthians and second Corinthians because they are two different letters, right? And we're gonna be looking in second Corinthians chapter number five. If you're looking those up you'll have kind of addresses and chapter breaks in there. If you're new to all of this, that's great. Now, the reason that Paul was writing to this church in Corinth is because their behavior was not matching what they actually said they were. I don't know if you've ever run into people like that. They've claimed to be something and they're not acting like the something that they claim to be. And that's what was going on in Corinth. You had a bunch of people that claim to follow Jesus, and they weren't exactly doing that as they should. Now, the predominant number of people that were in Corinth were Gentiles. Now let me pause for a second. Gentile just means they were non-Jewish in their background, okay. So generally speaking, I'm talking mostly to Gentiles when I'm talking on a Sunday morning, although we do have some people in our church that are from Jewish backgrounds. But those Gentiles that were making up the church of Corinth mostly were coming from pagan backgrounds. And a lot of the stuff that they did was no bueno, it was not a good thing, right? And so Paul is trying to say to them, "Hey, pay attention here because now that you're following Jesus, these are the kinds of things that need to go in your life, this is not what your life should look like." And so Paul's trying to give them some correction. He's even defending his own ministry in second Corinthians. And so you're paying it. That's kind of the context of how he's using this term. So Paul actually says, I view myself as an ambassador to you Corinthians because I'm bringing you a message from the kingdom of heaven about what you're supposed to be doing, because you're so enmeshed in the things of the world that you've lost sight of what your real country is and I'm here to tell you about it. In fact, here's what Paul says in second Corinthians five verse number 20. He says, we are therefore Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf. Be reconciled to God. Now, when Paul uses the term, we, when he says we are Christ's ambassadors, he's not talking about you and me specifically in this context, he's talking about himself and his colleagues. Paul at any given time in the various travels that he did, at any given time had 15, 20, 25 people that were traveling with him. And what Paul said, he said, we, talking about he and his colleagues, we are Christ's ambassadors to you specifically. In other words, we're bringing a message. Now the word ambassador in the ancient world is much like we would understand it maybe in our modern world when it comes to diplomacy and countries sending out ambassadors, right, where you've got somebody who gets appointed from the United States to represent the interests of the United States and the interest of the president of the United States in another country. That's what was happening in the ancient world. You would have empires and Kings that would send out someone that would be an envoy or an ambassador. And they would be in another kingdom, but they would be representing the interests of the king from their home country. That's the idea behind what Paul's talking about here. And he's basically saying, I'm a representative of the kingdom of God. And I'm here to talk to you Corinthians because you're so enmeshed in the things of the world that you're missing the idea of where your true country is, and really where you need to make sure that you get your marching orders from, and that's from King Jesus himself. So his example to the Corinthians of being an ambassador should be our example. In other words, I think behind Paul's words is he saying, I am an ambassador to you, but you should be ambassadors to the world and the city that you're living in. That's really what it should look like, right? And so we take his idea here, his example, and we begin to learn from it. You see, here's what I've realized. Everybody represents someone or some thing in their life. Everybody does. Every single one of us we represent someone or some thing in our life. And we, as the people of God should follow the example that Paul is laying out for us. And we should understand ourselves as representatives of King Jesus, as ambassadors of King Jesus. So how does Paul help us to see this idea of being an ambassador in second Corinthians chapter five. I'm gonna pull out a handful of trues that I want us to be able to grab hold of today. And here's the first one. It's pretty straightforward and simple. Ambassadors are appointed. I want you to get that before we even get started in talking about what the ambassador's role is and what the ambassador's doing. I want us to understand that ambassadors are actually appointed. Again, look at verse number 20 in our focal text here. We are therefore whose ambassadors?

We are Christ ambassadors, right? Not ambassadors of ourselves. We didn't appoint ourselves. We are Christ's ambassadors. In other words, we are appointed by Christ for this particular time and to represent the message of the king. That means all of us folks. Not just those of us who do this for a living. I want to make sure I clear something up. There are no such things as professional Christians. I just want to say that because believe me, I have felt that many times over. I'm at some gathering, right, along with everybody else, and maybe the gathering is going to have, well, let's open with prayer and every eye just goes to me. Why? Because you're a professional. There are no professional prayers. There are no professional Christians. We are all appointed as ambassadors of King Jesus. It just sounds weird. Like what if I'm a contestant on a game show, right? And they're like, "Oh Jerry Gillis, he's from Buffalo, New York, occupation, professional Christian." That's ridiculous, right? People would ask, what's a professional Christian? Oh, he must be a pastor. Pastors aren't professional Christians. Pastors are just Christians who God called into serving him vocationally alongside of other Christians who aren't professionals. We're just all people following Jesus together. But it's all of us that have been called to be ambassadors. It's not just some of us, right? That means if your name is Lenny, you're called to be an ambassador. If your name is Ella, you are called to be an ambassador. If your name is Gabby, everybody's going, "Is he coming to me right now? I'm scared to death. Stop doing this." If your name is Lou, you're not like, "I've got a bunch of them, right?" It's just the facts. We've all been called and we've all been appointed. That's why we've got to remember this because we've been appointed by King Jesus. We're not our own. We've been appointed. And you have to kind of know what you've signed up for. It's a dark world that we live in. There are spiritual forces that are opposing us at every turn. People want to rage against truth, even if it's not that confrontational of truth, they just want to rage against truth because they have established themselves as the truth standard. You remember, right? My truth. What? I'm sorry, what? You own truth like my truth and your truth. They're just living there truth. No, no, no. There's no mine and their and your, there's just the, the truth. Jesus said, I am the way and your truth. Nope. I am the way and my truth. Nope. I am the way and the truth, the life, right? No one comes to the Father except through me. You see, we have to understand that you and I have been appointed as ambassadors living in a world that's raging against truth. And do you know what, this world needs ambassadors from the kingdom of light that are bringing that into the midst of the kingdom of darkness. That's what we need. And we have to have our eyes wide open. Now, I realized there's people that are rage against that. Listen carefully. We don't have to act like them. We don't have to share their tactics. They may want to be all about being outraged and yelling and carrying on. And we're like, "Well, we're just fighting fire with fire. And you're a stupid idiot. And you're a moron. Hey, hey." That's not how we need to do what we do. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, right? That's not how we're supposed to act. We're ambassadors. We've been appointed by the king. And so not only do we have to represent him in how we say what we say, but even how we live behind what we say. This is important for us because we have to walk into our appointment open-eyed. I don't know if you remember this name, Christopher Stevens, but he was ambassador from the United States that was appointed to Libya. He was serving in the embassy there in Benghazi where on September 11th, 2012, he was murdered. And I began at that time to try and learn a little bit about he and some of the other folks that were killed at the embassy in Benghazi. You guys remember that, right? And I read some articles at that time about some of the things that he had said about what it was to be an ambassador and some of the things that people said about him. And boy, one of the articles that I read, the first line of it just captured my attention immediately. Here's what it said. The header on the article said, the slain ambassador died trying to help build a better Libya. This was the opening line of the article. Chris Stevens knew what he was getting into. He knew long time friend Daniel Seidemann said that Libya was a place of great promise, but also one of great peril. "When he went to Libya, he had no illusions about where he was going," Seidemann said, "He's probably done more than anybody on the planet to help the Libyan people, and he knew going in that this was not going to protect him." This man with extraordinary courage and extraordinary loyalty to his country said yes to the appointment and he went in with his eyes wide open. Nobody intended to die. He didn't want to die, but he understood that he was walking into a place of great peril. You see, you and I have to understand as well, is that we're on assignment that we've been made ambassadors. That's who we are. And we're Christ's ambassadors. We're not our own. And that the world that we live in, that every place that we find our foot falling, this is a place where we're supposed to be representing the interests of King Jesus and the kingdom of God. That means that you're on assignment everywhere that you are. And we need to understand that the world, this kingdom of darkness needs people of light, ambassadors of light, that are walking into their midst so that they're saying to themselves, "Wait a minute, I didn't realize I was stumbling around in darkness for so long. There's another way. There's a different way for us to live our lives. There's truth. There's light. There's peace. There's joy. This is what we need from ambassadors of the kingdom of heaven." You're on assignment everywhere you go. So when you go to work, sir, ma'am, when you go to work, you're not there just to make money. That's a good thing because it helps you supply the needs that you have and your family has and all those kinds of things to be generous with others. It's a good thing to be able to make money at work, right? But that's not the only reason you're there. You're there to be an ambassador of King Jesus. That's why you're there. You're representing him even at work, right? Young person, you're at school, maybe you're in high school or college or you're a grad student, you're like, "I'm there to get good grades and hopefully get a good job." Hey, I'm for both of those things, get good grades, get a good job. I'm pulling for you. But it's not the only reason you're there. You're there as an ambassador of King Jesus. You're there to represent him in who you are, what you say and what you do. This is true about every aspect of our life, no matter where we are or where our foot touches. If you're at home, mom and dad, you've got kids at home. You're not just at home to make sure that your kids brush their teeth and do their homework. By the way, I recommend both. Brushing your teeth, good thing, homework, good thing. But you're not there just to do that. You're there as an ambassador to help your kids see that there is another way here. There is a different way here. That there is new creation here available to us all. You get the picture, right? If you're in your neighborhood, you're not just there so that when you run out of sugar, you've got somebody to call and borrow some from. You're in your neighborhood because you're an ambassador and you've been appointed by King Jesus to represent his interest in that place. You see, we've got to make sure that we understand that as ambassadors we are appointed. But, secondarily you have to understand this, that ambassadors have an agenda. And that agenda becomes pretty clear to us when we look at the text of scripture and just understand it, right? When Paul says that we are Christ's ambassadors, the implication, listen, the implication is that we are not our own ambassadors. We are not brand ambassadors for ourselves. We are actually saying that we're here to represent Jesus. In other words, this implies an agenda that's not self centered. We're ambassadors from another country, the kingdom of heaven. That's where our citizenship is. And we're here to represent the interests of the king and the kingdom wherever we find ourselves. We're not here to represent our own interests. In fact, Paul actually said that in the context of what we're talking about. He said, we're therefore Christ's ambassadors, right? In verse number 18 or verse number 20. But if you back up, back up a few verses into verse 14 and 15, listen to what Paul said. For Christ's love compels us because we are convinced that one died for all and therefore all died. And he died for all, listen to this, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again. That the agenda here that we're talking about is an agenda that says, this is not self-centered. This is not about me. This is about the interests of the king. That should be our agenda. Going back to Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya. Another article that I read helped me to understand how much he understood about what it was to be an ambassador. Listen to what it said. This is from October of 2012. It says, to Ahmed Bani, U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens was simply Chris, as he was to people throughout Benghazi. "When he passed in the street, the young men would call out, 'hello, Chris.' And they knew his face," he says. "And he would laugh and say, 'hello.' This is the right way to deal with people here." Mr. Stevens was newly arrived in Benghazi as the U.S. envoy to the anti-Qaddafi rebels when Mr. Bani, an Air Force colonel turned rebel spokesman, first met him. "Work for your country, not yourself," Stevens advised him at their first meeting in spring 2011. Did you hear those words? Work for your country, not yourself. That's what ambassadors do. They work on behalf of their country, they work on behalf of their president or their king or their leader, not for themselves because ambassadors have an agenda. You see, too often what happens for us, my friends, what happens for us is that we lose sight of being an ambassador, and instead we make ourselves many kings and queens. We are not the kings and queens of that country. We are serving the king of the universe, the king of the kingdom of heaven, King Jesus. He's the king, we're ambassadors of his. We have to remember that because we're representing him. We're here to communicate to a world an agenda that's different than the agenda of the world. And sometimes we get that confused. Maybe worse yet what we do is we create our own agenda and we attach his name to it. That's even worse. That's a difficult thing. We sometimes do that when we fuse together our politics and God. We start to fuse it all together, right? This is what I want. These are the politics that I want. And therefore God wants it. Maybe God doesn't want it exactly like you're talking about. God knows everything about everything. He knows how flawed all of our systems are all over the world in any country that we might live in. But what we have to recognize is this, we're here to represent his interests. We're here to represent him as the king. We should not get those things confused or conflated and make sure that we always focus on representing him because we're his ambassadors. Ambassadors, they're appointed and they have an agenda, but thirdly ambassadors have authority. What do I mean when I say that? Well, look again at verse number 20, it says this. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though, here it is, God were making his appeal through us. Do you know that comes with inherent authority. As ambassadors, God's making his appeal through us. By the way, listen to this, this phrase as though, it's certainly proper to be there, but it doesn't come with like a question mark. Well, maybe God's doing this. No, no. If you read this kind of literally, and some of your translations probably say this, if you read this literally, we are therefore Christ's ambassadors, God making his appeal through us. That's how you'd read it literally. In other words, this is something God is doing. Now, you and I both understand that this is a derived authority that we have, right? It's not our own authority. It's an authority that comes from God. In the ancient world, listen to this, here's the phrase they used, the voice of the ambassador is the voice of the king. The voice of the ambassador is the voice of the king. Now, if you think about this, that God has appointed us as ambassadors of the kingdom of light, of the kingdom of heaven, to represent his interests in the place that we live in this world. If that's the case, would you and I be wise to be slow to speak more than we are. Let me just ask you this way. President of United States appoints you as an ambassador to another country, wherever. You're an ambassador to a middle eastern country, okay. And all the pomp and circumstance of appointing you to that position and all that stuff. Do you get over there and just start flying off the handle on all your opinions about everything in the world? I think not because you're over there for one purpose, you are representing the interests of your country and representing the interests of your president. And you're only going to say things that are in tune with that. You're not going to say things in opposition to that, because that sends mixed messages about who your country actually is. My brothers and sisters, we need to be more careful about how we speak and how we type when it comes to representing King Jesus. You and I are ambassadors. And to the extent that we are speaking about the king and his kingdom, God gives us authority to do that. God is making his appeal through us. Isn't that an unbelievable thing to think about? God is appealing to the world through our mouths. That's a startling thing. We should take that seriously. We should remember that. When you're scrolling through, you just need to remember that. When you're in that group conversation, you just need to remember that. You're an ambassador of the king. He has appointed you. He's given you an agenda and he has given his authority to you in so much as you are representing his interests. So let's not take that lightly, right?

But the king points us as ambassadors. And he also, through us, ambassadors make an appeal. This is clear from the scripture that we were looking at just a moment ago. I'll show it to you again in verse number 20. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. You see, that's what we see the appeal to be, right? The appeal is this. God says, I've appointed you as ambassadors. You've got an agenda, it's not your own. I'm gonna give you my authority as long as you're speaking about me and my kingdom and my purposes and representing my interests. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to appeal to the world. Well, what's the appeal? Here it is, be reconciled to God. There's the appeal. Be reconciled to God. Now, when we look at that, you and I have to understand that the ministry of reconciliation and the message of reconciliation are at the heart of what Paul is talking about in this chapter. The ministry of reconciliation entrusted to us and the message of reconciliation given to us is what is at the heart of this chapter. In fact, let me show it to you. Back up just a couple of verses into verse 18. All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us, here it is, the ministry, back up one, he gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors. Did you hear that? We are therefore Christ's ambassadors. Whenever you see therefore, you ask what is it? Therefore. I've said this like a thousand times. Some of you are just giving away how you haven't been here as often as you should. When you see a therefore, you always ask, what is it? Therefore, right. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors. Why? Because we've been given the ministry of reconciliation and we've been given the message of reconciliation, therefore we are Christ's representatives, his ambassadors, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf as his ambassadors, be reconciled to God. That is the message that we are bringing to a world in great need. But you know what Paul does. You're kind of thinking to yourself, okay, what does that involve more specifically? Like give me some more meat to that message. Is the message, I just walk around saying, be reconciled to God and you be reconciled to God and you be reconciled to God. Sort of, but you have to understand what's being said, right? That's why Paul doesn't finish right there when he says, we are therefore Christ's ambassadors, God making his appeal through us, be reconciled to God. But then he adds a loaded, loaded statement, right after in verse number 21. Look at what it says. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. I'm gonna stop right here for just a second because this deserves a few moments. You see, when we start to understand this idea of reconciliation, let's just start right here. God made. Do you know what that says when Paul is summarizing this idea of reconciliation? Do you know what Paul is trying to tell us? God is the initiator of reconciliation. God has always been the one that started this task. You remember, if you go all the way back to the garden, right? God created everything. God made everything beautiful, created humanity in his image. God said that it was good. Humanity is dwelling in relationship with God. And then humanity chooses rebellion against God, chooses their own agenda, chooses their own way as opposed to choosing God's way. And they are now in an interrupted relationship with God. They feel shamed. They're hiding. Adam and Eve are. And guess what happens? God initiates with them. They're hiding. God is coming to. God initiates with them. And then we see the effects of sin when we look from Genesis three to Genesis 11, right? We just see all of the sin that's building over the course of human history. And do you know what God says? God says, I'm gonna initiate with a man named Abraham. He's not the likely candidate. He's the son of a pagan idol maker, but I'm gonna still choose him. And I'm gonna make a promise to him. It doesn't depend on Abraham, it depends on me. I'm gonna make a promise to him that through him, even though he and his wife don't have any kids and they're like a zillion years old right now, and she's thinking to herself, kids, what are you talking about? My biological clock detonated like 40 years ago. But I'm going to promise that you're going to be a nation. You're going to be a great nation. I'm gonna give you a land. And from you is going to come a royal seat. And I'm gonna rescue the world through you. God initiated that with Abraham. It didn't have anything to do with Abraham. You know why? Because God's the initiator of reconciliation. While we were sinners, Christ died for us. How did that happen? God initiated that. We didn't do it. God did this. So we need to start in our understanding of reconciliation, start right here, God made, God did this. God made what? Him who had no sin. Oh, who are we talking about right here? You know who we're talking about, right? We're talking about Jesus. Him who had no sin. We know this from the very birth of Jesus. Jesus wasn't born like the rest of us were born. We were born from a mother and father who lived here on earth. Jesus was born from the Holy Spirit. He was conceived in a virgin womb, such that the brokenness of our sin was not found in him. The degradation of our humanity was not found in him. He was without sin, spotless. In fact, so spotless that he was compared in the New Testament to the very animal sacrifice that happened in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, when animal sacrifices for sin had to occur, they needed to happen with a spotless animal, a blemishless lamb. And Jesus is called in the New Testament the spotless, pure, Passover lamb of God, because he is without sin. In fact, when you go to the cross where Jesus is going to die for the sins of the world, you'll still find people around that story who were testifying to his innocence and his purity and his holiness. In fact, people that didn't even believe like Pontius Pilate. After he gets done with Jesus, he ends up washing his hands saying, , "I don't find anything wrong here." When Jesus is on a cross, there is a Roman guard as he is dying, standing underneath him saying, "Truly, this is the son of God." When Jesus is there with two thieves on either side, one thief looks at the other thief with Jesus in the middle and says, "We deserve to be here. But this man he's done nothing wrong." Why? He is without sin. He who had no sin. You see, God made him who had no sin, this is where it sobers us, to be sin. You can't say something more sobering than this. God made him who had no sin to be sin. You do understand in Paul summary here of this reconciliation, this ministry of reconciliation, this message of reconciliation that we've been given. You do understand that sin is a big deal in this as he summarizes it. He talks about the one who had no sin to be sin. Sin is carrying a lot of weight in this statement. Isn't it? There's a reason for that because sin is a big issue. It's cosmic in its reach. And it's the reason that reconciliation is necessary. Sin, that's what's interrupted everything, that's what's broken everything. Sin is this constant devolving into death. It is the separation of relationship. It's what puts us at immunity with God, where we are not friends with God. We are enemies with God. Sin stands in opposition to everything that God is, and we have no power over it because the wages of sin, the Bible says, is death. The payment for sin is death. That doesn't mean that when we sin, we just physically die though we will. And though that is a product of sin. It's talking even more soberingly about our spiritual death. And ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you something. This is why the gospel is such good news because spiritual death is not something we can resurrect ourselves. Thank God that God initiated. God made him who had no sin to be sin. You see, we have to understand this that what Jesus did he did willingly. This is not a scenario where mean old God the Father said, son, I'm going to make you do these things and if you don't do them, I'm sending you to your room. Jesus willingly, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. That's what Hebrews 12 says. Jesus says, no one has taken my life from me. No one. I lay it down of my own accord. So Jesus wasn't made to do this. Jesus as God the Son is joining the Father in his eternal purposes and is willingly laying his life down. And what he does, listen to this, God made him who had no sin Jesus to be sin. It does not say he made him to be a sinner. He said it made him to be sin. In other words, what Jesus was, was Jesus was the object of God's holy justice and wrath on behalf of sinners. And only he who had no sin could stand in the capacity of being the one to satisfy the justice of Almighty God against sin. You and I do not want a God who doesn't care about justice. We do not want that. God is just. He will judge sin. And what he has done in Jesus is that Jesus has borne on himself the weight of God's justice and the weight of God's wrath against sin so much so that Jesus cried out on a cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Because Jesus, even though maybe it was not practically a reality of separation, he was experientially removed from the relationship he had had and known forever in eternity past with God the Father. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus is feeling the weight of all of God's wrath against sin. The weight of all of God's justice against sin. The Bible says, Jesus had no sin, but he was to be sin so that God could pour out his wrath and be just, and also the justifier of all who would put their faith in him. I know I'm wound up a little bit this morning, but this is super important for us to understand, because this is the message of reconciliation that we're bringing to the world as ambassadors. This isn't just preaching for the sake of preaching. We're unpacking what Paul did in summarizing the very content of what we are to proclaim to the world as ambassadors. And if you're an ambassador, you should know what you're representing, right? You should know who you're representing. What is it they're saying, what is it they're doing? What is their agenda? That's our job as ambassadors, right? Every single one of us, no matter what your name is. And this Jesus, he goes to the, listen, he takes upon himself the wrath of God into the deepest of darkest hell, such that his screams could not even be heard by the angels in heaven. That's how deep Jesus paid for our sin. I don't even know how to give words to all of that frankly. My words fall short of what Jesus has done when the scripture says that he who had no sin, God made to be sin. But listen carefully to this. For us. This just reveals the heart of God and the love of Christ that what God has done is that he's done this all for us because we could not save ourselves. We could not resurrect our spiritual death. God has initiated this. And he has made him who knew no sin to be sin. Why? For us. Helpless, lost, wondering sinners, who could not save or rescue themselves, God in his great heart of love has made a way for us to be reconciled to him through his son. Could you imagine an all wise, all knowing God doing reconciliation this way through the cross of Christ if there was another way. There isn't another way. Only God the Son could satisfy the justice of God because only he in his beauty and perfection and holiness and purity could be the object of taking upon himself, the sinfulness of humanity and dying a death in our place to satisfy the justice of God, but God, by his spirit, raising Jesus up from the grave, such that we know that Jesus' sacrifice was sufficient to satisfy the justice of God. And that all of this is done for us. The cross, my brothers and sisters, my friends, the cross is the place where the justice of God meets the mercy of God and they kiss at the cross so that now God can be both just in judging sin and the justifier of freely forgiving and releasing from the bondage of sin everybody who puts their faith in what the Lord Jesus has done. He who knew no sin has become, listen to this, he became sin for us. Do you know what that means? Listen to me. You're wanted. We've sinned. We're enemies. We've failed. We've made mistakes. And you're wanted by God. He loves you. He's done everything he needs to do to reconcile the world to him through his son. But the message we bring is that you need to be reconciled to him. He has reconciled the world to himself through his son. Now what you and I need to do is share with other people, you need to be reconciled to God. Why did he do this for us? Oh, let's see. So that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Think about it this way. God poured his wrath on Jesus so that in Jesus we might become the righteousness of God. God poured out his wrath on him so that in him we might be rescued. Such great news for us. This is the beautiful news of the gospel in our lives. And he's not talking about here that he's made us all morally righteous. That's the process of sanctification, just like Paul was writing to the Corinthians. They had been blowing it on a number of occasions, right? They weren't all the way there. They weren't all the way morally righteous. He's saying, "No, no. You got to follow Jesus and he's gonna work this out in your life." He says, "No, we don't become righteous." He says, "We become the righteousness of God." The righteousness of God means this, that now because of Jesus, when we find ourselves putting our faith in what he has done through his death for sin on our behalf and his resurrection from the dead, when we put our faith in Jesus, you know what happens? We now get the status that Jesus has, the righteousness of God and we are in right standing before God. It's like a legal mandate in a court system. Boom! They are innocent in my eyes because they are in the innocent one Jesus.

We now become the righteousness of God who are becoming more righteous as we walk with Jesus through the sanctification in our faith. Boy, this is so rich. Isn't it? This verse, come on. Like it just explodes when you start reading it, right? And it's just one verse of Paul summarizing what he's saying, the message of reconciliation actually is. I love how Martin Luther also summarize this. Listen to what he said. "Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, just as I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine and have given to me what is yours. You have taken upon yourself what you were not and have given to me what I was not." Don't you thank God for that truth. This is the richness of the gospel. That's why I jot this down if you would, everybody is an ambassador of something, who or what will you represent? Everybody is. Whatever your name is. No professional class. Everybody is an ambassador of something or someone, what will you represent?