Dive- Week 2- The Mission

Last week I had the opportunity to speak again at Dive.  Dive is a once a month Wednesday night gathering of a few local church student ministries north of Birmingham.  We are meeting once per month together in May, June, July, and August.  I was invited to speak by my friend Jason Durant the Student Minister at First Baptist Church Hayden.  First Baptist hosted the event this week and we met in their main auditorium, so a special “thank you” goes out to FBC for giving up their main room for a Wednesday night.  If you scroll to the bottom of this article you can click the link to hear the audio of the full message.

This week I talked about the mission of the church and the mission of every Christian.   We dove in to 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 and focused on the passages about the ministry of reconciliation.  It’s a passage I have loved for a long time but have never taken opportunity to preach through it.

Two key words stand out to me in the passage… reconciliation and ambassadors.  In the Apostle Paul’s time period when Rome would conquer a new territory many times they would send as many as 10 ambassadors to live in the new area and represent the king back in Rome and to carry his message.  It is a beautiful picture of for us when Paul writes that we are ambassadors for Christ on this planet as we represent the true King and carry his message in a land that is not our home.  Since we have been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ we are now to take the message of reconciliation, which is powerfully summed up in 2 Corinthians 5:21, to everyone…everywhere.  This is in short the mission of the church. 

We are group of people who ourselves were once alienated from God and enemies of God who have been made right with God through the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf.  We now have the mission of taking the Gospel of Jesus to our family, co-workers, friends, neighbors, strangers, and the world.  We have the privilege of showing and sharing the power of the Gospel with people just like us and with people nothing like us.  We are to display the power of the Gospel in our lives and declare it with our lips.  It’s a privilege to carry the banner of the Gospel everywhere we go and it is convicting to think about how poorly we all sometimes do this.

So many people have bought into a belief that Christianity is a boring religion that asks you to perform some rituals or rights of passages and then simply to not do anything “bad” the rest of your life and to die and go to heaven and not do anything “bad” for eternity.  THAT IS NOT CHRISTIANITY, and it is not what Jesus died for.  I hope people we’ll see that Christianity is not about getting a get out of hell free card that begins and ends with a walk down a church aisle.  It is to be a life consusmed with Jesus and only satisfied in Him.  Jesus himself calls us to the frontlines of the mission of the church and to be willing to lay down our lives for the advancement of His Gospel.  The Gospel is not to be trifled with and the mission is not to be delayed.  We have been reconciled to God and it is our privilege to share with the world how they also can be reconciled through Jesus.