Such a great paradox between what we read in the news and what we read in the Bible. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. We are His ambassadors. God makes His appeal through us. The church is the body of Christ. We bear His very name! And yet we drag it through the mud.
What does it mean to be Christ's ambassadors? It means we represent His kingdom. We show others what it's like, what He's like. And yet we fail at this all the time. Where He is faithful, we are faithless. Where He is kind, we are nasty. Where He is holy, we are just like everyone else.
He's not surprised by any of this. He knew how we'd fail, and yet He still trusted us with the most important of assignments. He put His good news into our hands, and He told us to take it out to a hurting, needy world. It blows my mind. If He had asked me, I would have said, "Oh, no, God. This is a bad idea. These people can't even be trusted to show up to worship on time. They're easily distracted, self-absorbed, messy. They're dust, Lord. Redeemed yes, but still just dust. They'll make a mockery of your great name. Don't entrust this to them."
But I wasn't there. And He knows infinitely more than my little mind can ever hope to grasp. This was the way He chose to make Himself known on the earth--through messed up dust like us--and it is the way that is best. I have to trust Him on that. And I have to believe that whatever harm His people are bringing to His name, even more good is being done.
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reported
that Christians are significantly more likely to give money to the homeless,
return excess money to a shop clerk, help a sick neighbor, spend time with
someone who's depressed, and help someone find a job. People who regularly
attend church give four times as much to charity as their secular neighbors.
They are twice as likely to volunteer with the poor, the sick, and the
elderly.
These are just the small
things. They don't include the Christians who provide loving homes for one
foster child after another, who feed, clothe, and welcome refugees, who bring
new life to addicts and prisoners. I've not seen many national news stories on
Christians who leave the comfort of their western homes to lay pipes for fresh
water in El Salvador, to love street children in India, to rescue
sex-trafficked girls in Thailand, to teach grown-up orphans in Russia how to be
good mothers. Yet these things happen every day.
We are Christ's ambassadors. We
represent His kingdom in our service, our love, our joy, our patience, our
perseverance, and our hope. I look at myself, nearly defeated by something as mundane as a couple weeks
of plumbing woes, and wonder at God's use of someone like me. He could have
chosen angels, and yet He chooses to use regular, flawed people like you and
me. His power is perfected in our weakness. His light shines through our
frailness. His name rises above the scandal of the week. In all this, He knows
what He's doing.
