In the past, I wrote a whole series of posts called Understanding God’s Government. One of these posts – What It Means To Be God’s Ambassadors – focused specifically on how the first human was created – and Jesus followers have been re-created – to be God’s ambassadors.
This concept is essential to understand for the health of Christians both individually and corporately as Christ-centered communities. Not understanding it can lead to all sorts of deceptive philosophies – one of which is that because we’re free in Christ it doesn’t matter how we behave. This is the thinking the Corinthian church that Paul the apostle worked with and wrote letters to were thinking.
Accomplished author Jessica Brodie, who I had the pleasure of meeting recently at a workshop for authors, recently wrote this post for Christianity.com that provides some deeper insight into what the role of an ambassador of Christ entails. My favorite line in the article is this…
As ambassadors of the Good King, our actions show from Whom we come.
Paul had to remind the Corinthian church that they weren’t behaving like who they were. They weren’t fully grasping that their citizenship was transferred to a new nation and government they represented by their actions.
When your citizenship is transferred, then you see every part of your life through the lens of that new citizenship and according to your new government’s policies and procedures. Just like the first human was designed to do, we represent our government to the foreign nation we live in (the world).
I encourage you to jump over to Jessica’s article for a deeper look at what it means to be an ambassador of Christ as she dives deep into biblical examples and specific tasks ambassadors are commissioned to carry out.
Jessica Brodie
Thanks for sharing, Mike! The concept of being God’s ambassador is really important to me in my own faith walk because it reminds me of the BIG PICTURE, something we can often forget in our daily plod and all the noise of life.