Matt Chandler - Ambassadors

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. This will be our passage. We’re literally just going to walk through this sentence by sentence, and kind of land here on our last week of Thrones and Thorns. I got a few questions last week in the member meeting. They were different questions, but they were kind of asking the same thing: if you saw things differently in this election cycle than maybe I saw them, is this a good place for you to call church home? Let me answer that. Of course! What I was trying to do was delineate between the Word of God and my position or perspective. Unfortunately, because my perspective was really the only one represented, what ended up happening was that in many of our home groups—not all of our home groups, but many of them—the discussion was not around the inherent, unchanging Word of God but around my perspective. Therefore, if you didn’t share my perspective, you very much felt ostracized and on the outs, and I’m asking for your forgiveness. That was not my intent, and so where that happened, please forgive me. This was a learning experience for me too. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to thread the needle perfectly on this issue. Again, absolutely, you are welcomed here. In fact, I said week one that there must be a diversity of beliefs that a community of faith can hold. But I never meant to ostracize or to make you feel on the outs; that wasn’t my intent. So please forgive me for that. I’ve made some notes on how to do this better for four years from now, and we’ll see how I do then. My guess is I’ll have new lessons to learn, and at the end of that one, I’ll be like, «Oh, now this, » and then four years after that, maybe just maybe, I’ll nail it, but we’ll see. I wanted in the buildout of the series to have a week post-election. I had no idea how it would go and didn’t know what we would be talking about, other than I did know my text—this text. Regardless of how this thing was going, this was what was turned in for God. This was what was turned in for our communications team, and this will be our text that weekend after the election. I just wanted to be able to remind us of the things that are most important and orient us around being the people of God—the Kingdom of God—in an empire, and then talk a little about what it looks like to live into this moment. Maybe my application has changed based on how the election went, but I’ll wait until I get over there and get myself in some trouble near the end of the sermon. With that said, I love this passage. This passage actually has what I’ve historically called coffee cup verses in it. What I mean by that is, if you have a church background, there are verses in here that you probably had on either a coffee cup or a t-shirt at some point. They were on a bookmark or a bumper sticker. There are just a couple of these verses that are kind of like Instagram profile explanations. The problem with that most often is those verses are yanked out of their context and applied erroneously, if you will. What I want to do is kind of get into the context of this passage because I think it will shape and help us as we try to live into this moment on the other side of the election. So, no more from me. Let’s look at verse 16: «From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.» Now, what’s interesting about this text is that even in these limited verses, we have three «therefores.» «Therefore» in the Bible, or really in any literature, sums up something. They’ve already said something, and because that is true, «therefore» is how we ought to think and consider. When you’ve got three «therefores, » we are in a very layered passage today. What he has been speaking about is the constraining, forming love of Jesus Christ—that’s the topic of this entire chapter and the chapter before it. To encounter the person of Jesus Christ—to hear and respond by faith to the gospel—does something to us. Salvation does something to us, and I might add, because I’m in the Bible Belt, if it has not, you are probably not saved. If the gospel has not transformed something, giving you a new appetite, a new lens by which you see the world, or a new hunger for the things of God, then I’m not quite sure what we’re calling salvation. That’s the point—the context that this verse is in. He’s making the argument that one of the things that happens when people encounter the gospel is they become new. Something fundamentally changes in them. It’s like where the gospel is at work; it brings an entirely new understanding of God and the world. It brings light where there was darkness; it gives sight.