I hope there are many ways that I am not like a tv preacher.

Is that a good way to start a message?

I hope there are many ways that I am not like a tv preacher…but one of the main ones is this: I’m not usually very good at closing the deal. I’m not naturally a sales person.

As we come to the end of our close look at our vision statement, though, I’m sensing God’s prompting to ask us to take action, to do something about all that we’ve looked at.

I love our vision statement. I love what it stands for. I love the picture I get in my mind of our church living this out. It’s rooted in how our church has listened and responded to God, and it is thoroughly consistent with the bible. I have committed myself to trying to live it out; and today, I want to ask you to buy in, too.

I said last week…I’ve probably said it many times, actually…that what’s beautiful about our vision statement is not any one line, but the way that each of the lines builds on each other and makes a “whole”.

Living out love is both dependent on everything that comes before, and it is also the action that takes us full circle back to the beginning. As we live out love in tangible ways with other people, it’s a way to build a growing community.

There are several places in the bible that highlight this “full circle” nature of God’s work in us.

1 Peter 2 has one of those places. “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people”–there’s the community. “Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy”–there’s listening and changing. “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us”–there’s living out love.

The full circle pattern is there in its full glory in 2 Corinthians 5, which we’ve heard a couple of times already today. The love of Christ compels us and urges us on, because he has died for all. Christ is on a mission. He is gathering a community, his love is driving it, his presence is changing us, making us new creations, and he invites us, no, he compels us to live out the love we’ve received from him and be an integral part of bringing more people into right relationship with God.

We are ambassadors for Christ, representatives of God. God is working through us, loving through us, changing us and making us new, giving us a mission to extend that same transforming and new-creation power to everyone else on the planet, because God wants us all in his community, his family.

I think we get this.

I think we understand pretty well the bigness and completeness of what God is doing through Christ in the world and the part we are called to play in it.

I think God is asking us to picture what it could look like, and to commit to doing it by his leading and his power.

Getting outside of the regular routine is often one of the ways that I have an “a-ha” experience. It’s why I try to take time to get out of the office and pray and reflect. And going to India this summer was a way to get outside my usual view on life and see some things in a new way.

I went expecting to be drawn to the children that we met, and as I’ve said before, I definitely was.

But it was more than the girls who made an impact on me. It was humbling to meet pastors who are serving God so courageously in remote villages out in the Indian countryside.

Take a look at 2 Corinthians 5: 14-21, because I’d like to draw attention to the ways I saw these pastors living out Paul’s words.

The love of Christ was so obviously compelling these men and women! They no longer were living for themselves, for their own dreams and goals. They were living for Christ, obedient to him, and on his mission.

In a country where Christian are the 2% minority, they had a newness to their lives that was beautifully attractive. God had changed their lives! I talked a couple of weeks ago about the negative view most Indian people have of the gods and goddesses in their belief system. They know they are in conflict with the gods, they know they need something to be made right.

And because of that, these Christian men and women who served as pastors were so gratefully aware of the way their relationship with God had been healed by Jesus Christ. They lived in this reconciliation. They knew why they needed to have the relationship made right, and the good news of Christ’s love and sacrifice for them enabled them to see themselves and everything around them in a new way.

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation!”

This has taken on new meaning for me after seeing and meeting and talking with the pastors in the Dharwad area. God has done what no one else could do, healing the breach between us through Jesus.

And God has entrusted us with this message of newness and reconciliation. God is entreating us, making an appeal through us, so that you and I and everyone will enter this right relationship with God.

The Christians we saw in Dharwad took their responsibility to share Jesus with others very seriously.

They pour out their lives, moving to places where they know no one and know they are the only Christians in a village. They serve and love and give to earn the right to speak God’s appeal, to give the good news that the God of the universe wants a right relationship with every person, and has done what needs to be done to make it happen.

They sacrificed and lived and breathed a commitment to be ambassadors of Christ. It is their supreme mission and goal.

I want to live as a sold-out ambassador, too.

And I am absolutely convinced that it is not just released ministry as a pastor that Paul has in mind when he says “ambassadors.” Like Polly and Gary and Clint and Fairlight and Martha and Karen and Ralph last week, like so many of you here today, we are ambassadors when we live out love in our everyday lives. When we hold out the message of God’s forgiveness and love. When we let God make his appeal through our love and our lives, this is how we join what God is doing in the world.

God loves you so much he put people in your life that brought you to this community of NFC, and you have been invited into his family. God loves you so much that he wants to give you purpose and direction by making you an ambassador, an intentional representative of his family.

Will you offer your life…your life right now, as it is, with what you already do 24/7…will you offer your life as an ambassador of the good news of God through Jesus Christ?

If you find yourself agreeing with and drawn to this vision statement…would you consider today what it looks like for you to buy into the vision and into our community at Newberg Friends?

This vision is a good framework for life, and this community is a great one to participate in!

Do you have an intentional “backbone” for your life with God? I think the picture I’d love to see is each of us being able to say what we are intentionally doing to live out each line of the vision statement. Not because the statement is perfect, or sacred, but because I really do think it gets to what is important about life with God.

What is your plan for each line?

How are you a part of and contributing to a growing community, listening to Christ, changing in the Spirit, living out love? I don’t think we have to have some “ministry” or perfect thing for each line. But in a simple way, can I think of something intentional I am doing to make each part of the vision statement a reality in my life?

I wonder if it helps to look back at each line, and ask a couple of questions. Turn your worship folder over and look at each line.

It says we want to be a growing community. If you buy in to that, if you commit to it, what does that mean?

Perhaps it means a one-time invitation to someone to come to your house for dinner. Or a longer-term commitment to meet and commit to knowing and being known. I’m not necessarily asking you to “do more at church.” But what would it look like to give your energy and effort to finding the community that you need? What would it look like to give your energy and effort to helping someone else find the relationships they need?

It says we want to listen to Christ. If you buy in to that, if you commit to it, what does that mean?

Perhaps it means a lunch hour in your car, talking with God. Or reading your bible first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Perhaps it means getting together with someone else and talking with each other about how you saw God at work in the past week. What would it look like to make a serious commitment to regularly listening to Christ and obeying?

It says we want to be changing in the Spirit. If you commit to that, what does it mean?

Perhaps it means seeing yourself as God sees you, letting go of past habits and hang up. Perhaps it means confessing things we need to let go of, that we need God to forgive and heal.

Living out love

Perhaps this is as simple as a prayer each day for God to love others through you. Maybe it’s looking for ways to share who you are and what you have with others.

In our time of open worship, would you ask God to help?

How is Christ’s love compelling you? What does it look like for you to be his ambassador?

When our time of open worship is concluded, we’ll have a chance to sing together. The songs we will sing offer an excellent opportunity to say “yes”, to commit to living out love.