Ambassadors for Him

Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.

-II Corinthians 5:20

I've really been contemplating the whole God-thing in my life and trying to connect with it on a level that surpasses the basics of going to church on Sundays, Wednesdays, and making an attempt to even get to Sunday school on time. I can't seriously think I've arrived when doing the bare minimum. My personal Christianity involves the things that I do on a daily basis, all day, that tell people what God is all about...it's like being an ambassador. An ambassador is a sovereign representative of a particular government who is assigned to a foreign government for a special and often temporary assignment.

Allow me then to operationalize the term "Christian" as a person or ambassador who, acting under the government of the Holy Spirit, has been sent to this foreign world to represent deity - the essential nature of God - and carry out His assigned mission before going to be with him in heaven.

So what does this mean for me? As I meditated on this thought, God provided me with what I like to call the rules of engagement that I, as His ambassador, must adhere to at all times:

1. God is my ultimate authority and governor. Democracy is an awesome concept, but because I have been purchased with, by, and through the blood of Jesus, I am not free to do as I please without regard to my Government.
   
2. This world is a foreign place to my soul and I must always remember that I'm only here to carry out a specific God-given assignment. I can be among this people for influential purposes only. I can not conform.
   
3. My acts of service must be assigned of God and carried out in His way. Ambassadors act upon the commands of the Commander-in-Chief. Unless the Commander assigns and approves and action, I shall not undertake it.
4. I must not act according to my own intelligence. The point at which I begin to lean to my own understanding, I breach the commitment that I have made to said Commander, and I, at that point, cease to be representative of the government that sent me.

We really serve an awesome God! I'll continue this post as it comes to me...