Today I come around this scripture on the theme of new creation. I am excited to open the word with you today to share a little bit more about what it looks like to be new creations in Christ and hopefully from the standpoint of ministry but of encouragement to anyone in the room, no matter what part of the journey on your Christian life you are on right now. I hope that this message is broad enough where it applies to you. I think it will. I did forget just earlier that afterwards there’s a little stand at the back if you want to sign up to volunteer. Also, there are ways to donate towards us. We are a non-for-profit. We exist only because of the generosity of donations. So if life affords you to give a donation today, that would be greatly appreciated. And then also you can sign up to be a prayer partner. If you want to know more and if prayer is a big part of your life, you can choose to be a part of our prayer newsletters as well. So if nothing else, you could be praying for us and with us. I want to encourage you in that way.
But we open this passage today in 2 Corinthians 5 where Paul, the Apostle Paul, is explaining to the church in Corinth what it looks like to live a new life in Christ. This morning, it was pretty special to be a part of a baptism there and be sprinkled with water. I’ve had the privilege of going into the jails and seeing ad hoc baptisms, adult baptisms I must say, in the life of prisons in those clothing wheelie baskets. They bring them out, they put a hose in it. They fill it up like a bathtub and the men go in and go under the water to be baptized. But the reason why we do this is because it signifies something deeper that is going on in our hearts and in our lives.
In 2 Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul opens this section saying, “those who have become are in Christ, the old is gone, the new has come.” We are new creations. This speaks to the conversion moment in our lives. Some of us have grown up in churches and I understand that faith has been more of a gradual situation for you. But for many people who have come to the faith, there is a moment, and even those who have grown up in church, normally it’s around your teenage years or into your 20s where you say, “Okay, I’m not just going to church because my parents go anymore.” But you make a conscious decision. You make a conscious conversion or plea to God to save you and you reach out to God’s loving and gracious arms to accept you on behalf of Jesus Christ and to forgive you of your sins and to come into relationship with him.
This new creation is a miracle. It is something that is the crux and the basis of the Christian faith to have salvation by grace through faith alone.
It is the basis of who we are and the identity we have as children of God. But I want to give you a bit of an analogy from my own household to explain that that’s just the beginning. Just like your wedding day, you say your vows; it doesn’t mean if you’ve had a great wedding day, that’s not necessarily the same as building a great marriage. Same thing as owning a car. I remember the first time I got a car; it doesn’t mean that you’re going to treat that car well and fill it with oil or obey the speed limit, heaven forbid. There’s this thing about our Christian journeys and it’s a paradox within salvation that Paul speaks of in other letters. He talks about firstly that we have been saved by grace through faith. It is a gift. It is something that we cannot earn. Salvation is by grace through faith. It’s based on something that is received from God, offered to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. But in Philippians 2, the same writer Paul talks about working out our salvation with fear and trembling. So there seems to be a paradox between God’s providence in our lives to bring us into relationship with him and our own personal responsibilities and our own personal habits and spiritual practices to say to God, “Make me more like you, Jesus. Help me become deeper in love with you.” And that is the journey of the Christian faith. That is our discipleship journey.
The Journey of Being a New Creation
It’s like at Christmas time in my household over the last few years. As I said before, I’ve got an 8-year-old and a six-year-old boy, and they’re crazy about Lego. And the last few Christmases and birthdays, it’s been Lego on the top of the Christmas list. We’ve got so many Legos over the last few years and they want the biggest ones obviously and the most intricate ones. On Christmas morning, they open up their gifts and obviously as compliant parents, we get them what they wanted for Christmas and they open up their gift. They’re so excited. They have their Lego. But I know what this means now as a parent and as a father that they’re excited about the gift that they now have, but the gift isn’t made yet. The gift hasn’t been built yet. And guess who has to be the one that builds it? You’re looking at him. I spend the rest of Christmas or Boxing Day or sometimes multiple days on building projects with my sons, building their Lego with them and for them and doing that with them.
You see, our Christian journey, our journey of faith with Jesus, it is a moment. It is a moment of becoming a new creation and that is valid and that is a moment of birth, rebirth, just like we believe in baptism. That is a moment where our hearts become alive to God and I don’t want to downplay the miracle of salvation here. But today I want to talk about the journey of being a new creation and what it means for us to be living as new creations. There is a quote by Tim Keller that he says by becoming Christians or coming into faith with God, we become fully loved and fully known at the same time. And God comes into our lives and he starts to work on things. He starts to build the Lego of our lives and starts to chip away at what is not like him. He wants to come into our lives and build our character. He wants to come into our lives and change how we think about things so that we see things through the eyes of God. And that is a lifelong journey.
Eugene Peterson, a famous author and the author of the paraphrase The Message Bible, talks about discipleship and the journey of faith being a long obedience in the same direction. Something that we work out over time in the same direction, and our direction is Jesus. Becoming like Jesus is something that we commit to for the rest of our lives. Jesus himself talks about it in the gospels as being something that we commit to every single day, that we commit to being new creations by taking up our cross, dying to ourselves, taking up our cross and following him. This is something that we choose daily. It is something that we work towards. It’s something that we never arrive at.
Jesus as Our North Star
Just as the sailors for many, many years in the northern seas have used the North Star as navigating their way home. So many of these sailors in the North Seas, the North oceans, they use this North Star because it is one of the few stars in our sky that doesn’t move. It doesn’t rotate much. It’s something that can be used for navigation. But I tell you right now, they don’t necessarily believe that they’re actually going to sail their boat literally to the North Star. They just use the North Star to navigate their way through life. None of us should have the pretense or the idea that the goal of our Christianity is to be perfect in all ways, that we were going to get to this place where we’re exactly like Jesus and we’ve got everything together and everything is the way it should be. I think our lives in this world and our discipleship journeys are only going to be culminated in the life to come.
The goal isn’t to necessarily reach the North Star and become exactly like Jesus. I don’t think that is necessarily even doable. But I think that we get to be people sailing through life using Jesus as our example and as our exemplar to guide us to home, to guide us to the place where we become more at home with Jesus.
I have the privilege of going into prisons and seeing these darkness-to-light moments take place. But it doesn’t just happen there. It is something that happens after prison. And it is something that people choose to walk alongside other people to see them come home to Jesus and have their relationship with Jesus and their journey of discipleship take place. There’s a story of a lady named Helen. She’s one of our key volunteers in Windsor, in the Windsor prison. Just last year, we were having a kids’ day with some kids of inmates out in Western Sydney at a Baptist church out there. And she was volunteering. She came up to me so excited. She was saying, “Jono, I can’t wait until the end of today. After today, I’m going down to the shops. I’m buying everything I need for a roast dinner.” And I’m thinking in my mind, I get pretty excited about roast dinners, but you’re seemingly more excited than normal. But she says to me and goes on to say that the reason why she’s having this dinner is because she’s been working with a lady and just coming alongside and mentoring as a volunteer in Delwinia, the women’s prison in Windsor, for many years. She’s been a volunteer there for over 10 years and she’s been walking on the faith journey with this lady in prison and then throughout her parole period. But the reason why she was getting her dinner ready and her roast dinner prepared is because that following day on the Sunday, they were going to have a Sunday roast to sit down together as someone who has been walking with this person, this lady, through her faith journey through prison and parole. And they were going to have a roast dinner to celebrate her freedom. The reason why they were doing a roast dinner is because she was ending her parole sentence.
A Faith Meant for Others
In this passage that we read today, our faith journey isn’t meant to be just a private one. Our faith journey was meant to be personal, yes, but our faith journey was never meant to be private. In this passage, Paul reflects that we are all made new in Jesus. But then he quickly turns the attention off of us and says we’ve been given the ministry of reconciliation. And then further than that, he calls us ambassadors for Christ, people who represent Jesus in our worlds. And that is what Jesus aims to do. He does not just want us to be new creations for the sake of ourselves but for the sake of others. To be people who are committed to other people’s new creation journey. Not as perfect north stars ourselves, but as people that can just help people on their journey home and teach them how to navigate life in the likeness of Jesus.
Our faith journey was meant to be personal, yes, but our faith journey was never meant to be private.
There’s a quote by an author named Henri Nouwen who says our prayer life, our Christian life, should not be something that takes us away from the world but something that leads us further into the world. Sometimes as Christians, we try to think about how we can separate ourselves away from the world as much as possible. But in fact, Jesus is calling us to be ambassadors and to share in this ministry of reconciliation and go into the world. The very thing that Jesus says to his disciples at the point of his resurrection before he ascends into heaven, what’s the first thing he says in the great commission? It’s a two-letter word. Go. There’s an outward momentum. There’s an outward focus to our faith.
Living as an Ambassador in the World
I would pose to you today that if your inner life with Jesus is growing deeper, then your outward life representing Jesus in the world should go further. Now, this isn’t opposed to one another. It is not that we lock ourselves away from the world and say, “How can we just be as holy as possible?” No, we live a life with Jesus so that we can go and make disciples just like Helen has done with the lady that she’s been walking a journey with. So my prayer for us today and my call to all of us is maybe you’re not necessarily called to prison ministry per se. I would be pumped if you did because we need more volunteers and that would be amazing and let’s have a talk after this. But this is broader than that. There is a bigger call for every Christian to not just live life as new creations for ourselves, but to live on behalf of others, giving the ministry of reconciliation and being ambassadors for Christ in our worlds, wherever you find yourself: in your workplace, in your sporting teams, in your schools, in your universities.
If your inner life with Jesus is growing deeper, then your outward life representing Jesus in the world should go further.
As you walk down the street, I had an interaction just down at Yaramundi. I had an interaction with a lady down there a few weeks back where I was just there on my day off. In summertime, I get to just go down and have a quick dip and have a swim and I was doing that on my day off. But as I came out of the water and got ready to leave, there was a lady there and she was noticeably upset. And I had every reason to go, “It’s my day off. I am going home and I am going to turn on the NBA because I like basketball.” But I had to physically or mentally say to myself, “No, I am an ambassador for Christ. God has called me to be salt and light in my world, no matter if I’ve clocked in or clocked out of my job.” And this person is in need right now. It seems as though she needs a conversation.
And funnily enough, and it is pretty pertinent right now with our state of the world, but she moved here from Iran six years ago and she’s upset because she’s by herself, a single mom with a couple of kids. And she was doing it tough. She was not finding like she was having enough bandwidth in her life. Everything’s too much. And I was able to talk to her about her faith and funnily enough, she originally left Iran because she was a Christian and she wanted to come into Australia as a safer place to be. And I talked about her prayer life and connecting back to a church out Richmond way and we prayed together. And that was it. I said bye. And I said, “I’m praying for you.”
Being Present and Aware
You see those times, and it’s funny when you have eyes to see and you teach yourself to live as an ambassador for Christ, the amount of times you see these little opportunities around you. So many people nowadays are so stuck on their phones that they don’t even look up to see what’s going on around them. So we need to be people of presence. We need to be people, if we’re going to be ambassadors for Christ, we need to be people willing to put ourselves out there, willing to pay attention, willing to look up from our device and go, “Who’s around me? What’s going on?” Being aware of everything around me. Because it’s only the present people who catch those opportunities. And as the great commission says that we are called to go into the world, we are meant to go and make disciples of all nations. In Acts 2, the very last thing Jesus says is he says you will be my witnesses from when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you’ll share about me from Judea to the ends of the earth. And I believe that as Christians, we are called again to this outward motion of the gospel going further into our communities. And the way that that happens is through us. Through us being ministers of reconciliation, people who are committed to be ambassadors for Christ to share the opportunity of being new creations, being made new in Christ.
A Hope That Never Gives Up
There’s a story and I’ll close here because I think my time is running out. But I met a man in Clarence Prison up in Grafton. It’s the most northern prison facility in our state and one of the biggest prison facilities in our nation. A 1500-bed prison. And up there I got to share in a whole day of chapel services. The chaplain there takes his little wheelie beach cart that you normally use for your kids, but it’s full of Bible tracts, Bibles, and a CD player. And he goes around a whole day and runs eight chapel services in the eight sections of the prison. What a full day. Can you imagine running eight services? That’d be a big day. But he goes and he makes his way around and I got to spend a day with him and I remember sitting with a man who had been in prison and he was saying, “I’ve been in prison for seven times.” But the only reason why this time is different, and this is inspiring to hear, he said, “The only reason why I think this time will be different is because now I have hope in Jesus. The other seven times and the times that I’ve come back in and out and in and out, I was just living for myself.” But I love that he had the faith and the hope now that he has found Jesus for himself to brave the outside world and to believe that new creation is possible.
As crazy as the world is, as messy as people can be, don’t give up on them. Because I believe the gospel is something that gives us hope and the amount of hope that we need to never give up on people.
So my final encouragement for us is as crazy as the world is, as messy as people can be, don’t give up on them. Because I believe the gospel is something that gives us hope and the amount of hope that we need to never give up on people. So, I want to encourage you as a church community to not give up on people, but to keep heading out into the world with the hope of new creation and being ministers of reconciliation and ambassadors for Christ wherever God puts you in Jesus’ name. Amen.