LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1971, Page 85

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MORNING DEVOTIONS 85

Paul calls them. He himself had been one and still was
one to the people of Corinth. An ambassador is one who
is sent by another, represents another, and speaks for
another. A privilege indeed it would be to represent our
government before the people of another land. What a
much greater privilege it is to represent the Lord of life.
You pastors who preach and teachers who teach and
laymen who march out in the stream of life, what a
privilege to represent Him to men everywhere for whom
He has a word of reconciliation, even though that mes-
sage is carried in earthen vessels!

This marching song is central in the Christian life.
Evangelism is never optional in the New Testament.
It is not, “You may be my witnesses,” but, “You
shall ....” It is inescapable, for “you shall receive
power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you,
and you shall be My witnesses.”

And what is the song? The ambassador is not speak-
ing something he dreamed up or created. He is sent
by God to say something for God. That message is cen-
tered in an event. That’s the great difference between
the Christian religion and all others, the difference be-
tween the Christian religion and philosophy, between
the Christian religion and secularism. The event is what
God did in Jesus Christ. “It is not ourselves we pro-
claim,” says Paul, but “we proclaim Jesus Christ as
Lord.” You know how he said to these people, “I declare
unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which
you have always received, how that Christ died for our
sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried,
that He rose again on the third day according to the
Scriptures.” He knew there was no other way to God
than through Jesus Christ. There is only one way to
heaven after death and to the abundant life now, and
that’s the Jesus way. All the world is to know that they
may try as they will through self-righteousness, self-
help, self-re’iance; they may seek where they will; but
neither is there salvation in any other. There is no other
way than through Jesus, who died on Calvary’s cross for
your sins and mine and for those of every man of woman
born. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man
cometh to the Father but by Me.” The King of kings
said that.

This is the heart. This is the center. It’s so easy to
wander away from it, to substitute for Christ as Savior
a wandering carpenter who taught some good things and
gave to men a good example. When this happens, it
means we have lost a great faith anchored in a particular
even which took place at a particular time. At the heart
of the message is the insistence that God acted in Christ.
The initiative was His. And whenever we forget or lose
sight of this, we sing a vague and unconvincing song.
As ambassadors of Christ we are to sing the love of
God not in a general way, but we march and sing of that
love of God that says, “Christ was innocent of sin, and
yet for our sake God made Him one with the sinfulness
of men, so that in Him we might be made one with the
goodness of God Himself.”

I

And how do we sing this marching song? Every
marching song has a “hurry” about it. There is an
urgency. The purpose of our march is not to put men
in a meditative mood but to be the Spirit’s agents in
bringing them to a real conviction. When the house is
burning, it is not time to study the history of firefight-
ing. That’s the time to turn on the hose or, if necessary,
to beat out the flames with your bare hands.

Our march demands this urgency for a number of
reasons. There is the nature of the message itself —
that’s why we “appeal.” We plead, “Be reconciled!”
Heaven and hell are not figures of speech.

Then there is the vast field to be harvested. Some
78 percent of the world is without Christ. Only 59 per-
cent of our country is churched, and 20 million of our
high school people are growing up as spiritually illiterate
as if they had been living in the jungles of the most
desolate island. Of the three billion people in the world,
only 750 million have heard the Good News. Someone
has estimated that if all the non-Christians in the world
were placed in a single line, that line would be 300,000
miles in length and would circle the earth 12 times.

There are also the needs of the world here and now.
If we listen to Christ, we know that society cannot be
regenerated except by the regeneration of the individual
human hearts.

There is the life of the church. The church is only
always one generation away from extinction. Let any
one generation of Christians mute their voices in testi-
mony to Christ, and the midnight blackness of a world
bereft of hope will cover all the earth.

And because of the urgency we need to sing it with
every means of persuasion. In our day, when every
cause and product is using every possible means to in-
fluence people, we need to go all out. Nor are we to
avoid emotional appeals assuming that valid decisions
are made only in the atmosphere of cold intellectualism.
Nonsense! Men act when they are emotionally stirred.
We are to sing it through our giving — individuals and
congregations seeing beyond their parochial limits, de-
termining to sacrifice to spread the Good News.

It’s a song to be sung with enthusiasm. It takes God’s
Spirit to do that. Bruce Barton wrote: “If you can give
your son only one gift, give him enthusiasm.” That’s
what we need. Savanarola had enthusiasm, and Flor-
ence shouts for an hour, “We will have no king but
Christ.”

It’s a song to be sung confidently and courageously.
Often we are so timid. We have a lack of confidence in
our faith and in our God. When we rub shoulders out
there in life with those who ignore Christ, we are less
than bold in our ambassadorship. There are times when
the sheer weight of non-Christian attitudes overwhelms
us, and we save our witness for the safety of the sanc-
tuary on Sunday. We almost apologize at times. No one
is asking for an overbearing piety in the streets of life
but for a great confidence in this Lord who has given
us this dignity. When we think of this Christ, who

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