Good evening. Session four. This is the last night of Missions Conference. It has been good. I have enjoyed sharing. Hopefully the feeling is mutual, but thank you for the opportunity to be up here once again. If you have your outlines, we're on the very last page tonight. It's the fourth in our series of While here on earth, we are pictures of Christ. Tonight, session four, while here on earth, in this brief moment we have, the few years that we have here on this planet, we get to be His ambassadors. Perhaps out of all the pictures in 1st or 2nd Corinthians 2 through 5, this is the most well-known. But I think there's some really cool things that we can learn from it. I thought though, being a Sunday night, we'd do things a little more informally. So I'm going to start out with some pictures. Some of you have been asking questions through the week about various things about New Guinea. So I thought I'd show some of our life on planet Popitar. Now, this morning, We learned about Wells Blue bunny mascots and we're talking about bunnies and rabbits. Our latest addition and our pet is a rabbit. So that is Trax, named affectionately after bunny Trax. And Briella has cherished that rabbit and holds it like a baby and takes it everywhere. So that is our latest rabbit. Now there's other things that come around the house, not here on the center where we were living, but when we were in the village there were different things. Pigs are the most common. They're everywhere. They're a nuisance. We have to always clean up after them and straighten the yard. There's the tree frogs that you see every once in a while on the balcony. Those things are amazing jumpers. They jump way up there, already 10 foot off the ground, jump another 10 foot and land somewhere and just hop away. And who knows what this animal is down on the bottom right? Goose Goose, very good. Kind of small marsupial possum type thing, got a big tail on it. We had a couple of those over the years in the village. So those were a couple of things around the house. Insects, suppose anybody wants to, Jim says no. Now there's actually a lot fewer, if you don't like mosquitoes and flies and everything, then move to New Guinea. There are a lot fewer there. The ones that are there, though, are a little bit bigger. So here's some of the creatures that we've caught around and seen around. They're big. Some of them you can actually fry up like a, what are those, kebabs? That's in a quart jar there, that one in the middle, one of the largest beetle bugs on the planet. Some sort of caterpillar and all kinds of leaf insects that you're walking past all the time and you don't realize they're there because they blend in. Now snakes, I had a hard time. We have a few snakes over there, but I had a hard time finding all my pictures of them because there are actually more poisonous snakes in Florida than there are in New Guinea. So my advice is stay away from Florida. You'll be alright. Alright, sea creatures. Now we lived right on the ocean in New Guinea. So we saw over the years all kinds of sea creatures. We had that exposed reef right near us. So our girls, one of their hobbies would be to go out with their friends and collect the shellfish from under the rocks and the coral and cook them up on an open fire and eat them. They would find shellfish. Those ones in the middle, a little bit hard to see, but there's all kinds of sea cucumbers right there in the middle. Now a sea cucumber is a curious creature because it's the only one that can puke up its intestines in self-defense and then grow them back. So it's a real sticky, gooey substance. So that's how they fight. That's how to one side. The other side is they propel water. If you gently squeeze them, not too hard to make them shoot their guts out, but lightly, They shoot water and the girls have used them as their squirt guns. Bottom right corner is the brittle starfish. And you might be able to see what looks like a bunch of zigs and zags, but it's just the coral reef covered in all these spiny, brittle starfish that move pretty fast. And the top right is jellyfish. Every once in a while, we get jellyfish that roll in. Some of them, we don't know what they are, so we usually don't play with them too much. Then food. I thought I'd show a couple pictures of food. In the village, one of our favorite things is the coconuts. Fresh coconut, which I guess is really popular now in the States as a health drink or something, coconut water. So you break open these coconuts, drink the water out. Our girls love it. Briella is there with her friends sharing a drink. And then we always get to eat good. Now that we're not living full time in the tribe, When we go back, we hardly ever take food with us, and we depend a lot more on the people. So we get a lot of potatoes. I told you guys, I think, that there are 40 different kinds of bananas, lots of bananas, lots of taro. If they're treating us really well, we get rice. They buy rice in town. So there's potatoes and rice and some greens there at the bottom. Now, this next one I actually found in the grocery store. And they sell, you find all kinds of different local produce here. And I thought, hey, that's something that I bet the folks in the States would recognize, but it looks kind of different here. So tell me what this is. It's a food. What kind of food is that? It does look like an asparagus. It's very large. It's not an asparagus. That's my hand. I'm holding it. It's about two, two and a half foot long, real thick. That is a white radish. So some things are a little bigger over there. All right. Second Corinthians chapter five is where we're going to be. I want to talk about being ambassadors. Here's some more information about New Guinea. I enjoyed Scott's update, and so much of the stuff there in Papua is similar to us. Papua New Guinea is that little country in orange above Australia. To the left of it, that's the Papua side connected to the same landmass. Just on the New Guinea side, there are 860 different languages. Just over 9 million people now make up those 860 different language groups. At least 300 of them that we know of are still unreached. Still without the Bible in their language, still without a clear gospel message. Still much to be done. Now, how does that compare to the US as far as size and languages? I did a little study here. The size of New Guinea is just a little bit smaller than Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota put together. Now between All of those, there are 258 counties in those three states. 258. In order to match the number of languages in New Guinea, each of our counties in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota would have to have at least three and a half languages. And that's the number of languages spoken in New Guinea. So quite a task. There are not many Americans over in New Guinea. By far, the most amount of Americans are missionaries that are there working in many of the tribes. There are some business people, some of them in mining and other things that are there. And then there's a few political folks. One of them is the ambassador for the United States. is Ambassador Catherine Ebert Gray. She is now the U.S. Ambassador to Papua New Guinea. I got to see her a few months ago, meet her, and hear a report. But I want to first look at what an ambassador is. It's a noun, and an ambassador is an accredited diplomat sent by a country as its official representative to a foreign country. That's what an ambassador is. Tonight, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, we're going to look at what it means to be an ambassador. And we're going to see if this definition fits to us. Before I do that, I want to ask a little bit of review questions, see where we're at with being able to track for the week. Thursday night, that was our first night that we presented a topic on while here on earth. From 2 Corinthians chapter 2, what are we, audience? His fragrance, right? And we are that aroma of Christ that are to rub off on other people. Okay, Friday night. Some of you were here Friday night. What are we according to 2 Corinthians 3? His letters, written by Christ through the Holy Spirit on our hearts as an open letter to the world. This morning, we are His His vessels, His clay pots, these fragile things that contain the power of Christ. That He uses these fragile, broken pots. And tonight, as we look at the Word, we are His ambassadors. We're going to look at verses 6 through 21, but I'm going to jump down to verse 17 to start out. 2 Corinthians 5.17. Let's go ahead and pray. Father, thank you for this time in your word. Thank you that we can be your ambassadors. We pray as we look at 2 Corinthians 5, you will speak through it by your spirit. Amen. Verse 17 says this, I'll read 17 through 20. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things passed away. Behold, the new things have come. Now all these things are from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. And he has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were making an appeal through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. What are we according to this passage? If you look at verse 17, the first thing says, Therefore, if anyone in Christ is in Christ, the old things have passed. Behold, the new things have come. He is a new creature. If anyone in Christ, he is a new creature. The old has passed. Behold, all things have come new. I guess in that translation I put creation, new creation, new creature. And what is that? It's the children of God. I want to tell you a story about Tom Rowe. Tom Rowe was one of my early language helpers and he came often to the office and I would meet him in the village and we'd go up into the jungle together and he taught me all kinds of things about the cultural language. Tokyung, I told you about this morning, he was one of the first to get saved. Tom Rao was in that first group as well. Tom Rao got saved and one day we went down to the village together and we were talking and we actually taught some Bible lessons and we were walking back and Tom Rao was walking on the road and he said, hey, watch this. And at the time, he was chewing a betel nut. Now, some of those pictures you saw that Scott showed, their teeth were red. In New Guinea too, they're all red because they chew on this betel nut mixed with lime and mustard seed. It's a very mild narcotic and it's just their coffee. They trade it, they chew on it constantly. And he was chewing the shell off of this to get to the nut. And he goes, watch. And he sucked on this shell, the betel nut, And then he tossed it right on the middle of the trail. He said, I can do that now. Now, what did that mean? What are the cultural implications of that? See, the Papata have this belief of this source power that resides in different parts of our body. Fingernail clippings, hair clippings, saliva, And that if someone can capture some of that, they can use it to work sorcery against you. And so whenever someone's walking down the trail from another village, especially, not their own, if they're chewing on buoy or something, they'll stop, they'll look all around, make sure no one's looking, and they'll toss it back in the jungle behind a tree. Because they're afraid of the spirits. Because they're afraid that someone might come, grab that, and work sorcery on them. And after Tom Rau got the gospel, and he had heard it a few times and he was clear, he said, watch this. Threw it right in the middle. He said, I don't have to worry about that anymore. I'm not Satan's kid anymore. I'm a child of God. That's what we are in Christ. A new creation. Children of God. Not only that, verse 18 says, Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself. Where's God at? Of course, He's everywhere. But His home is in heaven. He resides in heaven. And He's reconciled them to Himself. And our citizenship is with Him in heaven. Ephesians says that we're seated with Him in the heavenlies. We have a new citizenship. When we started teaching the first time, we lived right between two villages, Burau and Bom, there in Papata. And the Burau and Bom people were divided by a tiny little river. And when we wanted to gather the village to teach, the Burau people said, I am not going over to Bom to be with those people. They are a different clan. They follow different ways. They are in a different government section. We're not meeting with them. The bone people said, this is Kabahiro, right in the middle. Remember that story, place of tragedy? This is where we used to meet and fight. We're not going across there and meeting with Buddha. And so we initially had to teach for three months in Burão, through the Bible, present the gospel, and then cross over the little river and teach for three months. For about the next four or five months, we were back and forth every other day between the two, teaching. When we got to Aix and started teaching about the church, they started saying, hey, wait a second, This clan thing, it's not something of the earth. We're one in Christ. We are His church. His body. And before we got too far into Acts, they said, why don't we meet together? And so the people of Boam and the people of Bura started to meet right there in place of tragedy, in Kabehiru, together. Because they recognized they have a new citizenship. It's not Cabunglingas or Raher, which are the clan names. It's not Bom or Burrau. It's my citizenship is in heaven. Not only that, but if we look at verse 20, it says, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. We have a new calling as ambassadors. Man, what a passage. We are a new creation, children of God, with a new citizenship in heaven and a new calling as ambassadors. Since we've moved out, the church there on the coast has continued to grow. It's had its struggles. It's had its ups and downs. It's not growing at the pace we would want it to. It still has its struggles. We go in from time to time and pretty disappointed, actually. but we keep prodding them along and they're growing. One of the coolest things to see though was after one of the services to see them split up into groups around the word to discuss what they'd heard and how they can apply that to their lives to be better ambassadors to the people around them. They wrote on the chalkboard that day all the village names that they were in. And they said, these are the places we need to target as ambassadors of the King. And they began to meet together to pray, to read the Word, and talk about it. That's a change. And I wonder if we do that as believers. So what is an ambassador? If we move on back through that passage, there's a couple of key things I think we can pick up. Ambassadors. If you look at verse 19, it says this, He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. As ambassadors, our responsibility is to speak on behalf of the country or king that we are sent by. Ambassador Ebert Gray of Papua New Guinea. She came to our mission center there and we had the stage decorated and all the flags up and we did a big to-do for the ambassador from the US to Papua New Guinea to come. And she came and she delivered an address but she made it very clear that this message was from the United States of America. And her script that she followed was exactly what she was told to say. She gave us voting information. She told us what to do in case of emergency with the COVID. She told us who to contact. She told us what the U.S. would do at what point. And she was speaking with authority on the government of the United States of America. telling us exactly the message they had given her. And that is our job, to speak on behalf of our King. See, verse 19 says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against Him, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Committed to us that message. Remember Ephesians 2? Consider where we once were. Ephesians 2. I'm going to have a lot of references throughout this outline. We're not going to look at them all. But you can maybe jot them down and study them later. Ephesians 2. We were Gentiles separated from God. Enemies with Him. God's chosen people in the Old Testament. The Jews. And we were apart from Him. In darkness. Without hope. And Christ, by His blood, brought us one body together, Jews and Gentiles, in Christ. And has given to us the message to bring together, not just Jews and Gentiles, but people from every nation, tongue and tribe, to come together in Christ. That message of reconciliation, two things that are torn apart to be brought together. That's the message of reconciliation. And that's the message that we can bring to the world. Verse 20 says, therefore, we are ambassadors. We've already looked at this, but a couple more things that ambassadors do. They support their citizens. Ambassador Everett Gray told us time and time again, if you American citizens, and it was kind of odd actually, because there in Papua New Guinea, the missionaries, we come from 13 different countries. There's some from Switzerland and Germany and different countries in Europe, all over, and we were sitting there, and some of them came, but she was very specific. To the American citizens, we will do whatever we need to for your protection. If you come to our facility, we will do what we can to protect you. We're going to take care of you. If you lose your passport, if the government detains you, contact this number. Part of her role is to support the citizens. One of the common things in Popitar is to beat their wives. It's very, very common. They do that in order to subdue them. Every husband would do it. And as we taught the believers through Ephesians, that was a radical change for them to actually love their wives, as Christ loved the church, and not to beat her. But there's been a few incidents in the church since then. It wasn't a switch that turned on overnight, and all of a sudden they're perfect husbands. The beatings have gone way down. But we had a new Christian who used to beat his wife all the time. And he got in a fight with his wife. This time, though, he didn't beat her. But he got really, really mad and sent her away. Sent her back to her parents. And then he went back to his house and sat. The cool thing is that when I went and visited, other believers had come to him, sat down with him and said, hey, the reconciliation needs to happen between you and your wife. You guys are broken apart right now. That's not what God wants. He wants you to be together. Let me pray with you. As ambassadors, we're supposed to help our citizens. What about those around us? Those who are struggling with their marriage, with their family, with relationships? Are we saying, hey, we're one in Christ. I'm here for you. Let's talk. Let's meet together. Let's pray. That's what an ambassador does. Last thing an ambassador does is reconnect the separated. That's what this message of reconciliation is about. We were separated from God and God reconciled us to himself through Christ. One of the joys that Lori and I get to do is travel around together. Sometimes Lori gets to go into different tribes with me. Sometimes it's just me. Occasionally, it's the whole family. But we have the opportunity to go into some of those 44 tribal locations that we oversee where teams are at. A couple of fun things about it. I mean, we get to go all kinds of modes of transportation. We get to do off-roading 4x4ing to get into some of the places. We have to hike up to seven hours to get into some. We take Kodiak airplanes. YouTube channel called Bush Pilot that I've heard several people talk about. It's this bush pilot that flies through the jungles of New Guinea landing on these crazy airstrips and he documents it with all these GoPro cameras. So if you're interested in that, look up Bush Pilot. He's one of our pilots there in New Guinea. and we get on his plane and fly into these locations. We have one helicopter in New Guinea because some of those places are so remote, no way to build an airstrip and we get to go in on an airplane. This bottom one, this was the last place I was in before we left New Guinea. Checking on one of the missionaries there. Coming back on a boat, you can see the island in the background. Anything weird about that island? Yeah, it's a volcano. It's going off there in the background as we're leaving. So you get in some interesting circumstances, but the cool thing is, in all these adventures we get to go on, as we get there, the work of the missionaries there is the message of reconciliation. To see people reconnected with their Creator, their God, people who for hundreds of years have been separated, generations and generations, by the lies of the devil. living in fear, living under the power of darkness, blinded by Satan. And now to see these churches being established and saying, this is great. And here's some of the next steps you can do. Oh, you're still back in language study. It's hard. Scott can attest to that. All right, here's some next steps, because we have the message of reconciliation to reconnect people with their creator God. What an awesome privilege and responsibility. A few things as we close up to remember. Ambassadors, we need to remember this. If we look back earlier in the passage, verse 6 says, Therefore, being always of good courage and knowing that while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be home with the Lord. Therefore, we also have our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing Him. We need to remember this as ambassadors. You may have a house, but you are not truly home. You may have a house, but you're not truly home. In the last three years in Papua New Guinea, with our changing of ministries and locations and jobs, we were in five different houses over three years. That was a lot of moving around. That was pretty rough on my wife and our family to do all those transitions. And it made it real obvious that wasn't our true home. It's kind of weird being a missionary because you come back to the States after three or four or five years, and you don't totally fit in. Some of my friends here can probably attest to that. I don't quite fit in. But you go back to New Guinea, and that's not really home either. I don't fully fit there. But the same should be true of us. You may have a house, but this isn't your home. Remember that. Loyalty to their true home is critical. Ambassador Gray, as she talked to us, we tried to listen to see what side of the political issue she was on. It was right around the time of the elections with Trump and Biden. And we'd ask questions to see kind of where she was leaning. We're asking questions about the vaccines and the mask mandate. And to this day, none of us have a clue where she stood on those issues. Because she represented whoever was in office serving them. Whatever was protocol, that's what she backed. She was loyal to the message of the country. It didn't matter what she thought. It was the message of the messenger. loyalty to their true home. Something else to remember is this, while here you may suffer as a persecuted minority. There's a model for handling persecution, Jesus himself. You can write down that reference too, 1 Peter 2.23, and remember Colossians 3.1-3, excellent passages. I'm not going to spend a lot of time there. We've talked a bit about suffering through the week, and I wanted tonight to be a little more uplifting, the privilege that we have as ambassadors. I told you the story about Tokyo this morning getting kicked off his land. Everybody around him wanted him to take that clan to the village court. Because they put that thing on his door, they would have to pay him quite a bit of money to take it down. If he went through it, he would have to pay. But if they put it up, and he abided by it and they did it without cause, they would have to pay him all these shell necklaces. And they were saying, take them to court. That's your land. That was your dad's and you grew up there. That's yours. And to the Popitar, there are two issues they fight over. People sleeping with their wives and their land. Those are the two things that will bring out the machetes in the fighting. In Tokyo, his response was different from all those around. You know what? That's not really my land. It's God's. I'm just here for a little while. Wow, what a perspective. Another thing to remember from verse 10 says this, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Remember this, you are accountable. There's some references you can put down. We're going to have to give an account one day ambassadors. You're the one sent to represent the king and give his message here on earth. And one day, He's going to call you back and say, how did you do with that? You're going to have to give an account, whether it be good or whether it be bad. Final thing to remember in 2 Corinthians 5, it says this, for the love of Christ controls us. having concluded that one died for all, therefore all died. Ambassadors themselves are motivated by love of their country. We are to be controlled by the love of Christ. His love for us compels us to respond. Our love for Him compels us to serve Him. Christ's love in His own ministry is a model for us. Man, what did he do? Philippians chapter 2. He humbled himself, became obedient, served us to give his message. As vessels of Christ's love, his love overflows out of our hearts. That's our responsibility as ambassadors. Now to wrap things up, I want to remind us and I want to show a little bit of a difference. Here was the definition of an ambassador. an accredited diplomat sent by a country as its official representative to a foreign leader. Helpers, those offering plates. We're going to do a reverse offering. So normally what happens in some churches is they pass the offering plate around and everybody puts something in. We're going to do a little different so you guys can start passing those offering plates. Everybody takes something out. Okay, take one of those out and pass it to the next group. I've been trying to give something away each night. So the night representing his fragrance, I gave away these little aroma candles. Not too many of you took them. So if you want reminded of the aroma candle, the smoke billowing through your house, there's a bowl left on the counter out there. You can grab it. Tuesday we were talking about his letters and I had you guys write letters to yourself that's going to be mailed back to you in a couple months and I also said these rings that are made out of Sego nuts were done by the Maruyama school who are learning how to read and write and do other things and they are carving these Sego rings to help fund their school and there's some for you guys as well so you can get those. This morning we talked about clay pots and how are all these fragile cracked vessels that can be used by him. And if you didn't get one of these, there's more at the table. Your last chance tonight. Okay? And tonight, I am going way out. I'm going overboard here. Can I get one of those? And everybody gets a penny. All right. Now, these pennies, though, are special. These I have had engraved on them the definition of a missionary. Some of you may have seen this before, but do you guys take a look at it? Has everybody got one? Actually, I have this one here. This one's a little bit bigger. All right, here's the penny. Okay, this morning we talked about the shell necklaces made from the kina shell. In New Guinea, they actually have coins called kina coins named after the shell. So here's the shells, here's the kina coin. We have pennies in America. Okay, on the penny is inscribed the definition of a missionary. Do you guys see it? There it is. One cent. Now, I tried to get refund because they spelled it wrong. But a missionary is one cent. Now, remember what an ambassador is? An accredited diplomat sent by a country as its official representative to a foreign country? What is a missionary? It comes from the word apostolos, or one sent out. That's what a missionary is, one sent. So what is the difference between those two? Ambassadors and missionaries. A couple things for us to keep in mind as we go. Both are sent to foreign lands as messengers. apostles or sorry ambassadors and missionaries they're both sent to foreign lands as messengers that's their job as ambassadors of Christ we are sent from what foreign from what country our citizenship in heaven to this world to give the message of reconciliation that's what our job as ambassadors are now what is a missionary as missionaries we are sent from our church to regions beyond to make disciples as Christ commanded. So here's the little tiny distinction. The difference is this. All of us are ambassadors. Because we are a long way from heaven right now. And this place we call Earth, while here on Earth for a little bit of time, is not our true home. And we've been sent by the King here, left here in this foreign land, to be a witness to Him. All of us, no matter where you're at. Lamars, Sioux City, Africa, you are His ambassador. But, not all missionaries, not all of us are missionaries. Some are sent, and some sent. You get the difference? Both are sent ones. One sent by the King from heaven to this earth, you're an ambassador wherever you're at. The other, a missionary sent out from the church to go to a region beyond the church to make disciples of nations. And I want to challenge us. You guys are all ambassadors. When it comes to missionaries, some of you maybe should be going, being those sent ones. But those who stay should continue to send them out. I appreciate the way you guys have done that. I was telling my parents earlier that there's no church like Lamar's that have gotten behind us and been so focused on missions in so many ways to the unreached. The offering pledge this morning is just one sign of that. So thank you guys. Continue it. Be as ambassadors. Keep sending as missionaries or sending missionaries and going as missionaries. Father, thank you for our time. Thank you for these reminders. It's in your son's name I pray. Amen.