Calvary Women
2023-2024 Ministry Focus

ALIENS AND AMBASSADORS:
Living in Response to the Lord Our God

Isaiah 42:5-8; 43:1-3a, 10-12
This is what God, the LORD, says—who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it—“I am the LORD. I have called you for a righteous purpose, and I will hold you by your hand. I will watch over you, and I will appoint you to be a covenant for the people and a light to the nations, in order to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, and those sitting in darkness from the prison house. I am the LORD. That is my name, and I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols.

Now this is what the LORD says—the one who created you, Jacob, and the one who formed you, Israel—“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and the rivers will not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, and the flame will not burn you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, and your Savior.

“You are my witnesses”—this is the LORD’s declaration—“and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. No god was formed before me, and there will be none after me. I—I am the LORD. Besides me, there is no Savior. I alone declared, saved, and proclaimed—and not some foreign god among you. So you are my witnesses”—this is the LORD’s declaration—“and I am God.

Our starting place—our foundation, our core, our focus—is God. EveryTHING and EVERYONE has been created by God. We hear in these verses that He the CREATOR and the one who CALLS people to Himself. We hear He is the one who SAVES, REDEEMS, and promises to ALWAYS be with us. And we hear that He alone is worthy of worship and glory. He has created, called, saved, and redeemed us SO THAT we “may know and believe Him and understand that He is God”. And as Isaiah 43:10 points out, we are to be His witnesses and servants.

What a gift and privilege it is to have such a starting place available to us! God—who He is, as well as what He has done, is doing, and will do—gives us purpose and value that we could never match or even come close to on our own. We try—either in parts of our lives or in all of it—to be the starting place and the focus. Our fallen, full-of-flesh selves think we can figure it out on our own. We have our own power, our own goals, our own truth, We have our own gods we worship and our own “saviors” we look to. But as these verses from Isaiah clearly explain, God alone is “the Lord our God” and our “Savior”.

With belief and trust in God as our Creator, Savior, Redeemer, and ever-present Guide and Help through the Holy Spirit in us, we then live in response. Our focus for this ministry year will be to live as ALIENS and AMBASSADORS.

As many of you probably already know, I did not come up with those terms on my own. They’re straight from Scripture. With God as our foundation and core, we are urged by Peter in 1 Peter 2:11-12 “as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, SO THAT in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.”

Now Peter was writing to a group of people who were spiritually AND physically “aliens”—people scattered from their homeland, in the midst of people different from themselves. But we, too, as God’s children in this present time—Kingdom residents in the already but not yet Kingdom—are aliens. Sin and its effects are still a part of our everyday lives. Satan is still active and effective—not ultimately, but surely in the world. And if you are a follower of Jesus, you see and know we are surrounded by people who do not believe in a sovereign, saving God and are different. Perhaps different in beliefs, goals, actions, or attitudes, but most certainly walking towards a different eternity.

So how do we live as aliens and strangers? Although this is not stated, it is certainly implied—we acknowledge, accept, and remember that we are aliens and strangers. We remember Who (capital W) created, called, saved, and redeemed us. Then we live in response—specifically as Paul writes, we “abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul”. We stay away from and do not indulge what our flesh wants—those sinful desires whose punishment has been covered by the blood of Jesus, but whose effects still plague us as we are being transformed by the Holy Spirit. INSTEAD, we behave excellently. We do good deeds. Why? Certainly to bring good that is needed, but infinitely more so, SO THAT as others observe those good works, they will glorify God. God is the One who saved us. He is WITH US as aliens in this world marred and oftentimes ravaged by sin and darkness so we can be His ambassadors.

This is the second part of our focus to live in response to the Lord our God.

2 Corinthians 5:18-21—Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.” He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Here Paul is telling us that we are ambassadors—representatives of and those that proclaim Christ. We are appealing and pleading on Christ’s behalf that those who do not yet know Christ as Savior and Lord will be reconciled to Him. We saw in 1 Peter that as aliens we are to know we’re different, why we’re different, and live different kinds of lives than those around us—lives marked by excellent behavior and good deeds that come because of the forgiveness of sins and promise of eternal life we have through Christ. Then here is 2 Corinthians, we see along with or perhaps through that excellent behavior and those good deeds, we should take opportunities to share the message of reconciliation. The good news of Jesus Christ.

So let’s strive to bring all this together so our focus for the ministry year is clear!

We START with a high view and right understanding of God that we saw in Isaiah. God has created, called, saved, and redeemed us SO THAT we “may know and believe Him and understand that He is God”. We see our need for a Savior to be in relationship with that God, realize our complete dependance on Christ, and the power, discernment, and competence we have through the Holy Spirit in us. That’s the whole Trinity, friends! We also have the encouragement, help, and partnership from others who believe as we do—particularly those in our church family. Then we can live as both aliens and ambassadors. We acknowledge we are different because of Christ and seek to understand and live in the midst of the circumstances and people around us. We remember that EVERYONE’S GREATEST NEED IS SALVATION, so we act, serve, and speak in those circumstances, with those people in a way that honors God and points them towards that need. We are both aliens and ambassadors for the Lord our God.