Audio from last Friday’s Marketplace Ambassadors meeting at Covenant Life Church is now available for download or streaming here.

I wanted to quickly recap my talk, and also thank our good men and women who attended and continue to attend our meetings.  Thanks to those who keep showing up at 7am on a Friday!  We know there are other very good things you could be doing with your time.

A Tale of Two Lives

I shared my personal testimony as a child who, like so many, “grew up in a Christian home but rebelled.”  My rebellion story is not unlike that of many others–I went the way of the world, and for me given where I lived and with whom I associated, that meant I lived two lives.  One life was what my parents and other authority figures saw (what I wanted them to see), and the other was what I did with my friends and within the broader community of young people in high school and college –partying, getting into trouble, flirting with disaster and even death on a regular basis, etc.

The Christian training of my youth, rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, created a crisis in my life.  As much as I wanted to live a secret life, at some point I had to choose my path.  And try as I might to say the life with my friends was truly real and satisfying, my upbringing showed me better, and I knew it.  Jesus Christ is the final authority over all life, and repentance and faith in His name is the real path to life–His life.

What I’m Not Saying

I could say a lot about the impact of the gospel in my adult experience as I “do life” with those in the wider world and marketplace–many of whom are not Christians or are not active in any local church to gain Christian training.  I don’t want to suggest by my testimony that I somehow assent to an insular, segregated vision of life in the church that is too often largely divorced from the concerns of others–outside their repentance and faith.  I don’t believe that is the loving, Biblical, Christ-like way to live out our faith and engage the marketplace.

Seeing the difference between an inward-facing and outward-facing Christian life is another kind of crisis altogether.  I am seeing that it is bound up with the secret life crisis of my youth, but still it is very different.  This is not about where I stand in relation to Christ, but in relation to others.

So, let me leave that distinction in place for now, and maybe we can come back to it.  The key thing here is that a crisis can come in many flavors—at home, in our nation, in the marketplace.  It comes to us as Christians and non-Christians.  It is part of life in a fallen world.  But it is also more than that.  It is a training ground.

Where do you see crisis in your life?

Defining “Crisis”

Crisis is not just when bad things happen; it is more properly defined as a moment of truth or a turning point.  As I mentioned in my own experience of crisis–and I used 9/11 as a powerful example in my own life–the reality is that when a crisis arrives, especially when it comes upon us suddenly, the foundations of our faith will be revealed.

Oswald Chambers, in the famous devotional My Utmost for His Highest, offered this comment on crisis in his daily devotional entry for September 10th:

We presume that we would be ready for battle if confronted with a great crisis, but it is not the crisis that builds something within us— it simply reveals what we are made of already. Do you find yourself saying, “If God calls me to battle, of course I will rise to the occasion”? Yet you won’t rise to the occasion unless you have done so on God’s training ground. If you are not doing the task that is closest to you now, which God has engineered into your life, when the crisis comes, instead of being fit for battle, you will be revealed as being unfit. Crises always reveal a person’s true character.

Once you’ve discerned where crisis is confronting you, then ask yourself, What is this saying about my character to those around me?

Communicating in Crisis

Christ taught that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.  Crisis has this amazing tendency to churn up things in our heart, and much of how our true character is revealed takes place in our words.  How do we communicate in crisis?  This is a rich opportunity for us as Christians to be different, to genuinely though perhaps gently, demonstrate our true faith.  And this is not about us showing ourselves superior in any away–that is self-righteousness, and we all know what that kind of communication feels and sounds like.  It is offensive, and Jesus attacked it regularly.

No, Christian faith is a gracious gift from God, available in recognizing Jesus Christ as the God-given way to God, and it is available to all the world in the simple act of repentance and genuinely calling out to Christ as Lord and Savior.  Christian communication in crisis must never be from self-superiority.  This is where we turn to Scripture, to some foundational truths from 2 Corinthians 5 that I have laid out to shape our communication in crisis.

Our communication in crisis situations in work or in any area of life begins with the gospel.  This is where Paul begins.  He starts with the new creation in Christ.  From there, you can see a clear progression in 2 Corinthians 5 from our new identity to a new style of communication.   Here it is in short form:

New creation: “If anyone is in Christ—a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come.” (v17)

New love: “For the love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died.” (v14)

New identity: “Christ reconciled us to himself…therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.” (v18, 20)

New perspectives of others: “From now on we regard no one according to the flesh.” (v16)

New mission: “God through Christ gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” (v18)

New communication: “Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others…[as] God is making His appeal through us.” (v11, 20)

It takes effort to apply this new creation reality to how we communicate in a given situation.  I want to argue that it is nothing more and nothing less than a necessary part of regular Christian discipleship.  Each of these “indicatives” can and will be fleshed out further here, but more important than that is wrestling with them yourself.  Can I ask you to carve out time to read and re-read 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 using the above as a lens?  Doing this has served me well, and I can commend the exercise to you as well worth the time and effort.

Application

Once we wrestle with the text and understand Paul’s intentions to his initial audience (and I suggest using a Study Bible or commentary to guide your study), we then have the next level of effort.  We need to get these truths worked out clear enough in our minds so we can bring them forward in our lives, into real flesh-and-blood crisis situations, to serve those with whom we work.  It will take effort, but with the Holy Spirit promising to finish the broad work of sanctification He started in us, we can have confidence we have “divine power” (2 Peter 1:3) working along with us in this effort.

To guide your application of the above truths into increasing effectiveness in your life and work, I offer the following “5 Ps” of gospel-centered crisis communication:

Power: Believe the gospel powerfully transforms us from rebels against God to representatives for God!

Preparation: Preach the gospel to yourself daily and meditate frequently on 2 Corinthians 5:11-21.

Prayer: Ask the Holy Spirit before, during & after your various conversations to help you regard no one according to the flesh.  Our mission and our highest concern for others should be reconciliation to God.

Persuasion: From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks…if the love of Christ controls you, love will define your speech, and you will be persuasive.  God will be making his appeal through you.

Perseverance:  Expect all this to happen over time.  Work on these things now, so when the crisis comes, your foundations in Christ will be revealed as sure, true, and attractive.

Conclusion

I hope this is helpful.  We will continue pressing forward in this study of 2 Corinthians 5 and Paul’s experience in the difficulties in that church.  I am also excited that our Sunday sermon series on 2 Peter, starting with this fog-lifting overview message of the epistle by Robin Boisvert, is arriving into our church at what seems like just the right time as we face our own season of difficulty.

This is nothing new.  The church has a mission, and it is not mainly about us. Effective communication, particularly in the crisis situations we face at work, is a unique mission field.  If we can get gripped by the Holy Spirit’s work as intended for us individually and as the church, as modeled and taught by Christ and Paul, which we have been given to study and apply in Scripture, then I am confident we will not only emerge through our crisis in a God-honoring way, we will also be better trained to serve and love others in their crisis situations with the love of Christ gifted to us by a merciful God.