Who are "Saints" in the Bible?
I think it's important for us when we talk about the gospel to realize that the gospel as good news, isn't just information and Paul said it is the power of God to transform us. And so the gospel isn't just information or words. It's actually the power of God that transforms us, to bring us from a state of spiritual deadness to a place of spiritual life. And that gospel has implications. It transforms the way that we understand who we are and how we relate to ourselves, how we relate to other people. How do we relate to God?
And so when we begin to look at the different ways that the scriptures describe the life of a believer, that they describe the identity of a believer that comes through the gospel. It begins to paint a picture of how we're to understand ourselves. And it's important to see how scripture does that. And so sometimes we talk a lot about the fact that the gospel makes us saints, that we can all recognize as men and women being created in the image of God, but living life in a fallen world, that we all suffer the effects of sin, we're all suffers.
And we all sin and we're all sinners. And our sin affects others. And we cause suffering in other people's lives and sin causes suffering in our lives. And we understand those identities, but the gospel transforms those identities. And as we begin to understand it, we understand rightly that we're saints, that we've been set apart by God. We've been made holy. The holy spirit is working in us to conform our lives into the character and a reflection of Christ himself. And we're a Royal priesthood set apart by God and his grace. We're saints. Paul even acknowledges and in his letters to the church, he even greets them as saints. So it's important to remember that, yes, we sin. Yes, we are sinned against, and yes, we suffer. But because of the gospel, we're saints, because of the gospel, God calls us sons, sons, and daughters, or family. That transforms the way we understand how we relate to him, how we relate to other members of the body of Christ.
What does it mean to be a family? How does the family relate to each other? How do we relate to our father? That's important to recognize. They call us ambassadors, that our role here on this earth as followers of Christ, is to be ambassadors. We have a ministry that he's given us to bring this gospel, to proclaim this gospel. And so in every circumstance, we find ourselves in we're to be ambassadors of the gospel. For every conversation we're in, we're an ambassador. An ambassador is a full-time job. It's a 24/7 job. And I think sometimes we forget about ambassadors because we don't interact with ambassadors often, and they're not in our daily language, our daily life, but an ambassador is a very, very particular role. Someone is sent to another place to represent a leader, or a king, or a nation in that place.
So anything they do or say is representative of what the king would do or say if he were there and that's our role. So in every time and every circumstance, every conversation, the way that we respond is to represent the way the king will respond if he was here. And so when we remember this is our role. In our discussions with our kids and those disagreements that happened with our spouse in that moment, we're ambassadors. So the gospel fundamentally changes the way that we understand who we are and how we live. And sometimes if we limit it just to information that we have to know, we miss the fact that the power of the gospel transforms us and completely recreates our identity.
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