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The reading from God's Word written for the morning is the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, the second chapter. I begin at the verse numbered 14. "But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved, and among

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those who are perishing. To one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not like so many peddlers of God's Word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ." Are we beginning to commend ourselves again, or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to

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you or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts to be known and read by all men. And you show that you are a letter from Christ, delivered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his Word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I think those who travel a great deal come to have a special appreciation for mail. I remember the first time I ever saw the Alps. It was five days before Christmas in 1957. I was traveling by train from Cherbourg to Lucerne. French trains are cold, dirty, and inhospitable. I can remember

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waiting two hours for breakfast, only to discover that all they had in the dining car was coffee, which I do not drink, and hard rolls, which I think were left over from Christmas the year before. So I sat there for two hours, cold, dirty, hungry, and dejected, and looked at the Alps, and they didn't impress me at all. When I got to the little hotel where I was staying, the man at

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the desk smiled and said, "You have a room facing the mountains." That fact did not charm me. But as I started to go up the steps, he said, "Herr Thielemann, Herr Thielemann, you have a letter." And I went back and got the letter, went upstairs and sat down on the edge of my bed, not having removed either my hat or my coat, and read the Christmas letter I had received from my parents

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at home. And through the magic of mail, a few minutes later when I got up and walked to the window and looked out, even the Alps were changed. I felt wonderful. Mail is a wonderful tonic when you're on the road. It brings closeness across the mile. And I suppose that's why, as we follow the roads of our lives, that especially at Christmas time we send greetings to one another. We Americans

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will send two and a half billion Christmas cards this year, and that's a lot of cards. And all those that I receive, at least, I will read two or three times. I get much more pleasure out of sitting down and reading my Christmas cards than I do watching Bob Hope or Andy Williams or John Denver stand there with a suntan they got in Palm Springs in the middle of a fake snowy street,

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which doesn't look like any street I ever saw before in my life, singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem." So I enjoy Christmas cards, and that brings me to my third Christmas query. Have you mailed your cards yet? Now the Apostle Paul was a traveler, and he enjoyed getting mail, and he also sent mail when he was on the road. The most personal letters which we have from him are a

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collection of four or five letters which we have gathered together into two books of the New Testament which we call 1st and 2nd Corinthians. And in one of those letters to Corinth, Paul says, "You are our letter of recommendation. You are a letter from Christ, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God." Now Paul is referring here to a first-century custom which

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carries over to this day. If a person was going to a distant city where they knew no one, they would try to find someone from their home to give them a letter of recommendation to someone that this person knew in this distant city. Occasionally I get letters from pastors that are brought to me by folks coming to Pittsburgh, and these pastors whom I've known across the year recommend these

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folks and say, "Can you do anything to help them fit into your wonderful city?" And of course I'm happy to do that. Well what Paul is saying to the Corinthians, and by projection to us is this, that we are letters of recommendation for Jesus Christ, that we carry within ourselves testimony to his beauty and peace and purity and strength. You know Plato said a long time ago that a good

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teacher doesn't really write on paper, a good teacher writes on the hearts and the minds of her students. And what Paul is saying here is that the Holy Spirit writes upon the heart and the mind of the Christian so that that Christian becomes the principal human agency by which God and Christ is revealed to the world. And he also says in this same passage that as we go out to be

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the letters of the Lord, the correspondence of Christ, the master's mail, if you will, that we do not go alone, that we are accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit of God. A few weeks ago I was in Seattle preaching at the First Presbyterian Church there. The minister of that church is an old friend and I was having dinner one evening with him and his wife and their children.

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They have a beautiful daughter who was born in Korea and whom they adopted many years ago. And they told me of how Kim came to them. When she was just three years old, together with a lot of other orphans coming from Korea, she was put on a plane with just three things--the clothes she was wearing, a little toy to entertain herself on the journey, and a picture of the new mommy and daddy she was

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coming to in the United States. Now somehow in the process of the flight this little three-year-old lost the picture of her new mommy and daddy. Now can you think of how traumatic that must have been? This little girl a half a world away from all of her yesterday, her hopes pinned on just two people and having pictures of those people, because that's the way she understood that she would

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recognize them amongst all the multitudes that she would see when she got there. And here she was, halfway across the sea, and discovers she's lost the picture. When she got off the plane, she was absolutely terrified. What she didn't know was that her new mommy and daddy also had a picture of her, and they picked her out immediately. And it was love at first sight, and has been love ever

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since. Now I relate this story to you because as we travel through life, moving from place to place, situation to situation, circumstance to circumstance, there are times, let's face it, when we lose the picture of God, when we seem to become distant from him, when we experience more of his apparent absence than his presence. There are times when we drift away and where doubts and

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anxieties cloud in upon us. But what Paul says to us here is that at the very moment when we lose the picture of God, it's important to remember that he never loses his picture of us. So the point of this passage, written to the Corinthians and to us 1,900 years later, is this. We are to be the Christmas cards of God. We're to be the Master's mail, and we are to recognize as we go

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out carrying the message of the gospel that we do not go alone, but are accompanied by the Holy Spirit of God. Paul says, "You are written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God." Of course, even though that's the case, we have to recognize that many times our witness is very weak and very diluted and very ineffectual. I've thought a lot about why that is so,

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and I've come to two conclusions. I think there are two reasons why the Master's mail doesn't often get through to other people. And the first is this--insufficient postage. What I mean by that is this. The single greatest deterrent to the expansion and growth of the kingdom of God in the world is the unsatisfactory living of many who claim the name of Jesus Christ.

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You know, a lot of people display their Christmas cards today. You'll go into homes and you'll see them on the mantle, or you'll see them pasted on the wall or on windows, or sometimes they're pinned to draperies. Well, if you took all of the Christmas cards of Christ, all those who claim his name and who say as they go out into the world that they are his and live like him, you will see

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some very, very ugly cards amongst them. And they turn people away from Christ. They do not recommend Jesus, they insult him. Early this last fall I gave the town's lectures at Allegheny College, not too many miles north of here. The students were asked, before I came, to write essays on the subject, "Why the Christian Faith is Irrelevant Today." And the ten students who

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wrote the best essays were invited to have dinner with me to discuss their papers. I was sent all of these papers in advance. What I discovered in reading the papers and what I discovered in the very fascinating three-hour dinner I had with these college young men and women was this. They all, each and every one, argued that that which made the Christian faith irrelevant in our time was

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the conduct of so many who claimed to be Christian. As one young girl said to me, "I see no more faith, hope, or love in many Christians than I see in atheists." These youngsters, you see, are not being turned off by the gospel. They're not being turned off by Christ. They're being turned away by weak witnesses, by pious phonies. I couldn't help but think a little while ago as we were doing

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this baptism of a church in Atlanta, Georgia, there was a young couple that joined this church some years ago now and brought a little boy for baptism, and he was baptized. And a year later, about a year and a half later, they brought another little boy to be baptized, and he was baptized also. Right after the second baptism, they discovered that the first child had a congenital

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illness and could not possibly live to be more than three years old. Now when this was discovered in the first child, they immediately examined the second child and found that this child was dying too and could not live beyond three years old. So here's a young couple with two babies, both dying. The father couldn't stand the weight of this. He left his wife and his two sons and

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returned to the North. But the mother took on the sole support of that family and was all the love and the leadership in that little dying family of hers. Now in this small church of which she was a part, it was a custom on Sunday morning for there to be an announcement time to which anyone could contribute, sharing their victories or their defeats, things for which they needed prayer or

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things for which they were grateful for prayers already answered. And one morning this young mother stood up and she said, "I can't go it anymore. I've tried as hard as I can. I'm exhausted physically, emotionally, spiritually, economically. I have nothing left." Now you made promises at the time when my children were baptized, just as we made promises a few minutes ago in this room. You

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made promises that you would help in the Christian upbringing of my children. I won't have them long, but I'm calling on you for your help right now. The church immediately responded with financial assistance, but more important than that, they established among their own membership a little daycare center for those two dying babies while the mother went out to work and earned the family's

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support. Word of that got out into the community, and other families who had dying children, and there are more of them than you might imagine, called and said, "Since you're taking care of these dying youngsters, could we bring our children too?" And the church said yes. And word of that spread wider in the community so that there were people of many other ages who

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were terminally ill and who said, "If here is a church that is so compassionate with those who are dying that they minister in such a way, that's the kind of church that I, in the last years of my life, want to go to." And they began to come. Now some people in that local church left the church. They didn't want to be around all these dying people. Insufficient postage. But others took

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up that ministry so that that church grew, and that church stands as a strong witness for the compassion and love of Jesus Christ in that city until this day. You can mark this down. I'll defend this thesis anywhere to anyone at any time. When Christians live like Christians, when the love of God is manifested in them, when a congregation becomes a powerhouse of such

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presence of the purity of Jesus, when that happens, why you have to bar the doors to keep the crowds out. But weak witness, ignorant witness, inadequate witness, ill-disciplined Christian living drives people away. The mail does not get through. And so I say this morning from a full heart, but also with the authority which is mine as a pastor in the flock of the Lord Jesus Christ,

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if your life is the kind of life that doesn't recommend Jesus but defames him, then repent. We must plead before the Holy Spirit for his cleansing power. He has promised that if we confess he will rid us of our sins. And so we must rid ourselves by his strength of those things that do not honor him. And the holes that open up in our lives as ugly things are taken away will be

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filled by his grace so that his love will move in us and we will become a living Christmas for other people. Have you mailed your cards yet? I think the other reason why much of the correspondence of the King does not get through is the problem is incorrect address. You know, originally all Christmas cards were almost the same, just a single little card, no fold, and a very simple

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one-line greeting with maybe a sprig of holly or a bow up in the corner. Of course now cards have become much more specialized and you can get a card for anyone, for grandmothers and for cousins and for people who were born on Christmas and for the mailman and the milkman. We don't have milkmen anymore. You know the kinds of things that I'm saying. Very specialized cards. Well Paul says

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that we are the letters of Christ and that we are written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God, and the spirit of the living God tailors us to be specialized in our witness to those with whom we come in contact. See what I'm saying is the master's mail is never addressed to occupant. It's addressed to specific people, and I believe that the Holy Spirit puts us into

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circumstances and situations where we have precisely the right word. I hear people speaking about how they would love the light of Christ to shine in their office or in their home or in their neighborhood or in their club, and they seem to forget that they have been put in those places and that that light is intended to come from them. Of course to be that kind of a witness, to be alert,

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to know what's going on about you so that you can say the right word at the right time, that takes both sensitivity and courage. Sensitivity? Dr. Joseph Smith was a noted psychiatrist in Washington DC, and he had a patient on one occasion, a woman, who spent all of her time huddling in the corner of her room, moaning. He went in and tried to talk to her, no response. He tried to communicate with

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her by single word, just saying a word like "mother" or "love" or "fear," nothing. And then one day he got a new idea. He went into a room, got down on his hands and knees beside her in the corner, and moaned with her. And every time she moaned, he moaned. And after a few days of this, she would moan just to see if he would moan. And they first communicated with moans, and then words, and then

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sentences, and then paragraphs, until he brought that woman to relatively normal mental health. It took sensitivity, it took caring, it took just the right touch, and he had to wait a while until he discovered exactly what that right touch was. But out of his bearing, and his caring, and his sharing, he opened the door to the light. That's what we, as the letters of the Lord, must do. So

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first there must be sensitivity, and then to sensitivity must be added courage. There must be in the first place alertness, but to that must be added the flame of real Christian bravery. Whenever I think of that at this season of the year, the name of a certain composer comes to mind. This man was in very poor health. Indeed, his right side was so paralyzed that he could

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barely hold the pen with which he wrote his musical scores. He had exhausted all of his financial resources, and his creditors were threatening him at every hand. Also the critics had turned against him. They praised his music at one time, but now they described him as a kind of has-been. But this composer was a servant of God. This composer understood himself to be a letter

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from the Lord. What he wrote he understood to be part of Christ's correspondence to other men, and so he did not permit himself to be discouraged by these other circumstances, but took his courage from the Lord he served. And as a result, George Frederick Handel wrote the Messiah, a Christmas card from Christ, and no incorrect address on that card. So I put my

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question again. Have you mailed your cards yet? I mentioned earlier that I was in Seattle a few weeks ago. My principal reason for being there was to deliver the Staley Lectures at Seattle Pacific University. It's a fine school there on the West Coast, but it rained almost the whole time I was there. And I was being picked up one evening by my driver, and he had another young

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man in the front seat with him, and when they pulled up, this other young man jumped out of the front seat, and I said, "Oh, get back in the car. You don't have to get wet." "No, sir," he said, with the rain falling down on him and also on me, "I want to meet you, and I want to shake your hand." So we stood there in the rain and met and shook hands, and then I said, "Now can we get in the

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car?" And we got in the car. And I said, "What was all that about? Why did we stand out there in the rain?" He said, "Well, I've wanted to meet you for a long time, and I will tell you why. I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I became a Christian when I was in the 10th grade. I'm now a junior here at Seattle Pacific. Growing up as a Christian in Las Vegas is very hard, because there is a great deal

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of evil in that city." But he said, "Every night, or better, every school night, I would go to bed at 1030, and the last thing I would do would be to climb into bed, turn out the light, and then turn on my radio. And I tuned in station KILA, which is the Christian radio station in that area, and every weeknight at 1030, your voice would come over the radio, and I would hear one of your sermons.

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Your voice was the last voice I heard every night. Your encouragement in the things of Christ was the last word I heard every night. You lifted my spirits. You strengthened me so that I was able to hold fast to my new faith, which means more and more to me every day." Well, you can imagine how I felt upon hearing that. I was thrilled to the very center and core of my being. For those of you who

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have ever had someone come to you and say, "I got the message because of your bringing it to me," when the testimony of that kind of a changed light is given to you, it just makes you feel wonderful. If you've ever had the experience, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you've never had that experience, if you've never had any person say to you, "You were Christ's agent in

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strengthening me and the things of the Spirit for my life," if you've never had that experience, then there's no way I can describe it to you. I do not have the words to articulate the fulfillment that comes with it. The point is that it gives you Christmas in your heart all year round. And if you could even imagine what that feels like, then you would be all the more urgent, all the more

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sensitive, all the more courageous in being a card for Christ, in being part of the Master's mail. Having experienced that thrill even once, you would want to experience again and again that same thrill. So it's Christmas time now, and a lot of people correspond at Christmas time who do not correspond at any other time of the year. May I be so bold as to suggest that you take up your

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correspondence again, that you make it a point to make your life a card from Christ? Remember what the Apostle Paul says, says to each and every one of us. You are a letter, a card from Christ, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. Have you mailed your cards yet? Let us pray. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast chosen to express

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Thyself through us, and we pray that we might be fit and worthy and profitable messengers. For the blessing of those who will receive the word through us, for the blessing of our own hearts as we see their joy and share it with them, and for the blessing of Jesus, whose greatest desire it is to bring all to Himself, that He might present all to Thee. We lift our prayer

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in His name. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]