Your Life Is An Ad Campaign For Christ

Joshua Crawford

No one signs up for an exercise program that produces couch potatoes, uses a hair loss treatment that creates more baldness, or has a back surgery performed by a doctor that leaves patients crippled.  Every product or service needs a successful spokesperson to testify that the product works as advertised.  In the same way, each Christian’s life is an ad campaign for Jesus Christ, as 2 Corinthians 5:20 says, “we are ambassadors for Christ.”  If our lives speak for Christ, what are we saying about him?

In Luke 13, Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a couple things we understand.  First, he said the kingdom was like “a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” (v. 18-19)  Next, he said the kingdom of God is “like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until it was all leavened.” (v. 20-21)  Is the kingdom of God producing all sorts of new life within us, like the mustard tree?  Has the kingdom of God spread throughout our lives completely, like in the leavened bread?  Has a mustard seed and some bread dough packaged together a better ad campaign for Christ than we have?

In 2 Corinthians 5:17, the apostle Paul says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”  Whoa, that’s quite a bold claim for the Lord: Jesus will literally make you a new creation.  Paul needed to reinforce this outrageous claim with verifiable evidence – and he did.  In his previous life, known as Saul, he had ravaged the church, “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord…” (Acts 9:1)  All it took was one encounter with Jesus, later in Acts 9, and Saul became Paul, a full-time spokesman for Jesus.  People even said, “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called upon this [Jesus] name?” (Acts 9:21)  Paul’s life went from seed to tree, unleavened to leavened bread, just as Jesus said would happen; he was truly a new creation.

The Bible has advertised for 2,000 years that in Jesus Christ, God has supplied our every need.  (Philippians 4:19)  What kind of daily ad campaign are we running for Jesus?  Either being a Christian has made us “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness,” (Ephesians 4:24) or we’re still “slaves to various passions and pleasures,” (Titus 3:3) falsely advertising that Jesus isn’t enough to change us.  How does your life market Jesus to the world?