“Be careful
how you live, not as fools but as those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity for doing good in these evil days.
Don't act thoughtlessly, but try to understand what the Lord wants you to do.”
Ephesians 5:15-17
Next week will be the First Sunday in Lent. As we travel through Lent towards Easter
we are doing something different this year. It’s called ‘40 days or Purpose’. Beginning next Sunday we are
asking folk to read each day a chapter from Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life.”
We are asking
everybody to consider joining with others to discuss their meditations. We are inviting folk to be faithful in worship as
we focus on the same themes as the weekly meditations. We will be suggesting a verse to memorize each week that indicates
one of God’s purposes for our lives. This morning many of us shared breakfast together, signed up for small groups and
were introduced to the program.
If you weren’t
able to do that, we still have a book for you. There are groups that would like you to be in them. And it’s not too
late to volunteer to be a host for a group yourself. But that’s for the week to come.
Right now we
meet around a table that is laid with bread and wine. And as we do so I wish to focus our thoughts on a verse in Ephesians
5:15-17 (NLT) “Be careful how you live, not as fools but as those who are wise.
Make the most of every opportunity for doing good in these evil days. Don't act thoughtlessly, but try to understand what
the Lord wants you to do.”
That verse raises
3 basic questions we all ask about our lives:
- What does God want?
- What does it take?
- Why should we bother?
What does God want?
The Bible from
start to finish has complete clarity regarding what God asks from us. The straight answer? Everything. What does God want
from us? Everything. Our whole selves. Not 10 percent. Not 50 percent. Not 99.99
percent. Everything. There’s no mystery, there’s no give and take,
there’s no ambiguity in scripture about this. Romans 6:13, “Give yourselves
completely to God … use your whole body as a tool to do what is right for the glory of God.”
C.S. Lewis once
said, “The only thing Christianity cannot be is moderately important.” It’s all or nothing. It’s either
true and should determine how we live our life, or we should just forget about it. God doesn’t play games with something
as important as our lives.
It has always
been that way. The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy 10:12 “This is what the
Lord your God wants you to do: Respect the Lord and do what He has told you to do. Love Him. Serve the Lord your God with
your whole being.” Did you hear that? Your “whole being.” That means everything.
There are those
that say we can do it all and we can have it all. Jesus spoke quite plainly against such a notion. Matthew 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either
he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God
and money.” He doesn’t say we “should not” serve God and something else – he says we “cannot”
serve God and something else. He points out that it’s impossible to have two ‘number one’ priorities in
our life. We have to have a number one, and everything else is going to be 2, 3, 4, and 5. You can’t have two number
one priorities.
It doesn’t
have to be money that detracts us from God. It can be work. It can be sports and hobbies. It can be school. It can be ambition. It can be family. It can be music. It can be food. It can be T.V. It can be the Internet.
They are all good things. God created them. But God didn’t create them to take priority over our relationship with Him.
And any time we have something in our life that’s number one above God then we are not giving God our whole selves.
Jesus tells a
story in Luke 14 about a king who plans a big banquet and then goes out and invites everybody to come. People start to make
excuses. The first said, “I just bought a field, and I must go and see it – please excuse me.” Another said,
“I just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out – please excuse me.” Still another
said, “I just got married, so I can’t come.” Now, think about that.
Three ordinary
men are invited to a banquet by a king, and they all turn him down. The first uses his possessions as an excuse – I
just bought some land and I have to go look at it – it will still be there, but he had to go look at it. The second
uses his work as an excuse – I’ve got stuff I need to get on with. The third guy used his wife as an excuse. So
here’s the challenge: What excuses do we keep giving to God for putting ourselves first? ‘Lord, let me first do
this, then I’ll be sold out to you. Let me first do this, and then I’ll be all Yours.’ If we would put God
first in our lives, God would take care of everything else. “Seek ye first the
Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.”
The first question
of life is – ‘What does God want?’ The Bible is so crystal clear on this it’s almost a no-brainer.
What does God want? Everything… and every time we sit on the fence we lose. Which leads to a second question…
What does it take?
Our Bible reading
from Luke 10 gave us the story of Mary and Martha. In the scripture reading Jesus tells us that Mary had chosen the better
part. Mary had chosen to make time to sit at the feet of Jesus. Martha would rather look busy. Sometimes we mistake activity
for devotion. Even our activity for God. “But Lord, I’m preparing this and I’m doing that, can’t you
see how busy I am? Don’t my works look good to You?”
And God seems
to say “There’s being busy and there’s being distracted. I’ve got things you need to know, but you
won’t stop so you’ll never learn them.”
God
wants our whole lives. The word in the Bible for somebody who seeks wholeheartedly to follow God is the word disciple.
And the root of the word for disciple is one of the most unpopular words in the dictionary of today’s culture. The word
‘discipline.’ The first part of 1Timothy 4:7 says “Discipline your
self for the purpose of godliness.” Discipline requires two things; one a letting go, the other a taking up.
To discipline
ourselves means letting go of instant gratification. Our culture doesn’t just tell that we can have it all, it also
suggests we can have it all now. That if we feed our need and give in to our greed then we’ll be just peachy.
Martha sees Jesus coming and heads straight for the kitchen. Feed the need. We put off deepening our relationship with God
because there’s always something else we can do rather than sit at the feet of Jesus. Discipline is doing the difficult
thing now, in order to enjoy the benefit later. Discipline requires letting go of instant gratification.
Discipline
also involves taking up something that we don’t always think of as a positive, namely ‘habits’. Somebody
once said that “If we make good our habits, then our habits make us good!” The second part of 1 Timothy 4:7 says
“Spend your time and energy in the exercise of keeping spiritually fit.” Habits such as daily prayer, scripture reading, attendance at worship, serving in
some ministry or other, giving of our gifts of time, talent and treasure… such ‘habits’ have a way of working
their way into our lives so as they shape our lives.
What
does God want? Everything.
What
does it take? Discipline.
But…
Why should we bother?
Why should we
make the effort to grow spiritually? Why should we let go of some things to make time for God in our lives? The answer is
pictured before us in bread and wine. I can tell you the reason why we ought to do it in two words – the Cross. Because
of the Cross.
2 Corinthians
5:15 tells us “He (Jesus) died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who
died for them and was raised again.”
The message of
Christianity is the message of the Cross. That God is so crazily, madly, intensely
in love with us that in Christ He would rather suffer and die than have our relationship with Him destroyed.
God is so intent
on us not wasting our lives going after what will never satisfy and pursuing dreams that can never be fulfilled, that in Jesus
Christ, God in flesh and blood, He came amongst us, and in Jesus Christ showed us how it could be. He showed us through the
Holy Spirit that healing is possible, that reconciliation and forgiveness can define our lives, that evil doesn’t always
have the last word and that abundant life, not death, can be the defining experience of our existence.
Why bother? Because
God knows that till we get it right about the place God should play in our lives we’re never going to figure out why
we’re on this planet. Why bother? Because the Bible is crystal clear that in order for us to be all that God intended,
God requires that we offer our whole selves to Him. Why bother? Because Christ loved us and gave His life for us that we may
no longer be part of the problem but part of the solution.
To God’s
name be all honor, power and glory. Amen.
