Life For God

Assumption, one subtle belief. And before we know it, we're living a life we never meant to choose. Trying to control God, trying to replace God, trying to use God, trying to earn God's favor. But from the very beginning, God has always desired something different. To be with us.

Good morning.

It's Christmas Sweater Sunday. I love this. We just always look a little shinier, a little brighter. A friend with the gift of encouragement told me this morning that some of us bring the ugly with or without the sweater. And he wasn't wrong.

That is true. It's a good day for ugly Christmas sweaters, right? Because it's just cold out there. It is crazy cold out there. I let our dogs out this morning and they farted snowflakes.

I mean, it was. It was ridiculous. I. I chipped my tooth on my coffee. It's really, really cold. But I'm grateful that you guys are here.

We're combined into one service today, so I know we're. We're all figuring out if there's someone at the other service that normally sits in our spot. So I'm grateful that we've all peacefully coexisted there. I want to ask you this morning as we continue in this WITH series, when you think of great people of God, who is it that comes to mind for you? Do you think of prolific missionaries like the Apostle Paul, perhaps?

Or maybe skilled apologists like Wes Huff or Tim Keller? Maybe you think about brilliant philosophers like C.S. lewis or Philip Yancey, or powerful evangelists like Billy Graham or Dwight Moody. Maybe you think of dynamic songwriters and worship leaders like Chris Tomlin or Phil Wickham. I think we have a tendency when we think about spiritual greatness, we think in terms of human talent or achievement.

And when we do that, we reduce faith to all the good things we do. Baptizing people, growing the church, fighting poverty, providing aid to immigrants, or persuading skeptics, or cleaning up after natural disasters, rescuing people from human trafficking. And those are all good things. But those are all things that can be done without God's involvement. At Christmas, we celebrate that God put on flesh, and he came to earth in the person of Jesus to pursue a relationship with us.

But that idea of a relationship with God is, I think, one of the hardest things for us as human beings to wrap our heads around. We don't always get what that means. So with some inspiration from this little book called with, written by Sky Giotani, we have been preparing for Christmas by examining some of the distorted ways that we sometimes think about God. They're not completely wrong ways. We just.

We take certain truths about God and we enlarge them, or we exaggerate them, or there are others that we neglect entirely. Each of these distortions of who God is has an element of truth in it. And we probably all, at different times in our lives, live in each one of these postures. So far we've talked about life under God where we try to trade religious behavior for blessings and favors. This is a posture that envisions a moody God who's in a bad mood a lot of the time and just has to be appeased.

So rather than focusing on living in relationship with God, we tend to focus on how can I manipulate God to get him to give me what I want. Then there's a posture that we talked about a couple of weeks ago that we called Life over God, which is when we try to use principles, I mean, sometimes legitimate biblical principles, but we try to take these and we piece them together into a roadmap for success. And so we begin to substitute this formulaic list of best practices for truly knowing and being with God. We talked last week about Life from God where we take the reality that God is our provider and then we twist it around ourselves. This is a posture that encourages us to view God as a genie whose primary job is to give us whatever we ask for.

So this morning, what I want us to do is look at yet another one of these postures. We're gonna call this one Life for God. And this is an activist mentality. It focuses on accomplishing great and world changing things for God. Sky Gitani writes that we tend to find purpose and meaning through what we do for God and his kingdom.

The Life for God posture is highly celebrated and those capable of accomplishing the most receive great accolades and admiration. So like each of the postures that we've looked at over the last few weeks, Life for God thinking is partially grounded in some very legitimate biblical concepts like service. I mean, Jesus told his disciples that whoever wants to become great among you, he said, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant. And whoever wants to be first must be your slave. Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

So Jesus willingly humbled himself, he willingly put on flesh, and he hung with outcasts, and he washed feet, and he died a great, a criminal's death he absolutely didn't deserve. And he calls his disciples to follow his example by serving as well. Life for God also emphasizes sacrifice The Apostle Peter once told Jesus, we have left all we had to follow you. And that was true. In following Jesus, the disciples left behind careers and homes, in some cases, families.

They left behind familiar surroundings. But truly, I tell you, Jesus said to them, no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and in the age to come, eternal life. Jesus came to sacrifice himself for the salvation of the world. And he promised that no sacrifice made by his followers for his sake will be wasted or unrewarded. And when we consistently and sacrificially serve others, that really can have significant impact.

The Apostle Paul opened his letter to the Romans with these words. Paul said, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. The Gospel of Jesus is intended to spread. It's intended to impact lives. That's why we pay attention to how many people attend our services.

That's why we pay attention to how many people choose to be baptized here, or how many dollars are given, or how many families we adopt for Christmas. There are a number of different metrics that we try to keep track of because we see all of those as potential indicators of impact, service and sacrifice and impact our noble pursuits. But all of these things can be detached from a genuine relationship with God. We could pursue all of these things on our own, without any reliance on God's strength or his guidance, which is not the life God calls us to see. When we pursue life for God in our own strength, we tend to wind up in the ditch, because that mindset will often encourage us, for example, to equate our worth with our achievements.

Scripture calls David a man after God's heart. Now, we know David wasn't perfect, but David was a man who sought God. But one of David's big failures came in 2nd Samuel, chapter 24, when he decided, rather than trust God's protection, to take a census of all Israel's capable fighting men. God had already granted David numerous military victories. But David wanted to know, without any help from God, how tough his army was.

And David's arrogance cost many lives. See, we reflect thinking like David's when we derive our peace of mind from the size of our bank balance, or when we look to human talent and planning alone to give our church success, or when we equate our significance with how many followers we have, or how many books we sell or how many deals we close. This kind of excessive Self reliance has a tendency to encourage us to actually neglect our own intimacy with God. I'm reminded of Luke chapter 10 where Jesus visited the home of two sisters friends of his named Mary and Martha. And Mary sat and listened to Jesus while Martha, I think her last name was Stuart, right?

Martha fretted and she worried about fixing the meal and being the consummate hostess. And she actually got irritated that her sister wasn't in the kitchen with her helping out. And Jesus said that Mary was the one that actually made the better choice. Because at the end of the day, the time we spend with God is just as important as anything we try to do for Him. Do we believe that?

That the time we spend with God is just as important as anything we try to do for Him?

Like many of you, I rarely get to the end of my to do list. And so I can just tell you there are days when my agenda feels extra full. And on those days it is sometimes tempting to just roll out of bed and skip right over spending any time in scripture, skip right over spending any time in prayer and just get busy trying to accomplish things for God. Anybody else ever struggle with that? But I'm called to a life with God, not just activity for Him.

So spending time with God is as important as my productivity. When we pursue life for God in our own strength, we're often gonna tend to struggle constantly with feelings of inadequacy. See, our desire to accomplish meaningful things, I believe is a God given instinct. But we were never meant to do that on our own. Sky Gitani writes, life for God takes our fear of insignificance and throws gasoline on it.

The resulting fire may be presented to the world as a godly ambition, a holy desire to see God's mission advance. But when these flames are fueled by fear, they reveal no peace, joy or love. The relentless drive to prove our worth can quickly become destructive. See the activism orientation of Life for God Thinking can also lead us to believe that when we're right, the ends justify the means. I mean, we see that in the Apostle Paul in his pre Jesus life of zeal for all things Jewish and Old Testament.

The Apostle Paul saw Christians as a threat and he felt 100% justified and authorized by God to intimidate them, imprison them, even kill them. So it's possible to take a right belief, like the value and sanctity of human life, and use it to justify some very wrong behaviors like bombing Planned Parenthood clinics or assaulting doctors who provide abortions. How often do we see people's passions about political or sometimes even biblical issues pour out in condescension and contempt toward people who think differently. See, the apostle Paul knew from personal experience how easy it is to trust in our own abilities and passion to get things done. So in Philippians chapter three, Paul rattled off all of his Jewish credentials.

He said, if someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews in regard to the law, a Pharisee. As for zeal persecuting the church, as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. See, in the Jewish world, Paul had it going on. He was jumping through hoops and he was climbing ranks. But then he met Jesus, and Jesus reoriented Paul's entire focus.

Paul went on to say in Philippians, but whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things, I consider them garbage, comparatively worthless that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that that comes from God on the basis of faith. See, what had once been supremely important to Paul, this no longer mattered to him. After meeting Jesus, Paul's goal, his only goal, was to be with him. So he abandoned his former drive to score points with God and he began trusting in Jesus alone to make him righteous.

Now Paul was fully invested in Jesus mission. But Paul knew that our identity as followers of Jesus is found not in what we do for God. It's found in what God declares about us. Because of our faith in Jesus, God wants our work to flow out of our connection with him, not our desperate attempts to earn his love or approval. So if we're going to avoid spending our lives camping out in this life for God territory, our I think there are three tensions we need to pay really careful attention to.

Starting with this one. Number one is the tension of appearing versus knowing. Appearing versus knowing. The natural bent of our performance mentality is to try to prove what we can do for God. And Jesus had a really sobering response to that way of thinking.

Jesus said, not everyone who says to me, lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and in your name perform many miracles. Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you away from me, you evildoers. See, Jesus said that on the day of judgment, there are going to be a lot of people who assume that they belong to him because of their practiced religious behaviors. In particular, Jesus spoke to our desire to do impressive attention getting things like prophesying, casting out demons, performing miracles.

But are we willing to quietly, faithfully, obediently walk with Jesus in ways that nobody else sees as a husband? I try imperfectly to be helpful at home. But early in our marriage, after reading the five love languages, I would sometimes clean our house and I would fold laundry and I would wash dishes, and I would think to myself that I was loving my wife through all my acts of service. Until one day Allison pointed out to me that I wasn't totally doing that for her. And she was right.

Cause keeping our house clean and organized, that's actually important to me. So I could do all these things to make our house the way I wanted it to be, and I could allow myself to think I was doing it for her when I really wasn't. There's a difference between loving and serving my wife and simply keeping our home the way that I want it to be anyway. And in the same way, Jesus said that acting religious is not the same thing as knowing him.

We can go through a lot of religious motions and yet not know Jesus in a personal way at all. Now there's a second tension we have to pay attention to, and this is the tension of striving versus relying in our drive to prove ourselves. We have a natural human tendency to take pride in things like how often we attend church, how faithfully we serve, how generously we give, how hard we pray, or how well we know our Bibles. And there's no question that spiritual growth requires effort. But the Christian life was never intended to be all up to us.

It was never intended to be something that we just achieve in our own strength. Paul addressed this tension in Philippians. He said, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Paul wanted his friends, not just in Philippi, but in all of the churches that he had influence over. He wanted them to continue following Jesus.

He wanted them to live the life of disciples, whether he was there with them to personally prod them along or not. But he didn't want them to make the mistake of thinking that that life was all up to them. So he went on in verse 13 of Philippians 2, remind them, for it is God. It is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. A couple of years ago, we bought a new washer and dryer and we had it delivered to our home.

And our laundry room is on the second floor of our home. So the delivery guys had to carry both of those appliances up the stairs and around a corner and down a hall and around another corner into our laundry room. And to do that, they used these moving straps. You guys seen these? They're pretty impressive to watch.

So they put the washer or the dryer between them. They wear these straps, and the straps enabled them to share and to balance the weight. Watching those guys carry these heavy things up and down our stairs in a way that really didn't involve any of the huffing and puffing that would be involved. I think if I were trying to do that was just a reminder that when you have a really smart and strong helper, you can move things that would be way too heavy to lift alone. Now, the life God calls us to is not always an easy life.

It requires some self denial. Jesus calls us to swim against the cultural current, but God never asks us to do that alone. We were created for life with God, which reminds us that spiritual maturity isn't something we achieve. It's something that God produces in us through his spirit. God gives his spirit to all believers to help us desire and choose a life that aligns with his purposes.

So we strive for spiritual growth and we rely on God. We weren't made just to live life for God. We're meant for life with God. So we also need to be mindful of this third tension, and that is the tension between doing versus being. It's really tempting to treat the Bible as a self help guide to behavior modification.

I mean, we can see all of these traits, all of these virtues, all these habits and disciplines that Scripture encourages, and we can just assume that our job is simply to act that way, to carefully maintain the appearance of these character traits in our lives, which is quintessential life for God thinking. Last summer, John Veach and I visited Ghana to help plan our Christmas offering project to help build a clinic there. And like Adrian shared earlier, I am so grateful for the generosity of our church family that we have. We've hit the goal of $66,000 to build the clinic and we've raised what we need to send a Container of supplies all the way over there. We've raised the money now that we need for a solar backup system.

Not a solar system that would be a first time ever for. But I've almost said that several times in my communications about this. It's been amazing to be a part of that. But when John and I were in Ghana this past summer, one of the things that I learned was that Ghana was a British colony for a number of years. So there's still a lot of Christian influence there.

But Islam is spreading in Ghana, especially in the north, and mosques are just popping up all over the place. So there were several parts of Ghana that we traveled around and where we just saw mosque after mosque after mosque. And there's one church in Ghana that has decided, because it seems that Islam just continues to gain traction, they have decided to raise funds to build churches all over the place as well. And we passed several of those, including this one, Jesus is the answer church, which as you can see, we kind of out in the middle of nowhere. The problem is these aren't really churches.

They're just empty buildings and they're putting them up all over the place. See, instead of actually making disciples, this church is working hard to create the illusion of making disciples. They're trying to carefully craft this impression of growth and impact. But smoke and mirrors are not how God works. See, Jesus said to his disciples in John 15, I am the vine, you are the branches.

If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. See, we are not the vine. Jesus is. We're not the ones who produce fruit, he is.

You can't snip a branch off of a tomato plant and expect it to keep producing tomatoes. And for that very same reason, we have to remain connected to Jesus. In order to produce the character that God desires, we have to pursue life with God. That's what Paul was getting at when he wrote in Galatians that the fruit, the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Fruit is not an accessory, it's not a decoration.

It's what naturally grows on a healthy fruit tree. Now, I love fresh fruit. Anybody else? I love fresh fruit. It's a little harder to come by during cold weather months like this.

So suppose I take this ficus tree right here. Everybody just focus on the ficus for a moment if you would, and got a handy dandy apple that I'll put right there.

And let's see, I'VE got bananas, good source of potassium. I think I'll put the banana over here on this side. My favorite, however, peaches.

And this particular variety of peach. I've been genetically engineering this one. It actually comes off the tree already diced for you. It's really handy. I'm going to put some peaches there, and because they're my favorite, I'm going to double down on peaches.

And there you have it. So it's now a fruit tree. Right. Mission accomplished. Does that make it a fruit tree?

No. Stapling an orange or duct taping a tangerine zip. Tying a pomegranate if you want to get fancy to a tree doesn't change the nature of the tree. God isn't looking for us to make merely external modifications to our lives, like cleaning up our language when we're at church or at life group. God isn't looking for us to donate to a good cause when somebody twists our arm or we need a tax deduction.

God isn't looking for us to suddenly become prayerful when it's mealtime. God doesn't want us to artificially change Personas or alter our habits just because we're in certain settings or with certain people. He wants to give us the gift of His Holy Spirit, who specializes in transforming us from the inside out and helping us to take on the character of Jesus. See, we were made for life with God. Godly character is not an act.

It's the natural byproduct of God's Spirit in us. It's not an additive, it's not an accessory. It's not an appearance that we cultivate. It's what happens when the Holy Spirit is living and reigning within us. Life for God, on the other hand, is what happens when we focus only on what we can do when we busy ourselves trying to use drywall screws to put the grapes on the tree.

Rather than inviting God into every part of our lives and trusting him to do what he's promised to do, we don't pursue God's mission to try to get his attention. We align with his mission when we're already doing life with God. Here's the bottom line that we're getting at today. God wants to be with us and he wants to work through us, not just have us work for Him. Do you see the difference?

God wants to be with us. He wants to do his work through us. He's not interested in just having us jump through hoops or cultivate appearances or work for Him. Last Sunday we looked at a story that Jesus told in Luke chapter 15 about a young punk who arrogantly demanded his inheritance while his father was still alive. And as we said last week, remarkably, his father granted his selfish request.

And this young man took this wad of cash that his father handed him and he left home, took all the money with him and he quickly blew all of it. And it wasn't long before he found himself broke and hungry, and he decided his best option was to go back home and beg his dad for a job. And his loving father, who had been watching for him the whole time he'd been away, saw him in the distance and ran to meet him and threw a huge bash to celebrate his return. And in the story during this party, the man's rule following older son, who had been there the entire time, fumed that all of that attention that he felt so much more deserving of was being stupidly wasted on his spoiled brat brother. And we said last week that as different as these two sons were, they were both consumers.

They were both more interested in what they could get from their father than simply being with them. But what their dad wanted most was simply to be with his sons. In Jesus story, when the older son griped about all the fuss that was being made over his younger brother, this is how the father responded. He said, my son, you are always with me and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found. See the father's words to both of his sons when he welcomed his younger son home and when he tried to calm his older son down, the father's words made clear that what brought him the most joy was not his son's work ethic, it was simply being with them. Both of these sons were focused on getting their dad's wealth, but he was always focused on simply being with them. God wants to be with us and work through us, not just have us work for Him.

So let me toss out a couple of questions that I think are important questions for us to wrestle with as we search our hearts around this particular issue. For starters, do you see yourself as a contractor for God or as a loved and adopted child?

You know, a contractor can be fired, but a child has a place in the family.

Are you convinced, perhaps, that your value to God stems from how much you know, or how passionately you worship, or how diligently you serve, or how faithfully you attend services, or how generously you give, or how thoroughly you obey? Or do you know in your heart that God loves you and values you simply because he made you, that he put on flesh and he died in your place and my place at the cross. Not because we earned that, but because he loves us and he wants to be with us. The Life for God posture is always going to disappoint us because we, we cannot measure up to God's holiness and perfection. God isn't looking for our achievement or our activism or our performance.

He wants us. He wants to be with us. He wants to live in us. God's heart for us is actually reflected in a prayer that the Apostle Paul prayed over his friends at the church in Ephesus. And I want to pray this prayer over all of us as we close today.

So whether you want to read these words off the screen or you want to close your eyes and just listen, this is what Paul writes. I kneel before the Father, from Whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his spirit, your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.

And all God's people said, amen.

Life with God is what we're created for and as a church, that's why we exist. To help all of us to experience and to seek and to live that life with God. Gonna invite our friends on the Next Step team to go ahead and come on up here. Every time we come together, we just wanna extend an opportunity to take a tangible next step, whatever it is that God is leading you to do. Because of the weather, we're not doing our Next Steps class today, but we will resume those next week.

Our Next Steps engage. Class take next Sunday at 11am we would love for you, if you're looking for a way to get more involved in life and ministry here at Greenwood Christian, we'd love for you to attend that class and learn more about that at any time. This is true of all of us here in the room. And we know we have more people than usual online with us today. Just text the word next at any time to the number that you'll see often on your screen.

317-707-9997. And just let us know what God is prompting you to think about or to do in your heart. We would love to connect with you and help you take that next step. But for all of us who are here in person, anytime, after every service, every Sunday, there are going to be several of us just like this down here in front of the stage. And if we can pray with you, if we can encourage you, if we can answer questions or help you to discern.