The Obedience of Faith

SERMON: 1991-04-28--r0291--the-obedience-of-faith SOURCE DURATION: 00:35:08.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 27 ('Let us pray.') is a formal prayer initiation, which is retained as part of the sermon's closing structure (a benediction/prayer). It immediately precedes candidate 28, which is silence and marks the transition out of the spoken sermon content. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:00:00.920] [CUT] Life that each of us has for God. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:00:00.920; resume after this marked segment] Just as in our natural families, babies grow up to become mature and to become individuals who are responsible for their own lives and who are able to be a blessing to other people so in the body of Christ too. God doesn't want us just to be spiritual babies. He doesn't just want us to be busy taking things in, having taken things in, He wants us to grow strong and tall in Him so that the body of Christ growing to maturity may fulfill the purpose and the destiny that God hears for it among all the nations of the world. The question that we want to try to deal with tonight, if all of that is true, if God not only gives us spiritual giftings but if He uses even the broken areas of our lives to be a channel of His grace to touch the lives of other people, then how do we go about finding our very specific calling in life? That's not only a critical question that's asked by young people when they try to make up their mind as to how it is that they're going to live and spend their life, but it's a question that needs to be considered by all of us as periodically we review where we've come from and we make plans for the future so that whatever days the Lord continues to give us may be used for the glory of God in the most productive and useful fashion. And that's why tonight we want to look together at these seven verses in the first chapter of the book of Romans because tucked away in these seven verses is Paul's experience of God's call upon his life. And as he talks about God's call upon his life and as we look at that together tonight, we'll get a little bit of an understanding not only how God works in Paul's life, but hopefully also we can deduce from that some principles that God wants to apply in your life and in my life so that as we go on with the Lord Jesus Christ we become increasingly aware of what is the particular niche that God is calling us to in life so that concentrating on that specific calling that we have, our lives can be fruitful to the maximum because we are fulfilling that destiny in life for which God has not only created us, but has called us in Jesus Christ to be his child and to live for the praise of his glory. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. I want to suggest to you tonight that in that opening verse we have three levels of calling that were operative in Paul's life that he understood and that you and I in turn need to understand and to apply to our own lives. First of all, there is a general calling that God has on the lives of all children of God. He starts out by saying Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ. Now if you have a Bible with footnotes then you will know that the word servant in the Greek is really the word slave. The Greek word is doulos, you may have heard of it before. Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ. And he uses that word very deliberately because there is a big distinction between a hired servant and a slave. Because you see a hired servant has certain rights and privileges. When you go out and hire somebody to work for you, you negotiate. I want to work these hours and I want this kind of pay and if we can come to an agreement then we'll have a contract together. But if one of us breaks the agreement then I can either fire you or you can leave my employ and you can go out and find somebody else. And even though there can be a measure of control that is being exercised by the master over the servant in terms of economic dependence, in most cultures a hired servant, if he's really driven to it, is a free man or a free woman to go where he or she wants. A slave has no such privileges. A slave is the property of the master. Has no rights, has no privileges, is told to do what he needs to do and has no way of escaping. And if he tries to escape he can only run away and if he gets caught running away then he's going to be in a big pile of trouble because a slave has no rights. Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ uses that word very deliberately because you see in the Roman church to which he was writing here, the church at Rome, the vast majority of the believers identified with what it was to be a slave because most of them were from that economic strata of life. Now when Paul here says that he is a slave of Jesus Christ, what he is saying is that he knows he has no rights. He belongs to Jesus Christ body and soul. He is at the beck and the call of his master and long before he can consider himself an apostle chosen to bring the word of God to other people. He knows that he has to come to Jesus and Jesus has the right to tell him what to do and what not to do. Paul is not an apostle because he chooses to be an apostle. He becomes, as we'll see in a few moments, an apostle because God calls him to be an apostle. But his response to the revelation of Jesus was the crying out from his heart that said, "Lord, what is it that you would have me do?" And he begins by surrendering his life to Jesus as a slave. I want to suggest to you tonight that there is an important principle there for those of us that want to know the will of God for our lives. Because you see a lot of people get confused between being a slave and being a servant. And a lot of God's people think they can negotiate with the Lord the terms of their surrender. You know how it goes, don't you? "Lord, I love you and I'll serve you and I'll do certain things as long as I don't have to do this particular thing and as long as I can negotiate the hours and as long as I can have something to say about what I like and what I don't like." And the world is filled with believers and filled with Christians who try to negotiate with the Lord Jesus and try to tell the Lord Jesus what it is that they want to do with their lives. And then when the Lord won't play ball, they take their bat and ball and they want to go home because they want to hold on to some right of self-determination, some right of doing with their life what they want to do, some corner of their heart that they want to hold on to where they continue to be Lord. And what the Lord Jesus wants all of us to understand is that when we came to the cross of Jesus, repented of our sins and were purchased at the cost of His blood, we forfeited all rights to our own life and to our own future and to all of our own plans. We became slaves, bond servants, as the King James Version has, of the Lord Jesus Christ who has purchased us with His blood and who owns us lock, stock and barrel and who has His own plan and His own purpose for our lives. And if we're ever going to discover the will of God, it's got to begin by putting everything on the altar to present your body, says Paul in Romans Chapter 12, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable before God. That's scary business. Because what if He wants me to do things that I don't want to do? What if He wants to send me someplace where I don't want to go? What if He wants me to embrace that I don't really think are values that I want to embrace? Those are scary thoughts that run through the hearts and the minds of most of God's people at some point or another. And that's one of the reasons why so often our surrender to Jesus is so incomplete. And that's why very often times we give Him 75 percent of our lives, we give Him 90 percent of our lives, but then there are these deep-seated fears that we are afraid are going to come true if I really give it all over to the Lord. And that's all part of the lie that Satan puts into your life and into my life where he tries to picture a negative image of our God and Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Because you see there's another side to slavery that we don't think of very often in terms of Western culture. And that is that how well a slave fared was largely determined by the qualities and the characteristics of the Master. The Master who calls us to His servant is the Lord Jesus who laid down His life for His sheep. And any Jesus who dies on the cross for you and for me isn't waiting to take us and to plunge us into the kind of ruin and misery that Satan makes us imagine is going to happen if really we give our lives to Him in total and complete surrender. This Jesus loves you and me more than He loved Himself. He knows you and me better than we know ourselves. And the plan and the purpose that He has for His life is the plan and the purpose that He knows we have been exactly fit for because it is that plan and purpose for which He destined us. Paul said even before I was born God had chosen and called me for this specific ministry. He said that God chose to give me. And while the road of servanthood and the road of service can indeed by times be very painful and difficult. The Lord Jesus provides the grace that we need in order to carry out the calling that He has upon our lives. Let me ask you tonight. Are you willing to be whatever it is that God might have for you? Are you willing to put it all on the altar? Are you willing to say Lord Jesus I am your willing servant, I am your slave. I'm going to trust that you will take me step by step in ways that I can handle and that you will lead me into things that will give glory to your most holy name and that will build me out and make my life useful and productive in your kingdom. A lot of people want to know the will of God for their lives. But they're not prepared to start with a complete surrender to His plan and to His purpose. And when that lingers in the back of our minds then there are many things that we will never hear the voice of God on and there are many callings that God may put upon our lives that we will never yield to because deep down we are afraid of what it is that God is going to make us do if we really give it all over to the Lord. And if you're confused sometimes as to why it is that you're here and if you wonder what exactly is it that I'm supposed to be doing with my life then ask yourself the question am I a slave of Jesus? Have I given up my rights of choice and preference and all the other things that govern my life can I say with Paul I am a slave of Jesus Christ? Because you see only when that issue is settled in your life and in my life as it was in Paul's life can God go on and give us a revelation of the particular calling that He has on your life and on my life. Paul a slave of Jesus Christ called to be an apostle. Called to be an apostle. Why did Jesus Christ intervene so very dramatically in Saul's life on the road to Damascus? It was because from before the foundation of time God had determined that Saul of Tarsus, who we know today as Paul, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Saul, was called and chosen by God to be an apostle. That is to say one who is going to be sent out all over the world to proclaim in Jesus Christ the salvation and the redemption for which all of the world is longing. Paul a servant of Jesus Christ called to be an apostle and all his life Paul lived with a keen understanding that there was a call upon his life that he needed to yield to by the sovereign choice of Jesus Christ. I believe that applies to your life and to my life. You've heard me say before that biblically speaking I believe that God calls all of his children into specific areas of life and into specific areas of ministry. And the call may or may not be as dramatic as the call that the apostle Paul experienced. Often times it is not. Often times our call becomes evident by the gifts and the desires and the ministries that God raises up for our lives. But however it is that God calls us to his task and to his ministry I can almost guarantee you there will be a time lag between the call and the fulfillment of that call when we really begin to function in the ministry that God has for us. Paul a servant of Jesus Christ called to be an apostle. A lot of people think that Paul became an apostle immediately upon his conversion. And a superficial reading of the book of Acts would seem to give that indication he gets converted to Acts chapter 9. Then immediately begins to preach in Damascus but you will recall that preaching didn't last very long. He had a particular knack for getting people mad at him. He had to run for his life. They had to let him out of the city over the city wall in a basket you will recall. Spend some time in Jerusalem. Couldn't hack it there either because people wanted to kill him there too. Goes into the Transjordanian, the Arabian desert for we don't know how long. Eventually ends up in the city of Tarsus and it's not until Acts chapter 11 when there is a revival that is taking place in Antioch that Barnabas now goes and finds Saul in Tarsus and brings him back and then it's not until Acts chapter 13 when the leaders of that church are in prayer and in worship that the Holy Spirit says to the five prophets who are gathered there take Barnabas and Saul and set them apart for the ministry to which I have called them. And that becomes the first missionary journey of the apostle Paul. And if you look carefully at the time frame between his call and the exercise of his ministry you discover that something like 13 years has passed. Of those 13 years today we know very little because you see they were times of preparation. Saul called to be an apostle. And again there is a principle in that that you and I really need to understand I believe. One of the problems with God's people is that when we finally get excited by the Lord Jesus and we get captured by his will and we turn our lives over to him by his grace and we really want to start serving him then the first thing that we want to do is we throw ourselves headlong into everything that comes our way and we think we're ready to take on the world. And we forget that if on human terms we're going to send somebody out to represent our company and our business we want to make sure they're trained and they know what they're doing. And our father who was in heaven when he wants to use you and me in his service and in his kingdom he doesn't just want to throw us out and make us swim or float or drown he wants to train us and he wants to equip us so that our gifts can be developed our character can be established and we can be a worthy servant of Jesus in the work of ministry that he has established for us in the Christian life. Because you see it's a jungle out there that's not just a cliche it is a battle. And when we're called by the Lord Jesus to be servants of God in whatever capacity to which he is called us some of us are called to be housewives and some of us are called to be businessmen some of us are called to speak or to teach the truth of God others have different gifts and abilities whatever you're calling. It is of critical importance that we learn to be faithful in little before the Lord will place us over much. The temptation and the tendency in your life and in my life is always to run ahead of the Lord to overestimate our own ability and to say well I'm ready to go but we're not always in the best position to determine if we're the ones that are ready to go. If you're here tonight and you sense there is a calling that God has put upon your life there are dreams that you dream and there's a vision that you want to pursue in terms of what it is that you can do in the kingdom of God. Don't just throw that out the window. Don't just think it was your own thinking and that it's part of your own imagination. If you're yielded to the Lord Jesus Christ there's a pretty good chance that Jesus placed it within your heart. But recognize that it's going to take time for that to be worked out in the course of history. And what God is wanting to do is teach you to be faithful in little. I learned to redeem the time as Paul did. To do those things that the Lord Jesus Christ calls you to do that maybe aren't very glamorous. Learn to be faithful in the areas where the Lord calls you to be faithful. Even though there is no immediate payoff or there doesn't seem to be any kind of connection between what it is that you're hoping to do with your life and what is happening now. God makes no mistakes. And many of the things that don't make very much sense in your life today. One day you're going to look back on and you're going to say the hand of the Lord was in it and were it not for that training and were it not for that disciplining and for learning the kinds of lessons that I needed to learn in those kinds of situations I would not be able to be or to do the kinds of things that I'm doing or called upon to do today. You'll discover that when the time is right, when God has worked in you the necessary character, the necessary patience, the necessary love, the necessary compassion. There will come a time when people around you begin to recognize that God has a gifting and an enabling on your life. And you'll discover that God begins to open doors. And as you begin to walk through those open doors in humility and in patience and in a quiet waiting before God, you discover that God is leading you to establish you in the particular ministry that God has for your life. And without becoming unduly preoccupied with the fact that we need to know where our calling lies, let me re-emphasize that part of the secret to satisfaction in the Christian life is to become increasingly aware of where God's calling upon our life lies so that in that area we can concentrate with our gifts and with our abilities and we can know that we walk in the blessing of God because other people's lives are being touched by the grace that God has given to us. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, had a part for the gospel of God. Not only does Paul have a general calling upon his life, not only does Paul have a particular calling upon his life, he also has a very specific calling upon his life. He wasn't an apostle only in the broad sense of the word. He was a very specific apostle with a very specific ministry that was primarily directed towards the Gentiles that you will recall was already evident in that initial call when the Lord Jesus comes to Ananias and says to Ananias, "He is a chosen vessel instrument of mine to bear my name before the Gentiles and before the kings and before the sons of Israel." Paul called himself an apostle to the Gentiles. Peter and the others had a ministry to the Jews. Paul's ministry was a ministry to the Gentiles and again it's very interesting in the apostles or in the book of Acts and in the letters of Paul to see how he comes into that ministry. Because you would think that the moment he's converted and the moment now that he gets placed into an apostleship, he would begin to fulfill that destiny within his life, but he doesn't. If you read Acts chapter 13 and you see there that Paul sets out to be involved in ministry, he doesn't first go to the Gentiles, he first goes to the Jews. Every city that he goes to, he goes to the synagogue. When the people in the synagogue reject the message, then he says, "Now God is setting me apart to go to the Gentiles," and he then begins to preach to the Gentiles who hear the word of God and having heard the word of God begin to respond and their lives are transformed and changed. "Through him," he says here in verse 5, "we have received grace in apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all nations." Again I believe you'll find the same principle to be true in your own life. In the Christian life as in the natural life we begin sort of as general practitioners. The field is wide open. We don't know very clearly where our calling lies. We don't know very clearly what it is that we're to do with our lives, but we give it to Jesus and we say, "Lord Jesus, my life is yours. Lead me the way that you want me to go." As we follow we begin to discover the field narrows. Either by the calling of God upon my life or the giftings that I experience in my life I discover there are many, many things that I'm not very good at and there are many things that I'm not called to do, but there are certain things that I'm good at and there are certain things that God is calling me to do and my general idea begins to narrow into a particular calling. I become a counselor. I begin to be good at entertaining company. I'm a good administrator. I manage my business for the Lord and I have a vision to build a business that gives glory to God. I go into education. Any number of fields that become part and parcel of that area of my life and we throw ourselves into it. We follow the kind of education, the kind of training that we need to pursue that goal with our lives and then as we work within that field of education or that field of endeavor in the process of being involved in the course of life we begin to specialize and we begin to understand this is where my area of interest lies and that will shift from year to year to some degree until as time goes on we begin to become more and more clear concerning God's calling upon our lives and we begin to function more and more within the very specific calling that God has in our life and in our experience. I look back over my own life and I see that to be very much true. I was about 12, 13 or 14 when I first experienced God's call on my life to ministry. It wasn't a dramatic kind of a thing. It was just sort of a conviction that God placed within my heart that has stayed with me all those many years. When I first experienced that kind of call I had my own ideas of what that would involve. I made the kinds of decisions and pursued the kind of course that I had to pursue in order for that to come to realization. When I first began in ministry, ministry was sort of a general practitioner. You do all the many things that you're called upon to do. As time went on I began to discover there were some things that I wasn't very good at. There were some other things that God was really beginning to bless. As the years have gone by I've become more and more convinced in my own life that one of my specific callings is to build up the body of Christ to the maturity that God calls us to be so that all together the church can grow to maturity and be ready for the Lord Jesus when He comes in the clouds of glory. Your own history will be different from mine. Your own walk in life will be different from mine. But I can guarantee you that if it's yielded to the Lord Jesus there are gifts that are beginning to emerge in your life but in some cases have already come to a far extent of fruition. I want to encourage you to pursue that. Take some calculated chances. Step out. Try to do the kinds of things to which the Lord calls you. And as you do you discover that God's grace is there. In giving it all over to the Lord Jesus you discover your own sense of identity. And you discover that the blessing of God rests upon your life. And then you can focus in a world of busyness and in a world of confusion on doing the kinds of things that you're called upon to do to the glory of God. And you'll have the satisfaction of being an instrument used of Jesus to bring His healing and His touch to the lives of others. And if all of that sounds still rather vague in your own heart or in your own mind, and you're not very clear concerning the direction of your own life, then don't panic or become overly concerned because we can become so anxious to try to find it all out that we lose sight of the many opportunities that the Lord gives us. Make sure you've presented your body as a living sacrifice. Begin to serve the Lord with the opportunities that the Lord gives you. And in the context of being obedient in the areas where the Lord calls you to be obedient, His grace will rest upon your life. It's His job to open the door. It is His job to equip you. It is His job to lead you. And it's His job to let you know that you have arrived. And when you do, there will be an overwhelming sense of awe within your own heart that the Almighty God and Father of Jesus Christ, who made the whole world out of nothing, should love you so much that He's willing to entrust the responsibility of His Kingdom to the likes of you and me. Then when we come to the end of our life, we can look back. We can know that whether the things we have done have been major or minor in the eyes of men, our lives have mattered because we have fulfilled the thing that God has called us to do. The Apostle Paul at the end of his life was able to say, "I have run the race. I have finished the course. There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." Jesus doesn't just save us to bring us to Heaven. He saves us to restore us to a life of service in the Kingdom of God. How He does that is the theme of the book of Romans. Perhaps if the Lord gives us freedom as time goes on, we'll get into a study of that. We'll begin to see how God and Jesus Christ makes all the provisions that are necessary so that we can fulfill not only our general calling, not only our particular calling, but also our very specific calling. Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. To God be the glory. Let us pray. [Silence]