Transcript
Well, Paul's aim in life we saw last week based on his
feral message to the Ephesian elders here in Acts chapter 20 is twofold. He
wanted to finish the race and he wanted to complete the task. Here it is again in
verse 24, "I consider my life worth nothing to me if only I may finish the
race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me the task of testifying
to the gospel of God's grace." Last week we looked at Paul's desire to finish the
race and for Paul to finish the race as we saw meant living his life faithfully
before the Lord regardless of the challenges and the difficulties that he
experienced along the way. And it's no small credit to the Apostle Paul's
perseverance not to mention the power of the Holy Spirit that he was able to say
at the end of his life I have fought the good fight I have finished the race I
have kept the faith now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness
which the Lord the righteous judge will award to me on that day and not only to
me but also to all who have longed for his appearing. Why put such effort into
running the race? Why get up on Sunday morning and gather for collective
worship when either you could be sleeping in or taking your son or your
grandson fishing? Why bother working out the difficulties in a marital spat when
the world is filled with willing people who would gladly go to bed with you? Why
strive for honesty and integrity in your business when all around you the people
who cheat and lie seem to get ahead and prosper while you struggle? Why struggle
to be faithful to the Lord in the Christian life? Well Paul says it's
because at the end of the race there is a prize he calls it a crown. Listen again
to how he puts it 1 Corinthians 9 24 and 25 do you not know that in a race all
the runners run but only one gets the prize run in such a way as to get the
prize everyone who competes in the games goes into strict trading they do it to
get a crown that will not last but we do it to get a crown that will last forever
hundred years from now you've often heard me say this it will not have
mattered much if your life in the in the here and now was happy or unhappy if you
were rich or poor successful famous or infamous what will matter is have you
run the race and is there laid up for you the prize of the upward call of God
in Christ Jesus as Paul describes it in Philippians chapter 3 have you will you
have received the glory that God has for you as an heir of God and a co-heir with
Christ and more than anything else we need to pray for the Lord to open our
eyes so that like Jesus for the joy that was said before him we can run the race
knowing that in the end it's going to be more than worth it all that's what
motivates God's people and has kept them moving forward historically brings us
this morning then to the second element of Paul's aim in life and that is the
fact that he wants to complete the task for notice again how he puts it he says
if only I may finish the race complete the task that the Lord Jesus has given
me and then he spells out what that task is the task of testifying to the gospel
of God's grace it's not enough for Paul to run the race it's not enough for Paul
to live his life to the very end in a way that is faithful to God despite all
the obstacles he also wants to complete the job the Lord gave him and that job
as he mentions in that passage is the task of testifying to the gospel of God
from the very beginning in Paul's conversion he was chosen to be an
apostle to the Gentiles if Peter was an apostle to the Jews primarily Paul was
chosen to be an apostle to the Gentiles which is why in the book of Acts we have
all these missionary journeys that he goes on proclaiming the gospel everywhere
where it has not previously been proclaimed second Timothy 111 he says
concerning himself of this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a
teacher and elsewhere he talks about doing this task with all the energy that
God inspires within him now most of us here will not have been called to that
particular task but if you know the gospel then you know that when Jesus
saves us he saves us because each of us as members of his body also have a job
to accomplish you have often heard us quote Ephesians 2 10 it's really I think
one of Valerie's life verses we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus
to do good works which God prepared in advance or beforehand for us to do we
are saved to serve each of us has a calling upon life and the challenge in
living life is when we get to the end of our days to be able to say with the
Apostle Paul I have not only finished running the race but I have completed
the task that the Lord has given me which of course raises the very
interesting question how do I even know what is this specific task that God has
saved me for not all of us have you know revelations from heaven that knock us to
the ground like Paul did at his conversion most of us we just kind of
live life and we we hope that it sort of sorts out as we go along the way and we
hope that we make the right decisions and but how do we know how do we know
that we are on track and how can we be confident that when we get to the end of
our lives we're able to say the task that you have given me the thing that I
was created for the thing that I was redeemed for I have completed it and I
can throw my crown if you will as do the elders in the book of Revelation before
the crown of God I think Romans chapter 12 first eight verses give us some very
practical insights as to how to discover or to ascertain the call of God in our
lives so let me take a moment and read the verses with you and then I want to
go through those eight verses and and point out four principles in Romans
chapter 12 that I think are really helpful to determine the calling that
God has on our lives it's a very familiar passage let me read it with you
I urge you brothers in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as living
sacrifices holy and pleasing to God this is your spiritual act of worship do not
conform any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind then you will be able to test and approve what God's will
is his good pleasing and perfect will for the grace given me I say to every
one of you do not think of yourself more highly than you ought but rather think
of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the measure of faith God
has given you just as each of us has one body with many members and these members
do not all have the same function so in Christ we who are many form one body and
each member belongs to all the others we have different gifts according to the
grace given us if a man's gift is prophesying let him use it in proportion
to his faith if it is serving let him serve if it is teaching let him teach if
it is encouraging let him encourage if it is contributing to the needs of
others let him give generously if it is leadership let him govern diligently and
if it is showing mercy let him do it cheerfully four things that will help
us discover what it is that we have been created for and what it is that we have
been redeemed for principle number one in finding our calling is that it
always starts with surrender listen again to verse 1 I urge you brothers in view
of God's mercy offer your bodies as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to
God this is your spiritual act of worship present your bodies as a living
sacrifice the background of course here is Old Testament sacrificial worship as
part of worshipping the Lord the Israelites would bring sacrifices
including whole burnt offerings which were in the Old Testament a symbolic way
of saying you have bought us we belong to you and therefore we give ourselves
back to you lock stock and barrel in the New Testament we no longer bring animal
sacrifices but the sacrifice that the Lord is looking for is the sacrifice of
our lives present your bodies as a living sacrifice I don't believe that
we can ever find out what God's purpose or calling on our lives is unless there
is some moment in time where we say to him Lord you're not only my Savior I
want you to be my Lord up until now I have lived by my own desires my my my
own dreams and my own ambitions and and maybe those are things you gave to me
maybe they are not but I hold them loosely I put them on the altar and
spirit soul and body I belong to you and if you want to send me to Timbuktu
and be a missionary there then Lord I'm prepared to go there if you want me to
not ever get married in the course of my life that I am prepared to yield to you
if you want me to change jobs if you want me to do whatever or be whatever
I'm putting it all on the altar that's pretty heavy stuff and nothing that
comes naturally to any one of us which is why Paul says I beseech you I plead
with you by the mercies of God see the book of Romans doesn't start in Romans
chapter 12 with the invitation to put it all on the altar starts in Romans
chapter 1 with an examination of our sin and then leads to all of the things that
God has done for us in Christ Jesus our Lord and after he's gone through all
those descriptions of how valuable we are to God and how much God has loved us
in the gift of his son then he comes to this place where he says I beseech you I
urge you by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice and so if you like all of us struggle with the lordship of Jesus and
wonder can I trust him will his plans be better for my life than my own plans are
then you can start by asking the Lord to give you a revelation of his love for
you what he has done for you in Christ and to allow you to experience the
grandeur of his majesty love so amazing so divine demands my life my soul my
all and if you look at the great Old Testament saints like Abraham and the
others that have gone before us when do you find them building altars to God
when do you find them laying it all on the altar it's after they have received a
revelation of the grace of God and his promises towards them does that make
sense the more we see God's power and love and his care for us that more
anxious we are to put it all on the altar and to please him because he is
simply worth it and we can never ever out give him in any aspect of our lives
so it begins with surrender and without surrender you'll always be fighting
because the Lord will be pulling the reign of your life to move the horse in
this direction so to speak and the moment you feel that tug everything
inside you says well Lord here I am but send George I don't want to do this and
we all have those battles and that's okay but God's grace will win out
because he loves us and he knows what is best because we're his workmanship he
knows you better than you know yourself and he knows better what will give you
joy in the final analysis than you even do yourself so it begins with surrender
but then our thinking needs to change we need to learn to think get this we need
to learn to think like a servant do not conform any longer to the pattern of
this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind then you will be
able to test and approve what God's will is his good pleasing and perfect wheel
two operative words there if we could put that slide back up for a moment the
first word is the word conform and the second is the word transformed to
conform is to be conformed to the world and the values of the world to be
transformed is to be changed from the values of the world to the values of
God's kingdom and nowhere is that more important I believe than in our
understanding of the gifts and the talents and the treasures that God has
entrusted to us let me explain it this way in the natural in the natural we're
alienated from God we're under Satan's power we're self-centered and our view of
our time talent and treasure is that it belongs to me I can do with my time what
I want to do with my time I can do with my talents what I want to do with my
talents and I can do with my treasure what I want to do with my treasure and
in the world my first effort is to secure my identity my place by building
on these natural assets and fighting off everybody that will threaten me or that
will take from me in the world that's perfectly natural that's how the whole
world thinks now they often cover it up and try to make it look good and noble
but the final analysis when push comes to shove it's all about me and it's all
about my needs then we come to Christ and we discover that Jesus didn't hold
on even to being the son of God he laid it all down he died a shameful death in
the cross why because he knew that the inheritance came from whom not from
Satan not from the kingdoms of the world the inheritance came from his father if
he pleased his father then his father would take care of him and for that what
happened he was given the what come on name that is above every name that at
the mention of the name of Jesus every knee would bow now when you became a
Christian you might not have understood all of this and you bite his second
thoughts about becoming a Christian but when you became a Christian you said I
don't want to live like this anymore I don't want to be an orphan I don't want
to be a pauper I don't want to be deceived by the devil I don't want to be
living in conflict I want to be a child of God I want to learn to trust God I
want to learn to take my time talent and treasures and and and dedicate them
first to God and then share them with the people that God places in my world
isn't that an amazing thing now that's not an instantaneous process but that's
why Paul says I want you not to be conformed to the world anymore that's not
your life anymore in Christ this is your life this is where you walk this is
where the grace of God flows this is where the power of God flows so learn to
be transformed or it is metamorphosis it's like a butterfly don't be a
caterpillar any longer spread your wings and fly in the kingdom of God learn to
be transformed by the renewal of your mind and there's a thousand and one
little choices that you and I make every day that move us in one direction or the
other you with me don't ever think that when the big challenge to obedience
comes that all of a sudden you're gonna be able to be obedient if you haven't
learned to take up your cross what does Jesus say daily daily Lord help me to
see life from your perspective daily Lord help me to honor you daily help me
to repent when my selfishness gets in the way which often for each one of us
it will so we need to surrender we need to learn to think like a servant and
then here's a really interesting one that I really love in this passage we
need to do what Paul calls a sober self evaluation by the grace given me I say
to every one of you do not think of yourself more highly than you want but
rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the measure
of faith that God has given you again the words in yellow there are the two
leave that up are the two operative words sober judgment and measure of
faith and measure of faith has to do with the inheritance that God has
prepared for each of us in Christ Jesus our Lord again let me try to explain it
this way I hope you can bear with me while I do that Romans 8 17 a verse we
have often quoted if we are children then we are heirs heirs of God co-heirs
with Christ talked about that last week to be an heir of God is mind-blowing and
to be a co-heir with Christ is equally mind-blowing you know if you got a
thing in the mail and it wasn't from some Nigerian scam saying that you have
just inherited untold riches millions and properties you'd be beside yourself
I mean even if you want a small amount of the lottery you'd be beside yourself
you sinful lottery buyer let that rest we are heirs of God and co-heirs with
Christ and again the Holy Spirit has to go as a revelation because Jesus first
of all God owns the whole blooming universe and if you want to see what
that looks like then then then follow some of the science videos on Netflix or
wherever you can because the universe is mind-blowing unbelievable and God spoke
it into being just like that and Jesus because he was obedient unto death he
got the whole shouldn't match the name that is above every name everything
belongs to Jesus now remember when you become a Christian you become an heir of
God and a co-heir of Jesus that means the sum total of what God has given to
Jesus he shares with his people and that's why up here you see these little
slices of the picture because these represent the aspects of the kingdom
that God has given you I said earlier each one of us is time talent and
treasure God deals those out to you on the basis of what you can handle and the
ability to lay hold of that piece of the inheritance is determined by the measure
of your faith if God wants to give you if God wants to give you the ability to
make money then he gives you the faith you might not recognize it as faith but
he gives you the ability to believe that you can do that if he gives you the
ability if he calls you to share in his ministry of compassion then he is going
to give you a measure of faith that enables you to pour out yourself into
hopeless situations that would drive everybody else starkly bananas in around
the corner do you understand what I'm saying he gives you the measure of faith
and the measure of your faith will determine what you can believe God for
both in the here and now and in eternity and that varies there are people who are
one talented there are people who are two talented and there are people who
are five talented God in his wisdom knows how much you can handle and how
much he can and trust to you now here's what Paul is saying the danger because
remember we're still learning how to think like servants instead of thinking
like owners because that's the the big sin that we committed when we fell in
sin the danger he says is that we think of ourselves more highly they really
hated upstairs when I do this he says think of yourself with sober judgment in
according to the measure of faith that God gives you so here's a two-fold
problem that we face one is that I think more highly of myself than I ought to you
know God has answered my prayer and I think that I'm God's gift to the church
or God has given me an ability to speak words into somebody's life and my land
God used it and that person has changed and I'm gonna go around saying well you
know I'm really God's chosen spokesperson or you know I really close
that great business deal and and now I'm I'm King Todd do you know what I'm
talking about the human propensity to think of
ourselves more highly than we ought to you don't because pride goes before fall
and God knows how to pull the rug out from underneath you and bring you to a
place of humility whatever you have whatever you have accomplished you
accomplish because of the grace of God in and through you and he deserves the
praise but there's another extreme and I see as much of this as they do of the
other that is don't think of yourself more lowly than you ought to because you
see in the church there is a false sense of humility often we know we're not
supposed to be pride and arrogance so now you know God used me in some
significant way in somebody's life and I say who wasn't me it's all God well you
should have seen what was like when God was doing it all by himself he uses us
it's not humility to say I don't have gifts I don't have time I don't have
treasures I don't have talents sober judgment sober judgment says this is who
God has made me to be this is how God has redeemed me this is how God has
filled me with the Holy Spirit and as we often say around here by God's grace I'm
going to fill my space unapologetically I'm going to be what God is calling me
to be and I'm going to do the job that he called me to do and I'm not gonna
have a false humility that says oh oh I can never speak to anybody I can never
lead in devotions I've often said some people are so nervous they can't even
lead in silent prayer oh God have mercy false humility knock it out of the park
be who God makes you to be and be proud in a healthy way before God that he has
redeemed us to be his children we are co-heirs and come eternity we're gonna
run his kingdom we better learn to start running it now better run it now because
this is all training for what is to come you still with me all right so we need
to surrender we need to learn to think like servants our gifts are to serve
God and others not to puff ourselves up we need to have a sober judgment neither
too high nor too low and then we just need to learn to step out in faith as
God gives us opportunities notice how the passage goes on let's read that
together we have different gifts according to the grace give it can you
read it okay full voice well so again we have different gifts according to the
grace given us if a man's gift is prophesying let him use it in proportion
to his faith if it is serving let him serve if it is teaching let him teach if
it is encouraging let him encourage if it is contributing to the needs of
others let him give generously if it is leadership let him govern diligently if
it is showing mercy let him do it cheerfully notice the operative words
there are the words let him seven times it occurs in that passage let him use it
let him serve let him teach let him encourage let him give let him govern
and let him do it cheerfully interestingly enough those two words do
not occur in the Greek they're added because of the context demands it but
here is the point after you've done a sober self-evaluation and you discover
a little bit of who you are and what Christ has given you and made you in
terms of time talent and treasure then if you want to grow in those areas the
purpose of those gifts is not to sit on it wait until they are perfected you
start using them you start doing what lies at hand because it is in the
exercise of your gifts that you discover who you are who you are not what you
are good at what God blesses and what benefits other people see I've noticed
over the years there's real danger when you teach on spiritual gifts because
spiritual gifts and become become very paralyzing you become very introspective
and you say well am I this or am I that or am I the other thing before you know
it is you're like the dude in the parable of the one talent who buries his
treasure because taking risks is too dangerous for him and he doesn't want to
get into trouble and in that process is more worried about himself than he's
about the master you will never discover what your gifts are by sitting around
waiting and going through training for 10,000 years before you step out if you
want to move a car its direction it moves a lot easier when it's driving than
when it's sitting in your driveway and my recommendation for people is that if
you surrendered yourself to the Lord if you're learning to think like a servant
and you are able to do a sober self evaluation then just live step out when
there's opportunities for service when there's opportunities for ministry when
there's opportunities to develop a career or a job step into it do it wisely
do it prayerfully do it in consultation with other people around you who can
mentor you and who can support you and as you do and as you step into it you
will discover sooner rather than later yeah this really fits me I like doing
this sometimes Christians have such a backward view of God and serving God
that unless it hurts it can't possibly be God well sometimes it will hurt but
there's also a place of pleasure and joy when you hit your sweet spot and you
know that you're moving in the updraft of God's Holy Spirit you know that there
is joy in doing the work of God and as you do that you will discover that what
starts out as a sort of a broad general practitioner begins to narrow and you
begin to discover more and more clearly what you're good at what you're not good
at what God blesses and what other people affirm and so if you look at
Romans chapter 1 verse 1 where Paul talks about himself he talks about
himself first of all being a servant of Christ then he talks about himself being
an apostle and then his apostleship focuses more narrowly on being a
specific apostle to the Gentiles and part of the key to successful living part
of the key of being able to stand before God one day and saying I have completed
my task is to know that you have been faithful to the calling that he places
upon you because when all has been said and done that's what life's all about
it's about being faithful Jesus puts it this way in Matthew 24 who then is the
faithful and wise servant whom the master has put in charge of the servants
in his household to give them their food at the proper time it will be good for
that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns faithful to be
faithful is to put God's interests ahead of our own and the biblical principle is
that if you're faithful in little God will put you over much Jesus in Matthew
25 parable of the faithful steward the day of judgment well done good and
faithful servant you have been faithful with a few things I will put you in
charge of many things come share in your masters happiness when we stand before
God in that final day and he is handing out his rewards the rewards are not
going to be based on on how big we have been in the kingdom let me try to
explain it this way it's going to be based on how faithful we have been to
what has been entrusted to us and some surprises are going to come in the
kingdom when we discover that the little old lady who gave her last penny in the
offering plate receives a greater reward than somebody who gave simply out of
their abundance because God is looking at the sacrifice of the heart and so you
know as we reflect on this you reflect on your journey not only reflect on what
God in Christ has given you in terms of time talent and treasure then ask
yourself when I get to the end of my life will I have will I be able to say
with the Apostle Paul I've run the race I finished the fight I've kept the faith
now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord the
righteous judge will award to me on that day and not only to me but also to all
who have longed for his appearing
you