What keeps us going in life? Romans 12:1-8 September 29, 2013 (All scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible)

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1 What keeps us going in life? Romans 12:1-8 September 29, 2013 (All scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible) In the movie Cast Away, Chuck Noland, a FedEx systems troubleshooter, played by Tom Hanks, is stranded on a South Pacific island, the sole survivor of a company plane crash. The film tells the story of the next four years of Noland's sparse existence. Those four years begin as Noland wakens to the sound of the crashing sea upon his new tropical island home. Noland, sitting in the sand, unpacks a handful of FedEx plastic-wrapped packages that survived the crash and floated to shore video tapes, a pair of ice skates, an evening gown, and a volley ball. He opens all the packages except one. The one medium-sized cardboard box, identified only with a pair of angel wings, remains sealed for the four years Noland is cut off from civilization. Eventually Noland sails from the island and is picked up by a ship. Watch what happens at the end of the movie. (show clip) What happens? Noland escorts the unopened box up a dusty Texas farm road. He knocks on the door of the house, but no one answers. He leans the weathered box against the door and leaves a short note. "Thanks," he writes, "this package saved my life." How did that package save his life? Getting that package to that home gave him a reason to live. Living for someone else is what kept Noland going while he was stranded on that island. Just as that package gave Noland a reason to keep persevering in difficult circumstances, so God gives us a reason to keep moving on in life. And that reason is others focused. I d like us to consider where we find motivation to keep going in life. If you have a Bible, please open it to Romans 12:1-8. We ll look at this passage and consider the question, What keeps us going in life? Our passage opens with Paul urging us to make our lives a living sacrifice to God. Look at verse 1. 1 Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. Whenever, we see the word Therefore we need to ask what is it there for? In other words, Therefore is a connector. Paul is connecting his request in verse 1, with what he has written in the first 11 chapters of Romans. In those chapters, Paul has highlighted the mercy and grace of God that have enabled us to have a relationship with God. Paul is saying that in light of all that God has done for us, this is how we should respond by offering ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. This means an absolute surrender to God. In offering our body, we are offering our whole person to God. The end of verse 1 says that this is our spiritual service of worship. That might be better translated, our informed service of worship. Thus our knowledge of God and His sacrifice for us motivates our complete surrender to Him. In verse 2, Paul helps us understand what our surrender to God means for us. 1

2 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Surrendering to God means that we won t be conformed to this world. We will not take on the values of this world when those values conflict with God s values. We live in a world that teaches us to live for self. Everything we do, even our good works, revolves around us and our desires. That s why we see greed, corruption, addiction and stress. People will do anything to get what this life has to offer. Paul says instead of conforming, we need to think in terms of transforming. Transforming into what? Transforming to take on the lifestyle and values of Jesus. Jesus found His fulfillment in serving His Father and people. In serving the Father and others, Jesus rejected the acclaim of the world. Jesus took His service to the extreme by giving His life for us. That move from conforming to transforming would be a big change in our lives. How does that change happen? By the renewing of our mind. How do we renew our mind? The Spirit of God uses the Word of God to change our outlook and perspective. What once attracted us no longer attracts us. And what once repelled us now draws us. That is why we teach from the Bible every Sunday. That is why we encourage daily reflection in the Bible. God uses the Bible to renew our mind. When I was a junior in college, some guys in Campus Crusade invited me over for a guys night in which they were going to make nachos and play board games. I thought, You ve got to be kidding. How can you have any fun without alcohol? But I read in the Bible about the richness of friendships between followers of Christ. And I didn t have any other options for that Friday night, so I went. I had a great time. Nobody needed alcohol to have a conversation. That night my perspective began to change on what was a good time. Over the next few months, as I read what God had to say about joy and connecting with people, my definition of a good time changed permanently. Alcohol was no longer a prerequisite. Rather than looking forward to verbally jousting with people, I began to look forward to hearing people s story. What happened? My mind was renewed and I rejected the world s values and took on God s values. And in that way, I lived as a living sacrifice to God. The end of verse 2 tells us what happens when we submit to God s transforming process through the renewal of our mind. We prove the will of God, that which is good, acceptable and perfect. But we only find out that the will of God is good, acceptable and perfect after we submit to Him. I never would have known that God s way of relating with people is so much better than the world s way of relating to people unless I had first submitted my Friday nights to Him. In verse 3 we see one of the results of a renewed mind. 3 For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. A renewed mind delivers us from typical self-centeredness. Our tendency is to think more highly of ourselves than we should. And that tendency leads to frustration because we think that our employer doesn t recognize our talents or our spouse doesn t notice our sacrifices or our roommate doesn t care about our work keeping the apartment clean. So, far from following 2

3 Jesus example of serving others, we think others should step up in their service or recognition of us. Instead of focusing on our importance, Paul says we should look at ourselves in light of the faith that God has given us. We are in desperate need of the work of God. Renewing our mind with God s Word moves us from being frustrated to being grateful people. In verses 4-5, Paul reminds us that we should be connected to the body of Christ. 4 For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. One of the results of submission to Christ is participation in the body of Christ. When I was in organic chemistry, in one of our labs, we had to identify unknown compounds. In seeking to identify the unknown compound, we would first test for physical characteristics. Every compound has a melting and boiling point, so we would heat the compound until it melted then boiled, recording both temperatures. Using those two temperatures, we could narrow the field of possible identities for our unknown compound. Thus those physical characteristics helped us identify our unknown compound. In the same way, Paul is giving us a physical characteristic of someone who is submitted to Christ. A person submitted to Christ will be connected to a body of believers. People submitted to the Lord live out the conviction of connecting to a body of believers. As an example, last year two families moved away from Lincoln and North Pointe, the Baurains to Canada and the Kollars to Florida. Before they moved, I knew both families would get involved in a church in their respective locations. My certainty had nothing to do with the churches in their respective cities. My certainty had to do with their relationship with the Lord. Out of obedience to God, they would join a Bibleteaching church. And they have. In contrast, I meet numbers of professing Christians who aren t connected to a church. They have all kinds of reasons, but at the end of the day these people are living in disobedience to God. Paul s metaphor of a body to describe the church is a reminder of the diversity amidst unity of the church. That diversity is a good thing. The hand isn t anything like the eye. They perform different tasks, but they will have to work together if the body is to receive nourishment. And the hand and the eye can t work together without the brain. Yet this diversity is part of the reason some believers don t connect with a church. They think that those people aren t anything like them. But the diversity of the church is part of God s design. We need different people with different abilities working together in order for the body to function. In verses 6-8, Paul gives a list of gifts. This is not an exhaustive list. But please notice that the exercising of each of these gifts is for the benefit of other people, not the person with the gift. The person exercising the gift gets joy as others are strengthened by him exercising his gift. 6 Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; 7 if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; 8 or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. 3

4 In the New Testament prophets gave specific revelations regarding specific needs. That is an others focused gift. Serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading and showing mercy are all others focused. God has given all of us gifts. But the exercise of those gifts isn t for our own good. The exercise of our gifts is for the good of others. What keeps us going in life? Living a surrendered and transformed life and using our gifts to help others keeps us going in life. Living a surrendered and transformed life and using our gifts to help others keeps us going in life. In her book, Because He Loves Me, Elyse Fitzpatrick tells this story. In Victorian England, treadmills weren't found in air-conditioned health clubs they were found in prisons. Treadmills, or tread wheels, as they were called, were used in penal servitude as a form of punishment. Some tread wheels were productive, grinding wheat or transporting water, but others were purely punitive in nature. Prisoners were punished by spending the bulk of their day walking up an inclined plane, knowing that all their hard labor was for nothing. The only hope the prisoner had was that, at some day in the future, he would have "paid his debt" to society and would be set free. He couldn't even look on his labor at the end of the day and know that, if nothing else, he'd been productive. Sadly, that is how many people live, climbing the treadmill with nothing to show for their effort. God has redeemed us from that curse. He has given us gifts that we are to exercise on others behalf. Following Him gets us off the treadmill going to nowhere. As we think about serving as a light for Christ in Lincoln, one of the places we can fulfill our calling is here in the body of North Pointe. Let me draw your attention to the bulletin. Perhaps you can find a way to exercise your gift. Some of you have attended North Pointe for a while. Maybe the next step in your spiritual journey is to connect yourself with this body. One way to deepen your connection is to serve. In serving not only will you have the opportunity to spend yourselves in the service of others, but you ll have the opportunity to develop friendships with your fellow volunteers. Mike Yaconelli in his book, Messy Spirituality, wrote of how individual believers, who may think they are insignificant, are brought together in the body of Christ to create a magnificent work of art. All year, the community anticipates Concordia's annual Christmas concert. Each December, a huge choir and a full orchestra give a musical performance in the concert hall at the college. Every year, the people in the community create a unique background for the concert a one-hundred-by-thirty-foot mosaic. Beginning in the summer, about six months before the concert, the community designs a new mosaic, rents an empty building and the painting begins. Hundreds of people, from junior high schoolers to senior citizens, paint the mosaic. They paint by number on a large-scale design that has thousands of tiny pieces. Day after day, month after month, one little painted piece at a time, the picture on the mosaic gradually takes shape. When everyone has finished painting, an artist goes over the entire creation, perfecting the final work of art. When the mosaic is completed, they place it behind the choir. It has the appearance of an enormous, beautiful stained-glass window. The weekend of the concert, those people who helped paint arrive early, along with their friends and neighbors. Throughout the building, you can hear people whispering, "See that little green spot below the camel's foot? I painted it." Every year in the middle of the summer in Moorhead, Minnesota, thousands of unknown, ordinary people paint a tiny insignificant tile. Six months later, the result is a spectacularly beautiful masterpiece. So it is when we serve others. God touches up our 4

5 efforts and we are part of a masterpiece that honors Him and enriches others. In giving ourselves to God by serving others we ensure that our life will be filled with purpose. What keeps us going in life? Living a surrendered and transformed life and using our gifts to help others keeps us going in life. Living a surrendered and transformed life and using our gifts to help others keeps us going in life. 5