If you are in this building today and call yourself a Christian, you have a vitally important purpose. We all live with purpose, the question is what is our purpose? Well if we look at a person’s life it’s pretty easy to tell what their primary purpose is.
Maybe it’s financial success, maybe to get sympathy from the world, maybe to be healthy & live a long life, be a good parent or spouse. Maybe it’s to avoid suffering, help the needy, have fun while we can, fight for social justice. Or maybe we’re just trying to get though it all waiting to achieve our final destination of either heaven or nothingness depending on what we believe.
Maybe you have or are achieving your purpose, maybe you’re far from it and discouraged. Whatever you have made your purpose in life, you have the right to pursue it, but I have come to learn through experience that there is only one true purpose that every person can achieve, and is inline with our Creator’s vision for us. It is simply to have a growing relationship with Him, the living God.
Paul probably summed it up best in Philippians 3:4-14. Let me pull a couple highlights out of that passage. He says he lived a perfectly righteous life according to the Law, but whatever gain he had from that, he counted as loss for the sake of Christ. He says everything is counted as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
“My goal, my purpose is to gain Christ and be found in him not with my own righteousness from following rules, but with the righteousness that comes from faith (which is a surrendering trust) so that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead.
I press on forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God.” Paul has joined the team, and his entire purpose is to win the game, and in this game the prize is being with Christ for eternity.
Now I am going to be bold and say that there are probably very few Christians who have this at the top of their list of life purposes. Because if we compare ourselves to people throughout history who did, we see such a dramatic difference between them and us, that clearly our main passion and purpose is somewhere else. Whether or not we claim that a relationship with Christ is our main purpose, the truth shows up in our lives.
Is it not true that Jesus describes North American Christians when he speaks to the Laodicean church in Revelation 3, “I know your works: you are neither hot or cold. Would that you were either cold or hot!
So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot or cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”
He also says to the church in Sardis, “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.”
Now there are positive things about the church, the people of the church today, but Jesus is very accurately describing the general state of the church in the west today. It is lukewarm, it’s dying, and we are nowhere near completing the work that Jesus gave us to do. Why is this? Well the three things he tells these churches to do are wake up (see things as I see them, see yourself as you truly are), repent (admit I am right and change your ways) , and be zealous.
The other night we had a very important baseball game, we were fighting for a playoff spot and a chance to avoid the Baldur powerhouse in the first round of the playoffs. Well we have a group of young guys on the team who don’t play regularly, but have joined the team. They all left half way through the game to go play shinny hockey somewhere. The game ended up going into extra innings and we could have used some of them, but they weren’t there, and it really bothered the guys who were working hard to win this game.
The first thing I thought about was the church. How many people have signed up to be on Jesus’ team, but when he tells us to get in there and play, we refuse, or we’re not there? I’m not talking about serving in the church, volunteering to help with stuff, but really zealously pursuing Christ and the purpose of His church.
Would you sign up for a team and never play when the coach wanted to put you in the lineup? Would you join the military and refuse to go into battle? How long would you last? But this is what so many Christians have done. We join the team for the benefits of saying we’re on the team, rather than to play for the coach. Why is it that coaches are always the ones who get fired when a team isn’t doing well? It’s because the players won’t play for that coach, and you can’t fire all the players so the coach goes.
Well my friends we are on a team where the coach can’t be fired, but we can surely be put off the team if we signed up under false pretences.
So here’s the deal. These other purposes that I mentioned at the beginning, our worldly purposes are not necessarily bad, but they must come under the ultimate purpose of being a follower of Jesus, if indeed we have signed up for His team. His purpose must infiltrate every other area of our lives, and there may be times when we must give up our chosen worldly purposes when they do not align with His.
So today I want to paint a picture of living with purpose on Jesus’ team. I have often wondered why Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life” was such a megahit a few years ago.
The truth is that it was bigger with non-Christians than with Christians in terms of sales, telling me that the world outside of the church is looking for purpose as much or more than those in the church. I thought the book was pretty good, but not the phenomenon it became.
The very first Scripture verse in that book was Proverbs 11:28 from the Message Bible, “A life devoted to things is a dead life, a stump; a God-shaped life is a flourishing tree.” Now that may not be the best translation, but it does reflect the essence of the Christian’s purpose on earth to be God focused and not world focused.
For me the key to knowing our purpose is to first of all really believe that God created us for himself, and he saved us for himself, and we are completely his property made to live for him and not ourselves. Using the team analogy again, if a hockey team hires a goalie, it is for the specific purpose of keeping goals out of their own net, and if the goalie wants to score goals and plays to score goals on the other net he will not fulfill his purpose and will be quickly let go. If he didn’t want to be a goalie, he never should have accepted the invitation to play.
One of the best places to look at how Jesus sees our purpose is in the book of Luke especially in chapters 12-14. It’s well accepted that Luke was probably the most accurate reporter in the New Testament, so we trust what he records from Jesus words.
Throughout these chapters Jesus says things like, do not fear or be anxious about anything in the world, but fear the one who can cast your soul into hell. Acknowledge Him before people. Don’t seek after things or money, but seek the Kingdom of God. Stay ready and dressed for action. Settle with your accusers. Repent or perish. Bear fruit or be cut down. Enter through the narrow door or be left outside.
Don’t make lame excuses for not coming to Christ’s banquet. Count the cost before you decide to follow me because if you do not renounce all that you have, you can’t be my disciple. And if you lose your saltiness (your zeal, your effectiveness, your fruitfulness) you will be thrown away.
Now this is where a lot of Christians start tuning out the message, because we don’t want to be told that we actually have to do something as Christians, we just need to receive all the good stuff Jesus has to give. But Jesus is clearly saying, before you even consider joining my team, you need to know what’s expected of you because I will not let you off the hook if you choose not to play according to my game plan.
Our purpose is to bear fruit for the Kingdom. In John 15 Jesus says, “I am the vine, and every branch in me that does not bear fruit, the Father takes away. Not only that, every branch that does bear fruit gets pruned so that it can bear even more fruit.”
Now here’s the important part. He goes on to say, abide in me because you can do nothing without me, you can’t bear fruit without the vine, and if you don’t abide in me you are thrown away like a branch that withers and will be thrown into the fire and burned.
The most important and primary purpose of the Christian (and really of all people) is to have a lasting, growing, intimate relationship with Jesus, so that we can bear fruit for His Kingdom by His working through us via the Holy Spirit. We do not control our Christianity, our Christianity controls us by changing our character and making us like His willing puppets.
This relationship allows us to be more and more conformed to His image and Will. It gives us passion for the mission he has given us which is plainly from Psalm 67 and Matthew 28 “Go to the ends of the earth making His ways and saving power known to everyone, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded”.
Is that your primary mission in this life? We can only teach what we know, and the best way to teach is to demonstrate. So having and growing our relationship to the vine allows us to be the people we are to go make, true baptized disciples, obeying everything he has commanded. I want to be clear, the Bible is not saying, work harder to obey the rules, but get zealous about your relationship with Christ, loving him with all your heart mind soul and strength, and you will be transformed into one who does live like Him.
So it’s easy to say, abide in Christ, bear fruit, be disciples, but what does that actually mean and what does it practically look like in our lives? Well I have given you an extensive list in your bulletins of all the major commands I could find Jesus give in the Gospels. They are plentiful and are going to make you go uuggh. But before you say, “there’s no way I can ever achieve that”, hear me out.
Now to put it in a nutshell. Our mission is to obey all that he commands and teach others to do the same. But before that our main purpose is to believe in and love Jesus with our whole being. But there is a catch. The entire Bible screams, prove your belief. And the only way to prove our faith, our belief, is to test it with God’s will. You say you believe? Jesus and Scripture say prove it. You say you love Jesus, he says prove it.
Where does it say in Scripture that we shouldn’t live by Christ’s rules? All Paul says is that the Old Testament Law can’t save us. Obeying all the 10 Commandments, and New Testament commands that Jesus gives, just for the sake of obeying them will not save us, but it is the best proof that we are saved.
Nothing has changed since Old Testament times other than the fact that the penalty for sin has been paid by Christ. Until then, no amount of obedience or sacrifice could pay our penalty for sin. It had to be a perfect blood sacrifice. But the fact is that Jesus didn’t get rid of the 10 Commandments, he actually piled many more on top of them.
If you believe you are forgiven for your sins through Christ’s death, you probably are. But he didn’t stay dead, and neither should we. Jesus also says if you don’t forgive others God will not forgive you. But I thought he already did forgive me when I said I believed that Jesus died for my sins.
What he’s really saying is that if you don’t forgive, you must not be really saved or forgiven by God, you haven’t really accepted and believed that God has forgiven you, you don’t really know grace, or you would be showing it. Probably because you never really saw yourself as the wretched person that you are in God’s Holy eyes. That is the “wake up” part in Revelation 3. You don’t really understand why you had to be saved. The more we experience what Christ has done, the more we do it.
What about Romans 10:9-10 where it says, “Confess with your mouth and believe with your heart, and you will be saved”?
Notice it doesn’t say just confess with your mouth. It says and believe with your heart. Just ahead in the next chapter of Romans verses 19-24 there is the strong implication that if we stop believing/trusting the Lord, we could be cut off.
Jesus says in John 14:12, “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do”. Notice the language there, not he may be able to do these works, not he will want to do these works, just that he will. It is implied. He goes on to say 3 times in John 14 that if you love me (which is the greatest commandment) you will obey me.
Not you must try to obey me, not even that you must obey me in order to Love me, though it’s implied that if you love him you will obey, but again that this love, this belief, causes you to obey me and do these works. This obedience is the fruit, the natural outcome of your love and belief in Him.
We don’t have to play with words to clearly say that Jesus knows that love and belief in Him automatically produces these things, and therefore if they are not manifesting in a person’s life, they do not truly love him or believe in Him from the heart the way he requires. We tend to try harder to obey, to little avail, but he really means that we must as I said earlier, abide in him more deeply, build our relationship with him more intentionally, zealously, so that we truly do believe and love him, and bear fruit.
If you say you trust me and I tell you to do something, won’t you do it? If I tell you to go home and burn your house down, will you do it? Why not? Don’t you trust me? If God asked you to take your son up a hill and sacrifice him like he did with Abraham, would you?
You are right not to trust ridiculous commands from humans that go against God’s known will. 900 people in Jonestown perished because of this. But if you really believe that Jesus is who he says he is, you will trust that whatever he commands, it is right and you will do it. We are not to be fanatical, and outwardly over-zealous to the point that we become offensive, but we are to be completely zealous in our relationship with Jesus.
It’s this trust, this believing with your whole heart, mind and will that saves us. Not just verbally giving consent. No one has ever been saved by just saying yes I believe in Jesus, without it coming from deep within a transformed heart.
I have to tell you that the more I read God’s word, the fewer people I believe are in heaven. We have watered down God’s word so much to comfort ourselves with a false gospel. I’m sure most of you don’t really believe that you became a saved Christian just by intellectually reciting a prayer. So if you don’t believe that, why would you believe anything less than complete trust in Jesus and complete surrender to his will would be adequate? What does Jesus say it takes? Repent, be born again, and be baptized, not just physically in water, but spiritually in the Holy Spirit.
Maybe your faith hasn’t been tested yet. Have you had to prove that you completely trust Jesus yet? Do you really know that your belief is unshakable? Let me tell you what I think. I think many professing Christians avoid situations that test their faith because they know deep down that they don’t completely trust everything Christ says. And the question becomes, as James asks, “Will that untested, unproven faith save a man?”
When we become followers of Christ, God invites us to test him. When it says thou shalt not test the Lord your God, it refers to testing him with something that is not his will. Don’t jump off a building to see if he’ll catch you. He’s not obligated to intervene in those situations.
But he absolutely invites us to test Him and our faith by obeying what He commands. He is trustworthy by nature and therefore is obligated to live up to his promises. He has to be there when we follow His will, and He is there.
Remember though that much of what he promises has to do with suffering for Him, but He also promises that he will provide us with blessings in that suffering. Things like peace, joy, power, and ultimately increased intimacy with Him. That’s His ultimate purpose.
The truth is most of us would be more willing to die for our country or family, than to suffer rejection, embarrassment, or discomfort for the Lord. Mark 8:34-38 say, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, because whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake or the sake of the gospel will save it”. This doesn’t necessarily mean actual physical death, but it does mean giving up your life for Him.
Then the passage ends with, “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels”.
How many of us act like we are ashamed of the fact that we follow Christ, regardless of what we may say in church? Out there do we act like we are ashamed?
God will not tolerate being fit into our lives as it is convenient for us. He is to be our lives. He bought us with His son’s blood. We are literally his slaves, but he wants to treat us like His children. He didn’t buy us to use and abuse us, he bought us to save us so we could be with Him forever.
But because He loves us so much, he doesn’t force us into a relationship, he knows that’s not real love. He gave us the choice to be saved by His will, or reject Him by living in our own way forever with Satan, who hates us.
So if you buy all this and are ready to really trust him, to test your faith, to join the team wholeheartedly, ready to play, what does he want his team to do? What is the purpose of this team called the church? We are to bear fruit, and the fruit is our obedience, which comes from abiding in Him and loving Him with every part of our being.
Then we will sow the seeds for His harvest. Do you see that obedience is the fruit, not how many new people we get into our church? But that our obedience will cause Him to bring new people into His Kingdom.
The Great Commission is our purpose, and at the end of the Great Commission to go make disciples, he says, “And hey, don’t worry, trust me that I am with you always as you do this. I will do it through you if you just give me the chance, if you just put yourself out there and live like you really trust me and love me”.
Has the word of God dried up for you? Statistics show that only 10% of church going Christians have read the entire Bible. Only 16% of Christians read the Bible everyday. We say we revere the Bible and claim it as our authority, but do we read it?
How are we to be disciples of Christ, and lovers of God if we don’t know Him and what he asks of us, and promises to us. This lack of dedication to God’s Word in itself shows that we are not true disciples, because only the Bible teaches us all that he commands, which in turn we are to teach to others. If we don’t know it, how can we do that?
Isn’t that what most of us would say is the main reason we are not active in the Great Commission? Because we don’t how to do it or what to say, or how to answer the questions or objections we might get? Why is that? Isn’t it because we don’t know the Bible well enough, we don’t know God’s ways and nature well enough? How long have you been a Christian, and you don’t know His desires and what he wants from us, and how he wants us to go about it? By the way, later this summer we will have a message going into detail just on sharing our faith.
When it says in Hebrews 4:12 that the Word of God is living and active, I think part of what the writer means is that if it isn’t being lived, it becomes just another book. It has no power in our lives unless we allow it to through our true belief becoming action empowered by the Holy Spirit. I read the Bible off and on for almost 20 years and it had nothing for me, then one day whamo, it came alive for me because I came alive to it, became desperate for God, and started doing the word not just hearing it.
Neither I, nor anyone else is by any means all the way there in terms of this, but many people have had glimpses of the power of the living word through our obedience to it. As mature Christians we need to stop sucking on the milk bottle, start knowing and doing the Word, being like Christ, and start eating steak. Frankly we should be as ashamed of not knowing the Bible, as we would be if we were sucking on a baby’s bottle in a restaurant.
Jesus said he would rather have us cold rejecting him completely, than lukewarm, aligning with him for our own benefit, but not giving him anything but lip service. God’s grace saves us, but that grace has to be accepted, and it just unlocks the door to being permitted to follow Him.
We have to walk through that door before we are truly saved, before the deal is sealed. We have to respond to His invitation not just with words but with our hearts and will. Our works don’t get us an invitation to be on the team, only grace can do that. But it’s very clear that if we refuse to play, we never really joined the team, and we won’t be taken on the great road trip.
I bet many of us would have the courage to die for an important cause in this life, or for our loved ones. But do you have the guts to choose to spend eternity in Hell? Do you even believe in a literal Hell? Jesus does. What do you think is harder, following Jesus’ commands out of love for him, or spending forever suffering in Hell?
That my friends is living with purpose, the only purpose that really ultimately matters, following the Lord Jesus and all he commands. That will make us the best people, parents, workers, children, spouses, not trying to do it our way or the world’s way.
My prayer for all of us is that we will as Jesus says, wake up, repent, and be zealous for the relationship with Jesus through his word, to live according to his commands, to get rid of sin in our lives, and to go make disciples through our example.
