Giving God Your Best
John 3:16
I want to talk to you about something this morning that I believe is an important issue. It is something that I believe Christians are complacent about. For far too long our churches, those that are born again and washed in the blood have taken this matter too lightly. It is high time that we recognize this matter and accept responsibility for our actions and ask God to forgive us for what we have done. I am just as guilty about this area as much as you are and I believe that God pointed it out to me yesterday. Heaven help us to see this and correct it and get back on track to serving Him.
Before I go any further, you have heard me preach many times that the most important decision that you can ever make in life is not who am I going to marry, its not where am I going to work or what will I do after High School. Or in other words how am I going to support myself and my family (once I get one). Now don't misunderstand me, those decisions are important. And those situations do require some thought. But we have to put perspectives in their right place. Those decisions you make will determine your outcome in this physical world. But, and I want you to hear me, the most important decision you will make concerns the spiritual world. It’s a matter of where you will spend eternity. And I am sure that most, if not all of you will agree with me on that fact. What you need to understand is that making that decision will reveal one of two things. If you accept Heaven as your home, then you are recognizing that Jesus is who He claimed to be and we are what He says we are. That we are sinners in need of a Savior. That He is the only way of salvation. As a matter of fact, Jesus Himself said, John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. Yes the moment you understand that, and act on it you have made your decision for who He really is.
But if you are here this morning and you have never accepted Jesus as your Savior, believe it or not, you have already made your decision. Look in John 3:18.I am not preaching this morning a salvation message. Although that is a very good topic to preach and it will be mentioned. But I am trying to set the stage for my message. So please bear with me. So the most important decision you will make is a spiritual decision and not a physical one.
I want to talk now to those that are saved this morning for a moment. You have made your decision. Once, like me, you were that one in John 3:18 that was condemned. But praise the Lord, the Holy Spirit convicted you of your sins and you asked Jesus to forgive you and come into your heart. You have confessed with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believed in your heart that God raised Him from the dead. Amen and Hallelujah for that. But now what? The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
Now that you are saved, how are you living your life? Are you spending more of your time trying to get ahead in this world? Or are you more concerned about the things of God? Once you are saved, you will still have decisions to make. Wow! You are probably thinking this morning that there are a lot of decisions that have to be made. There are. What you are going to have to decide is what kind of life are you going to live here on earth? You have accepted Christ but are you living for Him? There are too many Christians that are allowing the things of this world dictate to them on how they live and the decisions that they make. We need to stop living for this world and ourselves and start living for Jesus. Remember what I said about making a decision of where you will spend eternity? It was a matter of spiritual things instead of physical things. The same goes with how we live our lives. Every decision we make should have a thought of how will it affect me spiritually. Please bear with me, I am still trying to set the stage for the message.
As we as Christians live our lives here on earth, the most important thing that we need to be working for are spiritual things. If all we do is as I said a little bit ago try to get ahead in this world and only concentrate on the physical side of things, what eternal good does it do us? It does no eternal good. The things that you are working for down here, say a new car, new boat, a new house or just to have a lot of money in your bank account will do you no good when you get to heaven. All those things that you put your time effort blood sweat and tears in will one day vanish away. There will come a time when the physical things that you cared about down here will not matter anymore. Luke says it best in his book in the 12th chapter starting in verse 16.
Now I am getting close to the message. We have seen through the introduction that it is the spiritual things that are important. It is the spiritual things that matter most. Now with that said, no doubt about it as we read in our text verse this morning that God gave the best He had. His Son.
God spared no expense for Salvation when He offered His only begotten Son to die on the cross at Calvary for our sins. You have made the decision to go to heaven when you die. You have accepted God’s best gift. His Son. Yes, God did give us His best. Which now brings me to my message this morning. With this thought in mind again that spiritual things are whats important: Are we giving God our best?
Christian, are we giving God the very best that we have. I said earlier that I believe we have become complacent in this area of our Christian walk. We have settled in and may I say we have become very lazy in giving God our best.
So this morning I want to share with you, time permitting, some areas in our lives that we need to give God our best in.
The first thing that I want us to see is that:
I. GOD gave us His best
A. For Eternity
We see in our text verse that God gave His only begotten Son. Yes He did give us His best. He gave His best so that we won’t have to go to hell and spend eternity separated from Him and His love. As I said in the introduction of this message, when you got saved, you accepted God’s best. You freely took the best gift that had ever been and that ever will be given. You decided that the spiritual decision of where you go when you die was more important than physical decisions. But are you giving your best back to Him? It is the spiritual things that will matter most when you stand before Him. When you stand before Him after you die, it will not impress God that you successfully climbed the ladder where you worked at. It won’t impress God by how much money you saved in your bank account. It won’t impress God how big your house was or how many cars you had in your garage. Why, because when you stand before Him, none of those things will matter. You will be wasting your breath when you try to tell him that you worked your fingers to the bone trying to acquire those things. The Bible says in Luke 12:34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Now to you who are lost and don’t know Christ as your Savior. May I say that you can’t give Him your best. What do I mean? May I be bold enough to say, that you have nothing good to give Him. Well a lot of people say that they want to change how they live before they get saved. They want to try to do things better and want to stop this habit or that habit before they get saved. Let me tell you that you are not going to do that. The best that you can give God is that which you already have and that is yourself. If you think that you are going to try to “clean yourself up” in order to get to God, you won’t ever get to God.
When I am talking about giving your best to God, what I am trying to say is that giving your best comes after your saved. A sinner is not going to naturally give the best they have to God. It is not an instinct that is built in. You have to understand how God sees us. In God’s eyes, we are if I may use this term, rotten.
It says in Psalms 14:2-3 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Psalm 53 also declares that there are none good. Comparing Psalm 14:2-3 to a couple of verses in Romans we see Romans 3:11-12 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
As a matter of fact, it says in verse 10 of this chapter and book As it is written there is none righteous no not one, and also in verse 23 for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. In God’s eyes you are a sinner. You cannot clean yourself up in order to get to God. My favorite song that I like to sing for an invitation song is “Just as I am”. That is how God wants you to come to Him. Just as you are. You cannot clean yourself up. No matter how much you scrub or try to erase, you will always fall short of what God demands. As a matter of fact, if you want to come before God, you have to be perfect.
Don’t try to bring anything to God without Jesus Christ as your Savior. It won’t amount to a hill of beans. In order for you to give your best to God, you must first accept the best from God.
2. For this life
John 10:10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
God wants us as His children to be blessed in this life. Look at Matthew 7:7-11.
God not only gave us the best gift for eternity, but He also wants to give us best gifts while we are here on earth. God is standing by, if you will, waiting to pour His blessings out on us. God wants whats best for our life. He knows what is best for us and He wants us to enjoy His blessing here on earth. Oh we are saved, but we are living defeated lives, because we are not living for Him. We are not giving Him our best.
We can have life more abundantly if we want it. All we have to do is give Him our best. Do you know what you are saying when you give God your best? You are saying that He is the only thing that matters in your life. You are saying that you love Him with all you heart soul mind and strength.
II. We need to GIVE Him our best
A. In our Behavior
1. In Church
Listen to me, how many come to church with a ho-hum attitude? How many come to church service after service and get nothing out of it? You come and sit in the chairs, shake some hands, sing some songs, try to stay awake through the message and then go home. Listen, you don’t get anything out of the service because you don’t put anything into it. Some might even come in with a bad attitude or with grudges or will even come in and start thinking about what’s for dinner, or who plays in the ball game that afternoon. Please do not come into church with a bad attitude, because you can quench the work of the Holy Spirit in this place.
How long does it take to get ready to come to church on Sunday mornings? It takes some longer than others. But if I may, I think we spend too much time getting the physical side of things ready when we come to church instead of getting the spiritual side of things ready. What do you mean preacher? We fix our hair up, we may iron our shirt, some women will take the time to put make up on and we will spend hours getting ready to come to church (don’t we Ellen), just to wrinkle what we have ironed by sitting in these chairs. Everything physically that you have done to prepare to come to church can go away.
May I say that we need to start getting ready for the Sunday service, no later than Saturday evening. Notice I said later than. For some it might start earlier. Listen it is important that we dress nice for church which I will talk about here shortly. But most important, we need to be spiritually ready for church. We need to have spent time in prayer asking God to forgive us of any unconfessed sin in our lives. We need to be praying for the Pastor for God to speak through him. We need to be praying for the lost soul that might be there. We need to be praying that God will prepare our hearts for the message.
2. Towards others:
I am sure you know where I am going with this one.
Did you know that how we interact with others, how we talk to others how we treat others will have an impact on the service. When we give our best behavior to God, it will cause us to put the needs of others (saved or not saved) before our needs. Someone might be going through a tougher time than what we are and we need to step up and take some of the load from off their shoulders and help carry it for them. Let’s quit thinking about ourselves and think about the work of the Lord. Do you see what I am getting at. It is all about the spiritual things in life that matter. Our behavior when we come through the doors of the church will set the mood for the service. We need to understand that.
3. what He has called us to do:
I don’t need to tell you (again) that God has called us to do a task. There is not one in this building that is saved that God has not called you to do something. Some of you are filling positions in this church already. You teach a Sunday school class, you serve on the Deacon board, you are a trustee. You work in the nursery or play the piano. But one job I don’t think God has called us to do is to be a pew warmer (or seat warmer). Look around in the church and you may see one person doing more than one, two or even three jobs while you are only doing one, or maybe even none. We could use you. Our behavior, our actions should be the best they can for God. We need to give God our best behavior.
B. In our dress
Remember, no matter what we do, we want to do and give our best to God. I believe that when we come to church we need to dress the best that we can for God. Some people have no problem dressing up to impress their boss at work. Then they don’t care what they wear to church. Not only for church, but for church activities as well. Now don’t get me wrong there are different kinds of clothes that we wear for those different activities. Some are not appropriate for all activities. I won’t wear a suit and tie to a picnic. I think how we dress says a lot about us. Amen! When our neighbors see us leave the house, they can kind of get an idea where we are going just based on how we are dressed. If they see you leave the house with swimming suits on, they conclude you are either going swimming or to the beach. If they see you with old clothes on, you are probably going to work in the yard or on your vehicle. If they see you with Church clothes on, they may conclude that you are going to church. Especially if they see a Bible under your arm.
Now does wearing a tie gentlemen, or a dress or skirt lady, make you more religious? No. It does not. But I believe that it can identify you as a child of God and we should want to dress our best for our heavenly Father.
Another area that I want to look at that we need to give God our best in really sums everything up.
C. Everything
Colossians 3:23 And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;
Christian, no matter what it is in our lives, work, school, relaxation, church no matter what it is, we should do our best for God. It takes planning and preparing. I want us to look at one word in this verse with the thought of what we learned about in the introduction of the message about spiritual things matter more than the physical things.
That word is heartily. It is made up of two Greek words. The first is spelled ek and pronounced ex and it means “from, out or of”. It is used many times in the New Testament, 761 times to be exact. And the second Greek word is psuche pronounced psoo-khay meaning breath, i.e. (by implication) spirit. This word is used 95 times in the New Testament mainly as it deals with our life or our soul.
In closing what is this verse saying? It is saying that when we do something, no matter what it is it should be done by giving our best to God. In order to give our best to God it must come from the inside, our soul. When we think of our soul it has a spiritual meaning to it. If we give God our best in no matter what we do, it will last eternally. And according to the next verse in 24, we will be rewarded from the Lord.
