Are You All In?
Romans 12:1
The Ingredients of a Christian|
A Believer is surrendered.
A believer is separated.
A believer is sober.
A believer is serving.
A believer is responding.
Rom. 12:1
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.”
The believer lives a crucified life.
1] Crucify the Self.
Are you a zombie for Jesus?
2] Crucify the Flesh.
Are you engaged in internal civil war?
3] Crucify the World.
Are you reflecting Christ or Culture?
Some people think that when they become a Christian, life gets easier. You know, you face, victory after victory and they attribute everything to God. Life is amazing and eveytrhing changes for them. Some other people find being a Christian very difficult because life gets harder for them. And sometimes, some people don’t see any change at all. That is a question I will tackle at the end of this series but for this series, I want to ask and answer the question, what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?
This series is really born from what my youth pastor told me, many years ago. Pastor Kevin McCullough once told me that you could line up a group of 100 people and go down the line and ask them, one by one, if they were a Christian. Each of them can say “YES.” But if you go back down that line and ask them “are you a disciple?” then only about 10 of them would say “YES” That statement left a mark upon my heart and I have carried it with me over the years. In this series, we are going to look at what it really means to be a Christian and what God wants us to be. To be a Christen, to be a disciple is to follow after Jesus and to love him.
R12, Are You All In?
What would you do with a million dollars? (Survey). The thing about this question is that your answer to this really reflects your priorities. Most people think about paying off their bills and then helping out others, either immediate family members bills, friends maybe, and then maybe donations to notable charities and then, back to self. Get yourself a better place to live, maybe go from a 2 story house to a mansion. Maybe trade in the ford focus for a Lamborghini maybe?
It’s an interesting and thought provoking question because it deals with our hearts. We tend to focus on ourselves and what we need to get rid of, like our bills, our student loans and our mortgages. We tend to think that eliminating these issues will make life easier for us and then we will experience true and real freedom. After we receive this so called freedom, then we can take what’s left over and begin to share our money. We can actually use our financial blessings to allow others to experience the same freedom we have just tasted. Am I right?
So, being a Christian, we bring in the same thought process. We think that we just need something that will set us free to experience true spirituality. Just like monetary gain, we tend to think this “blessing” or whatever it is that will set us free are something that we can gain, that we can get our hands on and control it to some measure. First, we will use this thing to bless ourselves and then we will bless others.
God’s idea for being a Christian paints a completely different picture altogether though. God wants us to look less like ourselves and more like Jesus Christ. What is it that God is after? Let’s look at Romans 12:1 (NIV)
When you see the word Therefore, find out what it’s there for. Romans 11 are all about God’s kindness to the nation of Israel. He’s kindness is shown, again and again, even in the midst of their disobedience. Verse 11 says, “Did God’s people stumble and fall beyond recovery? Of course not. So God made salvation available to the Gentiles. But he wanted his own people (Israel) to become jealous and claim it for themselves.”
Here’s the thing: God wanted his people, Israel, to get with it and find freedom in Christ but they rejected him. In their rejection and rebellion of accepting Christ, God made provision for the Gentiles to accept and receive Christ. The Gentiles were considered to be cut off branches but God, in his kindness, grafted us into the tree of life. Grafting us in is contrary to nature but God is able to do that because he loves us and his desire is not just for Gentiles to accept him but also Israel. The picture Paul is painting here is God is merciful to us. His love and his mercy should remain at the very front of our minds at all times. It is the kindness of God which brought us to a place of repentance.
II. Being a Christian means living a crucified life.
The essence of being a disciple is to live a sacrificial lifestyle. Our sacrificial lifestyle is to be lived in the light of God’s mercy. To sacrifice is to crucify three main areas of our lives. Jesus said “If you would follow me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” Jesus carried his cross and died for us. To be followers of Christ, to be disciples, we must take up our crosses as well. There are things in our lives that must die to in order to be a disciple.
Discipleship is not about focusing on the circumstances surrounding you but looking to God for everything. There are three areas of your life that must be crucified to become a disciple, a Christian.
Crucify Self.
Crucify yourself. Most of believers experience this when we hit rock bottom. We’re going about our lives trying to manage life but we find that we can’t and we come to discover that Jesus is the only one who can save us. What we find though, is that the Christian life is a daily process of continuously crucifying yourself and letting God to have complete control. When you die, Jesus sets you free. When you lose your life, you find it in Jesus.
Galatians 2:20
The point is this: are you a zombie for Jesus?
Crucify Our Flesh
Crucifying our sinful nature. This is the constant struggle we all face. There is an internal civil war going on all the time in our lives. (So you want to be like Christ?) To crucify our flesh means to isolate the areas in our lives that are not a reflection of Christ.
Galatians 5:24 & Galatians 5:19. What areas do you need to isolate and crucify?
Which side is winning? Paul said the good that I want to do, I do not do. And what I want to do, that I do not do. Paul was very aware of the internal struggle, the internal civil war he was facing. The question you need to ask yourself here is this: what side is winning the war?
Here is how you win the war. Focus on the sacrifice of Jesus. he paid it all. focus on the sacrifice, not the sin.
Crucify the World
This means to crucify the connection we have with the world. The world is trying to feed us with its own sets of what is right and wrong. It tries to feed us and give us what we want by appealing to our sinful nature.
Galatians 6:14. Do we boast only in the cross of Christ? Through his death on the cross, the world becomes crucified to us. This means the world has nothing to offer us. There is no appeal, there is no appetite the world cannot provide for those who have truly found life in the cross.
What’s in your wallet? Capital One credit cards have/had these commercials that always asked, “What’s in your wallet?” The question is aimed at what are you carrying for a credit card? Is it capital one, because, if it is then you’re in good hands. You don’t want a credit card that’s not going to work for you. Well, the same thing applies here. What, or better, who is in your wallet? What are you carrying around with you? The pleasures of the world or is Jesus everything to you? Have you crucified the world?
When we live crucified lives, we are then set apart for God. In our crucifixion, God sees the surrender that we have offered for the sake of Christ and following after Him. So, Christianity begins with surrender to God and self abandonment.
III. Closure
There’s a case study done at business schools that goes like this: John is a 32 year old engineer. He’s single and he enjoys going to estate sales and looking for any potential valuable items. One particular day, he comes across an estate sale that’s being run about an hour away from his home. He decides to go. He’s gets there a bit late so most of the people interested had already looked through. He talked with the people in charge and discovered there was some interest in the house from a couple of interested buyers. The house is being sold as one lot for $75,000. John takes a look around and sees a few valuable items here and there but nothing really stands out.
He makes his way downstairs and finds an old drawer and while he’s looking through this, he finds a hidden drawer. He pulls out a folded piece of cloths and unfolds it to find a few rare gold coins used by the Confederacy in during the Civil war era. To his knowledge, these coins are worth millions of dollars.
He goes home, does further research and discovers that he’s right. These coins are worth millions. He realizes that if he sold his house with all the furniture included and he sold his car and he put that together with all of his life’s savings, he has 75,000 dollars. Just enough to purchase this house. The questions racing through his mind and your mind when it comes to this scenario are:
What are the risks involved? What are the potential rewards? What would you do and why? In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus told a story about an ancient treasure and it goes like this.
Matthew 13:44 says, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy he went and sold all he had and bought the field.”
Why is it so hard for us to surrender to God? It’s because we begin surrender by asking the question, “What are the risks? What do I have to give up? What am I going to lose?” If you experience true spirituality, if you want to really be a true, authentic follower of Jesus Christ. Then you have to move beyond the questions and find you’re surrendering to the God who loves you and his mercy should be the catapult in your life that causes you to surrender to him.
Is there something holding you back? Have you been asking yourself the same questions over and over again? Have you not really given God your all because you’re stuck on those same questions? Are they holding you back? Then, I urge you, to consider the mercy and the kindness of God. Consider his love for you, in sending his son to die for you. Consider his grace, he freely poured out upon you. Live your life as a sacrifice for him. Surrender to God, abandon yourself. Are you all in?
