Debbie and I were blessed to be able to end our vacation on a seven-day cruise through the western Caribbean. Here is a picture of us enjoying dinner in the ship. It was a very enjoyable time. We actually got to swim with stingrays. But, you know what, all that food and sun and swimming is a little bit overrated. Nothing beats being back here at Bellevue to see all of your smiling faces. It is also good to be back because we are continuing on in this series on the topic of discipleship. For those of you who haven’t been here, we have defined discipleship as ordinary people learning to live everyday life like Jesus. When we say ordinary people we mean that discipleship is for everybody. Everybody is eligible to be a disciple. It is not something restricted to some sort of a super Christian or a super saint. The idea of learning implies that discipleship is not a one-time thing. It is an ongoing process. A lifetime activity. To live everyday life means that being a disciple is not restricted to what we do here on Sunday morning but should be part of your everyday life 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We are all doing this just so that we learn to live like Jesus. We live life as if Jesus was inside of us living our life for us. We have suggested that here at Bellevue Christian Church, in order to help you in this process of discipleship, we have identified three primary means of doing so that are identified by this simple little logo: gather, train, and go. The last few weeks Austin was here and he was preaching on this idea of gathering, and the idea here is that discipleship is not some sort of an isolated activity. It is something that happens best in community. I wasn’t able to hear all of his sermons. I heard the first one but I guess in the second one he said that one of the benefits of being in a community of people is it helps squeeze the sin out of you. I thought that was an interesting concept. We know that when we are in a community with other believers, a small group or home group class or whatever it is, that is a loving community of brothers and sisters in Christ that even though it can get a little bit messy at times where people can confess their sins and forgive each other, what happens is the Holy Spirit begins to work in that community, peeling off the parts of you that don’t look like Jesus and putting on the parts that do. Gathering is a very, very, very key aspect of discipleship.
Today we are going to shift from the gathering component to the training component. Training to look like Jesus and what that looks like. Next week, we are going to begin to look at some very practical things we can do that we refer to as the spiritual disciplines that help you being to look like Jesus. But I thought rather than jumping into those specific practical activities that we can do to train to live like Jesus, I thought first we have to be sold on the idea that we should train. It is difficult to engage in any sort of intensive training activity unless you are convinced that there is a need for that. In today’s passage out of 1 Timothy, Paul seems to suggest to Timothy that there is a necessity to training. He goes on to say “Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” What I like about Paul is he is using this athletic-type imagery to explain a concept that people might not understand. He does that often in his letters. That is what is good about Paul. He tries to find something that the people can relate to that can help them understand something that they might not be able to relate to. As I have learned, the people in his culture would be able to relate to this imagery of physical training because the gymnasium in Greek culture was the center of civic activity. In fact, the word training is a Greek word gymnasia ,which is basically where we get the word gymnasium. They would connect to this athletic imagery. Even though it might have been a few weeks or years for some of you since you stepped foot in a gym, I think most of us know what you do in a gym. You go there for physical training. In Paul’s day, that physical training would be to possibly prepare for some sort of a road race or possibly the Greek Olympics. We go to train for a variety of reasons. We train to get our body in shape and keep it in shape or maybe prepare ourselves for some sort of athletic competition or something like that. The bottom line is we know that, at least in America, people take physical training very seriously. They invest a lot of hours and a lot of money in training. I was reading this statistic that said the global fitness and health industry generates about $75 billion a year in revenue. That is a lot of money going to fitness and training. It is obvious that a lot of people see value in physical training. Paul was like that himself. Paul even goes on to say “For physical training is of some value.” He understood that there are benefits to physical training. Hopefully, even if we have not been in a gym for a while, we still understand that there are benefits to physical training.
But even though there are benefits to physical training, Paul goes on to imply is there are some real benefits to spiritual training. He goes on to say “but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” That word godliness doesn’t seem to connect with culture today. Did anybody use the word godly this past week? We don’t use it that much. Unless we are referring to Pope Francis or Mother Teresa, we don’t really use the term that much. It is a shame because really it was a very common word back in that early century. If we could attach the word godly to a lot of people today, we may have a better world going on. Godliness is really, at its heart, very simple. It is just the idea of living according to God’s desire. When some people think of being godly they conjure up this long list of religious dos and don’ts. It is not like that. It is living in the desire of God. The desire that God had for us since the beginning of creation. He desired us to live under his lordship and he would take care of us and protect us and give us everything that we would need. What some people refer to as the good life or the kingdom life. As most Christians know, we have this thing called the fall of man. That means that sin entered the world and got its grip on all of humanity. So much so that people in the world tend to prefer the worldly ways instead of the ways of God. Their own desires and personal desires instead of the desires of God. We see where that gets us. Call it what you want, but there is not a better word than sin. Sin is not just doing something wrong. It is living outside God’s will for your life. That results in all sorts of problems in the world. Starting from something as simple as a sarcastic comment to a friend or a spouse and moving on to things like road rage like we saw this last week in Arizona where this poor little girl was innocently killed, all the way up to what is going on with terrorism and ISIS and that sort of thing. All those things are just evidence that sin and evil is alive and very well in the world.
Christians, unfortunately, are not immune to this idea of sin. I said a few weeks ago that statistically Christians don’t look much better than the non-Christians in the world as far as things like alcoholism, pornography, divorce rates, and all that kind of stuff. They really don’t look that much different. When you think about why is that, it really boils down to maybe we are not listening to Paul. We are not training to be godly. What you have is a bunch of Christians walking around and there is no other word for it other than saying they are spiritually flabby. They are walking around out of shape. They have set the bar so low that they don’t look much different than the rest of the world. In the eyes of many Christians, they go through life and they are like I didn’t break any of the Ten Commandments this week. I didn’t steal. I didn’t commit adultery. I didn’t kill anybody so everything is okay. But we forget that Jesus was not about setting the bar low. He was about raising the bar. He didn’t want to deal with the Pharisees that were just keeping the laws and going through their to-do lists so I must be a pretty good Pharisee. No, he would raise the bar a little bit higher. He would say things like “It has been said that thou shall not commit adultery, but I say if you look at a woman lustfully, you have already committed adultery in your heart.” Or he would say “It has been said thou shall not kill, but I say if you have bitterness and hatred inside of you, you have already committed murder in your heart.” Jesus wasn’t doing this just to get under our skin and to create this impossible goal of some sort. He was trying to get his disciples to not be content with where they are spiritually and trying to paint a picture of the life that God desires for every human being. It is a life that can only come about by training and godliness. When you train in godliness, unlike physical training, training in godliness gets below the surface. It gets to what some would call the heart of the matter, the spirit of the matter, call it the soul, call it your interior life, call it what you want. But it is the stuff that is going on inside or in your head that he is trying to get to with godly training. I think that most people here would recognize that we have physical bodies. I would suspect that maybe a good percentage of you and even people that aren’t Christians would say we have a spiritual self too. We see the physical self. It is a side of ourselves that we are all pretty good at dressing up. You all look good today. We know how to play the part. We know how to do the things we are supposed to do to look good on the outside. It is the inside stuff that only you can see and only God can see. That is where all the yuck and the muck resides. That is where all the stuff that we would rather not be seen by others resides. Things like lust, anger, bitterness, hatred, envy, pride. All that stuff sits there and that is why we need to be trained in godliness.
The biggest challenge is trying to convince people that they need to train. If there is any obstacle it is trying to get over the hurdle of people thinking everything is fine with me. I have no issues. That person over there might have some issues or over there, but I am just fine. Several times I have been at the front door or at Café Connect after the service and somebody says Pastor Chuck that was the best sermon I have ever heard, but I really wish so and so was here to hear it. I am thinking maybe God had you hear it today for some reason. But it is always I wish somebody else was here so they could hear it. We are blind to our own faults and we see the faults of others. I know this would be impossible to do, but it could be a fun exercise. What if when we came to church on Sunday, we were all butt naked, in a spiritual sense. Did anybody go to the Science Center and see the transparent man or woman? Kind of like that. We see the transparent person but we don’t see the internal organs. What we would get a glimpse of is the soul, the character. I would like to think we would all be comfortable with that, showing off our inner self, but I am sure not going to be the first one in line to do so. Anybody want to be first in line? It is something that is not going to happen because we are afraid of what is inside of us. We are afraid it is going to offend somebody or they would see part of it that we don’t like. We keep those things very well hidden. I went to a men’s conference several years ago. I don’t remember much of what the speaker said other than he made this comment that just stuck. He said if somehow we were able to peer inside of the heart of the person sitting next to us, we would probably be so offended we would get up and leave the room. That is somewhat humorous but definitely true. If we could really see what is going on in the heart of men or women, I think we might be a little bit offended. Especially because a lot of those thoughts, prejudices, envy, and all that kind of stuff is directed outward at others. It is going on. I suspect it is going on right now. Some of you are looking at me and if I could peer through you I would see you are saying I don’t like what you are saying Chuck. I don’t care. That is my attitude. That’s my problem.
It is not so much that we offend our neighbor. It is that we offend God. It is really not even so much that we offend God in these things that are in the inside of us. It is that we disappoint him because he says I have such a better life than you. I have so much more that I want to give you. I have a life that you cannot imagine. You are living with all this crap inside of you. Many of us don’t even know we have it going on. We live in a state of denial until a situation might occur where all of a sudden it just pops up out of nowhere. You are talking to your spouse and he or she says a sarcastic remark and you come back with a sarcastic remark. Or you think a coworker is gossiping about something so you begin to devise how can I get back at this person. You don’t get what you want so you act like a little baby. These are automatic responses that come out in certain circumstances. We learn about a failure of a friend or an enemy and we get this little bit of a glee that comes up inside of us. A little bit of happiness. That happens sometimes. It happens to me sometimes. If we are honest, it all happens. Where does that come from? That is sin. That is what it is. We get an unexpected bill in the mail and we panic. We start going down all these roads of destruction. Or we get this health diagnosis that isn’t what we expected and we go into a pit of despair or depression. These aren’t things inside of us that for Christians suggest they are going to hell when they die. They are suggestive of an unkempt, sloppy, flabby soul. I don’t know how else to put it.
We have to remember when Paul wrote this letter he wasn’t writing to a nonbeliever. He was writing to a Christian. He was writing to a very, very strong Christian, Timothy. A kid whom he mentored for years. A kid who grew up in the faith. And he is saying train yourself to be godly. Sometimes Christians have this idea that when you become a Christian, everything is wonderful. I got my white robe on and I am standing here before others and I am purified, holy, and everything is wonderful and life is wonderful. That lasts for about five minutes and then you see others and you see yourself and the old man quickly comes back. There has been an internal change but primarily what happens is you have taken yourself off the throne of your life and put Jesus on the center of your life and got filled with the Holy Spirit. That is really what is happening there. We have this me part of us and it is represented by this diagram. It is just a simple way to think about the me-centered life. I have all the worst things that could be going on inside of you totally self-centered. Things like greed, anxiety, lust, negativity, unforgiveness, prejudice, pride, worry, fear, impatience. If you don’t believe that this stuff is the result of a me-centered life, just think about it. If you are experiencing any of these, it is because you are centered on self. Everything up there is because you are pulling every comment, everything that is said, every little anxiety, every little fear out there is going back to yourself. Then what happens for some of you is you have this dramatic conversion where you hear the gospel either from the sermon or TV or reading the gospel of John one night and you say I don’t understand it all, but I know this me-centered life is really just not working, so I am going to try Jesus. Before you know it you are accepting Jesus. You are standing in the baptistery. You are making that great declaration of faith saying I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and I have accepted him as Lord and Savior. Hallelujah! You get everybody clapping. He has been saved! So what. It doesn’t mean he has been changed. He has a fresh, brand new life, but what happens to all this other stuff. It is still there. Sure something may have changed. Maybe you were a really greedy person and now all of a sudden you find yourself very generous. Or you were somebody who struggled with despair and now you find a little bit of hope. But all the other stuff seems to still be there.
I don’t know the answer for that, but I know it is true. Because when I became a Christian way back in the 80s, I had a pretty dramatic conversion experience. Before I became a Christian, I had a potty mouth like a sailor. That is probably because I was a sailor. It is also because I had a bad heart. I had an internal condition that created this auto-response to burst out vulgarity. But when I became saved, just like that it was gone. I won’t say that I never used profanity again, but I definitely know he took it away right away. He took away the ongoing desire to do that. I think that happens all the time. Somebody gets saved in a dramatic conversion and something else gets taken away. Maybe it is lust. Maybe it is alcoholism. Maybe it is workoholism. All this stuff gets removed. Why doesn’t God remove all of it? I think what he wants to do is give us enough to demonstrate that something real happened when you accepted Christ. It was a real conversion. Something inside of you changed. God is at work in you. Then he says now let’s work together in a cooperative relationship. I work in you and you work out and we work together. In the book of Philippians, Paul uses almost these exact same terms. He is speaking to the Philippian church. He says “Therefore, my dear friends, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” Do you see the dual nature? You can’t do it on your own. You need God working with you through the power of the Holy Spirit. What happens when you begin to work together and train in godliness, over time all this other stuff just starts going away. You keep the Jesus-centered life. You train in godliness and pretty soon you are becoming a more patient person. Maybe a more humble person. Maybe a person of self-control and of joy. Pretty soon what is happening is you are beginning to look like Jesus. A year from now you look back and say I just don’t seem as angry as I did a year ago. Somebody says you just seem a little bit more joyful. They just seem a little bit more generous. What is really cool is when you get done with your life and you get to the other side, and I don’t know exactly how this works, but you look 100% like Jesus. This is not stuff that Chuck is making up. This is biblical stuff. It comes out of 1 John 3:1-2. John writes “Dear friends, now we are children of God (in other words, when you accept Christ, you become a child of God) and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” There is something that happens when you get to heaven, we are immediately transformed into the very image of Jesus Christ. That is something that should excite you. But in the meantime, we have to do our part. We are never going to fully arrive in this world, but we have to be moving in the direction.
In closing, I really want you to just grasp the idea of the importance of why we train in godliness. To be honest, if you don’t get this, if you don’t see the need to change, all the stuff I am going to talk about in the next couple sermons will be meaningless. The spiritual practices mean nothing because they are all about training in godliness. If you don’t think you need that training then it is going to be useless. Hopefully, you see the value in training in godliness and you see that it is not a one-time thing that occurs when you are saved and then you cruise through life never really doing anything. Never really cooperating with God in your transformation. As I wind it up, I bring you back to the whole idea of cruising. Anybody been on a cruise before? The good thing about being on a cruise is you get to eat what you want whenever you want 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the middle of the night if you want a piece of pizza, go get it. If instead of two eggs benedict you want three in the morning for breakfast, then that is fine. Instead of one dessert, you have five desserts, it doesn’t matter. You begin to have that attitude, why not? It is there. I might as well eat it. The funny thing is they put gyms on a cruise. We start out with the intention of working out. That lasts about five minutes. That is why they put them way in the back of the ship. It just seems to be inconsistent there. So I came back and I am not speaking for Debbie, but I know I came back feeling physically sluggish. Lost some weight before I left and put it all back on while we were on the cruise. Physically sluggish. More than that, I felt spiritually sluggish. Mentally refreshed, spiritually sluggish because I don’t think I cracked my Bible open once in those seven days. I don’t think I did a devotional once. Sure I did the obligatory prayer at meals. But I really didn’t get into my devotions, my quiet times, the spiritual practices that I would normally do because I was outside of my routine. It is very difficult for me when I am outside of my routine to try and embrace a new routine. What I could do was just beat myself up and say Chuck you are a terrible person because you are a pastor and you should be doing devotions all day long. I could do that but what good would it do. What I should do, and it is a spiritual practice of thankfulness, is sit back and say thank you God. I really enjoyed that cruise. It was nice meeting people. It was nice eating good food. It was nice enjoying the beauty of creation. The beauty of my wife. Just thank you God and I will get back into it.
Many of you haven’t been on a cruise, but many of you have been cruising too long. Many of you have been on a cruise spiritually. Days, weeks, years. You could do the same thing. You could beat yourself up and continue to go down the path of I don’t see the need to change. I am just going to keep going and not do anything. Or you could say today is a new day. God’s mercies are new every morning. You can start. He will be right there ready to work out with you. Ready to hang out with you. It has to be your choice. A lot of people put it on the church. The church is not doing stuff to help me grow. It is not our responsibility. You have to make a choice. The old cliché that says you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. It holds true for spirituality. We can have all the training facilities, the gymnasiums, the classrooms, the small groups, the home groups, the Bible studies and all that kind of stuff, but you have to decide whether or not you are going to engage it and embrace it. All we can do is provide the culture of discipleship. You have to decide do you really want to be a disciple or are you content with where you are at? What I am really is suggesting is you have to decide what kind of present and future you want to experience. This last Wednesday was Back to the Future day. The date was October 21, 2015 that he plugged into his time machine and he was going off into the future. But everybody in this room has a future. If you are a Christian, your future is 100% secured. If you accepted the blood of Jesus Christ, you accepted the sacrifice on the cross, you accepted the Christmas story, the Easter story, and you made Christ Lord of your life, then your future is secure. But what you can still control is your present. You have to decide when you are standing there in the future someday and you look back, what do you want to see? Do you want to see a life represented by the first circle? Life represented by the fruits of the world: bitterness, anger, negativity, unforgiveness, guilt, and all that stuff. Or do you want to look back and see a life that was filled with the fruit of the spirit? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control. You can experience that life in this present world. The life of godliness. The results of you actually being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Someone with the intent desire to live like Jesus. The only thing standing between you and that life is you. That is the only thing. You have to decide what is the life you want to live now and what is the life you want to live for all eternity. The choice is yours. Choose wisely. Let us pray.
