The Benefits of an Intentional Life
INTRODUCTION:
For the past 5 weeks I have preached messages under the broad heading of LIVING AN INTENTIONAL LIFE. During this time, we have seen the fact that God has always worked in an intentional manner—that is, he has never had an accident or made a mistake. We’ve considered the benefits of living intentionally in our spiritual lives, family lives, church life and just last week Buck Trautwein shared with us a wonderful example of being an intentional witness.
Now, I want to ask you a few questions—why? Why have we taken the time to think about AN INTENTIONAL LIFE? Does this issue really have anything to do with my life? In the broader scope of things, are there any benefits to this idea?
I believe these questions can be answered in the premise I gave you the very first week we started this series. If we do not have an agenda for our lives, one will be provided for us—either by the events of life itself, or by other people. You see, to live intentionally means to live on purpose. It means that we are taking control and determining how we will live our lives and spend our time, energy and resources. Without such a plan, life can easily “get away from us” and seemingly have us at its mercy.
I want to reiterate one word of caution before we continue. In saying that intentional living allows us to take control and determine how we will live our lives, it must be understood that I mean we live our lives the way God wants us to. I realize this sounds like two opposing ideas, “Live intentionally, take control; but do it God’s way.” But in reality, it makes perfect sense. We must intentionally determine to do things God’s way or we will live by another agenda. Left to ourselves, all of us will wander from the narrow road. Don’t be so sure of yourself and your ability to always do exactly what God desires. We are a fallen people and given the opportunity we will fall still farther. That’s why intentional living is such an important issue.
Now, let’s take a broader view of this topic and consider the benefits of living an intentional life.
SCRIPTURE: Colossians 3:23
PRAYER
The benefits of living an intentional life:
I. The benefits of having purpose
A. Purpose is meaning
One of golf’s immortal moments came when a Scotsman demonstrated the new game to President Ulysses Grant. Carefully placing the ball on the tee, he took a mighty swing. The club hit the turf and scattered dirt all over the President’s beard and surrounding vicinity, while the ball placidly waited on the tee. Again the Scotsman swung, and again he missed. Our President waited patiently through six tries and then quietly stated, “There seems to be a fair amount of exercise in the game, but I fail to see the purpose of the ball.” (Campus Life)
1. President Ulysses Grant made a statement that could be true about many lives today: There seems to be fair amount of exercise…but I fail to see the purpose. In other words, there is often much activity but little or no progress. For all the busyness in many of our lives I must ask, “are we getting anywhere from it?” Is there a purpose for it?
2. Purpose gives meaning to life. It gives one the ability and authority to say “I know why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
ILLUSTRATION: That reminds me of the story of a little girl who asked her mother, “Mommy, why do you cut the ends off the meat before you cook it?” The girl’s mother told her that she thought it added to the flavor by allowing the meat to better absorb the spices, but perhaps she should ask her grandmother since she always did it that way. So the little girl finds her grandmother and asks, “Grandma, why do you and Mommy cut the ends of the meat off before you cook it?” Her grandmother thought a moment and answered, “I think it allows the meat to stay tender because it soaks up the juices better, but why don’t you ask your Nana, after all, I learned from her and she always did it that way.” The little girl is getting a little frustrated, but climbs up in her great-grandmother’s lap and asks, “Nana, why do you cut the ends off the meat before you cook it?” Nana answered, “I don’t know why these women do it, I did it because my pot wasn’t big enough.”
3. Purpose gives meaning and allows you know why you’re doing what you’re doing!
B. Purpose is an anchor…to keep the surprises of life from tossing us around and inflicting constant seasickness on us.
1. Life does not always go the way we plan or want it to. When we have defined the purpose of life, we can hold steady during the trying times of storminess and doubt.
ILUSTRATION: I know that at this time in my life, I am supposed to be a pastor and that knowledge is an anchor for me. Let me tell you why. Tell story of call to ministry.
2. Seasickness is motion sickness. There are many people who wish the world would just stop for a while so they can catch their breath and catch up. Most of those people have lives filled with activity for which there is no clear cut purpose. They often become disoriented due the constant motion of their lives. An anchor makes sure that the motion can only go so far before we are drawn back in.
C. Purpose is a guide to keep us on course and ensure we are focusing on the right things.
There is a story involving Yogi Berra, the well-known catcher for the New York Yankees, and Hank Aaron, who at the time was the chief power hitter for the Milwaukee Braves. The teams were playing in the World Series, and as usual Yogi was keeping up his ceaseless chatter intended to pep up his teammates and distract the Milwaukee batters. As Aaron came to the plate, Yogi tried to distract him by saying, "Henry, you’re holding the bat wrong. You’re supposed to hold it so you can read the trademark.” Aaron didn’t say anything. When the next pitch came he hit a homerun into the left field bleachers. After rounding the bases and reaching home plate, Aaron looked at Yogi and said, “I didn’t come up here to read.”
1. Knowing your purpose helps keep you on track. I allows you to ignore the things that can easily distract you and take your attention away from the things that really matter.
2. It has been rightly said that “the good is enemy of the best.” There are many people who have had and done good things in life, but they have never known life in all its fullness because they couldn’t say no to the good so that they could have the best.
These are three of the benefits of knowing your purpose in life. Now let’s look at the benefits of living a disciplined life
II. The benefits of discipline
A. By discipline I do not mean punishment or correction. Rather, I am talking about the self-control to do the right things.
1. Have you heard the phrase, “Good intentions are never enough”? It means what good are ideas without following through with them.
2. ILLUSTRATION: I remember playing pick up football games in college. There was one guy who played whenever he had the chance. He was a decent football player, but he was a better talker—especially when we were on defense. He was always one step away from making a great play whether it was making a tackle before the first down, or knocking down or intercepting a pass. He was good, but we never did see him make a great play. He meant to, but there was always a reason he didn’t whether some one was in his way or he was a step too slow, or whatever the reason.
3. We all know people who are the same way. They are always talking about their plans. They’re gonna do this and they’re gonna do that. The plans sound impressive enough, but for some reason they never happen. This gets in the way or the time wasn’t right. There is always a reason nothing was accomplished. The sad thing is that they really meant and maybe even wanted to follow through, but they did not have the discipline to do the things that would accomplish the tasks they talked about.
4. Discipline helps you do the right things. It’s like the saying I once heard a preacher use—THE MAIN THING IS TO KEEP THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING. In other words, invest your time, energy and resources on the right things and the return will be more than you imagined.
B. Discipline helps you move beyond the surface
1. Have you ever noticed that it’s often easier to live a shallow life than to deal with it on a deeper level?
2. It reminds me of the swimming pool we had when I was growing up. There was a shallow end and a deep end. My mother had a rule: no one could cross the rope separating the two without swimming the length of the pool a few times. Her reason? Even though there was more fun to be had in the deep end, there was also a lot more danger. We played different games, and were much rowdier in the deep end because there was more room and more freedom.
3. Many people like to live life in the shallow end because the risk is minimal. The problem is that the shallow end is much smaller than the deep end. A person is limited in what they can do there. However, some feel it’s a good trade to not have to deal with the uncertainty and danger of the deep end.
Chuck Swindoll writes in his devotional The Quest for Character:
“All who fly risk crashing
All who drive risk colliding
All who run risk falling
All who walk risk stumbling
All who live risk something!”
a. Life is a risk. To confront the risk brings greater reward, satisfaction and fulfillment than staying in the shallow end ever will.
b. Let me say one last thing about the shallow end—the only major crisis we ever had in our pool happened in the shallow end. My cousin David decided to dive in head first and quickly hit his head on the bottom. Thankfully, there was no permanent paralysis, but the trauma occurred when someone tried to do something in the shallow end that was not possible there. If he had gone to the deep end, he could have completed his dive and come up with the thrill and satisfaction of accomplishment instead of the dread of thinking “if I had only done things differently….”
4. Discipline helps us move beyond the surface.
C. Discipline breeds balance
1. M. Scott Peck writes in his book THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED, “I spent much of my ninth summer on a bicycle. About a mile from our house the road went down a steep hill and turned sharply at the bottom. Coasting down the hill one morning, I felt my gathering speed to be ecstatic. To give up this ecstasy by applying brakes seemed an absurd self-punishment. So I resolved to simultaneously retain my speed and negotiate the corner. My ecstasy ended seconds later when I was propelled a dozen feet off the road into the woods. I was badly scratched and bleeding, and the front wheel of my new bike was twisted beyond use from its impact against a tree. I had been unwilling to suffer the pain of giving up my ecstatic speed in the interest of maintaining my balance around the corner. I learned, however, that the loss of balance is ultimately more painful that the giving up required to maintain balance.”
2. Discipline helps us make the proper choices so that we do not have to endure unnecessary hardship and difficult in life. Notice the word unnecessary. Life is sometimes full of hardship, but there are times we bring things upon ourselves that are totally unnecessary.
D. Discipline brings freedom
1. Remember the story of my pool and my mom’s rule? If someone would take the time to learn to swim properly there was a whole new world of possibility opened up to them. They were no longer confined to the shallow end. The interesting thing is that there were boundaries at the deep end as well, but when we were kids I never remember us complaining that it was too small. We were just glad not to be in the shallow end. The relatively little amount of time it took to learn to swim, allowed us the freedom to do more than we ever could have dreamed possible in the shallow end.
2. Now there are some who listen to me say “discipline breeds freedom” and they want to scoff. To them the words discipline and freedom stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. But let me illustrate.
When Krista and I were first married we both worked jobs that paid us very well. The strange thing is that the money never seemed to be enough. About three years into our marriage we heard of a little thing called a budget. WE decided to try it. By that time I was in ministry full-time, we had a baby on the way and Krista was no longer working. What I brought home in a week was only 36% of what we together brought home in a week when we were first married. The strange thing is that the money seemed to go further. We did not always stay on our budget perfectly, but there was money for all the things we needed money before simply because we had learned to discipline ourselves.
3. Discipline bred freedom.
WE’VE LOOKED AT THE BENEFITS OF KNOWING YOUR PURPOSE AND LIVING IN A DISCIPINED MANNER, NOW LET’S CONSIDER THE BENEFITS OF VISION.
III. The benefits of vision
A. Vision is being able to look to the future and see where you would like to end up. It is the ultimate goal—the light at the end of the tunnel.
Bill Hybels, Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church shares this story in his book Who You Are When No One’s Looking:
It started like so many evenings. Mom and Dad at home and Jimmy playing after dinner. Mom and Dad were absorbed with jobs and did not notice the time. It was a full moon and some of the light seeped through the windows. Then Mom glanced at the clock. “Jimmy, it’s time to go to bed. Go up now and I’ll come and settle you later.” Unlike usual, Jimmy went straight upstairs to his room. An hour or so later his mother came up to check if all was well, and to her astonishment found that her was staring quietly out of his window at the moonlit scenery. “What are you doing Jimmy?” “I’m looking at the moon, Mommy.” “Well, it’s time to go to bed now.” As one reluctant boy settled down, he said, “Mommy, you know one day I’m going to walk on the moon.” Who could have known that the boy in whom the dream was planted that night would survive a near fatal motorbike crash which broke almost every bone in his body, and would bring to fruition this dream 32 years later when James Irwin stepped on the moon’s surface, just one of 12 representatives of the human race to have done so?
B. Vision is where purpose and discipline come together in our lives and lead us down the road with a definite destination in mind. For James Irwin, vision helped him recognize his purpose and discipline his life so that he could see the dream fulfilled.
C. To have vision is to live a life of faith. The writer of Hebrews said that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”
D. Vision keeps us going when we feel like giving up.
ILLUSTRATION: When I was a freshman in high school I tried out for the JV basketball team. I had never played organized ball before. And I found that the first day of tryouts that I had never run so much in my life before. At the end of practice we had to run “suicides”. [EXPLAIN SUICIDES] After the first one, I thought I would die…then we ran another one and another one. Then the coach said, “Whoever finishes this one first doesn’t have to run anymore. I thought, I’M GONNA WIN BECAUSE I’M DONE RUNNING. As we ran I ached. I heaved in air, I felt like I would pass out, but I kept running because I had a vision—if I could reach the end line first I would be finished. I did reach the line first…not because I was the fastest or most talented or even in the best shape, but because I had a vision that kept me going when I felt like quitting.
CONCLUSION:
There are benefits to intentionally living life the way God wants us to. If we’ll allow him to—he will give us purpose, help us develop discipline and give a vision that will sustain us until he is ready to take us home.
