Are you a winner or a loser? We all want to be winners, don’t we? At the end of the game, we want to be on the side with 14 runs, like the White Sox had last night, instead of the team with 3 runs, like the Indians.
Nike had a slogan a couple of years ago that reflected this attitude: "second place is first loser." Other slogans: "winning isn’t everything, but losing is nothing." / "Whoever said, ’It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,’ probably lost."
Is that a good thing? Well, it depends on what’s at stake. If you’re highly competitive about everything, it’s probably not real healthy. If winning a game of Scrabble is a life-or-death issue for you, there may be a problem. If everything in your life is a competition; if you’re constantly comparing yourself to others, that’s probably not healthy.
You know people like this: you mention that you’ve been suffering from a cold; they tell you about the time they had to be hospitalized for pneumonia. Your son makes the honor roll; theirs is going to Harvard. You buy a minivan, they buy a 31-foot Ford Excursion land yacht urban assault vehicle with a sunroof and a tow hitch that weighs 7,000 pounds and eats Hondas for breakfast. You go to Florida for vacation; they go to Italy. Maybe you have family members like this, for whom everything in life is a contest. They’re the ones who send out those awful Christmas letters every year.
But there are areas where winning really is everything; where a wholehearted dedication to coming out on top is both healthy and necessary. One of these areas is war. As General Douglas MacArthur said, "In war there is no substitute for victory."
What I’d like to do this morning is to consider some aspects of the life of Jesus Christ that will help us to make this distinction - between those things that are important and critical and worth fighting for, and those things that are relatively unimportant. We need to look to Christ as our example in this, First, because He, better than anyone else who ever lived, had a clear understanding of what is important and what is not. And Second, because the world we live in doesn’t do a good job of making these distinctions.
As we look at Christ, we will see that he was not only a winner, but that in the areas where it truly mattered, He was and is an absolute victor, the champion of champions. We will see that in Christ, we are on the winning side in the only contest that matters. We will find that, no matter how things may look right now, when all is said and done, we will be holding the most valuable trophy of all.
We’re going to look at two areas in which Christ is victorious: In his battle with death and in his battle with sin.
1. Christ is victorious over death
"For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death." - 1 Corinthians 15:25-26 (NIV)
"For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed . . . then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" . . . But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." - 1 Corinthians 15:52-57 (NIV)
It may seem strange to speak of death as an enemy to be destroyed, but that is what it is. All men have an innate fear of death.
* They may see death as the end, as the simple cessation of life, a mere extinguishing of the spark of life. And even so, they fear the darkness, the emptiness, the nothingness, the not-being of death. The thought of their own annihilation terrifies them. When the time of their death seems far away, they can put it out of their minds and give little thought to it. But as they grow old or sick and death comes near, the prospect of their death does not bring them joy or peace, but fear and anxiety. Most would give anything; all of their life savings, anything, for just a few more hours or days of life.
* They may fear death because they anticipate a judgment, a reckoning. They sense that there will be an accounting for the things they have done, and they are fearful that the outcome of the judgment will not be good.
* Or they may not have a clear expectation of what may come after death, whether nothingness, judgement, or something else. But this very uncertainty fills them with dread, as they prepare to walk through a doorway not knowing whether the other side will be happy and beautiful, or whether it will be fearsome and horrible.
"To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would grunt and
sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose boundary
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1 (adapted)
Death is the ultimate enemy because it takes everything away from us. Think of all the things we strive mightily to preserve and keep from losing, and death steals them all. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. The capacity to speak, to communicate, to enjoy any kind of pleasure - all gone. The ability to move about, to exercise control over our surroundings, to influence others. Friends and family. Gone. Our possessions are divided up and given away, our friends and loved ones abandon us and find other companions, and we are put into a box in the ground. Death is not a friend, death is an enemy.
But the enemy of death will be absolutely destroyed. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead showed that the power of death over mankind had been broken. When He returns, we will be resurrected also. We will be restored to life, and this life will not be subject to death. It will be eternal.
Application:
· We no longer need to fear death. We can freely enjoy life, knowing that the time and manner of our death is in God’s hands. More importantly, we know that death is not the end.
· We can obey God, even when obedience involves the risk of loss; knowing that we cannot lose that which is most precious - life. In Christ, we have won the battle with death.
2. Jesus Christ is victorious over sin
"For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin . . . Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him . . . In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace." - Romans 6:6-14 (NIV)
Before Christ came, we all were under the power of sin; we all were subject to it. Although we had free will, we always freely chose to sin, because we loved it. We were slaves to sin, but we were willing slaves. We couldn’t do anything else but sin, nor did we want to do anything else. We could sin fast, or sin slow; we could sin in many different ways, but we were slaves to sin all the time.
You might object that you did "good" things before you became a Christian; if you have not yet come to faith in Christ, you might object to the idea that you can do nothing but sin. But in God’s view, the only acts that are truly good are those that are done from a pure heart with a desire to honor and glorify Him. This is not possible for an unbeliever. Even the apparently "good" deeds of a non-Christian are not acceptable to God as good, because they are not done out of a desire to serve and worship Him.
Through his death and resurrection, Christ broke the power of sin in our lives. We now have the capacity to reject the call of sin and to choose obedience instead. We can now freely choose to serve and worship God.
Application:
· Sin has no power over you. You can refuse to yield to it. You can say no. Christ has won the battle with sin on your behalf.
· Do you have a "besetting sin" that you have been unable to get rid of? Its power over you has been broken. You are not it’s slave. You no longer have to yield to it. Continue to resist and struggle, and by God’s grace its hold on you will loosen and you will be free of its control.
· If you haven’t become a Christian, ask God to forgive your sin and give you freedom from it.
(For an .rtf file of this and other sermons, see www.journeychurchonline.org/messages.htm)
