What Color Is Your Thumb? – Becoming A Greenhouse pt. 3
Matt. 16:24-28 January 26/27, 2003
Context:
These last two weeks I’ve been talking about the vision of the church as a greenhouse – as a place of discipleship. We talked 2 weeks ago about the call and command of our Lord Jesus to “make disciples” – to baptize and to teach people to obey. Last week we talked about a vision of discipleship as growth, as nurture, and as a starting point for fruitful lives in the world. And we reflected on the quality of our spiritual “soil” as described by Jesus in Matt. 13.
Today, in the last sermon on the middle part of our church vision for discipleship, I want to get a little more specific. What does it mean to grow to maturity and fruitfulness? What would that look like, how do we get there?
The Cost/Benefit of Discipleship:
Let’s begin by considering the standard. What does God expect of His disciples?
Matt 16:24-28
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."
Familiar words of Scripture, and there is no denying it is a high call. A call to self-denial, to surrender. A call to give up everything, to sacrifice it all for Jesus. And yet, if that is all we see in this text, we miss the main point. If all we see is what we have to give, we are ignoring Jesus’ main point.
Yes, He does talk about denying ourselves. He does talk about taking up our cross. He does talk about following Him, and we know that after He said this He went to Jerusalem to be crucified. He does talk about losing our life. But that is not the main point.
Jesus’ main point is that in doing all of that which I have just described, we gain the most. God is not a cosmic tyrant, demanding we sacrifice everything for Him so that we can sit in misery and poverty, and so that He can enjoy watching us wallow in despair. That is not a picture of God, that is a picture of the devil! The devil is the one who robs us of things and then enjoys our suffering. God calls us to give up things for a greater, personal good. You see, in these verses in Matthew we discover why God calls us to this level of self-sacrifice: because it is the road to greatest reward. It is in our best interests. Why does Jesus call us to “lose our life for [Him]?” So that we can find it. Jesus reverses our priorities, calls us to place the needs of our soul first, and promises that by surrendering our soul to Him, we will know what it means to truly live. Jesus calls us to take an eternal perspective – He says, in essence, “You could have it all – the whole world – fame – fortune – recognition – respect – the love of the crowd. But what good would that be if you lose your soul in the process? Or if, by pursuing those things, you lose your soul for eternity?” Do you see? Jesus isn’t calling us to some morbid standard of service, to sign up for some program that is going to destroy us and make us miserable. The high standard of discipleship He calls us to is for our own good – more than that, it is for our own best!! By following Him, we find life! We find freedom!! And we find the promise of reward from God Himself!!!
This week I had a great conversation with a friend. The question came up: “Why would I want to be a Christian if all it meant was giving up everything for God – putting Him first? How would my needs ever get met that way?” What an excellent question. And it is one I read Jesus anticipating in His call to discipleship. “Whoever loses his life for me will find it.” Putting God first – denying self and all the rest – is the only way to have all of our deepest, most significant needs met. It is the only way to know true reward. It is the only way to truly live.
Perhaps this sounds a little selfish to you. A little bit of bad, trick, reverse psychology: “hmmm… my goal is my own good and the true enjoyment of life… so to achieve that goal I must deny myself and give God control.” You might thing it is a contradiction – how could I know true life if I’m not pursuing my own desires first? Alternatively, you might even react against that from a “purist,” hyper-spiritual stance of asserting that denying ourselves means giving up everything with no hope of having our own needs met, or our own good enjoyed. If that were true, why would Jesus promise reward in the same breath – why would He move quickly to the promise of His return and the rewarding of us for our service? Why would He state that by losing our life, we would find it? Why would He warn us against getting everything in an earthly sense and losing our soul, were in not for the good of our soul? C. S. Lewis preached a sermon in 1941 where he said, “If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion … is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
An American pastor named Rodney Buchanan puts it this way: “Imagine yourself standing before God with a nickle in your hand. God asks you to give him your nickle, but you are reluctant because it is the only money you have. After all, it is your nickle. You jerk it away and hold it behind your back. You pout and cry because God is asking you to give it up. But what you do not understand is that when you give it up, God places a billion dollars in your hands. Or see yourself holding a mud pie and God asks you to hand it to him. But you like the mud pie, and you made it yourself. You are angry that he wants the mud pie you have made. But what you do not understand is that God wants you to empty your hands so that he can place in your hands a fresh pecan pie, still hot from the oven. How foolish we are to keep what little we have from God when he wants to give us something greater than anything we have ever dreamed.” (from sermoncentral.com)
Let me take this point of discipleship one step further with a story. I had lunch just over a week ago with a man I discovered used to be a pilot. One day, he was taking some friends for a ride in his plane, and he found out one of them had always dreamed of flying a plane. There were two sets of controls in the front, so he said, “go ahead, take the controls.” And he let her fly the plane. Suddenly, she froze. She got scared, panicked, and flopped back in her seat, pulling the stick with her. Well when you pull the stick back like that, the nose of the plane starts to climb rapidly – and if it is too rapid you won’t have enough power in the plane, the engine will stall, and the plane will start a quick descent towards earth. That’s not a good thing… The pilot tried hard to get her to release her grip, but the added danger made her hold on all the more tightly. Fortunately, this pilot is a big strong guy, and was able to grab his own set of controls and force them forward – fighting both the plane and the novice co-pilot, and regain control of the aircraft.
This story struck me as a parable of discipleship. We grab the controls, but we don’t know how to fly the plane. We don’t have the ability to land safely in eternity, and we certainly don’t have enough power to manage all the forces of the universe that affect our daily life. But we still want to hold on. Maybe it is panic. Maybe it is arrogance. Maybe it is simple ignorance. But the result is the same – we are flying into danger.
What happens if we let God fly? If we give up everything to follow Him, what happens? Jesus said, “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 went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:44-46). Both of these people “sold everything”; they denied themselves. But both did it knowing that what they received in return was of far greater value.
This is a mark of spiritual maturity, of growth in discipleship to a place of fruitfulness. It is the mark of obedience, of sacrifice not in some noble, altruistic pie-in-the-sky way, but of sacrificing something of lesser value to achieve something of greater value. I don’t think you’ll ever catch me saying that the call to discipleship is not great – but I hope you also hear that the reward is greater.
The Nature of the Reward:
What does this reward look like? Put another way, as part of our vision of discipleship depicted by the image of a greenhouse we’ve been talking about the idea of “bearing fruit” for God. What is that fruit – what is the reward?
A. Intimacy with God.
The first reward is intimacy with God. Paul wrote, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Phil. 3:8). Being a Christian is not about knowing things in your head, it is about a relationship with God. Interaction. Conversation. Intimacy.
Think about it in terms of your closest friend, hopefully your spouse if you are married. What is the reward for your love for them? Is it not their love for you in return? Is it not the intimacy, the connection, the relationship you share? Of course this is not perfect in our earthly relationships: sometimes our love is not returned and we experience pain and alienation instead of intimacy. And that is why this reward of intimacy with God is so much better – because God’s love for us is perfect. It is better than any love we can imagine: it is steadfast like the mountain, stronger than the forces of nature, more passionate than newlyweds, it raised Jesus from the dead and restores us to intimacy with God. We will not be disappointed. When we follow Jesus completely the reward is that we know Him more deeply, we hear Him speak more clearly, we (often) understand better the circumstances of our life and can then handle them with confidence that our intimate friend will walk through them with us. Deny yourself, and know the reward of intimacy with God.
B. Character, Power, and Resources to face every situation
The second reward, or “fruit” that comes from Biblical discipleship is the character that the Spirit builds in us as we walk with Him. Galatians lists these character qualities plainly, in a familiar passage (5:22): “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” These are character qualities – things that the life of the Spirit of God produces in us as we walk in obedience to Him.
I normally think of these qualities in terms of how the shape my interactions with others – as external qualities. But have you ever stopped to consider how these enrich our own lives? When we exercise self-control, we keep ourselves from all kinds of things that may not be in our best interests. When we are gentle, we are able to enjoy things longer because we don’t smash them. When we are faithful, we see the rewards that time and steadfastness bring. When we are good and kind, we feel the warmth in our soul from sharing that goodness and kindness with others. When we are patient, we arrive at our destination 30 minutes late because of a major dump of snow but still at peace rather than all stressed and upset. When we have the fruit of joy, we face all the varieties of life with that abiding attitude of heart. And when we are filled with love, we are truly alive and aware of those around us. As much as that list is an excellent descriptor of how to interact, it is also a list that produces fruit we’ll enjoy.
In addition to those character qualities comes the power and resources to face every situation in life. This reward flows from living in intimacy with God and from allowing Him to produce character fruit in us. The reward is that God walks alongside us. We face no situation in our lives without Him, without the offer of His power sometimes to change, sometimes to endure. We face no situation without all the resources of heaven at our disposal. Who but the children of God can make such a claim as this? The reward for denying ourselves and following Jesus is that He then walks alongside us in power and in fullness.
C. Eternity
The final reward I want to touch on briefly is the reward of eternity. To do that, let me tell the story of an elderly missionary couple who arrived at their home port after years of faithful service. At the dock, an ambassador and his wife--who had returned on the ship with them--were surrounded by a crowd. Roses were bestowed on his wife as photographers’ flashes exploded, and an attentive, admiring press and public hung on every word as he spoke of the joy of serving his government and coming home.
As the missionary couple walked unnoticed through that crowd, the wife, with hot tears streaking her face, wondered out loud to her husband, "Why is it that we have given our whole lives to Christ and yet there is no one here to honor us and welcome us home?"
Her understanding husband, reaching beyond that lonely moment, said to her, "Honey, we’re not home yet."
Martin Luther said, “If we consider the greatness and the glory of the life we shall have when we have risen from the dead, it would not be difficult at all for us to bear the concerns of this world. If I believe the Word, I shall on the Last Day, after the sentence has been pronounced, not only gladly have suffered ordinary temptations, insults, and imprisonment, but I shall also say: ‘O, that I did not throw myself under the feet of all the godless for the sake of the great glory which I now see revealed and which has come to me through the merit of Christ!’”
The Spiritual “Cost/Benefit” Analysis:
During this afternoon’s superbowl game, you could buy 1 second of advertising for the measly sum of $100 000. 7 seconds is a bargain at only $600 000. It is staggering to realize that advertisers gladly shell out that kind of money. They have done an analysis of the cost and the benefit, and are eager to pay for those few seconds.
Jesus’ math says this: “whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done.”
A Final Thought on Love as Motivation:
I want to assure you that the rewards are well worth the risk. Give God the nickle. Let Him replace the mud pie. Leave Him to fly the plane.
But let me add this: I hope you do the math and recognize the value, but I hope the motivation will then come from love. From your love for God and your recognition of His love for you. I hope it will be an outflowing, a response to your personal experience of the love of God reaching into your heart and soul, grabbing hold of you in such a powerful way that you are glad to give, to deny yourself, to follow Him, because you have found the treasure in the field – you have discovered the priceless pearl, and you will give anything to know intimacy with God, to see His Spirit produce character in you that enriches your life, and that draws you into eternity.
