Everybody needs a purpose and that’s why we’re spending 40 Days of Purpose, looking at God’s purposes for your life.
The last time I preached we focused on one of the purposes of life – “You Were Planned for God’s Pleasure.” Your first purpose is to get to know and love God. That’s called what?
I’ll give you a hint – the answer is right over on the side of our Sanctuary, right there on the banner!
Worship.
And last week, Will Dietrich preached about a second purpose of life, talking about how “You Were Formed for God’s Family.”
God wants you to learn to love other people and get along in His family, and the Bible calls that what?
If you need a hint, it’s on the other banner.
Fellowship.
Today we look at the third purpose that God put you on this planet for, and we find it in Romans 8:29 and many other verses. We read it for our New Testament Lesson, and we find that it teaches us that God has called us to “be conformed to the likeness of his Son”.
II Corinthians 3:18 teaches us that Christians are called to be “transformed into the likeness” of Christ.
I Thessalonians 1:6 tells us to “become imitators of the Lord.”
God’s plan has always been, to make you like Jesus Christ.
His plan from the very beginning has been to make human beings like Himself.
Now, don’t get me wrong, let me be clear, He’s not saying you’re going to be a god.
You will never be a god.
I mean your wife may think you’re a god, but you’ll never be a god.
In fact, I’m sure she doesn’t think you’re a god.
Maybe in your own mind you think you’re a god, but you’re not. But God doesn’t want you to become a god; He wants you to become godly. He wants you to develop His character, the way He thinks, the way He acts, the way He feels, His values, His moral character.
God wants to make you like Himself, and that’s God’s third plan for putting you on this planet, to make you like Jesus.
Let’s take a look at Ephesians 4:15.
“God wants us to grow up…like Christ in everything”.
Growing up is a process.
This doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s not like one day all of a sudden – ZAP – you’re an adult.
And in the same way, spiritually, growing up to become Christ-like is a process.
This is the third purpose of life – to grow to be like Christ.
We call this process is called “discipleship”, and it takes an entire lifetime. And hey – that word is on the newest banner we’ve put up in our sanctuary!
It’s going to take the rest of your life for God to build character in you, the character qualities of Jesus Christ.
Today we’re going to look at, “How does God do it? How does God help me grow spiritually? How does God make me like Jesus Christ?”
There are a couple of ways we know right off the bat.
One obvious way is – the Bible.
It takes truth to transform us. If you really want to grow up spiritually, you’ve got to get into this Book.
The more you get into it, the more you’re going to grow.
Another thing God uses is -- His people, and that’s why last week we talked about fellowship.
When we learn from each other, we grow and we develop. And the more you get with other people, other Christians, the more spiritually mature you’re going to become as you grow because you’re spending time with them.
Last week we heard a stirring testimony from Nancy Hulteen about how the Fellowship of this church sustained her and her family during her daughter’s illness.
God uses people in your life to help you grow.
That’s why you’ve got to have a lot of contact, and that’s why you need fellowship.
You’re never going to be a lone ranger Christian. But, God uses more than just those two things. He uses more than the Bible and He uses more than fellowship.
These are obvious – but today I want us to look at those things that are just as important in helping us to grow, but less obvious.
God also uses trouble! Trouble helps us to grow.
We all go through difficulties in our lives. And it doesn’t matter if these difficulties are ordained by God, created as temptations in our lives by Satan, or due to our own stupidity – God uses the troubles in our lives in helping us to grow.
Let’s take another look at one of the verses from our New Testament lesson. “In all things God works for the good for those who love Him, who have been called according to His purposes.”
Have you ever done something foolish or unwise or just downright stupid? Maybe you got drunk and did something tragic – such as try to drive. Maybe you said something that hurt someone you love.
Your stupidity is not stronger than God’s wisdom.
You can make the most foolish mistakes in the world and this passage will still be true – “In all things, God works for good.”
We often come into situations and we don’t know if it is God ordaining changes in our lives or Satan tempting us. Have you ever been in a situation like that? You wonder, why is God doing this to me? And you wonder if it is caused by Satan as a way of tempting you. A loss of a job. The death of a loved on. Sickness in your life. You know, it doesn’t matter if it is God ordained or if it is inflicted upon you by Satan – or if just happens to be a natural result of the laws of physics – God is in control.
God is stronger than Satan’s temptations, cancer, unemployment, and death – this passage is still true.
In all things, God works for good.
This verse doesn’t say all things are good
because there’s a lot of bad in the world,
but in all things God uses it to make me like Christ.
God is bigger, stronger, more powerful than any trouble you may have.
And He uses trouble to teach us to trust Him.
Take a look at what Paul said in Romans chapter 5:3-4 “…trouble produces patience, and patience produces character, and character produces hope”.
If you’re going to become like Jesus Christ, you’ve got to learn to trust God completely, even when things look terrible, things are falling apart. “I don’t understand it, I’m dying, I’m sinking, I’m going under the water here”.
You’re going to have to learn to trust God completely just the way Jesus did. God uses trouble to teach us to trust Him.
It’s easy to trust God when everything is going great in your life. The real test of your faith is, how do you relate to God when you don’t feel good?
Job is an amazing book in the Old Testament. When you think of Job, what one word comes to mind? Patience.
How many times have we heard people say about someone, “There goes John Doe, you know, he has the patience of Job.”
The truth is that the best part of the book of Job comes when he loses his patience. He has lost his children, his property, his wealth. His health became such a downward spiral, that at one point Job said, “My body is clothed with worms and scabs, my skin is broken and festering.”
Poor Job! And when he loses his patience, he begins to cry out to God, “Why is this happening to me?????”
Job is a long book, and at the end of the book everything is suddenly fantastic! He has his health back, new family, new home, and more importantly he has peace and joy.
The amazing thing about this is that God never answered Job’s question. He never explained “why” these bad things had happened to Job. He never let’s Job in on something that the reader of the book knows from chapter one – that it was Satan who did these things to Job. And God never explains why he let Satan do these things.
Job doesn’t learn about reasons.
Job learns about trusting God.
It is a part of Job’s growing up spiritually.
No matter how bad the problem, God is bigger. We need to trust God in all of our trials and tribulations, knowing that “In all things, God works for good.”
There is a second surprising way that God works in our lives to make us look more like Jesus.
He uses our temptations.
God uses our temptations to help us to grow spiritually.
Now I think it’s important to be real clear about the definition of temptation, what we’re talking about. Temptations are situations designed by Satan and they’re intended to harm us. That’s what temptations are. God never tempts us to do evil. The Bible is very clear about that. They are designed by Satan, intended to hurt us.
God never tempts us, but God is able, because of the greatness of His power and who He is, to use Satan’s temptations for good in our lives because temptation always provides a choice.
And when I choose for God rather than choosing for Satan, Satan’s plan is ruined and I start to grow in my life. And choices are needed to develop character in our lives.
Jesus faced temptations. He never sinned, but He faced temptations. Right after He was baptized at the very beginning of his public ministry at the age of 30, He went through an intense 40-day period of temptation out in the desert.
Look at what the Bible has to say in Matthew 4:1. “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil”. Now, if Jesus faced temptations, guess what? You and I are going to face temptations, too.
Let me give you a shot-gun blast of some basic facts about temptation.
Number one, remember that it is not a sin to be tempted. Jesus never sinned, yet He was tempted. It’s not a sin to be tempted.
Number two; being tempted is universal. Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Rick Warren, missionaries in distant jungles, your favorite Sunday School teacher, the Pope – everyone is subject to temptation.
Number three: you never outgrow temptations. You never get to a point in your life where you become so spiritual or so old, that you’re not tempted anymore. We all are tempted throughout all of our lives.
So what do you do with temptations in your life?
Let me suggest three things you can do in confronting temptations.
Step one: Keep your thoughts on good things.
The Bible talks about this many times. In
The more you open your mind to that which is not good and right, the more open your soul is to temptation.
Secondly, keep the Word of God in your thoughts. Psalm says, “Your Word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”
Jesus went through his 40 Days of Temptation. (Aren’t you glad you are just going through the 40 Days of Purpose?) He was tempted three times. How did Jesus respond to these temptations? With the Word of God.
At every temptation, Jesus responded “The Word of God says…”
The third step is to keep in touch with other Christians. Don’t go through life alone – it never works. We all need spiritual partners.
I know none of us like to talk about our temptations, but one of the ways to defeat them is to be open about them, to bring them out into the light. Get a spiritual partner, someone who can help you.
Solomon, a man known for his wisdom, said in the Old Testament, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!” (NIV)
Falling down can mean many things – physically falling down, sickness, unemployment – but it also means falling down spiritually, falling into sin. At all of those times, and especially when we fall into sin, we need the help of our friends to get us back on our feet.
So many of us, as we go through life, we have faced a temptation that’s been overwhelming.
It might be a temptation that is new or it might be lifelong. But the truth is, it’s something you’ve faced alone.
This step is saying, “Go tell someone else about this”.
I hope you are all in small groups during our 40 Days of Purpose. For one thing, these small groups are a big part of our program. But they are also a great way to find support. Last week Will Dietrich preached about the importance of fellowship – it is one of the purposes of our lives. And you may remember that one of the verses he mentioned came from Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
The fellowship of other people help us to face our temptations, and facing temptations successfully is part of becoming like Jesus Christ.
God wants to make you like Jesus Christ. God wants us to grow up into spiritual maturity.
God uses trouble to teach us to trust, and God uses temptation to teach us to obey. And a third way God helps us to grow is that he uses trespasses to teach us to forgive.
Now what in the world are trespasses?
This is an old biblical word to describe those situations designed by other people with the purpose of hurting us.
Yes, there are people in life who want to hurt you intentionally.
It’s hard to believe! After all, we look at ourselves as one of the good guys, why in the world would anyone want to hurt us?
But they do. It is one of the realities of life.
It may be one or two people in your life, or a large number of people. It may be a person or a faceless organization of people.
In one translation of the Lord’s Prayer, we often say, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.”
Now this is the tough one. It’s one thing to handle trouble and it’s another thing to handle temptation. But the most difficult tool of all that God uses in our lives to make us like Christ is this one.
Forgiving one another!
Time and again in Scripture we are taught to forgive others. Christ has forgiven us, we need to forgive others.
Bearing the hurt of other people without retaliation is, without a doubt, the most important and the most difficult step in becoming like Jesus Christ, because it often involves being misunderstood, being criticized, being judged, being hurt physically or emotionally or verbally, it may involve abuse.
Now let me be real clear. These are not good things. These are evil things, and God is not the author of evil. God does not cause these things.
But, these things are not bigger than God.
Remember our verse from Romans? “In all things God works for good…”
And even in those terrible situations in which a person does something to hurt you, God can work good out of that.
Remember that God has forgiven you.
God will never ask you to forgive anybody more than you’ve already been forgiven by Him.
Discipleship! That is the word for today. It means being like Christ, and being like Christ is one of God’s purposes for your life.
Now, I don’t know what you’re going through these days, I don’t know. I know what some of you are going through. I have an idea about a few people. But I don’t know what each and every person here is going through.
But God knows.
And in his knowledge of what you are going through, he has this to say – it is a verse we find in Philippians 2:5:
It is this week’s memory verse.
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5).
Let’s bow our heads.
Dear Father, life makes so much more sense when we realize that it’s not about our career, it’s not about our comfort, it’s all about character and becoming like Jesus. Help us to use life for the reason You gave it to us.
Copyright notice: Much of the outline for this sermon, and some of the matieral comes from the Rick Warren program, The 40 Days of Purpose.
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