This Thing Called Commitment
I remember back in 1998 when I saw my wife for the very first time. She wasn’t my wife at the time, but I knew I was going to like her. I met her at college, back at good old Central Christian College. We got to know each other. We were at the New Student Orientation together. And of course, there was a lot of flirting going on, I’m not gonna lie. Our relationship progressed and we started dating. Pretty soon, we were at a place where we both felt like this was the one God had picked out for us. College decisions had just worked that way and God was working to bring us together. So in June of 2000 we got married. We said our “I do’s” and went off into wedded bliss. We had just committed our lives to each other.
Most of you remember those feelings don’t you? Those days of dating someone new and exciting. It was so fun and you were totally into that person. You couldn’t stop asking about their life and you were totally into them. You went to sleep thinking about them, you dreamt about them, you woke up thinking about them and you thought about them all day long on a continuous 24 hour cycle. Before you knew it, you were married and that was an adventure in and of itself right?
Now I need you to help me answer some questions. Let’s say that after Misty and I had been married for 9 months for instance, let’s say I started to get a little bored with it all. So our relationship cooled and I started taking some time off. I told Misty I needed some space and that I needed some “Stan” time. But I told her that I would give her all of me on Tuesday mornings between the hours of 9 & 11 am. In that time there was no one else, I was all hers. The rest of the week though, I was spending time with other women. I was flirting around with them and having a good time with other women. I still knew Misty but our relationship was suffering. Now we were just kind of co-habitating in the same house. We were just roommates. How many of you would call that commitment? How many of you would call that faithfulness? I hope not.
That is absolutely not commitment. Yeah that “new car” feeling has worn off so we’re going to start taking less care of it, that’s ridiculous. Ephesians 5:22-27 actually compares the marriage relationship to that same kind of relationship between us and Christ. Let’s read it. Now this passage tells husbands and wives how to live with each other and how to deal with each other, but looking a little bit more closely, what else does it say? What can it teach us just as Christians about Christ? It teaches us that there are certain things that are important to Christ. One of those things is the church. And to make a long story short, we are the church. Not the building, this building will never win someone to Christ. We as individuals are a part of a bigger team. We are a part of something bigger. Individually we make up the church. This means that there is supposed to be a certain relationship between us and Christ.
That relationship is compared to a marriage relationship. Those of us who are Christians, at some point we all walked down the aisle. The Bible says that we are the Bride and Christ is the Bridegroom. We walked down that aisle, we saw Christ standing there. He had a tear in His eye because we were so beautiful to Him. We were committing our lives to Him when we became Christians and made Christ so happy He cried tears of joy. We looked Christ in the eye and said, “I do”. The first few months were great, remember? Then things started to cool off. It wasn’t quite as exciting as it was in the beginning. We started to say things like, “Well you know Jesus, I need some “me” time.” And on the side we have all these other idols and things in our lives that are taking the place that Christ should hold in our lives. You told God, “Look, you can have me on Sunday mornings between the hours of 9 & 11 AM, and for some of you that’s a stretch. God you can have me on Sunday mornings, but the rest of the week is mine.” And you leave Christ at home or here in the church building and you go off into the world to do whatever you feel like doing. How many of you would call that a commitment to Christ? How many of you would call that being faithful to Christ?
I hope not. Because that’s not faithfulness and it definitely isn’t commitment? But guess what? That happens every day, every week, every month, every year across America in thousands of churches. Christians are comfy with Christ, but their feelings have cooled. So now what, they become Christian “couch potatoes” and they just watch the world go by without lifting a finger toward being anything like what a Christian should be.
The passage that I really want to look at today is in the book of Romans 12:1, 2. Let’s read that. Let me tell you right off the bat, any commitment takes sacrifice.
1. Sacrifice? Who said anything about that?
If you are going to commit to something and get good at whatever that is, it takes sacrifice. No one walks to the top of the NFL without sacrifice. No one becomes a classical pianist in the Boston Symphony without sacrifice. No one grows in their profession without sacrifice. And the immediate I notice is that Paul says if you want to worship God in a true spiritual sense you will be a sacrifice. By sacrificing ourselves to God we are worshipping Him and that takes commitment. If you aren’t committed to Him you will stop sacrificing yourself, the relationship will cool and you will just get cozy in your pew.
“Sacrifice myself Stan? Are you sure? I don’t really like that idea?” Of course you don’t, because sacrifice requires something. In fact, it is going to be difficult to do. The problem with the word sacrifice is that we know it means that something difficult lies ahead and we don’t like the word difficult in our society. Tell me the last time you saw a commercial on TV, where the spokesperson said, “This is going to take some commitment on your part. This is really difficult. You’re going to have to sacrifice family time, golf time, work time and whatever other extra time you have to make this work.” I’ll tell you the last time you heard that on a commercial, NEVER! Why? Because everyone wants everything to be easy, simple. Just watch a Bow Flex commercial. With this simple machine, you can have ripped abs, toned pecs, chiseled arms, defined legs. All for only 20 minutes a day. It’s so easy you don’t even have to change your diet or anything. Just 20 minutes a day. To top it off, the machine folds up nice and “easy” for storage to make more room wherever you are.
What about the AB Lounge? Oh this one looks great. Now you don’t even have to go all the way to the floor to do your sit ups. You can just get in this little hammock and do your workout for just a few minutes everyday to get rid of that little bulge around the middle. It’s so easy. Cleaning products are no different. Not one of them says, this will take a little elbow grease. No, just spray on and wipe off. It’s so easy and you’re killing 99.99% of germs to top it off. How easy could it be? Anything to make life easier right? Pretty soon, La-Z-Boy is going to come out with a remote controller recliner that will drive you around anywhere you want to go. I can feel it. So you can sit in that chair all day, get up for 20 minutes on your Bow Flex and be in perfect condition. How easy will that be?
No one wants things to be difficult. We want life to be easy and we are constantly looking for ways to make life easier aren’t we? But let me tell you something, if you aren’t committed to those 20 minutes on the Bow Flex everyday, you won’t see results. And if you aren’t committed to Christ, you won’t see results either.
But what else does he say besides sacrifice in that verse? He says to be what kind of sacrifice? He says, “Be a living, holy, acceptable sacrifice?” So what does that mean?
2. What does all that mean?
Let’s start with acceptable to God. The sacrifice that is acceptable to God is one that God has designated. For instance, if in the OT God said I want a bull and you brought him vegetables, that is not an acceptable sacrifice to God. That is not what He wanted. Since Calvary, the Christian’s presentation of his “body” is the kind of sacrifice that has God’s approval. This means that we are offering all that we are, all that we have and we’re giving it all to God. We aren’t keeping anything to ourselves on the side, we’re offering it to Him.
Then there is this holy sacrifice. Holy in this passage doesn’t carry the same idea as it usually does in the NT. Normally it means “set apart” or “devoted to God”, but here it carries a different connotation. It means that the sacrifice, you and I, must be free from immoralities, lusts, sinful appetites. We are to be unblemished sacrifices. In the OT it wasn’t any different. The sacrifices had to be spotless, without blemish or the sacrifice was no good. In the same way today, our sinful lusts and the sinfulness that we live in must be mastered by self-control. Otherwise our sacrifice is blemished. (Paraphrase Reese).
This is like the husband who comes home with lipstick on his collar and smelling like another woman’s perfume, but still tries to make himself available to his wife. You all know the kind of look he would get. He would get that stare that goes right through your forehead wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t stand a chance. Trying to make nice with the wife, when he smells like another woman. That man is going to get torn to pieces. Saturday night comes and you’re out doing things you know you shouldn’t be doing. Your attention is not on getting ready for church tomorrow, but on yourself and what you want to be doing. After you’ve done whatever sinful thing it is you’re doing, you come to church the next morning and you sing, “Here I am to worship” or “Shout to the Lord” or a hymn, “My Jesus, My Savior”. And we offer God our blemished sacrifice. We offer God our tattered, torn up selves. But unlike the wife, God is much more forgiving. God is glad you are there, but He knows there is something wrong and there is something missing. He wants to help you and He wants you to grow up. However, we have just offered God our “unholy” sacrifice.
What about that word “living”? In the OT the sacrifices that were offered had been slain, so they were all dead. But God wants us to be “living” sacrifices. I’m glad God doesn’t expect me to kill myself to be an acceptable sacrifice. Jesus has already done that for me. Now I get to be a living, breathing sacrifice for Him. But what is the problem with a living sacrifice? The problem is that a living sacrifice can crawl off the altar. And we do that don’t we? Every Sunday comes around and we grudgingly say, “Oh, we have to go to church today? I guess I better get back up on the altar.” And we slowly, painfully and with a bad heart, climb back onto the altar. Then when church is over we shout, “Finally, the preacher is done talking. I can go back to my AB Lounge now, or my sports now, or my other girlfriend now, my real life now.” And we climb off the altar never to make it back to that altar until the next Sunday. Some of us never even make it all the way up onto the altar. Some of us forget to come to the altar and some of us just skip the altar on purpose because there are just too many other things going on. And all of a sudden, sacrificing ourselves even for 1 or 2 hours on a Sunday morning becomes a terribly difficult chore. Is that commitment to Christ? Is that faithfulness?
Some of you are looking at me now saying…
3. Why should I listen to you?
Paul says that there is a reason to listen to him. There is a reason to offer yourselves as living, holy and acceptable sacrifices. You’re saying, “Yeah. And it better be a good one too. I don’t want to sacrifice for nothing.” Paul says, “I urge you therefore brothers, by the what? Mercies of God. I love the way the New Living Translation puts this verse. It says, “And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind He will accept. When you think of what He has done for you, is this too much to ask?”
What has God done for me? What mercies are we talking about? We are simply talking about the mercies of God’s love for us and His plan to save us. You see, God knew that we wouldn’t always be committed to Him, so He prepared a way for us to get back to Him. He planned to have His Son murdered on the cross and through that perfect sacrifice we would have the chance to get back to God. All we have to do is realize that we need that sacrifice and choose to accept it.
The Bible tells us that this gift of salvation is “a free gift”. You have done nothing to earn it or to deserve it. And you can never be good enough to get in to heaven without it. So now the question is, “How do I receive this free gift?” After all, a gift we must accepted and received. You can’t just say, “Thanks for the gift”, and never open it, because then you would never receive the gift. So how do you receive God’s gift of grace. It is through a process we call the Plan of Salvation. The Bible tells us what to do. First it says you must believe that Jesus is God’s Son, that He died for you and that He rose again. You must truly believe that. Belief is the foundation that starts the plan of salvation. When you believe that statement, then you must repent of your sins. This means turning from the sinful lifestyle you are living and start living for God. Then the Bible says you must confess. You must confess in front of people, that Jesus is the Christ the Son of the Living God. It’s a public confession. We’re almost there. Then the Bible says that you must get baptized. Baptism is more than just a symbol, it is the point in which you receive forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Acts 2:38. Then from there, you must do you best to live your life faithfully for God.
Now, can all of those things individually by themselves save you? No. Why? Because if God wasn’t gracious you would only be getting wet. Or you would only be repeating words. God’s grace ultimately saves us, but in order to accept and receive that gift, there are certain steps we have to take, and God lays them out beautifully for us in the Bible.
Now I want you to look at 1 John 4:9, 10. Read. God loves us so much we will never be able to comprehend it on earth. You know why the church has a problem with commitment today? Because we don’t realize how much God has done for us. We take Jesus’ death for granted. We have heard the story so many times that it just rolls off of us like grease off a Teflon pan. It’s old news, just like when you’ve been married for a long enough time and you start to cool off. And you become less committed to making things work. And the same thing happens to Christians in their relationship with Christ. The problem is not that we don’t love Christ enough it’s that we don’t realize how much He loves us.
I want to share this final story with you this morning!
A number of years ago Norman Cousins wrote an editorial in Saturday Review in which he reported a conversation he had on a trip in India. He was talking with a Hindu priest named Satis Prasad. The man said he wanted to come to our country to work as a missionary among the Americans. Cousins assumed that he meant that he wanted to convert Americans to the Hindu religion, but when asked, Satis Prasad said, "Oh no, I would like to convert them to the Christian religion. Christianity cannot survive in the abstract. It needs not membership, but believers. The people of your country may claim they believe in Christianity, but from what I read at this distance Christianity is more a custom than anything else. I would ask that either you accept the teachings of Jesus in your everyday life and in your affairs as a nation, or stop invoking His name as sanction for everything you do. I want to help save Christianity for the Christian." B. Clayton Bell, in Preaching, May-June, 1986.
I hope that shocks us and makes us feel ashamed at what we have made Christianity in our country. Where does your true commitment lie? Are you sacrificing yourself for God or are you trying to sacrifice yourself to 3 or 4 different things? I would challenge you to make a commitment today. Christian already or a seeker!
(for a better feel, listen to this sermon at www.godshere.org)
