(synopsis: I Corinthians 9:19-27 tells us that Paul was running toward a prize. A goal that each of us should pursue)
OPEN: Hall of Famer Bob Feller was a major league pitcher for the Cleveland Indians back in the 30s, 40s and 50s. He was signed up in 1935 when he was only 16 years old, and in his 1st start in 1936 he struck out 15 St. Louis batters. The next year, in 1938, he became the 1st pitcher to strike out every batter in one game.
When Bob Feller was 9 years old, his teacher asked him to write an essay about an oak tree. Here are the ideas that he put in his theme: “An oak tree can be cut down and sawed into boards. You can make baseball bats out of them. You can also make home plates out of the boards. You can make bleachers out of the boards so people can watch baseball games.”
APPLY: Can anybody guess what this young man was focused on? Baseball. From his youth on, Bob Feller goal was to play baseball.
Paul once wrote: “For me to live is Christ” Philippians 1:21
And what Bob Feller wrote as a child was – “For me to lived is baseball”. That was his goal in life.
(pause…) That got me to thinking… what is our “goal” as Christians?
Why are we here?
Why do we go thru what we do?
What are we aiming to accomplish?
Or… (more personally) WHAT’S YOUR GOAL?
I. For some people, the goal of being in church is to have someone meet their own personal needs.
That’s how we start out. We were drawn to church because something/ someone met our needs
Ø There was a program that ministered to our kids
Ø There was counseling available for our marriage or some other difficulty we were facing.
Ø There was a revival/ Bible Study that led us to Christ, and we came to Christ because we wanted His love in our lives.
So – initially – for most of us… “For us to live” was for God to meet our needs.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because, unless you are highly unusual, you became a Christian because of what Christ and/or church did for you.
The problem arises when we fail to make the transition from that mindset to the one Paul declared in Philippians 1:21 “For me to live is Christ”
When a Christian remains in a “what can God do for me” mindset, they can be fairly difficult to be around. They’ll always frustrated with how the church isn’t meeting THEIR needs and their expectations. And you can tell who they are because they’ll be the ones you hear complaining.
ILLUS: Several years ago I read the following story by a preacher of a large church of over 5000 members. He wrote:
I was in the supermarket one day, and a lady came down the aisle whom I could barely see over the top of her groceries. I got somewhat frightened because she seemed to be heading straight for me. She screeched to a halt within a few feet of me, peered over her load, wagged her finger, and said, “I left your church. I left your church”.
So I said, “Well, if it’s my church, I think that was a very wise decision. If it’s my church, I think I’m going to leave too.”
She said, “Don’t you want to know why I left?”
I said, “No, not particularly, but I think I’m going to find out”. And I was right.
She said, “You weren’t meeting my needs”.
I answered, “I don’t ever recollect seeing you before, let alone talking to you, let alone knowing your needs. Did you ever tell anyone specifically what your needs were?”
She couldn’t recall that she had, so I raised another question. “Can you tell me, if we have 5,000 people sitting in that church, all with your attitude, how anyone’s needs are going to be met? If you reserve the right to have that attitude, then you must give everybody the freedom to have that attitude. And if everybody has that attitude, who on earth is going to do all the need meeting?”
Standing her ground, she demanded, “Then you tell me who will.”
Relieved, I said, “I thought you’d never ask.
This is what will work: when people stop sitting in the pew saying, ‘They’re not meeting my needs’ and start saying, ‘Whose needs can I meet?’ Then needs will be met. When a Servant Spirit flourishes in a congregation, they minister to each other as unto the Lord.”
Those who remain locked in a “self-focused” faith end up being complainers.
Now… they may DO many things for the church/ and for Christ, but if they’re complainers, they reveal that they haven’t understood what it is to Live For Christ.
II. What do I mean by that?
ILLUS: Just as an illustration… let me tell you about an e-mail conversation I had with a young soldier some time back. The U.S. military had just invaded Afghanistan and his unit was going to part of the next group go in, and this young man was clearly upset.
He said “This isn’t what I signed up to do. I signed up for the military because I wanted to go to college… and they promised to pay my college bill”
I wrote back to him and said:
“I understand. War is a terrible thing. And no one knows what will happen in this conflict. You may not come back from Afghanistan, or you may not come back in one piece. But you’ve got to understand - the military doesn’t exist to give you a college education. That’s perk they’ve given you to reward you for serving your country. But the military doesn’t exist to meet your needs. The military exists to keep the peace... and when that peace in threatened, their job is to kill people and break things… that’s what they do. That’s their goal. That’s their job description.
Now… do you suppose that young man go thru basic training?
Do you think he lived in the barracks?
Marched in parades?
Stood guard duty?
Went thru war games?
Yeah, he probably did all of that! He may have been an exemplary soldier from day one. But when it came to the ultimate reason that the military employed him - going to war - he revealed that his personal agenda was all about him. He wasn’t in the military because he wanted to be a soldier. He was in the military because of what they could do for him, and when the going got rough he wanted out.
III. Now, here in I Corinthians 9, Paul is explaining what our ultimate goal should be
REREAD vs. 19
“Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone (WHY?) to win as many as possible.”
· To the Jews he became a Jew
· To the Gentiles he became a gentile
· To the weak, he became weak
He wrote: “I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.” 1 Corinthians 9:23
Paul was pursuing a goal.
He was seeking a “prize”
He ran after a “reward”
This reward? This prize? This reward? To please the Savior who had changed his life.
Paul said: “I belong to no one. I’m a free man”
I don’t owe these people anything
But I DO owe Jesus …
Jesus has saved me, changed me, given my life hope and purpose
And so now I’m going to do everything I can to please Him, and I know it will please Jesus if I win others for Him. And so please Him I’m going to make myself a slave to everyone to find ways of bringing them to Him.
This was Paul’s prize
This was his finish line
This was his goal - his objective
AND… that should be OURS as well: To win as many people as we can for Jesus Christ
So… how does Paul think we can best win people to Christ???
1st – make sure nothing gets in the way of your witness
Look at 1 Corinthians 9:27 with me. Paul said “I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”
ILLUS: A preacher in a nearby congregation named Greg told of the time when he and his brother were young boys. They went to the barbershop by themselves one day to get haircuts, and as they entered the shop, it was so crowded they had to take the only seats left – chair positioned by the front door. Not much later, the front door swung open and in came a man cursing a blue streak. The man couldn’t see them because, as the door was opened, they were positioned behind it and the room was filled with tobacco smoke. The new patron made his way over to an open seat on the other side of the room and began to regale those beside him with dirty jokes laced with curse words and the use of the Lord’s name in vain.
Greg and his brother were appalled. This was a man from their church. He wasn’t an Elder or Sunday School teacher, but he was regarded as a “stalwart” of the church. In fact, just that last Sunday, this man had gotten up on stage and sang a song glorifying God. He had a beautiful voice, said Greg, but a corrupt mouth.
Then the man saw them. Blushing with shame, he apologized for his behavior. But it was almost too late to undo all the damage he’d done to his reputation with them. To these young boys, he had fallen considerably. He had “disqualified himself” in their eyes and his witness would never be the same.
Too often, Christians excuse their bad behavior by saying “that’s just the way I am”. “I’m only human”. And then they presume that everybody will overlook it
They’ll curse…
Tell dirty jokes…
Ogle women on the street
Insult their family/ their preacher/ their church
Or behave in some other sinful or mean-spirited way.
And even if someone calls them on it – they’ll just shrug it off as unimportant. BUT… it isn’t unimportant! Such behavior will disqualify us for the prize of reaching people for Jesus. It will undermine our objective and people will reject our message because we didn’t make our bodies our slaves.
ILLUS: A few years back, I broke my wrist. I slammed it into the wall in a fit of anger. When people found out about it, I heard a lot of people try to comfort me by saying:
“It’s ok Jeff, it just proves that you’re human”. “It just proves that you’re just like the rest of us”.
But I realized that the truth of the matter was that I had failed to make that impulse of my life a slave to God, and I had to repent or my witness would be worthless.
So 1st we must realize that to obtain our goal we must make sure that nothing disqualifies our witness.
2nd – We need to think about the people around us. The people who don’t go to church - what motivates them/ what interests them?
That’s what Paul was saying…
Are they Jews?
Are they Gentiles?
Are they weakened by hardship or sin?
Paul’s telling us that when he met someone who didn’t know Jesus… he asked himself: What motivates them? What is there about their lives that I can use to reach them for Christ?
ILLUS: Howard Hendricks tells about how he got interested in Jesus. He said:
I was nine years old, a little terror. I was out playing marbles one day, when a man named Walt came along and invited me to Sunday School. There was nothing appealing to me about anything with “school” in it, so he made me another proposition -- one I liked a lot better. “Wanna play a game of marbles with me?” he asked.
After he’d wiped me out in a couple games of marbles, he inquired, “Wanna learn how to play this game better?”
By the time he’d taught me how to play marbles over the next few days, he’d built such a relationship with me that I’d have gone anywhere he suggested. You know what that meant? I ended up in his Sunday School class with a dozen other boys, most of whom he’d magnetized in very much the same way. Of the 13 boys in that class, nine were from broken homes, and five were Roman Catholics. Eleven of those boys ended up in vocational Christian work.
So, 1st we must make sure that nothing disqualifies our witness
2nd, we must reach people “where they are” and
3rd – Think in terms of going to them… not waiting for them to come to us
Someone has estimated that only 3% of the non-Christian world will enter a church building. So if we’re going to be effective for Christ… we have to go to them.
In Paul’s day, he didn’t even have a church building to invite people to… so he had to find creative ways to introduce his Jesus to others.
ILLUS: I remember hearing one man tell about the way he did this when he was in school.
I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to get the birth dates of practically everybody he knew in school and then, he sent them birthday cards with personal messages. In those birthday cards he always told them he wished that they might have the greatest gift of all… the gift of salvation thru Jesus Christ.
CLOSE: Now you might ask… doesn’t our present atmosphere at school make that difficult?
Oh yeah. For example, I recently read about an 18 year old Senior named Eric Bast.
He had to serve a five-day suspension from Oak Hills High School for passing out 3,000 personalized letters to schoolmates. In the letters he explained how they could have a personal relationship with Christ and become children of God.
What he did was obtain a list of students in every home room in his school, and he enlisted 30 volunteers to help him put his letters in manila envelopes, and then delivered them to each home room.
He says, “I had this idea about six months ago, to write a letter to every person at my high school, explaining who Jesus Christ is and what our sins have done to separate us from God.”
Through the letters, he says he tried to explain “how Jesus can save us from those sins and forgive us, and pretty much just give everyone the opportunity to commit their lives to Christ.”
According to the Principal of the school, Bast was punished because he disrupted the learning environment and because he failed to get administrative approval for the letter distribution. But the 18-year-old says his “disruption” has resulted in a positive impact at his school among non-Christian students, and on fellow Christians as well.
The senior says his letter made a real impression on several of his unbelieving schoolmates, whose reaction was to realize “Man, this guy put this much time into it: it’s got to be at least real to him -- really, really real. So maybe I should look into this a little more.”
Now that his five-day suspension is behind him, Bast says he intends to follow up his evangelical letter campaign with additional witnessing. He says that his letters have already led to numerous opportunities to share his faith with students who are seeking to know more about Jesus.
OTHER SERMONS IN THIS SERIES
Cool Runnings - Isaiah 40:1-40:31
The Race Toward Evil - Isaiah 59:1-59:21
A Prize Every Time - 1 Corinthians 9:19-9:27
Getting Your 2nd Wind - Mark 5:1-5:20
Running For Freedom - Acts 8:26-8:40
The Runaway Lad and The Waiting Dad - Luke 15:11-15:24
