Intentional

Message Transcription

Well, we're picking up week two of our series called Imperfect Disciples. We've been thinking some about what are some of the qualities, the characteristics, the traits of disciples who are longing to really follow Jesus. What are some of those qualities they're trying to live out? We're taking our cue from Jesus. We began last week with this idea of helping us learn how to slow down, how to stop and take notice of the life that we have and the opportunities that God gives to us. As we think about what it means to be a disciple. We started with a couple of statements from Dallas Willard last week, the first one being his definition of a disciple, which is simply the process of becoming the person who Jesus would be if he were you. That's what it means to be a follower of Jesus, to live a life that Jesus would live if he were living your life. And not only that. Wrestling with this reality that that that's the most important pursuit that we could have. Jesus said, seek first the kingdom. Everything else will make sense after. And so what we learn from watching Jesus and watching his disciples throughout the Gospels and through the New Testament is that the most important thing God gets out of our life is not all the stuff that we do. But the person that we become the main thing, Dr. Willard says God gets out of our lives is not the achievements we accomplish.

It's the person we become. And so we want to think intentionally about that. In fact, that's our word for today. Intentional. Last week we talked about slow. What does it mean to slow down? We looked at the story of Mary and Martha and their pursuit of helping serve Jesus. Sometimes we get out in front of ourselves and we don't take care the way that we should. And Pete Cicero's important book, one that I'll again offer it to you this week too. If you have not read it, I invite you to take a look at it. It's going to challenge you. It's going to hurt your feelings. It's going to step on your toes, all those things. But I invite you to do it because it's worth it. But he wrote in his book, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, he said to many followers of Jesus are chronically overextended and doing more for Jesus than their inner life with him can sustain. Now, I don't know about you, but that is a painful reality. Truth in my life all too often. And I know it is for you too, because I had several conversations this week with folks saying I need to slow down. Too often I equate everything that I do with with who I am. And we're going to talk some about that again this morning. But being able to slow down and say, Jesus, what is it that you're calling me to? What kind of life, what kind of person, what kind of relationships, what kind of student, what kind of teacher, what type of disciple God are you inviting me to become? This week we're going to look at the second quality of imperfect disciples.

And that's intention. We're going to hope and pray and God's spirit is going to lead us to become more intentional. In Cicero's book, he talks about four different choices intentions that we're going to have to make if we're going to learn how to live more intentional lives and following Jesus. And the first one, he says, is this choosing between two different kinds of discipleship. He says there's worldly discipleship and then there's Jesus discipleship. And so it puts together or puts before us a couple of challenges, a couple of decisions that we have to make. And he says we're going to have to be intentional. The first one is making a choice between being popular or rejecting popularity. And one of the biggest challenges in our culture, in our world these days is this challenge of seeking popularity, right? Of doing decisions that will make us making decisions, rather, that will will help us to be seen as cool or hip or trendy trending and not mid as the cool kids say, Right? Did I use that right? I don't even know that I use that right mid c even saying that was so mid.

You won't even believe it. We were too busy trying to say or do something that would make us seem popular. Our focus becomes impressing other people. Impression Management. I want you to think something about me that may or may not be true, but if it makes me look good, I want it to be true. Jesus faced this temptation, the passage that Laura read for us just a moment ago. It was the second of the three. The devil took Jesus to the holy city. He had him stand on the highest point of the temple. If you are the son of God, this question of identity. Throw yourself down. If it's really true, then throw yourself down for it's written. He's not going to let your foot hit a stone. They're going to raise you up in their hands. You won't strike your foot. And I remember at this point in Jesus ministry, he's nobody. He's not popular. Nobody knows who he is. He's just another rabbi. And here's an opportunity for him to step into and say, hello, people. This is me. This is who I am. This is the kind of ministry that you're going to see lived out in me. But Jesus refuses to allow Satan. To put a wedge between he and his father. And so he responds. It's also written Do not put the Lord your God to the test. Later in Matthew 16, the religious leaders who are not too impressed with Jesus ask him to show them a sign.

If you want us to believe, show us a sign. Jesus refuses. You may remember in John chapter seven, Jesus own brothers don't believe who he is. Now, before we go too far down this road, think about this for a second. How many of you have a brother or even a sister? What would they have to do to convince you they were the Son of God? Okay. All right. So now we're there, right? Look to your left, to your right, your brother, your sister. What would they have to do to his own brothers? Said, Hey, man, if you want to be known, what are you doing here with us? You need to go to that festival in Jerusalem. You need to show everybody who you are, leave Galilee, go to Judea so that the your disciples there may see the works that you do, may see what you are about. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Right? If you want to be popular, if you want to be known, if you want somebody to think something of you, you've got to stand out from the crowd. What are you doing here with us? But again, Jesus is unwilling to cave into this popularity question. My time is not yet here. He says, For you, any time will do. And that may be just a verse we want to hold on to this week.

It's not my time for you anytime, but it's not my time. The world cannot hate you. But it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. You see Jesus faced and overcame this pressure to be popular by calling it out in his disciples. He called it out often in the religious leaders. In fact, he said it this way in Matthew 23, everything you do is done for people to see. And he was constantly warning his disciples, This is not how we pursue God. Even as something as simple, he says. When you pray, don't do it like they do when you fast, don't do it like they do when you give. Don't do it like they do. Don't do it for other people to see. Then you'll have your reward. That's not how we are to operate as followers of Jesus. In fact, how many times in Mark's gospel does he do a healing, something powerful? Incredible. His disciples minds are just blown away. And then Jesus turns to the person He's just healed. And he says, Don't tell anybody. Don't say a word. And I imagine his disciples are like, What is wrong with you? Don't tell anyone. Everybody needs to hear this. Jesus was not going to give in and cave in in the popularity question. In fact, Chesebro writes it this way. Jesus denounced any activity that had traces of seeking the approval or admiration of others.

I invite you this week just to go back and just follow Jesus again. Just pick a gospel and watch him. You never say, Hey, do this. People will turn around and take notice, baby. He never says it. Because he understood the human heart and he understood the constant temptation to want to be noticed. Even when I was thinking about this week. That never goes away, does it? That desire to be noticed. It never goes away. It may start in in school with our kids and wanting to be friends. And but but as we get older, it doesn't stop. Right. You get a job, you want to be noticed. You want someone to say you're doing great work. Man, that was awesome. I'm so thankful for, like, we crave that. As we get older, we don't want people to forget about us. We want them to remember. I think that there's a part of that that's that's reality. It's community. It's learning to love and be loved, to care and be cared for. But it can get twisted easy. Now, I know it may just sound so ironic coming from preacher who preaches to the worst of this. Good preaching. Good sermon today, preacher. You know it comes with that, though is. Like my son the first time Tim Talley ever preached here. He was sitting next to me 2012, and he leans over and he goes, Dad, that was pretty good.

I said, Yeah, it was pretty good. And he goes. That was better than yours. I said it was better than mine. And therefore, Tim Talley is not being invited to preach up here for a while. Had the desire to be noticed, to stand out, to be popular. It just it runs deep in us. And Jesus knew that. And so he's constantly warning his disciples, Don't fall into the trap. The most important person that you're serving is not you, and it's not somebody sitting. It's the one in heaven who sees it all. So you can have great confidence knowing when you serve. It's not going unnoticed. When you sacrifice and you take one for the team and nobody acknowledges it and no one recognizes it, in fact, they accuse you of doing the very opposite. He says, You can know your Heavenly Father sees it. He knows. Will that be enough? You see, there's a whole industry in our world today that's banking on popularity. Where are you tempted to pursue impression management? Were you tempted to to wrestle with this choice of being popular versus rejecting being popular and focusing on the one who matters most? Another another question, another opportunity for us to be intentional with our discipleship, Guerrero says, is in the second intention, he says, is being great, closely connected here. These first three are really closely connected, he says. But that temptation to be great versus rejecting great ism, meaning in our culture, in all of our lives, there are ways that we recognize and notice when people do really a good job at things.

And Jesus didn't want us to stink at stuff. He actually wanted us to do it really well. He says, My father has gifted you and his desire is that you would be fruitful, that you would use those gifts to his glory, Right? And in our culture, we have ways of assigning greatness, don't we? We have halls of fame and we have Tony Awards and Oscar awards. We have every industry, Nobel Prizes. We have awards for just about everything you can imagine where we recognize greatness. The danger is not being great. The danger is this seeking out of great ism like who is my audience? Who am I doing all of this for? Great ism is what led the religious leaders in Jesus day to see themselves as better than others. As more holy, like their knowledge and their propensity to follow that law, to know it and to follow it to the letter like it had this tendency to have them create differences, distinction between them and others. Right? They were offered the best seats in the synagogues. They were offered some some clothing to wear, some different garments that would would let everyone around them know how great they were. All the things that helped to distinguish them from our average Joes. But this created this huge contrast then between them and Jesus, who by all accounts of Jesus de Jesus ministry.

Jesus as a person was not great. Right. His beginning was not great. He was born in a cave in the middle of nowhere. His disciples weren't great. Have you ever read through what his disciples were doing before Jesus showed up? They were not in seminary. They were not leading scholars in Greek or Hebrew. They were not out the ones in the temple teaching lessons every Sunday morning. They were lucky to be there. His ministry wasn't great. And he did more grassroots types of stuff. We talked about how he did small things. In fact, if you look at most of his miracles, they were not done in front of large crowds. Most of them were done in small areas. And so he didn't take on the political and the economic superpowers of his day in the ways that those around the world would measure and say, Oh, that was great, right? He never got outside of this geographic radius around the Sea of Galilee. His impact. Again. Wasn't great. Even one of his first 12 disciples betrayed him. They were the closest ones to him for three years. His own cousin asked the question in Matthew 11 are. Are you the one? Are you the one who to come, or should we be waiting for somebody else? Because when I hear stories about you, I'm not hearing great stuff.

When I'm watching you walk around. Are you the one? Jesus faced this same temptation before his ministry began. Laura read these words just a few moments ago. Verse eight The devil took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. All this I give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. And Jesus said to him, Away from me, Satan, for it is written Worship the Lord your God and serve him only. You see, Jesus called his disciples to follow him in intentional ways from away from great ism. And into humility. And he would say things like, If you want to be great in the kingdom, then you need to be the servant. When it comes time to line up for dinner, you need to be last. When it comes time to do housekeeping, you need to pick the worst chores. The hardest ones. The ones that nobody wants. That's what you need to do. Another time he would bring a kid and he'd say, If you want to be great, you need to be like this little kid. No power, no status. No influence. No opportunity. Instead, it's just blind trust. Faith. And one who's going to provide. If you want to be great, that's. That's how you get to be great. Skusa offers a couple of questions. As we're wrestling with this intention, will we will we seek to just settle for being great or will we move away from this great ism and instead into humility and service? He says, When are my plans and ambitions legitimate, legitimately for the glory of God, and when do they cross the line into my own desire for greatness? And what opportunities has God placed before me to be lowly with the lowly? To be little with the little.

Do. The first one helps us reassess what's going on in our own hearts. Making plans without God in mind. The second one reminds us that every time we humble ourselves and we engage with the group, as Eddie reminded us, a marginalized and oppressed group that's been left out or left beside. And we get to encounter Christ. Jesus says, when you serve the least of these, what you're what you're doing is serving me. You're going to have an encounter. Will we humble ourselves to seek that type of greatness? The third intention that we have to face as imperfect disciples is again connected right here to this. Am I going to be successful or reject success ism? All right. We all want to be successful. That resonates with each and every one of us. Certainly as a preacher, I want to be a charge I want to be in charge of. I want to run. I want to lead a mega church. I want to have thousands of why? Why? I had all my best because I want everybody to know and love Jesus, right? Just behind that one.

I want to be cool. I want people to think great of me. I want to be successful. I want people to say when they go to a conference, How many of you have ever been to a conference where somebody says, well, you know, this guy's business is not really doing great, but he's a great guy and we want you to hear from him. Right? Well, I can tell you the same thing at church. Church conferences. They never say this guy's been pastoring a church at 20 people for 50 years. We want you to hear from him. Why? Because that's not seen as successful. That's not seen as important. Jesus says, Will we reject this reality that the world tries to put in front of us that too often gets into our own hearts? He says it's not what you do remember. It's not about what we do. It's the person we're becoming. Sakaziro says this in his book Success is becoming the person God calls you to become and doing what God calls you to do in his ways and according to his timetable. What if we allowed that to become our new definition of success? Success is becoming the kind of person that God wants me calls me to become, and then doing what He asks us to do on the timetable that he asks us to do it.

See, God's desire is not that we're not successful, right? Jesus said over and over again, I want you to be fruitful. I want you to multiply. I want you to go into all the world and to all nations and make disciples. Right. I want this gospel message to ring out, but I want it to ring out because it's reality. That you're not selling it door to door. Peter wrestled with this in a way that I think most of us can identify. I certainly can. I mean, Peter was so committed to Jesus being successful that when the guards showed up in the garden, he was not beneath pulling out a sword and chopping off some yahoos ear, if that's what it took. Right. You do what it takes. Mission accomplished. I had no idea. As much as I like to point fingers and go, Peter, what a goofball. How could he do that? How many times am I reaching for that sword and ready to swipe somebody because they're getting in my way and the things are not going the way they should be? And Lord, are you going to do something here or do I need to take things into my own hands? Right. Success is important. Is it? At what cost? You see, Jesus keeps pushing back against us to say, What is this costing your soul? And to the religious leaders. One day he'd say, with all your learning.

With all your learning, you have learned so much from the Scriptures and about the Messiah. And I'm standing right here and you can't even see me. I mean, how true of that. Of us, is it? And leads us to our last the fourth intention. And this may be the most challenging of all of them because they each lead us here. Is this last intention is to avoid suffering and failure. Or embrace it. Will we avoid suffering and failure, or will we learn to embrace it? If you've been in our Bible classes this fall, you've been in a series on First Corinthians, where we've talked a lot about Paul's letter to this church that was really similar to the church in the Western world. It's one of the it was one of the biggest cities, most wealthy in the entire empire. You had people from all over the world who lived there. It was wealthy. It was powerful, it was prestigious. It had all kinds of drama, all kinds of chaos, all kinds of challenges. It was the New York, the LA, the Las Vegas, all wrapped into 1 in 1 spot. It was a center of commerce and industry in ideas and thinking. And the church was zealous and had some pretty brilliant people in it, and it was gifted, but it faced a number of challenges, some of which were already getting into. Right? And in the midst of all this, Paul reminds them.

Chapter two, verse two, what it's all about. Says when I came to you. When I first visited you. When I spent those days and those nights with you, I resolved one thing to know nothing except Christ and him crucified. Whilst it all hinges on that. It was all about Jesus and the resurrection. It wasn't about how eloquent I could be. It wasn't about how handsome or well-dressed I could be. It wasn't about if I could win debates with certain people on different philosophical arguments. It wasn't about having money to throw around to anybody that I came into contact with. It was about proclaiming the gospel of Jesus and Him crucified. That was the lens that he viewed everything. In fact, as you read through the rest of his letters, you'll read it impacted how not only the church should treat one another and how they deal with each other, because there was some crazy stuff going on. But it also impacted how they view the world around them. It impacted how they have their gifts and how they use them beforehand In the world, we use our gifts to differentiate ourselves between others. I can do this. You can do that. Well, mine's a little more important than you. Paul says that's actually not the way in the kingdom. Remember Jesus teaching? If you want to be great, what do you become? You see, it's a different way of living.

He keeps reminding them and us over and over again that that disciples are called to live in the Kingdom of God. It's not about avoiding or denying painful realities. It's not pretending that hard things aren't really hard and having questions and wrestling and struggling. We see all of that in Paul's letters. In fact, sometimes it's so challenging that Peter, another one of the first disciples who also wrote to a couple of churches, says, you know that Paul guy? He writes some pretty challenging stuff. And in my head I'm thinking, if Peter doesn't understand, I'm in trouble because Peter was with him. No, no, no. It's not pretending that hard things don't happen. And that we don't face losses that are just overwhelming. Right. That's why he writes to us about when people die. Because he knows how heartbreaking that is. And Jesus understood that. And so Paul says, No, no, no. I know, I know. I know. It's so painful. But remember. Right. It's not the end of the story. And he keeps reminding me, don't hide from that. Don't run for that. Because then you chase after other things that will never give a true answer. They only leave you more empty and more hollow. They only make you look like the people that you used to be before Jesus showed up. So church, are we willing to seek reconciliation? Even when it conflicts with our tendency to want to sweep things under the rug.

Just pat it down. It's going to be okay. Are we willing to limit our plans and our activities ourselves? Are we willing to limit that? So that we don't overextend ourselves and begin to put our relationships at stake. To take for granted the people. The relationships that mean most to us. Are we willing to take time to grieve the real losses that we go through and not pretend they don't hurt, but instead to be willing to want to wade into that? Right. That's one of the things I love most about my wife. I mean, she got a lot of great quality. One of them, she can be present with people in pain. Right. And that success ism, that great ism like I want to have the thing to say. I want to have the thing to do to make it all okay. And I can't do that right. And Kaley's not worried about she's just present because she knows there's some things this side of heaven are not going to make sense and there's no word that's going to come that's going to make it all be okay again other than we're together. All right. I don't know where this is going, but we're together. My. Paul says, don't. I mean, Jesus says, Listen. Don't avoid suffering. Well, that's when the power of the gospel is manifest and made most real in the lives of people is when they see nothing separates us from God's love.

That sometimes that love comes to us through another person who's just willing to be present with us. And so he says don't don't short change that. Don't don't think that just because nothing bad's ever happened, that you have a good life. And don't think that just because a lot of bad stuff has happened, you have a bad life. Those are not the same thing. See if we're going to grow and mature as disciples. Can we start with confessing that we're imperfect? Can we just start there? But we serve one. Who is? And we trust that by pursuing His kingdom in His way of life, we will become the people that God called us to be. And we'll learn how to hear his voice so that we can respond and to say and do the things that he would do. If he were us. God. That is our hope and our prayer today. That you would help us to become the people you called us to be. People who don't get lost. In the chaos of the world going on around us, but who are intentional about making some decisions. Intentional about the kind of lives that we live. Gad Would you help us to be intentional in the ways that we love and serve one another? God. Would you help us to be intentional about resisting popularity and success ism and great ism? And avoiding pain and failure.

And instead, God teach us to be humble. To serve. To give sacrificially. To be willing to wait out into the midst of deep waters. That is sometimes so painful we can barely take a breath. But God knowing we are not alone. Knowing that you never leave us alone. Knowing that this is not the end of the story. My God, you're a God of hope. And you've called us to be hope bringers. God, would you help us to bring hope into the world this week? Whether it's in a relationship we have at school, whether it's at work, maybe it's at home or an important relationship. How would you help us to be intentional, to slow down? And to be intentional. Thank you, Father. Thank you. That you loved us so much that you sent your son. Who is not willing to cave in to the pressure to be popular. To avoid suffering on the cross. But to endure it. To not seek out worldly greatness or success, but instead just to be faithful to the ministry that you gave to them. You've got to change the lives. Those first 12 and so many others. And it's been changing lives ever since. God, we want you to change our lives and to help us be a part of changing more and more lives in the days and the weeks and the years to come. Thank you, God, for your goodness and your faithfulness to us. Thank you that you love us. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.