Sermon Tone Analysis

M for Mature:

Living beyond the Virtual

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

January 9~/11, 2008

 

If God gave a rating to your spiritual life like we do video games, what would it be?

Would it be M for Mature, or something else? That’s what this new series is about that we are starting today, about spiritual maturity, the process of growing closer to God and becoming more like his Son.

This series is about spiritual growth, and really a challenge for our church to commit to growing spiritually together, wherever we are to grow deeper in our relationship with God, to really progress.

Speaking of progress, I have my golf clubs up here because about 4 years ago I stood on the stage of our previous building and shot golf balls out into the crowd.

Some of you remember that?

I can’t believe I did that now, because I only started playing golf a couple of months before.

What was I thinking?! I’ve shot or thrown various things out to the crowd over the years, and one thing I have to confess is that three times I have hit the same lady in our church, right in the head…once with a golf ball, another time with a football, and another time with a _____.

What are the chances of that?

She is an older lady and probably the sweetest lady in our church, but she has some physical challenges that slow down her reaction time.

The last time it happened, I remember seeing it in slow motion.

I threw it out, and saw it in the air going straight for her.

I gasped, said “Noooooooo”…then boom, hit her.

I felt terrible.

She is always so gracious about it.

But now I’ve been playing golf about 4.5 years, and I’m confident in my progress.

I really am, and I hope you are, too.

And pray I don’t hit that same lady.

Let me hit a couple into the crowd.

You get to keep the ball if it hits you.

See, I’ve made some progress.

But progress doesn’t just happen, that’s true with just about anything, but certainly true of the Christian life.

Today we are going to kick off the series by focusing on our responsibility in the Christian life.

I say that because God also has responsibility for our spiritual growth.

He is committed to our growth, to our “sanctification” the Bible says, as in

 

Slide: _______________) 1 Thess.

5:23

 

/May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.

May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

/ We can only grow spiritually by his work in our lives, which means that the first and most important step to growing in our relationship with God is beginning one through faith in Christ.

You can become a better person, but you’ll never become close to God without his presence in your life.

God is active in our spiritual growth, but he also gives us responsibility for our growth.

That’s why two Christians, both with God’s presence in their lives, can have very different trajectories in their spiritual lives.

One grows great guns, and the other goes almost nowhere.

Same God in their lives, but different activities by the two people leading to different results.

That’s why in the book of Hebrews, the writer to those Christians chides them:

 

Slide: _______________) Hebrews 5:11-12

 

5/11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn.

12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again.

You need milk, not solid food!/

He is saying to these Christians, “You should be shaving by now!

You should be way farther down the road.

Take some responsibility for your own spiritual growth.

Grow up!”

God expects you to grow, and is committed to your growth.

You have to understand that God has a plan.

Involved in that plan is his yearning to redeem the world out of its lostness, and he can only involve mature Christians in strategic positions of responsibility to really make that happen.

In other words, God is just waiting patiently for large numbers of us, or let's just make it more personal -- God is waiting right now for you, for you, to grow further than you have grown before because he has a plan that involves you strategically in his redemptive effort in the world.

But he can't hand over strategic kingdom responsibility to a child, to a spiritual infant.

You don't take car keys and give them to your junior high student.

You just do that when they get a little older, and then you say, 'Now I think you can handle this.' God has a plan for every one of you that he can't put in your lap until you reach a point of spiritual maturity.

He wants you to be involved in the most exciting endeavor on the face of the earth, but you can't get there until you grow.

And what a great thing to grow closer to God, to feel more aware of his presence in your life now than six months ago, to sense God using you to impact his world in ways that you never even dreamed could happen, to know a greater and greater sense of his empowerment in your life!

We all want that, or we wouldn’t be here.

I know that you want to grow, but that means that you have some responsibility to help make that happen.

God will do his part, but we must be responsible for ours.

So today we are going to look at the life of the apostle Paul, in a passage of Scripture where he describes his own perspective about his own growth spiritually, to learn our responsibility.

If you want to know what separates Paul from the rest of us, the men from the boys, the ladies from the girls, then let’s turn to

 

Slide: _______________) Philippians 3:7-15

 

Listen to his perspective: /7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.

8 What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.

10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

13 Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

15 All of us who are mature should take such a view of things./

A lot of passion there, which brings me to my first point of responsibility, the first factor that separates people who really grow and those who don’t:

 

Slide: _______________) Desire

 

Did you hear his passion?

His focused desire?

He says that he considers every other competing desire in his life as “rubbish,” which sounds like some British person trying to make a strong point.

That’s rubbish!

But the word translated rubbish gave the translators from Greek to English a significant challenge because the Greek word, skubala, was a cuss word.

There is an English equivalent, and if I said it some of you would be entertained and the rest of you would be upset, so we’ll just leave it at “rubbish.”

But Paul was making a very strong point.

The readers of this letter would have been as shocked when he said skubala as if I said the English equivalent of skubala…but he is braver than me.

It wasn’t that everything else in Paul’s life was evil, but in comparison to his growing to know God better it was just dog poop.

That’s focused intensity, and the first element of Paul’s Christian life that makes him stand out: desire.

As I said before, I’m convinced that all of us want to grow and mature in Christ; the problem is that there are too many competing desires.

We want to focus on Christ, knowing and serving him, but that desire just gets shoved to the back of the desire pile.

We have career, other relationships, hobbies, entertainment, the new episodes of Lost, lots of other desires that compete.

I really think that the biggest problem most of us have is distraction.

What separates believers with good intentions and those who put those intentions to work is largely focus.

So, let’s put ourselves to the test.

On a scale of 1-10, 1 being distracted and 10 being highly focused on your relationship to and service of God, where are you right now?

What is your desire quotient?

Could people look at your life and say, “He or she has other commitments and interests, but they seem like skubala, like dog poop, in comparison.”

Focused desire is incredibly important, but there is still this huge gap between desire and actuality, that can only be filled in by this next component:

 

Slide: _______________) Discipline

 

Paul’s desire fueled his every day decisions to be disciplined, and there is no substitute for discipline in the Christian life.

The constant pressing on in the Christian life that he talks about in Philippians 3 is spelled out further in another passage where he describes his own Christian life,

 

Slide: _______________) 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

 

 /24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?

Run in such a way as to get the prize.

25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.

They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.

26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air.