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/IMAGINE:/ Living in 3D
Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor
April 8~/10, 2005
Good morning and welcome to Fellowship as we are right in the middle of our Imagine Campaign as a church—surely one of the most exciting moments in the life of our church, and I’m glad you are with us.
We are excited because we are doing all of this with eternity in mind…we want to impact people’s lives for eternity and help many more come to a forever relationship with Jesus Christ.
When you came in, you got some 3D glasses.
Go ahead and take those out.
There is a reason we have these glasses, to remind us that God invites us to live lives that are 3D not just 2 dimensional.
Most people live life in 2 dimensions, the here and now, but the third dimension is eternity…3 D living is living with eternity in mind.
Go ahead and put them on, and make sure you don’t do it upside down or it won’t work.
Everybody play here…put them on.
You look great!
I wish you could see what I see right now.
Well, let me allow you to (I-MAG).
This will be cool, but we need to train your eyes a little.
3 Dimensional living is not natural, so we need to train our eyes a little bit.
(Show clip).
Okay, great.
Never thought you’d do that in church, huh?
Now let me show you our land, and watch carefully.
In this Imagine step, we are relocating our church to the site on Legacy for our next twenty years of ministry.
You can see a great worship and multi-purpose space that will be full of light and be flexible…that will be cool.
Then the KidZone facilities that will have space for not only our kids now but children to come, and be designed around our ministry goals…those buildings are going to create a lot of excitement.
And then the youth building, which won’t just be our own youth building.
It will, but a youth center for our community.
We hope to reach thousands of kids there, and there is a lot more going into that than just a really cool building—though it will be a really cool building.
Why are we doing it?
Not because we are bored or just like buildings.
We are doing it with eternity in mind.
There are 650,000 people in a ten mile radius of our church and we want to do all we can to help them spend eternity with Jesus Christ.
And let’s pray to that end.
Short prayer
Today we are talking about 3D living, how God invites us to live beyond the here and now.
Yet, our culture is very much a two dimensional culture, obsessed with the here and now.
And that is interesting because many other cultures around the world and in history are very different.
Other cultures not even Christian have been obsessed with the afterlife.
When I was twelve, I went to London with my parents, and we went to the British museum.
My favorite part of that was the Egyptian area, all that stuff they got from the Egyptian tombs…I guess because I was a kid who loved my mummies.
Any way, it really was cool, but you see really quickly that this was a culture obsessed with the afterlife.
That’s why they made the fancy headdresses, so they would have a face in the afterlife…they didn’t want to walk around without a face.
Can’t blame them for that.
And they had food and servants and horses.
They wanted to be prepared.
Now, obviously their ideas were misguided, but the Bible says that God has placed eternity in the hearts of men…meaning that we all have this awareness that there is something after this life.
As Americans, we’ve done the best job ever trying to cover that awareness over.
We are very much a here and now culture, like the bumper sticker says, “I want it all, and I want it now.”
That’s America.
That’s why everybody advertises “easy credit,” “no down payment,” and why Americans max out all their credit cards.
We live for now.
Yet, occasionally this eternity idea breaks through, and we gain perspective…usually that’s when something big happens in our life that shakes us.
A loved one dies or we get really sick or maybe come close to death, and then we all of a sudden become quite clear that we are not going to live forever and we think about our lives differently.
At those points, we all become much more clear about what is really important.
With this in mind, I talked with my brother this week who is a cardiologist.
I wanted to confirm something, so I called him.
I asked him what the death rate is right now, and he confirmed that the death rate is hovering right at 100 percent.
Every one of us will die, unless Jesus comes back first.
After that comes eternity, and forever is a long time.
Jesus spent a lot of time pointing people to this reality, that the only way to make sense of life here is to consider it from the perspective of there.
At the end of our lives, our perspective of how we should be living now will be very clear.
So, today we want to look at a couple of key Bible passages to get us ready for eternity…to help us now how to live in three dimensions.
The first passages is in Luke 12, where Jesus tells a story in response to two brothers who are living in 2D.
They are really concerned about the here and now, and Jesus tells a story to broaden their perspective:
/13Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” 14Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” 15Then he said to them, “Watch out!
Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
16And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.
17He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do?
I have no place to store my crops.’
18“Then he said, ‘This is what I'll do.
I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
19And I'll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years.
Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”
’ /
So, Jesus tells this story about a guy who was pretty smart.
He had done very well in life and lived what we would now call the American dream.
This guy had it all, and he worked hard to get it.
So, what could be wrong with this guy?
He worked hard, invested for the future, thought ahead, amassed great wealth, and now was going to retire and enjoy all of his stuff that he worked so hard to get.
Sounds pretty good.
But Jesus then brings in a three dimensional perspective.
God comes into the story, so in verse 20 we read: 20/“But God said to him, ‘You fool!
This very night your life will be demanded from you.
Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
21“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” /
Why did God consider him a fool?
Because he didn’t live in 3D.
He only lived for the here and now.
He worked his whole life to build up all this stuff and was ready to really enjoy it, and then he dies.
And since he didn’t live with eternity in mind, he has nothing in eternity to show for his life here on earth.
Because he lived in 2D, he did not live on earth in a way that would make him rich toward God, that would build eternal wealth.
Elsewhere Jesus said, “/Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal”/ (Matt 5:19-20).
Jesus is telling us to invest our lives now in building wealth in eternity.
In fact, what the Bible teaches is that God rewards us in heaven for what we do now and that the only way we can build eternal wealth is in this life.
You and I will not build wealth in heaven…that will be determined by what we do here.
So, we have a choice with what we do.
We can store up for ourselves here on earth and just spend it or live with eternity in mind and invest it.
As one person has said about our possessions, “We cannot take them with us, but we can send them on ahead.”
This past week, we were booking flights for a trip that Don Overton and I are taking to New Zealand to speak at a couple of pastors conferences there, which is a cool thing I’ll tell you about as it gets closer.
One time I went over there, they bumped me up to business class from coach—which was awesome!
It is an 18 hour flight, so it really makes a difference.
I actually slept, and enjoyed the flight.
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