Raising The Bar—“Let Your Life Count For Something”
10/13/152 2 Chronicles 33:21-34:8 Philippians 3:7-16
Today is the final message in our series “Raising The Bar.” We have looked at letting our yes mean yes, our attitudes towards those around us, and our behavior and disposition at work. We have looked at all of these things because in the end we want our lives to count for something.
There was movie entitled “Saving Private Ryan” centered in Europe in World War II. This family had sent four of their sons to fight in the war. The War Department noticed that three of the sons had been killed and they wanted to send the 4th son back to his parents alive. The only problem was, the army didn’t know exactly where Private Ryan was fighting in Europe.
A group of about 8 guys go in search of finding Private Ryan. They engage in battles with German soldiers. They finally find Private Ryan and they explain the situation to him. But hearing that his brothers were dead, Private Ryan doesn’t want to leave his combat unit because he feels they are the only brothers he has left. He finally agrees to go, but by this time most of the 8 guys who went to save him are dead.
One of the last guys takes a bullet that should have gone to Private Ryan, and Ryan knows it. As Ryan is treating the guy who’s dying, the guy knows that his life is about over, he looks at Ryan and says, “make it count.” Ryan knew he owed a debt to live his life in such a way that those guys would not have given their lives in vain trying to save him.
Jesus came here on a mission seeking to find and to save you and me. My friends when we look at Jesus hanging on a cross, with blood running down his face, his back, his arms, his legs and his feet, and his face swollen from beatings, and spit in his eyes from the crowd, Jesus is not telling us to feel sorry for him, or to wish we could take his place.
Jesus is saying as my disciple “make it count.” “I gave my life for you, now go live in such a way as to make it count.” The amazing thing about making our lives count is that it can happen anywhere, at any time, for any of us, in any situation. We sometimes have a false idea of what it takes to make it count.
Suppose your dad was CEO of a company that made hundreds of millions of dollars each year and he was grooming you to take over the company with a salary of $15 million dollars per year for life. He let your brothers and sisters know that he was making you CEO for life and that he was appointing them as your assistants in various offices across the country making $5 million dollars each.
To help you run the company he would leave a few people from his board of directors to provide you with wisdom in running the company. A few years later your dad dies, and now you are CEO.
Now if you had this offered to you, how many of you believe you would be in a great position to make your life count. You’ve got money, you’ve got power, you’ve got the ability to raise the bar for the lives of many people. How many of you know, you would do so much for God, you would have so many rewards waiting for you when you got to heaven. When you died, there would be so many people at your funeral wanting to say what a blessing you were to their lives.
Let me tell you what really happened to a person who got this wonderful opportunity to make his life count. Well the first thing he did was called his brothers and sisters together along with their children for a family reunion and had them all murdered at the site. He called a trustee board meeting and killed all the trustees left over from his father’s administration. He used his money to persuade people to turn their back on God and to enjoy life doing whatever they wanted to do, and he built places of worship that were basically prostitute houses where worship of God involved sexual perversions of all kinds.
He made the lives of his workers miserable. He lost his wife and all of his children except one. His life came to a painful and tragic end after 8 years after being given this great opportunity. At his funeral, the only people who showed up outside a few family members were those who had to be there because of their position.
The last thing said about him was, “He died at age 40 to no one’s regret.” You may think I’m making this all up, but its right there in the bible in 2 Chronicles chapter 23. His name was King Jehoram. He lowered the bar so low, it was hard for any king to go lower than he did. Many of you met him in Life-Sharing this past week.
King Jehoram had a father who was trying to walk with God and his father tried to pass it on to him but it did not stick. At age 32 he was going to do his own thing. Later there was King by the name of Amon who became a King, who at age 22 who could make his life count. His father had lowered the bar but ended up humbling himself before God and raised it back up before he died.
Amon as soon as he took the throne, took the bar back down. He outright rejected the commandments of God. He went along with whatever was popular in society. He indulged in worshipping idols with all the sexual practices that went along with it. The Scriptures said, “he did evil in the eyes of the Lord.” His opportunity to make his life count ended with him being assassinated in his own palace after just two years of being king. The one good thing that can be said about him, was that he had a son name Josiah.
Josiah was eight years old when he became king. Now who would have thought an eight year old would start with the determination to make his life count. You don’t have to reach a certain age, to make a difference for God. You don’t have to be in power to make your life count. God is not calling us to make our lives count for some major event. He wants us to make our lives count for something today. We had our session meeting last night, and there were several good testimonies of God using people raising the bar in people’s lives in small ways. 1. Story opening and holding the door 2. The tying shoes 3. The panties.
Josiah was willing to listen to the people who were over him. He raised the bar by listening. He made his life count by listening. The Scriptures tell us by the time he was 16, while he was still young he began to seek the God of his father David. Teenagers you don’t have to go wild and try this and that simply because everybody else seems to do it. You do not have to reject the word of God simply because others are saying its old fashioned and its ideas are out of date. All of us need to remember, there is nothing new under the sun. The new morality of today is nothing more than the old sin from hundreds of years ago that has passed by.
You can call something a marital affair which makes it sound as something pleasing, fun, and exciting. But it is still the same old sin called adultery that leads to a lot of unexpected and unanticipated pain and heartache for a lot of people. Check out king David in 2 Samuel and ask him if it was worth it. It practically destroyed his family and led to a civil war in the nation.
By the time King Josiah was twenty years old, he began to take on the elements in his society that had rejected the word of God. He made a lot of people very angry when he cut down the Ashereh poles, idols, and altars of Baal. Asherah was the goddess of fertility. Baal was the thought to be the god who provided rain and took care of every day needs. The worship services of these gods involved all kinds of sexual practices. Sometimes prostitution was a command at the temples for Baal.
Homosexuality was part of the worship service as well as sexual orgies taking place between heterosexuals. For Josiah to take on the sexual freedoms of expression of his day was to bring down the wrath of the people upon him. But he wanted to make his life count by leading his people back to God. He was willing to take a stand, knowing that it was not going to be popular.
The funny thing about making your life count for Christ is that at some point you are going to run into whether you are willing to stand for truth or whether you are going to be liked and accepted by others. Jesus said Luke 9:23-26 (NIV)
23 Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. 25 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? 26 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.
As Christians, we are being blackmailed and bullying today to get us to deny the word of God. If we agree with the word of God that the practice of homosexuality is a sin just like the sin of two people living together, or if we agree with the word of God that marriage is between a man and a woman, we get the label that we hate people, are afraid of people, want to deny people their basic civil rights, or we are holding on to misguided views in our interpretation of the scriptures.
I said back in the 90’s, the homosexual debate was never over whether or not we are to love people who call themselves gay. We are called to love all people regardless. The issue was always “will the church approve and endorse homosexual behavior itself as a gift from God. The word of God does not support that view.
There has been no new scientific evidence produced on homosexuality in the last few years. The American Psychological Association did not do a new study to change their views on homosexual behavior as a disorder. A group of homosexuals threatened to disrupt and cause a scene at their national meeting if they did not move it off the list. They caved in to these bullying tactics and then insisted the rest of society follow them. There have been no new biblical texts recently found to support changing our understanding of the texts that we have for the last 2000 years. The so called new revelation is nothing but people choosing to change their minds and ignoring the obvious.
Our society became more sympathetic to the homosexual movement when a young man named Matthew Sheppard was allegedly beaten and killed because he was a homosexual. That was an awful tragedy for anyone to endure. We were given the view that homosexuals were victims of many such crimes, and that teenagers were committing suicide because of being gay, and that 10% of the population was gay, and if only gays were accepted we could all get along.
Well the truth is ,we have found out that only 2% of the population is gay. No-one has presented us with concrete evidence of mass suicides by teens who were gay. We now see that those who were the victims who are now accepted, instead of seeking to get along are have become the ones with the power to control what we can and cannot say and what we can and cannot believe.
Some of you would be fired from your jobs if you publicly state on your job, you believe marriage is to be, between a man and a woman. Gordon College is a Christian College that is up for accreditation. It may lose its accreditation if it does not agree that homosexual behavior itself is no longer sinful. A Christian printer who makes t-shirts was fined and is being ordered to diversity training because he declined to make T-Shirts celebrating gay-pride day. Can you imagine a homosexual printer being fined and ordered to attend diversity training if he declined to make a T-shirt celebrating God Can Change Homosexuality.
Christian student groups are losing their status on state college campuses, because they insist their leaders be Christians which the colleges consider is a form of discrimination. Without recognition they can’t have access to free rooms for meeting, student activity fees for their programs or any any other rights that other campus groups have including the Gay and Lesbian groups.
Last week the Supreme Court allowed five states to have their definition of marriage as between a man and a woman overturned. Only 3 states voted by popular demand to redefine marriage. 8 were done by legislatures and all the others by judges overturning the bans. The majority of the states have had their definitions of marriage thrown out by less than a handful of judges. It’s not democracy at work. It’s find a judge who you know is on your side and bring the case to him or to her. The judge becomes an instant hero, making his or her life count as a champion for civil rights. What seems like an avalanche of support to change the definition of marriage is a manipulation of circumstances.
I have no problem with our society allowing people to marry whomever they want to marry. I have a problem telling me I must reject the word of God and approve of the behavior or I will lose my job, my business, my accreditation, or my professional license if I don’t. The tragedy for us as a nation is that the endorsement of homosexual behavior has overruled the constitutional right of religious freedom.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof… If you are sending people to diversity classes to teach them to approve of behaviors that are contrary to their religious belief, isn’t that prohibiting their free exercise to believe what the bible teaches them to believe. Why doesn’t diversity training go both ways. You can bash me as being stupid, hateful and out of touch with reality and not have to learn anything about why I hold my beliefs.
The other sad thing is, what is being kept secret or just under the radar. The latest CDC report indicated that gay men make up less than 2% of the population, but accounted for 66% of the new aids cases. Even the plain dealer indicated, Based on recent studies, the CDC estimate about 18 percent of all homosexual men are infected with HIV, and more than a third of those infected don't realize they have the lethal virus, making them much more likely to pass it on to others by failing to take safety precautions.
The fastest growing segment of the population being infected with Aids is young men in the 13-24 age group. AIDS is increasing only in the homosexual community.
The Wall Street Journal last month had an article stating that if the current trend continues, 50% of gay and bisexual males will be HIV positive by the time they reach age 50. So why isn’t this message getting across. If a teacher said this in some of our schools to our youth, they would be called right wing bigots distorting the truth and spewing out hatred.
If I love you, I am going to warn you about possible consequences of your behavior. You can say whatever you want to about the bible, but God loves people enough to tell them the truth. Our media puts this information in little tiny articles and then asks, why young males are not getting the message of what’s happening.
Josiah was willing to raise the bar in his society by telling the people the truth about God and about their behavior. He recognized that not only did the society needed reforming, the people who claimed to know God also needed to be changed. They had become so self centered that the temple was falling down in places. By the time he was 26, he started process to repair the temple of the Lord His God.
While they were repairing the temple, they found a copy of the Bible as they knew it back then. It’s amazing that God’s people had so adopted the culture around them, that nobody even had a copy of the Scriptures anymore. Thank God that King Josiah was eager to get to know God.
When they started reading what the Scriptures said to the King, for the first time he realized that they were even worse than he had first imagined. Things that he had thought might had just been a little bad, were absolutely disgusting to God and had been completely forbidden by God. The prophet Huldah, she came to explain the word of God to the King. She told him basically, “God is so fed up with the behavior of his people that he is going to send judgment upon the nation and they will be removed.”
We are living at a time when we think God is unable to judge nations or to bring down the high and mighty. We have just deceived ourselves. The Scriptures tell us that the nations are just a drop in the bucket. I don’t know how God’s judgment will come, but it will come. It may already be here. But because King Josiah was doing all that he could to raise the bar and make his life count, the prophet Huldah told him “because you heart was responsive and humble, I will gather you to your ancestors in peace and your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place and those who live here.”
Josiah then went back and not only got rid of the big idols like the Ashtoreth and Baal that the people had gone crazy over, he got rid of all their little brother and sisters idols as well. His desire to make a difference with his life for God paid off. The Scriptures state 2 Chronicles 34:33 (NIV) 33 Josiah removed all the detestable idols from all the territory belonging to the Israelites, and he had all who were present in Israel serve the LORD their God. As long as he lived, they did not fail to follow the LORD, the God of their fathers. When Josiah died, it said all of the people mourned for him and the prophet Jeremiah even wrote laments or songs about him, and the people would sing about him. The writer in 2 Kings wrote, 2 Kings 23:25 (NIV)
25 Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the LORD as he did--with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses. Which way do you want to be remembered –Like King Jerhoram dying to noone’s regret, or like King Josiah dying having given all you had left to God.
God sees, when you are trying to raise the bar. He sees when you refuse to back down on your faith. Right now the tide is against those of us who want to be faithful to the Scriptures. It’s going to get a lot worse. We will be forced to choose between our love for Jesus and our desire to be accepted or to gain a position in society. Now is the time to make up our minds.
Just having a church going faith is not going to be enough. We are going to need a faith that causes us to be crucified daily if we are going to stand firm in our society. Satan is about to take off his gloves in this country and Christians are going to experience his wrath in ways they have not imagined before. One thing for sure, persecution is going to reveal who is serious about following Christ, and who is just going to church.
If you try raising the bar, its going to get you noticed. When people ask you why are you raising that bar, are you going to be bold enough to let them know its because you’re a follower of Jesus Christ or will you just shake it off to keep from raising any feathers. Jesus died for you.
He paid a price with his life, to cover your sin and mine so that we can be in a right relationship with God the Father. He rose again from the dead three days later to prove to you, that all He said was true about life, about Him, about heaven, about hell and about the cost to follow Him. You only have one life. You have to choose whom you are going to try and please with it. Make it count.
