Let’s Build The Church—Wanting To Make A Difference
July 21, 2013 Glenville 2 Samuel 18:19-23 2 Timothy 2:1-13
We are in part 3 of our series, “Let’s Build The Church,” and today we are going to look at Wanting To Make A Difference. Imagine if you were at your funeral, and it came to testimony time. I got up and I said, “ Now I want you to limit your testimony to two minutes and if there is anybody here today who can testify to a difference that the deceased has made in your life, come up and share it.”
If the first person got up and said, “The deceased worked with me on the job for 5 years and I can’t think of one thing he did that made a difference.” If the second person got up and said, “we were in school together for six years and I remember the time when, no that was somebody else. I can’t think of one thing he did that made a difference.” If the third person got up and said, “I went to church with the deceased for 10 years, and let me tell you, Praise God, “the one difference I know he made, is that I had planned to go fishing today, but this funeral caused me to cancel my fishing. I sure hope this is a short service.” Let me ask you, how would you be feeling about the life you had lived.
The truth is we can’t live without making a difference but the difference you make can be of a negative nature. There is a man in the bible who was a king, and the last thing said about him was 2 Chronicles 21:20 (NIV) 20 Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years. He passed away, to no one's regret, and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.
I don’t care who you are, where you live, or how much money you make, there is something inside of you that cries out for a certain level of importance. When you leave this world, you want somebody to say that your life counted. You want somebody to testify that you made a positive difference with your life. Nobody wants to leave behind the testimony, that was a complete waste of life.
Even those of you who are not living for God, you still want your life to count. The reason being, you are created in the image of God, and because God is important, you are important. Unfortunately, many of us look for importance in the wrong ways and in the wrong places. We deceive ourselves into thinking, if I just get what I want, I’m going to be happy. Most of us have not found that to be true, because everything we get comes with a price and the tag is hidden, because of sin. But even sin still cannot stop us from wanting to make a difference.
In our OT reading Ahimaaz was a skilled runner long distance runner. After the King’s army had won a battle, he wanted to run and tell the king the good news. He wanted to use his skill as runner to make a difference. But the commander of the army, Joab, told Ahimaaz that he was not the one to run and tell the news, because some of the news was bad.
Joab chose a black man and told him to run and tell the news. I guess the Kenyans and Ethiopians were winning marathons back then as well. The black man took off and headed to the king with the news. Ahimaaz asked Joab again to please let him run. Joab said, “why do you want to run. You’re not going to get paid anything for the job.” Ahimaaz said, “That doesn’t matter, I want to run.” In other words, “he wanted to make a difference.” He took off, and because he knew a short cut, he outran the first guy to get to the king.
We are in this series Let’s Build the Church. The kind of church we are thinking about building for New Life At Calvary is a church that is going to involve itself in the life of the community more than we have in the past. In our Lay Pastor’s meeting we were thinking of ways of how Sunday mornings will be ministry opportunities to go from the sanctuary to the community doing projects to serve those in the community. We want to begin to understand what Jesus meant when Jesus said, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We are going to choose to make a difference by looking for ways to serve.
In our New Testament were given three images to adopt into our lives if we are going to make a difference in this world for Christ and for others. It’s interesting that Paul starts this list off talking about suffering. Suffering is one of those things when we hear its coming one way, we head and go off in a different direction. Rarely though does suffering get us into trouble. It is our desire for pleasure that usually gets us into trouble. But it is in suffering that we learn character in life and we learn what is important.
If you’re going to make a difference, you can’t be afraid of having some discomfort in your life. At some point we have to ask ourselves, are we trying to build a church for our convenience, or are we building church for God to use us for others. Jesus said, if we give away our lives, we will find what true life is because He’s going to give it to us.
The first image we have is that of a soldier. Paul, the writer of 2nd Timothy was a man who had experienced beatings, prison, floods, hunger, dehydration and all kinds of persecution for the cause of Christ. He says, join with me in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Do you know the image most of us have a good soldier is that nice looking picture that they take of you in the army or navy or air force or marines and the soldiers send it back home to display on our mantles? The person is dressed very neatly and always looks good in that uniform.
But the life of a soldier in battle is anything but nice and neat and attractive to look at. Appearance is not high on the soldier’s list of things to do. Keeping alert for the enemy is closer to the top of the list. Soldiers don’t get to choose what they eat, where they go, or how often they change their clothes when they are on the battlefield. They expect to endure some difficult times. They expect some of them to get wounded and some of them to die in battle. Soldiers are often afraid, but they go ahead and carry out their mission. You have been called to make a difference as a soldier of Jesus Christ. That will lead to suffering and being shot at. Sometimes you will be hit by friendly fire. Sometimes you’re going to wonder if it’s worth all this. Soldiers have to trust, the leadership over them.
Let’s suppose you are a commander of a unit. Your job is to take out a bridge with a demolition squad. You explain the responsibilities to each of the soldiers and each one has special task to perform. It’s dark. You get behind enemy lines, and you make it to the bridge undetected. How do you feel when you discover that the two guys with the explosives had seen a sign that said “Talent Show Tonight at 9pm. First Prize 1,000.00.” The two guys had chosen to stop behind to go to the Talent Show to see if they could win the prize. They were planning on rejoining the group after the Talent Show was over. The mission had to be called off and two guys were wounded after you left the bridge. What do you think should happen to the two soldiers when they rejoin the group?
Paul tells us that one thing that keeps us from making a difference is that we get distracted by sideshows and forget that we are soldiers and start acting like civilians. He reminds us in verse 4, “no one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs, rather they try to please their commanding officer.” The big temptation for us as soldiers, is to forget who it is we are called to please. The moment we do that, we forget about suffering and go back to pleasing ourselves.
There are times when we want to say, “Jesus is no longer Lord. I’m in control here. I’m in charge of this mission.” We are making a difference, when we make this statement, but its not the kind of difference we want brought up at our funeral. Look back over your life this week at the ways in which you temporarily took off your uniform. Is that what you want us to tell the world? It may have been during an argument, during a moment out with friends, sitting at your computer, waiting for somebody wait to arrive late. It could have been the way you talked to your employee, your employer, your kids, your parents or the person at the street.
Some of us are struggling between being a soldier for Christ and wanting to be in charge of our lives. Which commanding officer are we going to please? Suffering is part of the life of a soldier. Doing things I don’t want to do is what makes for a great army unit, for a great church, and for a great life. At Marriage Sensation, Jesus told us how to solve our relationship problems. He said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” He changed love from a noun to a verb. It’s not something we have, but rather something that we do.
The second image that the apostle Paul uses has to do with something we are very familiar with and it has to do with constant discipline and rules. How many of you have every participated on an athletic team? How many of you know, you repeat the same thing over and over and over again to get good at it? If your goal is to hit homers, what do you do? If your goal is to make free throws what do you do? If your goal is to win sprints, what do you do? Do you do it only, when you feel like it?
How do you become good at serving? How do you become good at developing patience? How do you become good at following Jesus? How many of you know the best team does not always win. You can have the fastest relay team in the world and come across the line 25 yards ahead of everybody and lose the race. There is this little rule, that says you must hand off the baton to the next runner within a specific area or you lose the race. It doesn’t matter if you miss it by six inches or 60 feet, the same disqualification applies.
Suppose I told you that I wanted you to come and see me in a basketball team because I shined above everybody else. I promised you in advance I’d score more points, block more shots, and have more assist than the other players. If you just had to see this for yourself and you came to the game and I did everything I said you’d be amazed. You’d be amazed not at my performance, but amazed at how on earth did I get in a league with 6 and 7 year olds. If I told you I lied about my age and gave them some fake records so they had to accept me, what would you think of me?
Paul throws in this little fact about being an athlete. He says no one is crowned if he or she does not compete according to the rules. Look at your walk with Jesus. Are you pretending to be something that you are not? You know Jesus gave us some pretty clear cut rules of how we are to make a difference in the lives of others. He said that are a lot of people who would get saved if we would go out to find them.
Instead of going to look for them, we have bible studies on who were the lost, prayer meetings on finding the lost, and we even send our spirits to look for them to help them find the church. We know in our hearts we want to reach out and to help save the lost.
Suppose you told somebody to clean up the mess they had made in the kitchen. They had pots and pans all over the place and dishes in the sink. Would you be happy knowing they did a bible study on kitchen cleaning, had a prayer meeting for cleaner kitchens, and actually cleaned the kitchen in their heart?
Would you be thrilled to know the person had done these things or would you have rather they just started cleaning? If we are going to make a difference, sometimes we just need to start doing, even before we know how to do everything just right.
The third image that the apostle Paul uses is one to let us know, Building A Church is not going to happen overnight. We can’t do one thing, and expect the church to just blowup out of nowhere. The one thing we have to use takes a little time to operate. What we have to use is love. Love takes time. If you met someone at the grocery store, and they told you 15 times while standing in line, “I love you.” You might think something was wrong with them. Love in the church has to move from a noun a feeling, to a verb an action.
The third image is that of a farmer. Farmers have to know what they want to grow in order to know what they need to plant. You can’t plant corn and expect watermelons to grow. The farmer also knows there is a certain time frame in which to plow, to plant, to water, to weed, and to harvest. It’s important that things are carried out in a necessary order. Are you planting today, what you want to harvest at the end of the year? Some of us are refusing to look at what we are planting, but we insist the crop is going to come out find in the end.
It’s amazing how we as Christians can choose to follow a path, that leads away from God and think that if we do some religious things, somehow we will not end up where the path we are on is taking us. We are moving further away from God, and then we complain that God doesn’t seem real to us anymore.
Any Christian that stays away from the church is going to be pulled into the world’s way of thinking. There is a life that flows from Jesus Christ through other believers that helps us to choose Christ for our lives. Having a relationship with Christ is not something you do on your own, but in community with other believers.
The farmer also knows that all his work is an act of faith and that he is subject to the plans of God. Farmers can’t make it rain, they can’t control the temperature, they can’t make the soil produce, and they can’t determine how bountiful the harvest will be. Farmers can learn from others how to make changes to get better harvests, but they still know, God is ultimately in control. Farmers have to put in a lot of work up front, with no harvest in sight, but if they do, they are rewarded for their efforts.
We often want to make a difference, but we are often not sure of being willing to put in the work on the front end to make it happen. Farmers have to be patient. They have to do endure some worrying moments. They have to make course changes and adjustments with their techniques. They have to operate in faith that a harvest is going to be produced. When we speak of making a difference in the lives of others, we cannot stop God from making a difference in us. God never intended for us to come into this world, and leave out without touching the lives of others. We are where we are because that’s where God wanted to use us.
It’s up to us to choose the suffering of a soldier in order to please the commanding officer, to choose the discipline and obedience of an athlete in order to be crowned as victors, and to choose the hardworking patience of a farmer to receive the benefit of the harvest. We are about to discover how to serve people on another level so that they might get to see Jesus. The more of Jesus they get to see, the more of Jesus we are going to discover for our own lives.
New Life At Calvary is a step of faith every bit as much as planting seed in the ground expecting a harvest. We don’t have everything worked out yet and we never will because we are always going to be changing . We will lose about $40,000 from people not going on the move. We will lose some people who have been instrumental in operating some our ministries. We thank them all for what they have done.
What we will not lose is a greater dependency on God and a belief in God’s promise to provide for us, when we are obedient to Him. There is a verse in John in which Jesus is speaking and he says. John 12:24 (NIV) 24 I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
Right now, we are choosing as a church to be the kernel of wheat that falls to the ground and dies as a single seed. We have the possibility of being transformed into many seeds for the kingdom of God. This is one of the times in which we are deliberately putting ourselves in a situation in which our survival depends on a supernatural work of God. We believe we are on the verse of something great for God. Joshua didn’t know what was on the other side of the Jordan River, but he and the people ended up building a great nation and making a difference from God. Let us be strong and courageous and do likewise in building a great church.
