Apostles Church

Let me start by saying this, we’re going to look at the implications of what Paul said in the text we read here and what it means for us living rich, meaningful, consequential lives. We’re going to talk about the cost that’s associated with following Jesus. And I think a large part of the reason that I’ve chosen these particular things to talk about is that there is a glaring need for this message to be spoken into my life. So know that what I’m saying here publicly, I’ve been saying over and over to myself privately.

II) INTRO

I had a conversation recently where I asked the question, “If you found out Christ had in fact not been raised from the dead, how would you feel?” My friend said, “You know, if it turns out that Christianity isn’t true, that Christ wasn’t raised from the dead, I won’t regret one bit having been a Christian. The way of life that the Bible teaches is superior to the one I tried to live on my own. It has led me in love, honesty and integrity. It’s a morally superior way to live.”

How would you answer that question? Do you agree with my friend that if Christ hasn’t been raised, it’s okay because Christianity still has given you a better life than what you would have without it?

Look at how Paul answers: He says, if Christ is not raised, we are fools to be pitied! Why? Doesn’t he realize the moral goodness of the golden rule? Doesn’t he appreciate the fact that “loving your neighbor as yourself” is better than not loving your neighbor? No. He realizes that. The reason he says what he says is that following Christ has cost him everything. We see in 1 Cor here that he risks his life everyday. Literally. He says that if Christ was not raised, he fought wild beasts in Ephesus for nothing. If Christ was not raised, let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die! In the second letter to the Corinthians he’ll go on to tell us that in addition to fighting off wild animals, he’s also been whipped with 39 lashes five separate times, he was beaten with rods, stoned, once he even shipwrecked and floated in the open sea for a day and a night. He says he’s been in danger everywhere he’s gone, he’s been sleep deprived, starved, and even been left cold and naked. He experienced all of this to tell people about life changing truth of Jesus as the savior of humanity.

He’s one of the most consequential people in the history of the church, and even the history of the world, but he doesn’t see Christianity as being good times unless Christ was raised, because following Christ has not been comfortable for him It’s been immensely costly. The only reason we could answer in agreement with my friend is if following Christ hasn’t cost us anything.

One of my greatest fears for the Church, and our community here at Apostles in particular, is that by reducing the Christian life to a moral system we would become comfortable, and that our comfort would breed complacency, and that in our complacency we become boring and inconsequential.


III) Lives of Consequence

Two things every one of us in this room wants – whether we’re male/female, black/white, young/old, Christian/atheist. Every one of us wants to live a full, rich life and every one of us wants to live a life of consequence.

And we can all relate to this, right?

When we were kids, we had daydreams. We dreamt about all kinds of adventures and heroic acts and scenes of being a knight or a princess. When I was in about kindergarten, I had a crush on Kristy Harris. Kristy Harris was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen to that point. I remember several times getting put in the “time out” section during nap time for having misbehaved in some way. And while I was in time out, I would fantasize that Kristy had been kidnapped by some treacherous villains and taken up in a helicopter, which is typical of villains, as we all know. In fact, why do villains always have transportation? Why do we never see them just running off on foot? Anyway, so then the perpetrators, who were up there twisting their mustaches, would drop her from the helicopter to meet her most untimely kindergarten death. But she never died. You know why? Because I ran over and caught her every time. And then she recognized how brave and strong I was and she fell in love with me. That’s what we dream about – we dream about doing great things. We don’t dream about mediocrity and sitting on the couch with a bag of cheese puffs.

One of the most heart breaking stories I’ve ever read is the play by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. Miller tells the story of Willie Loman, a traveling salesman in New England. Willie Loman is the epitome of narcissism. He has an entirely exaggerated understanding of his importance, talent and success. Willie has two boys and he, like many men, ends up living vicariously through his oldest, Biff. He projects that same narcissistic worldview on Biff by giving him exaggerated praise regarding his gifts, talents and relative worth. He heaps such effusive praise on Biff throughout his adolescence that Biff develops a similarly convoluted ego and self-perception – living in the delusion of his own grandeur just like his dad. One day, a grown up Biff realizes that he’s been living inside his father’s lie and that in reality he’s just an average guy. He says to Willie, “Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!” Willie is immediately offended at the core of his being and responds, “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!”

See, we all want to live a consequential life. We all want to live in a great story and experience great meaning.


Well here’s the great news: Jesus offers us opportunity for both full living and consequential living. He said in John 10:10
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

But remember what, he also says in Matthew 16:24-25
“…If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.

Here’s the thing:

The "full life" that Jesus offers us is found along the same road that we carry the cross upon which we're to be crucified. Being a follower of Jesus is costly.

That’s why Paul says in our passage that “if Christ is not raised, he is to be pitied above all men.” Because he knows the reality of sharing in the suffering of Christ – of walking that road carrying his cross. But he also says later that he’s found the secret to and contentment – because he’s experienced that full life found only in Christ.

IV) Hedging our Bets

Do you know what it means to hedge a bet? Hedging a bet is betting on both sides to minimize loss. Like in Roulette if you bet on Red and Black, you’ll be sure no to lose everything. I think many of us who follow Christ are hedging our bets. Just in case it’s only for this life that we have hope in Christ. We’re willing to go ahead and give up some of the uglier and more public sins in our life. But those were usually off-putting to our peers anyway, so no huge loss. We’ll go ahead and attend church here and there, but we’re really hesitant to make a commitment to community and serve. We’ll even go ahead and give some of our money to the church or other charities – after all, it’s a tax write off and makes us feel pretty good.
But we are really hesitant to overextend ourselves in any of these areas, right?

If we truly want to live lives of consequence, if we truly want to experience the “fullness of life” that Jesus offers, we’re going to have to be willing to absorb the cost of being his follower. A life of consequence will always be a life of cost. And Jesus hasn’t left room for hedging bets; it’s an all-or-nothing deal.

Look at what Jesus says in Luke 9 or Rev 3:
• No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

• I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.

He doesn’t leave much room for equivocation. He doesn’t allow for having feet in both camps. We either have to be about following him, or not.

So for those of us who have decided to follow Christ, are we kind of lukewarm in our following? Do we have our hand on the plow but our eyes fixed behind us? Are we playing it safe; are we betting on both sides? Listen to what Shane Claiborne says about living life in a safe, comfortable kind of way in The Irresistible Revolution:

All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don't tiptoe.

V) Life Examples

Do we know anyone who has lived what we would consider a consequential life where it hasn’t cost them? Where they’ve just made a lot of comfortable, safe plays? Who do you know of that has been pretty lazy and half hearted that has really made a big impact in their sphere of the world, or industry, or art? Nobody!

It’s the Vincent Van Gogh’s who died in poverty because of unabashed pursuit of their art that changed the way we look at painting! It’s the Galileo’s who endured inquisition and prison and chastisement to fight for truth that advanced science! It’s the Martin Luther King Jr.’s who are willing to take a bullet before they’re willing to allow injustice to prevail that established civil rights in our country! Who do we know of that’s lived a safe, comfortable, tiptoeing life that inspire us?

It’s people who’ve lived costly, consequential lives that we read books about! Look at Mother Theresa. She gave up all that the world might have offered her to care for the poor and sick in Calcutta. If Christ was not raised, she is a fool to be pitied! What did she gain?
Yes she helped a lot of dying people. But she lived a life of abject poverty because of it. She often didn’t have even a mattress to sleep on or shoes to wear, because she didn’t want to have more than those she was serving. But if Christ wasn’t raised, if he wasn’t God then everything he said came from the mouth of a liar. If that were the case, she lived a masochistic mistake of a life based on the rantings of a madman. And all she gained was our admiration. If she knew that the result of her life would be a lot of dead people who were dying anyway and our admiration, I bet she’d have taken a different course.


Look at a guy named Adoniram Judson. He was the first long term missionary to the people in Burma – now known as Myanmar. He was a brilliant guy – a prodigy. Instead of staying in New England and thriving in business, making a name for himself and raising a healthy family, he followed God’s call to Burma. You know what happened to him there? First, he waited six years before a single person came to faith in Christ. Six Years of laboring with no discernable spiritual result! He was also imprisoned for 2 years by the Burmese government. Then he got out of prison only to watch three of his children die of sickness - and then his wife died of a contracted disease! Then he was remarried and lost his second wife to a similar disease!

When he left Burma, he had translated the entire Bible into the Burmese language and left behind him 100 churches and over 8,000 people who had embraced the way of Jesus.
If Christ was not raised, this man wasted his whole life fighting off sickness, watching his wives and children die from it, facing imprisonment and war and persecution – all to make known to the Burmese people something that wasn’t true! Ah, but if Christ was raised, then his life is an inspiration to all of us and an example of what it means to live a life of fullness and consequence.


VI) What Does it Look Like for Us?

But the question is, what does it look like for US to live these kinds of consequential lives? Not many of us are called to be pastors or missionaries. How can WE, live this kind of radically consequential life that we see in the stories of Mother Theresa and Adoniram Judson?


1) Prayer- In the way we pray.
We are told by the Apostle Paul to pray constantly! Do we? Or do we pray just enough that we can check it off our list of Christian duties and maybe even glean a bit of therapeutic value from it? Martin Luther, the great reformer of the 16th century, prayed for 3 hours every morning! When asked how he, such a busy man, had time to pray that long, he responded by saying, “I have so much business, I can not get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”
If Christ was not raised, he wasted about 4 years of his life praying to a God who either wasn’t there or wasn’t listening; but if Christ was raised, thank God for Luther’s investment and commitment! It changed the face of history. Listen to the encouragement of one Scottish Pastor:

“0h brother, pray; in spite of Satan, pray; spend hours in prayer; rather neglect friends than neglect prayer; rather fast, and lose breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper - and sleep too - than not pray. And we must not talk about prayer, we must pray in right earnest.”

If we want to experience real lives of consequence, we have to become people of deep, persistent prayer. God moves in response to the prayers of his people. We need to experience the kind of prayer that disrupts our comfortable routine.

2) Giving- In the way we use our money
Do you know what a pinup is? We usually think of a pinup as a poster with a girl from a dirty magazine. But you guys will also remember the car pinup. Remember ordering the Lamborghini and Ferrari posters out of the Scholastic catalog when you were in elementary school? A pinup is a picture of something that you don’t have, but you wish you did. So you look at it and dream about it and fantasize about it. We all have pin-ups, don’t we? For some of us it’s clothes, for some travel, for some entertainment, for some zip codes. You know what mine is? Mine is a home in rural Colorado with a wrap around porch and enough land to hunt on. It would be within driving distance of both skiing and golf. Playing golf at that altitude, in that thin air, even a skinny guy like me can drive the ball 320 yards. That’s how far Tiger drives it. Does that inspire you? Not inspire you to go to Colorado for your next vacation, but really inspire something deep inside of you?

I have a good friend who has a different pinup. His is for him and his wife to be able to fund 100 fresh water wells in sub-Saharan Africa where children walk 6 miles a day just so they don’t die of dehydration; and to support Christians to go there and dig the wells so they can tell the people about the Living Water of Jesus so that they don’t just drink from their new wells and never quench their true thirst.


So water wells or golf?
Which one of these is going to change the world? Which one of these inspires something deep inside of you? Which one of these would make a good documentary? Which one of these rings of consequential living?

I think too many of us have pinups of a vacation home in Aspen, or a bigger apartment, or a more comfortable life with a more prestigious job, have a pinup of an Ecuadorian village full of orphans who need basic medicine and clothing? Or a neighborhood in the Bronx where people are enslaved to drugs and violence and poverty? Or a neighborhood in Manhattan so enslaved to wealth and the American dream that their only hope for change is the transforming power of the gospel? And if we do dream about that Manhattan neighborhood, are we hoping to catch up with the people in it, or liberate them from it?

We need people who will resolve to say, “Yes! I will succeed in my field and make LOTS of money. And instead of spending it on me and my family for our comfort and convenience, I’m going to invest it so that our neighbors, both here and around the world can flourish – so that they can be freed from oppression!”

Giving of our financial resources for the good of neighbors and the advancement of the gospel to the point that it causes us to move socially DOWNWARD is a life that is to pitied if Christ is not raised. Giving a little bit off the top and maintaining upward mobility is just social responsibility – that’s what corporations do. That’s not the radical generosity of Jesus. But the radical generosity of Jesus is what’s changing the world.

Listen to what Paul says to his young protégé Timothy (1 Tim 6:18-19):

“Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.”

He says, if people want to know what it means to take hold of life that is TRULY life, tell them to be rich not in possessions, but in good deeds, and be generous and willing to share. If they live the radical generosity of Jesus, they’ll start to know what it means to REALLY live life.


3) Serving – The way we use our time

Paul says there that if we want to live true life, we should be rich in good deeds. JR said two weeks ago in his message on community that the Christian life is deeply personal, but never private. Part of the way that’s it’s not private, is that we live it out before others. So when we’re exhorted to be rich in good deeds, over and over again we see in the scriptures that those good deeds are primarily benefit two people: the church, and the needy. Our time is as valuable as our money, probably more so. If we want to experience consequence and impact in our lives, we need to spend more of our time serving. In fact, that is the way of Jesus. He came as servant and said that we should therefore be servants too. That means serving inside the church for the benefit of other believers, and serving outside of the church for the benefit of those who need the gospel and need material resources.

These guys have been pointed out before, but since I serve under them I have a special appreciation for what they do. The guys who lead our load in and load out teams are a great example of what it means to experience cost in serving. They give up lots of sleep, time and energy to make sure that we have a place to meet and worship every week. They are a great example to us and a great example of consequential service.


In talking about each of these, I’ve been using a lot of “if’s”. IF I live this costly life, and IF Christ is not raised…
Now look at what Paul says in verse 20 of 1 Cor 15 – “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead!” This is great news! Because now all of our worries and fears, everything that causes us to tiptoe, to hedge our bets, and to insulate ourselves from risk or discomfort can be assuaged. Jesus has validated his promises to us and his commands for us by his resurrection.

Again, we’re not all called to be foreign missionaries or pastors. What this truth means is be a financial analyst! But be a Financial Analyst with such a passion for the kingdom of God to be made known here and now that your whole purpose and orientation are changed. BE an ACTRESS, but be an actress who lives not for the fame of your name, but for the fame of God’s name amongst this broken and needy world!



VII) How?


How do we begin to experience a life a consequence and a life of fullness?

One answer:
1) Embrace the Gospel-
We talk about the gospel every week here, but still this still might seem like a nebulous answer. Let me explain what I mean.

It’s really easy when talking about lives of consequence and costly living to get into a very legalistic mindset. It’s very easy for us to start thinking about what we have to do to achieve and attain this consequential life. But let’s be very clear: none of these things we do can win us the favor of God. The prophet Isaiah tells us that even our best, most noble deeds are like filthy rags, literally used menstrual cloths, before the holiness of God. If we live really good, really costly lives, it would surely impress the people around us. It’s because the people around us are sinful. But God is Holy! We won’t gain the acceptance of God by living costly lives. It’s because Christ lived a costly life that we’re able to gain acceptance before God. It’s out of that acceptance that we do likewise. In other words, we don’t do good things and give generously and pray earnestly so that God will love us; it’s because God does love us that we do those things.

It’s by accepting the fact that Jesus’ consequential life is the only reason we can stand before God, and putting our trust in Him, that we can ever have hope to live a truly consequential life ourself. We must embrace the gospel.

As we embrace the gospel, two things will happen:

1) We’ll start to Live by the Power of the Spirit-
In 2 Thes 1:11-12 -- SUMMARY

With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul is saying here that we must rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish the good works prompted by our faith. Not only that we must rely on the Spirit, but also that the Spirit will fulfill the purposes of God through us. It’s a cooperative action. God inspires in us the desire to do it, we must submit to that desire and work it out, and God, by His power accomplishes it.

2) We begin to have a bigger vision of God-
One of the main reasons that we don’t trust or desire God, is that our picture of him is too small. We fail to recognize God for his greatness and majesty.

Because the truth is, we’re willing to embrace sacrifice and cost for something we think is worthy right? We’re willing to count the cost and go forth anyway for something we think is truly great.

When I started dating Katy, I kept an unofficial ledger in my checkbook of how much money I spent on her. I knew that if we dated for a while, this was going to be costly. If she ended up marrying me, it would be a great investment. If she ended up dumping me, it would be squandered. So I wanted to know either way, how much I’d invested or how much I’d wasted. I was literally counting the cost – and I was happy to do so! I was happy to do so, because she was well worth the cost.

What we need is to realize that Jesus is worth it. That this King is worth sacrificing for.

In 331 B.C. Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army of 40,000 squared off against Emperor Darius and 250,000 Persians at the Battle of Guagamela. Despite being outnumbered 6 to 1, Alexander won that battle.

Historian Agnes Sevill attributes the Macedonian success in large part to the soldiers’ loyalty to Alexander. Listen to what Sevill says:

“Alexander was a hero to his army, revered and beloved because he had proven himself to be a captain of men who discounted danger, who overcame every obstacle and had always been victorious.”

Darius’ men however were largely conscripts from the various lands he had conquered. That had been captured in previous battles and forced to fight. When things during the battle got costly, they fled. They fled because they weren’t committed to the grandeur of their King – they didn’t care for him.

What we need to see is that Jesus, infinitely vmore so than Alexander or anyone else, is to be revered and loved, trusted because he has proven himself to be a captain who discounted danger and personal loss, who overcame every obstacle and achieved victory. He achieved victory even over death itself. And he is good. We can trust that King with our very lives.

So my hope and prayer for us is that as we leave here we’d recognize our deep, inborn desire to live a life of consequence. Further that we’d recognize that a life of Godly consequence is necessarily going to mean a life of Godly cost. That we’d begin to experience that cost and consequence in the areas of prayer, giving, worship and service. And that we’d understand that the only way to do that is by embracing the gospel of Jesus, living by the power of his Spirit and having an ever increasing vision for the glory of God!