Cardio Burn

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon
Sunday, November 20, 2011

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

We all have 168. We can’t have any more, and we can’t give any back. We have 168 hours at the beginning of the week. How do we use them? Everyone has their own way of using their time. Everybody has to sleep but some decide to sleep a little bit more. Everybody has to work but some people decide to work a little bit more. Everybody has to eat but sometimes people eat a little bit more.

How we use those 168 hours is completely up to you. There’s no blueprint for the way in which we’re supposed to use these 168 hours. But how do you use them?

We’ve been looking at the last two weeks in this stewardship series about looking at everything as a gift from God. We see that every portion of our life, God has put those things into our lives and now He calls for us to manage them well. It’s not always an easy concept, especially in our culture and environment. We do like to call everything ours. “I work for it.” “I spent time on it. It’s mine.” Why would I want to call something that I made, that I did, that I built, why would I want to call it somebody else’s?

The more we struggle with this concept, the more we look in Scripture and find that God is clear. Everything we have, our possessions, even our time, is a gift from Him.

Time we know is very fragile, but time is one of those unique things because it’s different from all the rest of the commodities, all the rest of the possessions. When it comes to money, if we make a poor decision, if we lose a possession, if we do something, we can go and get another job and get some more money. We can make up for the poor choices we’ve made. We can almost go back as if it wasn’t ever made in the first place.

But with time, we can’t ever go back. We can’t get it back. If we’ve made a poor decision, we can’t say, “Well, I’d just like to have that time back.” We can’t have it back. It’s gone. We have the 168 hours and we say that sometimes it’s used in a positive way. Sometimes it’s wasted. We always know that time is precious. We realize that time is the greatest commodity. I even remember just talking with people who have grown children and when I spend time with my own, they say, “Well, make sure you cherish those times because they’re going to go away soon. It will be almost like you never even realized they were there because the time flies by so quickly. Cherish the time that you have.” You’ve heard that before.

God is very clear on time, too, even though He Himself is above space and time. He knows that we’re in the midst of time, that we put time as a constraint. But listen to some of these passages of Scripture that give us a good idea of where God is on the idea of time. Listen to the psalmist in Psalm 90:10, “The years of our life are 70 or even by reason of strength 80, yet their span is but toil and trouble.” And then in Verse 12, what he says is, “So teach me to number my days that I may get a heart of wisdom.” So he’s saying time is important. Time, if we grasp it right, if we understand it, it is short. But if we can gain a heart of wisdom, we can understand that time can be used in a positive way because God Himself knows that time can be wasted.

Listen to Paul’s letter that he writes to the Ephesians 5:15, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the very best use of your time because the days are evil. Therefore, don’t be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is.” There is an opportunity for us, that we know time is out there, that time is going to go by whether we like it or not. But there are those things in Scripture that he points out and he says, “You know, there are those places that will eat your time.” The days aren’t necessarily evil, but there are things in your life that can start to eat up your time, that can waste your time.

So what are the things in your life right now, the places where you’d say, “I’m really wasting a lot of time on this. It’s just eating up my schedule.” Things like the television that just kind of sucks you in. You watch a show and then, “Well, that show looks good, too. I’m going to watch that one.” And then you watch another one and another one and, all of a sudden, what happens? Time has been consumed.

Maybe it’s not the television. Maybe it’s technology. People can easily get consumed by the things of technology. You go on Facebook and it seems like you’ve only been on there a couple of minutes and it’s turned into hours. There are things that consume our time and not always in a positive way. We have to be careful about what it is and the way we’re using our time because we know that it’s precious.

But in both of these verses, in both Psalm 90 and in Ephesians, it says, “So we should try to figure out how to use time because we want to know the will of the Lord.” We want to know what it is to have wisdom concerning these things. And so we look to Scripture to find the life of significance. We want to live a life of significance because Jesus Himself when He came to the earth, He said, “I have come to bring them life and not just any life, not just a mediocre life, but a life so they could have it to the fullest.”

What is that life to the fullest? What is the life of significance? That’s hard to define because, in our culture, we don’t have a set way of saying, “Well, you know what’s significant for you is not significant for me.” There’s a way around that because what we find is that we have to define significance not by what we believe to be right or true, but what God believes to be right and true.

I want to take you back to the passage in Matthew that we heard just a little bit ago, Matthew 9. This will be our journey to find what this life of significance will look like. In Chapter 9:35, “Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages teaching in the synagogues, proclaiming the gospel and healing every disease and affliction, but when He saw the crowds, He had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers.’” What’s going on in the passage, Jesus Himself is going out doing the work that He’s always done. He’s proclaiming the Good News. He’s preaching to the poor, to the broken. He’s healing every affliction and every disease but what happens is He comes across another set of brokenness because the world is full of it and He sees these people and He says, “More needs,” and He has compassion on them.

But He starts to look around and He says, “There’s a ton of stuff to get done. Look how plentiful the harvest is and yet there are not enough workers. Praise to the Lord of the harvest that He will send people out here to work this harvest because it’s ripe and plentiful.” But what happens when Jesus speaks? Things get done because what we find right after this passage in the beginning of Chapter 10, it says, “And He called the twelve disciples to Himself and He gave them authority over every unclean spirit to cast them out, to heal every disease and every affliction.” It was these disciples who heard the voice of their Lord. They said, “The harvest is ripe. Now He’s going to send us out and do the same things that He was doing, preaching and proclaiming, healing every affliction.”

You see what happens when the Lord calls us into service. He’s calling us to serve a people who are outside of us. A life is significant. It starts in the service process. You’re able to say, “How can I change my mentality to not say, ‘How can I serve me?’ but how can I serve anybody else? How can I serve my neighbor?”

What Jesus follows up with after He calls each disciple by name, “Then the twelve disciples He sent out instructing them, ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, enter no town of the Samaritans.’” Now I’m taking a little bit of an interpretation for us today, not necessarily that the disciples would have known of this when Jesus spoke it, but the interpretation that comes to us is saying, so did Jesus not care about the Gentiles or the Samaritans? No, He did. He said, “We’re going to get to them later.” He said, “Where I want you disciples to start is with the people who you know, the people who you’re familiar with, the people who you’re around every single day. Start there.”

And so this life of significance that Jesus has called every Christian to starts with the very circles that we are familiar with. It starts when we serve our families, we serve our professions, we serve our communities and we serve our church. The life of significance is the calling first and foremost that Jesus says, “I have called you to something bigger.” This life of significance starts when we say, “So where do we start? How do we start to see the need?” So we say, “Let’s start with the people who are right in front of us.”

This past week at Junior High Small Group, I have a group of Junior High kids, both 7th and 8th Grades and we started talking about this whole idea of using gifts and talents in a way that we can start to serve and I said, “So who are you going to serve?” And they’re thinking, “Well, let’s go to the poor.” I said, “It’s great that you’re thinking about that, but I want you to think about the people who you wake up everyday and see. I want you to think about when you wake up in the morning, who has breakfast ready for you? I want you to be able to think about how you can start to serve your family because those are the people you’re going to see everyday.”

Now when we look at it, some people would say, “I don’t have family in the area.” Well, who do you see everyday? Who are the people who are around you? This isn’t just Mom and Dad, but this is kids. Kids, how can we start to be able to say, “How can I serve my family?” Maybe it’s by not bickering all the time. Maybe it’s by not saying, “You know what, I don’t want to do another chore.” How can I serve you?

There was an instance, because this is a very difficult one, it’s one that often gets neglected. My son was sitting with me about two weeks ago. I was sitting with him where we usually go in and we pray together before he goes to sleep. After we had said our prayer, he kind of said, “Dad, how come you’re not home more?” Right off the bat, I was almost defensive, “You know, Son, I have the church and the church is very important and there are some times I have to be gone at night because that’s when people have a chance to meet.” And I went into this whole kind of explanation about why I wasn’t there for him. And yet, here it is he’s looking at me and he just says, “Okay, Dad,” like he knew what I was talking about. It’s often times we find that the ones who are right next to us are the ones we neglect the most, the ones that we’d be able to say, “How can I serve you? How can I help you?”

In our families, the people we see everyday are the ones who God puts in our lives. How can we start to serve where we are with the people we see everyday? I want to start to teach my children good habits, good habits of being able to say, “I do want to spend this time with you and I don’t want to have anything else that’s distracting me.” It’s an opportunity for us to be able to say, “How can we serve those people?”

The next place, when we look at this life of significance, is to start to serve in our profession. Now our professions can be seen in a wide area. Where has God placed you right now and in what position are you in? I would say kids themselves, being in school, that’s your profession. That’s where God’s placed you right now. Maybe you’re a homemaker and you say, “Well, that’s where God has put me right now to use my gifts and my talents.” Maybe you’re in the marketplace and the workplace. That’s where God has placed you. So how can we start to look at serving in our profession?

We look at first and foremost the idea that God has given us the skills and the talents to do what we’re doing. Now when we say, “I’m going to serve in my profession,” the first thing we do is we do everything to the glory of God. Now that doesn’t mean we walk around the office or the house or at school yelling and screaming, “Jesus loves you! Jesus loves you!” It would be okay if you did that and it’s true, but we need to think about what it means to serve right there in our own places where God has put us.

When we serve, we do everything to the best of our ability, knowing that it’s a gift from God. But after that, we say, “Alright, when we’re doing everything to the glory of God, we also don’t neglect the people God has put in our lives.” Those people that work with us, maybe if you’re a homemaker, maybe it’s your children, maybe it’s other children that you come in contact with; at school, maybe it’s a set of friends who are around you, God has put individuals in your lives and it’s not by accident. You have to start to figure out, “Why are these people in my life? How is it that I can build a relationship with them?” That’s first and foremost because a relationship then gives you the opportunity later on to share a word of encouragement, to offer up a prayer. When we start to serve in our professions, God opens doors.

God also says in this life of significance that we should start serving in our communities. I go back to the early church many times to be able to see what is it they have done? What were they doing in that early church that was significant? They weren’t just in their towns and villages secluding themselves and not being around anybody else. They went into the marketplaces. They started to effect change within their culture, not by just words they spoke but by actions they were doing.

So how do we start to serve our communities? How do we start to make an active presence amongst the people of our community? At Gloria Dei, we do some things around here that help out the Food Pantry right here in Urbandale. The Food Pantry continues to grow in numbers as the economy gets worse. The people continue to flood into the Food Pantry, week after week. I just talked to the coordinator this past Tuesday. She said there was some food that was delivered to them and it was a week’s worth of food. She said it was gone in a day. She said there seems to be more people and more people and, as we enter into the holiday season, we try to find out what it is they need. But we do a part here at Gloria Dei. We spend time and we spend money to be able to help out the Food Pantry and be able to make an inroad into our community.

I believe God has called all of us as individuals to those places. Where is He calling you to? In this life of significance, we also say God calls us to serve our church, to serve the place where we worship. We’re entering into some big things, as Pastor Burcham talked about last week in his message when he was talking about investing, investing in people and opportunities. There are a lot of things and a lot of change that goes into the hearts of people, not because anything of what we do individually but because of what God is doing here.

When we spend time and we spend money in this place, we find that it’s an investment in people who we know and people who God is going to put in our path later on. It’s an investment in a people that we don’t even know yet, that we can start to look at in the future and say, “God is going to do something special.”

Just as Jesus, though, was walking along in the towns and villages and He was working day after day after day, healing, proclaiming the Good News, He still looked around and He said, “There’s so much.” Even as God Himself, He could have done it in a different way. He could have snapped His fingers and made it happen, but He called those disciples into work, to use their time and their skills in an appropriate way.

We at Gloria Dei can never move forward unless we have people who are on board with the vision and the mission of Gloria Dei. We can’t even go into a next step or a next process unless we know that people are going to be with us, in order that they’re going to give of their time and their talents and their treasures.

A life of significance is a life of service. When we use our time in ways that God has pointed out to us and when we serve our families, we serve our professions, we serve our communities and we serve our church, it’s when time is used to its utmost. We can start to say, “I want to live a life of significance. I want to live the way that God has called me to live. I want to look at everything that I have as a gift of His and I want to be a smart manager of it.”

We can start. We can start today and see that there’s a life of significance and not a life of mediocrity that’s ahead of us. Amen.