Not Our Lives, but God’s Lives

Romans 12:1-8

12I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. 3For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

 

            A sixteen-year-old boy comes home after getting his driver’s license and goes straight to his dad and asks, “Dad, can I borrow the car for tonight?”

            The father says, “Not so fast, son.  First I need to see your grades improve, you need to clean your room, and I need you to get a hair cut.”

            A few weeks passed and the boy brought home his report card and proudly handed it to his father.  “Dad, I got straight A’s and my room is sparkling.  Can I borrow the car tonight?”

            “Not so fast,” says the father.  “You still haven’t gotten a haircut.” 

            Thinking quickly the boy said, “But dad, Jesus had long hair.”

            “That’s true,” said the father.  “And Jesus walked everywhere he went, too.”

            Hopefully it is obvious that when it comes to being a Christian, the length of your hair doesn’t matter at all.  But as followers of Jesus Christ and as redeemed people working for the redemption of the world, there are certain things that we are expected to do with the lives that God has given to us.  Today I want to look at Romans 12:1-8 and look at three different expectations of those that are following Christ daily.  I want to look at Our Changed Lives, Our Humble Lives, and Our Gifted Lives.

Our Changed lives

            Our scripture for this morning begins with Paul encouraging the Roman Christians to present their bodies as living sacrifices.  Sacrifices made to God were common in the first century, not only in Judaism, but in other religions as well.  When they made sacrifices to God, they didn’t give God something that they didn’t need or want anymore.  It was always something valuable like the prize bull or lamb, finest grain, and so on.  If they were giving something to God that they really didn’t want anymore then I guess it would really be a sacrifice, now would it?

So Paul is encouraging the Romans to offer their bodies to God as a living sacrifice.  What Paul is saying is for the Romans to give their all to God.  Don’t hold back anything.  Don’t just give God what you no longer need.  Give him your body, your soul, your entire life.

I like the way Rick Warren talks about living sacrifices.  He asks the question “What’s wrong with living sacrifices?  They keep crawling off the altar.”  How many of us are guilty of this?  We offer our bodies, we offer our minds, souls, all of our being to God one day, only to take that offering back?  I hope you kept your receipt when you gave your body to God as a living sacrifice because you might want a refund.

            This is especially sad because we all do it.  We make a commitment to following Christ, and maybe we stick with it for a while.  A day, a week, a month, a year go by.  And then something “better” comes along and we crawl right off that altar.  We take that offering back from God.  And we don’t even try to justify it with God.  We don’t even say, “Oh, I was just joking.”  Or, “That was before I got this really sweet job offer making a bunch of money.”  Or whatever our excuse could be.  No, we just take back the lives that we gave to God.

            When we offer our bodies and our lives up to God as a living sacrifice, it is to be a life-long commitment to following and serving God.  Our desires for temporary and monetary satisfaction, our greed, lust, envy, yeah, they don’t go away, but we learn to fight and defeat those temptations because how we live as Christians matters.  Sure, we are saved by grace, but our faithfulness to Christ matters as well.  Believe me, I know that it can be hard, maybe even downright impossible to live a life anything close to the one that Jesus lived as an example.  Loving our enemies, forgiving others, caring for the poor and the least of these takes work.  And it is so opposite of the pursuit of the American Dream that every person is told that they are to put first.  This quest for money and power that our society seems to thirst and hunger for are so far from what Jesus calls us to.  And that is why Paul encourages the Roman Christians, and I would say us today, to not be conformed to the ways of the world, but to be transformed to the will of God.

            When I first really dedicated myself to serving the Lord, I found it very difficult because I was very much conformed to the ways of the world.  I was motivated by money, power, and fame.  And believe me, there are still plenty of worldly temptations out there that cause me to stumble to this day. 

            Furthermore, who has time to sit down and read the Bible and pray every day?  Who has enough money to live off only 90% of their income and give (at least) 10% to those in need?  Stop gossiping?  Buy fairly traded goods?  Live simply?  When I made the decision to follow and serve Christ I knew that it was a commitment that I should not take lightly because there were a lot of things in this world that I enjoyed being conformed to and that they would be difficult to change in my life.  So how did I go about it?

            I think a story is appropriate here.  Our back yard is extremely shaded.  There is row of about eight pine trees on my neighbor’s property that boarders our yard that casts a large shadow across our back yard most of the day.  This row of trees and the shade that it makes has dictated where I put my garden, what perennials I can grow, and how well (or how poorly) the grass grows in my back yard. 

            A few weeks ago my neighbor asked me if I would be able to help him take down the first tree in this row of trees.  It was the largest of the trees, by far.  He wanted to cut it down because it was overcoming the other trees, and it was leaning pretty severely toward my property.  So he thought that it would be best to cut the tree down before it fell down and caused some major damage.

            So this past Tuesday we began cutting down that big, old pine.  And how do you take down a big pine?  Do you just start chopping at the base of the tree?  If we were to just start chopping, we would have little control over where the thing fell.  It might have fallen into the fence, into my garden, or onto a smaller tree and caused significant damage (just the thing we were trying to avoid by cutting it down!).

            No, we started by cutting off many of the limbs.  Some were small limbs that came off with little effort.  Others were larger limbs that were a little dangerous and took a little more work and a little more planning.  Then we started to cut off the top of the tree.  And this was the part that scared me the most.  But my neighbor, a seasoned woodsman, dropped the top of the tree right where he had wanted it.  Then he cut the trunk of the tree into a number of smaller, more manageable sections.  Then once on the ground, we cut those sections up into more manageable sections and carried them off to be ground up into next year’s mulch.

            Our lives as living sacrifices, being not conformed to the ways of the world but being transformed to the will of God is a lot like cutting down that old pine.  We know that if we don’t do something about it, that our lives will eventually fall and cause damage.  Damage to our own lives and the lives of others.

            But it is scary to think of changing your life!  It is a daunting task, intimidating even.  And I believe that is why I was so slow to make a commitment to God in the first place.  I looked at the long list of “To Do’s” and “Not To Do’s” and the expectations were just too much for me.

            But it doesn’t have to be like this.  The good news, like with the cutting down of the old pine tree, is that you don’t have to do it on your own.  That is one of the greatest things about the church.  The church is a group of people that meets regularly to worship God and to care for one another.  And when there are others available, it makes these life changes seem more doable.  And we also have the Holy Spirit working within us to change our hearts.  So we don’t ever have to feel like we are doing it all on our own.

Also, like cutting down that old pine, we don’t need to do it all in one swift cut at the base of the tree.  We disassemble our lives that are conformed to the ways of the world piece by piece, limb by limb, into manageable sections.  Start praying daily.  Work on forgiving others.  Join a Bible study in a few weeks.  Start giving to those in need.  Practice hospitality.  And if you do these things in manageable sections, you will find yourself living a changed life.  You will become a living sacrifice, no longer conformed to the ways of the world.

Our Humble Lives

            Paul goes on to write that a part of being changed people is that we are to be humble.  In verse three he writes, “3For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.”

            Paul never says that we are to think poorly of ourselves, but we are not to think too highly of ourselves, either.  Paul isn’t saying that we shouldn’t have self confidence, that we shouldn’t be bold for Christ.  What Paul is saying is that each and every one of us has an equal amount of worth in the eyes of God.  Whether you are the president of the United States, the homeless man living on the street corner, the CEO of Kraft Food, or an out of work father each person, each living soul is worth the same to God.  What Paul is talking about here isn’t just humility, it is about equality.

Our Gifted Lives

            So Paul tells us that we are to lead changed and humble lives, lives that he will go on to explain further in the rest of chapter 12.  But between this charge to live lives fully committed to God as living sacrifices, giving an example of a changed life being a humble life, Paul launches into this section on giftedness.  Paul writes in verses 4-8, “4For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.”

            Paul begins by using his famous metaphor for the church: a body.  And that metaphor applies just as well today as it did in Paul’s day.  Each of us is different, and each of us is important.  Without even one of us, the body would be less and would suffer because of it.  Whether we are gifted to prophesy, minister, teach, exhort, give generously, to lead, or to be compassionate, we are to use these gifts for the glory of God.

            And we must remember that anytime we see a list of Spiritual Gifts in the Bible that this is not an exhaustive list.  Not every Spiritual Gift is listed here.  I believe all of the things that we are talented at or good at is a gift from God.  The Psalmist writes in Psalm 139:13, “¹³For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  And a knitter knows the thread that they are using!  Psalm 139 is all about how God knows us inside and out, top to bottom.  “Oh Lord you have searched me and know me.”  Of course God knows you and your giftedness…God made you.

            Perhaps the most difficult part of using our Spiritual Gifts is to figure out what they are.  Especially after we are told that we are to be humble.  Okay, so we are told “don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought to think.”  But then we are told that we are given these gifts and that we are expected to use them to glorify God.  So if God had given me the gift of music, should I volunteer to sing a solo at church next week?  That has never been my style because this doesn’t seem very humble to me.  To say, “Hey, you will all benefit from me singing a solo” seems like I am a little on the other side of humble. 

            This is where the Barnabases in the church come into play.  The contemporary of Paul named Barnabas was given that name because it means, “son of encouragement.”  We need to be sons and daughters of encouragement to help people discern their giftedness and how they can use that giftedness for God’s church.  Every year we have a group called the Gifts Discernment Committee that meets to select people for various roles in the church including people that help plan worship, Sunday School teachers and administrators, and fellowship committees.  The job of the Gifts Discernment Committee is to see these giftednesses in other people and encouraging them to fulfill specific roles for the church.

            But this is tough to do sometimes.  I know that sometimes it is difficult when you feel strongly led to serve God in a specific role.  A friend of mine named Richard is now 90 years old and a retired pastor.  He felt a call to ministry at a young age, but it wasn’t until he was (I believe) in his forties that he started his first pastorate.

            He had grown up in a system that selected its church leaders by the lot.  Different churches do this differently, but the way I understand the lot is that two or three possible pastors are nominated from the congregation.  Then there are three Bibles placed on a table, one of which has some sort of marker in it.  The location of the marker is unknown by those who have been nominated.  They then each pick up a Bible.  The person that chooses the Bible with the marker in it becomes the new pastor.  (This process differs from denomination to denomination, but the point is that God will choose the right person for the job through what seems to be mere chance.)

            So Richard felt the call to ministry at a young age, but you didn’t dare say in those days that you felt called to the ministry.  That would be prideful.  If God wanted you in the ministry he would call you through the lot.  I think that Richard and the church missed out on twenty-some years of professional ministry because Richard was not able to voice his personal call to use the gifts that God had given to him.

            So where do we find middle ground?  How can we announce that we feel led to serve God in a certain way without boasting in our giftedness?  I believe that we need to test what we believe to be our giftedness with what other people believe to be our giftedness.

            A person from the denomination office shared me one day that she would often get people coming to her office saying that they felt called to pastoral ministry.  Her answer was always, “Great, who else says so?”

            When we feel called to use what we perceive to be our gifts, it is helpful to have other people encourage us to use those gifts as well.  Go to someone and ask them to pray for you, ask them their opinion to see if they see that giftedness in you.  Balancing a humble attitude and using our Spiritual Gifts doesn’t need to be a difficult task. 

            So we are called to live lives different from the world around us, lives conformed not to the ways of the world but lives conformed to Christ himself.  Those lives are to be humble lives, not considering ourselves better than others, but seeing all people through the eyes of God as equals.  And we are to humbly discern how we can use the gifts that God has given to us to glorify God.  Because the lives that we have been given are not our lives at all.  They are God’s lives.  That’s what being a living sacrifice is all about.

Now it makes sense

Kevin Gasser

Staunton Mennonite Church

3/23/08

 

Mark 16:1-8 (NIV)

 

1When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

 4But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

 6″Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

 8Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

 

Thesis: None of the New Testament’s witness makes any sense unless the community is vindicated by the resurrection of the dead (pg. 338 Hays).

 

            Over the last three Sundays, you have seen me progressively get rougher looking.  My hair was cut short and my beard has been growing out.  I have lovingly been called “grizzly” and “grungy” by people in this congregation. 

            Now nobody ever asked me why I was putting myself through such a metamorphosis.  You simply accepted me, as grizzled and grungy as I appeared, and welcomed me.  And I appreciate that.  Especially since we as Christians need to be accepting of all people, no matter how they look or smell, even when they look different from us.  We are all created in the image of God, though some of us might be slightly more distorted images of God than others.

            Now I do have a reason for my exceptionally grizzled look over the last three weeks.  If I never told you that, you probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it.  You probably would have forgotten that rough looking guy that preached a few Sundays in Lent.  But now I am going to tell you that there is more to the story.

            Through Lent, we have witnessed the worship leader nailing a black piece of paper to the cross every week.  These black pieces of paper, which represented our sins, accumulated over the weeks.  Then, last Sunday everyone had the opportunity to nail their sins to the cross.  And it was covered from top to bottom.  It was a black out.  Our sins dominated the landscape.  Now this week, all of those sins are gone.  The cross is now cleared of all of those sins, and it has been made white as snow.

            As the black papers accumulated on the cross, I grew progressively grungier as well.  The whiskers grew out and thicker week by week.  I probably showered less frequently than I should have, and I chose to only wear dark colors.  Now, here today I stand clean cut and shaven, washed and made new again.

            Probably everyone here would have missed out on that message if I hadn’t disclosed this information to you this morning.  You would have just forgotten about my grunginess in a week or two.  But now you see the significance in what I was doing.  I was trying to show you something symbolically.  There is a cleansing, an atonement that makes us right with God again.  And the medium for that atonement is the cross.  The method for that atonement is crucifixion.  And the source of that atonement is Jesus Christ.

            Like my frequently changing styles, we have all done things that don’t make sense to many others.  Now there are things that are just bad decisions that we make that really never make sense and there are choices that we make that only make sense to others when we explain it to them.  Over that last few weeks I have been talking about the counter cultural nature of Christianity, the way that Christians are called to do things differently from the world around us.  I have spoken of how we as Christians are called to do things that don’t make sense to the rest of the world.  And today I would like to share with you why these things do make sense for those of us living on this side of Easter Sunday.  Because they only make sense in light of the resurrection.  Like my progressive grunginess, it only makes sense when you have the whole story.

            Our text for today speaks about the first Easter morning.  Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James (and Jesus?), and Salome are said by Mark to be going to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body.  Jesus had died on a Friday, the next day was the Sabbath, and it was early on the first day of the week when they had their first opportunity to go to Jesus’ grave to perform this duty.  And as they are walking, they become very pragmatic, asking, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?”

            But when they got to the tomb, they find that the stone has already been rolled away.  They walk into the tomb to find, not Jesus, but a young man dressed in white.  And this young man in white proceeds to tell the ladies, “Jesus, who was crucified, is not here.  He has risen.  Go and tell the disciples (and Peter) to meet him at Galilee.”

            And then we come to something that is somewhat problematic.  Verse eight says, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  Why is that problematic?  Well, originally the gospel of Mark ended with verse 8 and according to Mark, nobody else witnessed the empty tomb.  So if these ladies did not tell anyone else, then how did Mark find out?  How did we find out?

            I wonder sometimes what would have happened if they truly would not have told anyone else.  What if nobody had witnessed the resurrected Jesus?  What if the burial of Jesus was the end of the story?  Would the story have died with Jesus and his disciples?  Would we even know the name “Jesus” today? 

If I say the name Judas Maccabaeus, could you tell me who he was?  Does that name ring a bell?  What about Simon bar Kochba?  I would guess that most of us have never even heard of these men.  They are both very important people in Jewish history, but not really so much in Christian history.  Both were very influential people, both had a strong following.  Both were thought to be the messiah during their time and date, one coming before Jesus and one after.  But what happened to these two men?  They both died, they were killed by the Greek and Roman leaders, respectively.  And if they were resurrected, we don’t have any text today that shows this.  So if they were resurrected, and someone did witness this, then those witnesses, unlike the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, truly told no one.

I tell you the stories of Judas Maccabaeus and Simon bar Kochba to make the point that someone said something that first Easter Sunday.  Someone told of Jesus’ resurrection.  If they hadn’t, he might have gone down in history next to these two other men that we seem to know so little about.  If the Mary’s and Salome hadn’t witnessed to his resurrection, the story of Jesus would have probably died with him or been nothing more to us than a little line in the history books about some counter cultural leader in Palestine in the first century that made a bunch of statements about how the law of Moses was not being lived out properly and how God’s people needed to step it up a bit. 

But the word got out.  The women did not keep the resurrection a secret.  They told others and then those people told others and the word spread exponentially.  Eventually people started writing things down about what Jesus had told them, they began to record the things that he had said so that it could be passed on to others who were not there in person.  And they began to realize that these things that were confusing, these things that didn’t make sense to them at the time when Jesus said them, only make sense now.  Now that they know that Jesus is not dead, these things make sense.  Now that we are given the assurance that all those who are in Christ will rise with him, these tough sayings become intelligible.

Jesus said things like “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder’, but I say to that if you are angry with a brother or sister you are liable to judgment.  You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  You have heard it said ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’  But I say to you, Do not resist an evil doer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; if anyone wants to take your coat, give them your cloak as well, if anyone forces you to go a mile, go with them a second mile.  You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Paraphrase from Matthew 5:21-48)

This isn’t the way the world works!  The meek shall inherit the earth?  That is wrong, the strong will inherit the earth.  The powerful will inherit the earth.  The one with the biggest guns and the biggest bombs and the biggest bank account will inherit the earth.  That is what the culture around us is teaching us.  But that isn’t what Jesus says.  And what Jesus has taught us only makes sense now that we know about the resurrection.  Many of the teachings of Jesus only make sense with the promise of a new creation.

To illustrate this, I think it is appropriate to retell a story that we are all probably familiar with.  On October 2, 2006, a 32-year-old milk truck driver named Charles Roberts entered a one room Amish school house in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, taking 10 students hostage.  Their ages ranged from 6-years-old to 13.  After a boarding up the door and windows, Roberts began shooting the girls execution style, from point blank range in the back of the head.  A coroner from Lancaster County said, “there was not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere, everywhere.”

Five of the girls died on the spot or soon after.  The five other victims survived, though one, six-year-old Rosanna King, survives today in a wheel chair, being fed through a feeding tube, unable to communicate verbally.  Roberts also took his own life that morning.

This is a story that we are all familiar with.  It blanketed the news for days after the event took place.  Books are still being published about the shootings at Nickel Mines almost 18 months later.  But as I was preparing for today, and even this morning as I stand here preaching this message, I find myself getting angry.  How could someone do such a thing to these young, innocent girls?  What did they ever do to Charles Roberts?  And when you hear about the things he thought about doing to these girls, it just makes me sick.  And the worldly side of me kicks in and I begin to think, “It is too bad that Charles Roberts took his own life, because he would have gotten what he deserves in jail.  He would have been harassed by the other inmates and he probably would have gotten some sort of extreme punishment from the courts.”

But what happened?  While much of the world thinks of ways to pay back evil with evil, what was the response of the Amish community?  They forgave Charles Roberts for his offense.  They reached out to his family.  One Amish man is said to have held Charles Roberts’ father in his arms as they wept together for an hour.  The grandfather of one of the murdered girls was quick to remind others that they must not think evil of this man.  Charles Roberts left behind a wife, children, and parents as well.  All of them needed to grieve this terrible tragedy, too.  And the family of Charles Roberts has been able to do so with the grace and forgiveness offered to them by the Amish community.

Jesus said in Matthew 5:43, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father I heaven.”  The teachings of Jesus, the forgiving nature of the Amish community don’t make sense in the world we live.  We want vengeance, we want people to pay for what they have done to us.  Baking bread and cookies for the wife of the man who just shot 10 little girls is probably the last thing on most people’s minds.  But we are called to live a counter cultural life, different from the world around us.

The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 12:2, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”  I think it is safe to say that the Amish community has taken this passage to heart in many ways.  And so often all that the people of the world around them see is the lack of conformity in clothes, cars, and electricity.  What people don’t see is the second part of the verse.  We are not to become conformed to the patterns of this world, but rather we are to be transformed by Christ.

Now I don’t think that we need to go as far as the Amish do when we seek to not become conformed to the patterns of this world, but I also think that it is clear that the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul teach us that we are not supposed to be like the rest of the world, either.  We are to be a city on a hill that cannot be hid.  We are to stand out from the rest of the world.  And they will know us by our refusal to repay and eye for an eye, they will know us when we turn the other cheek and go the extra mile.  They will know us as followers of Jesus Christ.

As I began this message, I said that sometimes things just don’t make sense to us until we have the entire story.  And the teachings of Jesus just don’t make sense to most people.  Like Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:18 “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.”  But that is not the entire story.  There is more.  Paul goes on to say, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

So as we go from this place today, let us think about that first Easter morning when the Mary’s and Salome found the tomb to be empty.  They were so afraid that they didn’t tell anyone what they had found.  Imagine what the world would be like if they hadn’t found the courage to share that message.  Let us be glad they found the courage to share this message with other, and may we find the courage to do the same.