Seeking First God's Kingdom with Our Lives
Dr. David M. Hughes, Pastor First Baptist Church, Winston Salem, NC, and CBF Coordinating Council Alumni
January 28, 2007
SEEKING FIRST GOD’S KINGDOM WITH OUR LIVES
Colossians 1:3-4, 9-12; 3:17
Alfred Nobel dropped the newspaper and put his head in his hands. It was 1888. Nobel was a Swiss chemist who made his fortune inventing and producing dynamite. His brother Ludwig had died in France.
But now Alfred’s grief was compounded by dismay. He’d just read an obituary in a French newspaper—not his brother’s obituary, but his! An editor had confused the brothers. The headline read, “The Merchant of Death is Dead.” Alfred Nobel’s obituary described a man who had gotten rich by helping people kill one another.
Shaken by this appraisal of his life, Nobel resolved to use his wealth to change his legacy. When he died eight years later, he left more than $9 million to fund awards to those whose work benefited humanity. The awards came to be known as the Nobel Prizes.
As Randy Alcorn recounts this story in his book, The Treasure Principle, he observes that Alfred Nobel had an opportunity few of us ever have—to read his obituary and then make a significant course correction of his life. The fact is, many of us will never reflect that intensely about our lives until it’s too late.
Alcorn speculates that five minutes after we die, we’ll know exactly how we should have lived. We’ll see clearly how much of our lives was wasted or misdirected. Five minutes after we die, what will we wish we had done differently? Alcorn proposes the following exercise to help us think this through. Sit down, he says, and write out your obituary as it would currently read. Record what people will likely remember about you. Then, after you read and reflect on obituary number one, write obituary number two. Only this time, write your obituary from the perspective of heaven. Describe a Christ-centered life that expresses God’s purposes for you. Then, beginning today, make the changes you need to live out that life.
Wow! This is challenging stuff to work through on a Sunday morning at church. But it’s exactly the kind of spiritual heavy lifting I want us to do today as I conclude my “Seeking God’s Kingdom First” stewardship sermon series.
We’ve devoted the month of January to thinking about what it would mean to follow the mandate Jesus lays out in his Sermon on the Mount when he says, Seek first (God’s) kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things (our material needs) will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:33). We’ve asked, “What does it mean to honor God with our physical bodies? What does it mean to give God the first fruits of our money? What does it mean to be good stewards of our gifts and talents?”
Today, as we begin returning our “Seeking God’s Kingdom First” commitment cards, we ask the most sweeping question of all: “What does it mean to seek first God’s kingdom with my very life?”
Now this is a tough question for many reasons, not the least of which is it forces us to deal with a stubborn fact of life—life is short. Thousands of years ago, King David reflected on the brevity of life in Psalm 39: Show me, Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure (vv. 4-5).
We don’t like to think our days are numbered, but it’s true. If you live to be 77, the average life expectancy now in the United States, your days will number 28,105. That sounds like a long time, until you’ve lived almost 20,000 days, as I have. In fact, even people younger than I don’t have as much time as they think. Some time management guru figured out that if you are 35 years old, you only have 500 days to live, after you subtract all the time you’ll need to eat, sleep, work, run errands, commute and do personal hygiene. We get in our routines and rhythms of life, and before we know it more of life is behind us than before us.
Because life is so short, the Bible says wasting what little time we have is a tragedy. Because he spent considerable time on death row, the Apostle Paul knew better than most that he was living on borrowed time, that each day could be his last. That’s why he says emphatically in Ephesians 5:16, Make the most of every opportunity.
But the truth is, few of us follow through on this as well as Paul. Some of us waste time because we’re lazy. Our goal in life is to just get by and hope everything works out in the end. Others of us coast through life because we’re too afraid to risk any thing, so we sit tight and pray nothing goes wrong. Whether we’re lazy or afraid, we’re guilty of the great sin of unrealized potential.
Others of us are living life with great intensity, but still missing the point. We’re engaged in a decadent lifestyle that’s devoted to pleasuring ourselves. Or we’re obsessed with trivial pursuits and fruitless arguments that won’t ultimately matter. Or we’re working ourselves to death to accumulate great fortunes of wealth that we will leave behind the day we die. The fact is, we can be extremely successful by this world’s standards and still squander this great opportunity called life.
And we can rest assured, says scripture, that we will be held accountable for what we’ve done with our lives. Paul writes in Romans 14:12 that we will all give an account of ourselves to God. Rick Warren speculates that on that day of judgment we’ll be asked two questions by God: What did you do with my Jesus? And what did you do with the life I gave you?
Paul is bound and determined to help us understand how to make the most of our lives…before we die. And today, we would do well to heed his advice as we seek to make the most of our time here on this earth.
The first step in making the most of our time, says Paul, is to know God’s will. Paul makes this abundantly clear in his letter to the Colossians when he describes how he and his associate Timothy are praying for them. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you might live a life worthy of the Lord.
What is our goal in life? If you asked Paul question, he’d answer without hesitation--to live a life worthy of the Lord. And there is no way to do that apart from being very clear about God’s will and purpose for your life.
Years ago I remember reading a book that said, “It’s not enough to be climbing the ladder in life because your ladder may be leaning against the wrong wall.” Alfred Nobel learned that lesson the hard way. He found himself atop the ladder of success acquired by inventing a weapon used to kill people, and he was appalled. It’s not enough to be intently focused and time-efficient in life, if your intensity and efficiency are focused in the wrong direction.
Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do…to find the idea for which I can live and die.” Let me ask you today—have you discovered the idea for which you can live and die? Do you know what it is God really wishes you to do?
George Bernard Shaw put it this way. “This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” Let me ask you today—are you a feverish clot of ailments, or a force of nature, being used up for a mighty purpose?
You were not created to piddle your life away in trivial pursuits. You were made by God for God. Your overarching purpose in life, says Jesus is to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, trusting God to give you everything you need to fulfill that commitment. Specifically, how do you determine God’s purpose for your life? According to Paul, we do it by growing in the knowledge of God. And we grow in the knowledge of God by spending time in God’s word, meditating on it and memorizing it. And by listening to God in prayer.
Paul is a great example of someone who was ladder-climbing up the wrong wall until he came to a first-hand knowledge of God through the Spirit of Christ. He was the most zealous of Jewish leaders who was persecuting Christians until the Risen Christ transformed him on the road to Damascus. From that day forward, Paul became focused on bringing God’s kingdom to this earth, and the rest is history.
You may not be called, like Paul, to be a full-time missionary. But the question is, do you know God’s will for your life, and are you focusing your energies around accomplishing that will for the remainder of your days?
Paul also observes that people who make the most of their lives bear fruit in every good work. They understand that motion is not progress, and even progress as the world defines it is not necessarily progress as the kingdom of God defines it.
And so, for example, what good are churches with pews full of people and bank accounts full of money that minister only to themselves, and makes little impact on their surrounding communities for Christ? And what good are church members who only attend when it’s convenient and threw a few bucks in the offering plate when the mood strikes but never bear fruit for the kingdom?
Jesus is very clear that faithful disciples and faithful churches will be known by their fruit. They will love the Lord their God with all their hearts, and their neighbors as themselves. They will be feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and housing the homeless. They will be making disciples of everybody in their path, or trying to. They will be displaying the fruit of the Spirit in their everyday lives—love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
In his Parable of the Sower, Jesus describes fruitful seed that falls on good soil, where it produces a crop—a hundred, or sixty, or thirty times what is sown (Matthew 13:3-9). In light of that parable, Bob Buford says he wants the epitaph on his gravestone to read simply, “100X.” In other words, Bob’s goal as a Christian in business is to take all God has given him—his time, talents, resources, mind, the Holy Spirit, all of it—and multiply it 100 times over so that he might give it all back to the kingdom. There’s a man who understands how to make the most of his days.
Finally, Paul says if you want to make the most of your life, please God in every way. At the end of the day, it’s not other people we’re trying to please. It’s God. The people who accomplish most for the kingdom ultimately play to an audience of One. If you please God, nothing else really matters.
No one pleased God more than Jesus. On more than one occasion, God made it clear that Jesus was his son, in whom he was well pleased. If you want to please God, be like Jesus. Have the mind of Christ. And do the work Christ has for you to do. Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it (with all your heart) in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
It was minutes before the last basketball game of Carol’s senior year and the news came that her father had just died. When Carol’s coach found out, she decided to tell Carol before the game, knowing that Carol would probably elect not to play. But instead of being paralyzed with grief, Carol just took it in stride and said, “I’ll leave right after the game.”
The coach said, “Carol, you don’t have to play. The game isn’t that important.” Carol ignored the coach and played the game anyway. In fact, she played the game of her life, out-performing everybody else on the floor and scoring the most points of her career.
In the locker room after the game, the other players showered with Carol and offered some condolences. But most were appalled at her lack of sorrow. The coach was mad and thought Carol had too much devotion to sports and not enough compassion. She scolded Carol, “Why did you play the game? Your father is dead. I’m ashamed of you and of myself for not showing him due respect.”
Carol replied, “Coach, this was our last game. I am a senior. I had to play. This was the first time my dad has ever seen me play and I had to play like I had never played before.”
“But your father’s dead,” the coach replied.
Carol choked back the tears and smiled at her coach. “I guess you didn’t know my father was blind, did you?”
Folks, this is the last game you’ll play, the only life you’ll live on this earth. And you don’t know when the final buzzer will sound. Isn’t it time to get off the bench and play like you never played, live like you never lived? After all, your Father in heaven is watching.