Nothing Else Matters

My heart is stirred today. God has been working overtime on me the last couple of months, challenging me at the deepest levels of everything I thought I knew about the Christian life.

This morning turned out to be the culmination of all that God has been doing in me. We had an amazing service with our LifePoint Church family… one of those inexplicable encounters with God that none of us could have planned if we had tried. I walked towards the platform to bring the message, clutching a handful of notes that were “scrambled thoughts” at best. I had struggled all week, trying in vain to take all the things God has been teaching me these last two months and somehow condense them all into a logically organized, well outlined, sensible sermon to end our “Seeing Life Through God’s Eyes” series. Well, it didn’t happen!

God has poured out so much on me, that attempting to put it into one sermon would be like standing in front of a hundred fire hydrants trying to catch the water in a teacup! Despite my best efforts, I simply could not put the flood of thoughts into any kind of logical format. Now what? Preparation time was over… it was time to preach! I whispered a desperate prayer as the music faded and I stepped onto the stage: “God, this is gonna be a mess unless you show up in a big way. You’ve got this one, right?!”

Yeah, He had it. It just goes to show that when God wants to speak to people, He doesn’t need my help. He could just as easily use Balaam’s donkey. I began by honestly confessing to the church that I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to say, and then all I knew to do next was to start sharing what God had been breaking my heart about for two months. As it turns out, the whirlwind that God had been stirring in me became a hurricane across our church!

I lost count of how many people came up to me afterward, many of them with tears in their eyes, saying how God has been doing the very same work in their lives. I only knew about a couple of these stories, but it soon became obvious that the people of LifePoint are dangerously close to doing something radical for the kingdom of God. They are tired of living the typical “American Christian” life. They want to know what might happen if they were willing to truly lay it all on the line for the sake of others and the mission of Christ. How could anyone explain the following:

• A husband and wife deciding not to buy a piece of property because they don’t want to become even more tied down to “things,” but instead want to be free to let go of everything they own and follow God wherever He wants to lead them.
• A well-respected businessman choosing to walk the streets of downtown Greenville after work in order to build relationships with the homeless and invest his time, money and faith into their broken world.
• A couple in their 60′s blinking back tears as they happily surrendered the rest of their lives to do whatever God wants them to do.
• A mom going to Africa on her own dime to help provide much needed service in an orphanage… and a husband being gladly willing to watch all the kids at home and cheer her on while she’s away.
• A young married couple laying aside their plans for their future, and deciding instead to give their future to God’s plans.

And here’s one that really got me. One of our most faithful men emailed me this afternoon saying that he has been rethinking his plans for his upcoming retirement years, choosing now to invest those years in God’s mission rather than spending them on himself. He closed with these words: “I have never wanted to follow Christ more than I do now. Nothing else seems to matter!”

Let me tell you something. That’s what it’s all about. His words shook my heart like an earthquake! What if… what if all of us who call ourselves followers of Christ decided to exchange our plans, our time, our stuff for the mission of Jesus in this world. What if instead of thinking that God saved us for our benefit, maybe, just maybe God saved us for the sake of others! It’s a radical thought, I know… especially in a land where we’re convinced that the church exists to serve us.

The fact that these notions seem so foreign to us… even bizarre or extreme, is proof of just how far we’ve drifted from the mindset of the early church. I dare say if those believers were here today, they would hardly recognize modern Christianity as being Christianity at all. Today we invite people to come to Jesus so He can help them with their problems and take them to heaven. In those days, people chose to follow Jesus knowing that it would probably cost them everything… even their lives! They came to Jesus for the sake of the mission… we come to Jesus for our own benefit. We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that it’s all about us. Nothing could be further from the truth.

2 Corinthians 5:15 makes it unmistakably clear – Christ died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. What if we actually did that? What if we believed that attending a church service once a week for the rest of our lives would amount to absolutely nothing in the end unless we went out and gave our lives for the mission of Christ the rest of the week in whatever “mission field” God has planted each of us in. Just imagine what might happen.

This is why I’m so thrilled to be part of a church family that is starting to live out these very things… a church family who is deciding that it’s time to take the commands of Jesus seriously… a church family who is not content to just be believers in Christ, but who are determined to be followers of Christ.

All this has been weighing pretty heavily on me today, because today I turned 47 years old. Forty-seven years! Where has the time gone? What percentage of those 47 years have I lived for myself, and what percentage have I lived to fulfill my part in the mission of Christ in this world? But even more importantly… when I consider the time I have left, what percentage of my future am I planning on living for myself, and what percentage am I planning on living for Christ? When I stand before the Lord in eternity… nothing else will matter!

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