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Do We Daily Make a Full Sacrifice of Ourselves Like Jesus Did?
Eric V.
Snow, sermonette, 02-19-2010, Ann
Arbor, MI UCG
Is life always
about compromise? Like most politicians
seeking votes and passing legislation, should we live spiritually by taking half-measures
and giving half-loaves? Is serving God
merely somewhere on our list of priorities?
Or is it the top priority that reorganizes the rest of the list? Does God want total dedication and complete
self-sacrifice from His people?
God wants
us to fully commit our lives to Him, like Jesus did. Half-hearted efforts shouldn’t constitute our service to God.
S.P.S. Our daily lives should be characterized by a complete sacrifice to God.
2 questions today: 1st point: Are we serving God everyday as if we counted the cost?
Luke
14:25-33
Was this
text only a concern when we were baptized?
Consider this analogy: Suppose
you had a fancy wedding but then afterwards talked little to your husband or
wife and didn’t care about what he or she thought about how your lived your
life everyday. Is that really a
“marriage”? We have to keep up our
daily dedication to God, such as by prayer and Bible study. It isn’t just a one-time event, but a
relationship that has to be continually cared for by constant concern and
communication.
Verse
26: In general, is what other people
think more important to us than what God thinks? Do we sin or avoid doing good works because other people think
it’s fanatical or strange to obey God’s law?
Are we afraid to admit that we obey God’s law to our friends at school
or our co-workers? Classical
example: Would a teenager raised in the
church consider it a shameful confession to the guys in the high school locker
room that to admit that he’s still a virgin?
Another example: HWA’s fear of
what his business associates would think when his wife first started to keep
the Saturday Sabbath.
V. 27: Not just trials in life, but the purpose of
our lives. We are no longer our own,
seeking our own special purposes in life apart from God’s revelation to
us. “PF mentality” in Myers-Briggs
personality test system. To create and
live by our own self-devised moral code is not an option for Christians.
V. 28: Did we really count the cost at
baptism? More importantly for most of
us here, are we living as if we did count the cost? God offers us eternal life and eternal happiness in return for
total dedication to Him. We shouldn’t
think our relationship with the true God is like the how the pagans served
their gods: “If I serve God, then God
has to give me such-and-so in return now.”
That is, during this life. But
we shouldn’t base our relationship with God based on what we can “get” from
God. Are we living by “the way of get”
in our relationship with God?
V. 33: Do we live our spiritual lives thinking, “If we keep the Sabbath and Holy Days, go to church, make offerings and tithe, and avoid obvious big sins like adultery, then the rest of our lives are our own?” “Taxpayer analogy”: God makes no more claims on us?
Leads to 2nd point: Are we “Christian hedonists”?
Are we
trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain during this physical life while
still trying to obey the great commandment? Do we secretly or subconsciously
doubt that obeying God’s law pays? So
just in case the Bible is wrong and there’s no eternal life, we still got in
our fun anyway?
Mark
12:29-30
Are we
really living by this? Are we trying to
serve two masters? Isn’t that
hopeless? True, there’s HWA’s
orientation: To obey God’s law
increases happiness during this life also.
But suppose we think that things aren’t working out that way for us
individually?
A radical
re-orientation in our approach to life should have taken place when we got
baptized.
C.S. Lewis’s
Honest taxpayer analogy: Do we perceive
our service to God as paying taxes?
Then with what’s left over, we hope we can live on it? After giving up a certain amount to God, we
look forward to having enough time, money, and choices left to get on with what
we really want to do in life? That’s
not how God sees the purposes of our lives in His plan for humanity.
Quote Lewis
on p. 178 of Timothy Keller’s “The Reason for God.”
Luke
9:23-26
If God
requires us to die as martyrs during the Great Tribulation, would we deny the
faith to save our lives temporarily?
After all, we’re all going to die eventually anyway, sooner or
later. What will a few decades of
physical life matter in the context of eternity? There is “no exit” for us from eternal death except by the
resurrection and being “born again” when Christ returns.
I suspect
some of us would faithfully face the firing squad as martyrs better than live
60 years of the daily “grind” of building a relationship with God through
prayer, fasting, Bible study, meditation, and reorienting our lives to do what
He wants instead of what we want.
So in
conclusion: As the Passover approaches, let’s
make sure we have totally dedicated our lives to God on a daily basis. Let’s pay the cost that we counted at baptism
as being worth the price.
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