The Purpose of Your Life

[This message was shared during worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 25:14-30
Someone once said to me: “I know that Jesus loves me and that I’m saved by grace through my faith in Christ, but what exactly is the purpose of my life?”

The short answer is that you and I are alive for only one purpose: To glorify God. In Isaiah 43:7, God says, “...everyone who is called by my name...whom I created for my glory.”

God commands this not because God is an egomaniac.To glorify God entails using our lives in the ways intended to be used by the One Who created us out of an overabundance of gracious love. When we glorify God, acknowledge the relationship of love initiated by the God Who made us and Who has redeemed us through Christ, setting us free to be all that those created in God's image are meant to be.

We most glorify God not when we consider at the Bible’s portrayal of holy living, like we see in the Ten Commandments or in Jesus’ Beatitudes, then grit our teeth and strive to be good and holy people, whether it makes us or others miserable or not. We most glorify God when we enjoy God and use His gifts to us in ways that honor Him.

None of this is to say that following Jesus is easy. It's not.

But there will be no joy in living with Christ if we think we must be holy people who glorify God in the strength of our own power. We must learn the joy of letting go and letting God, of acknowledging our sin and weakness, so that we can be covered in the grace and filled with the power of God. This is what Paul was talking about in the New Testament when he wrote: "...when I am weak, then I am strong." God's power is perfected in us when we admit our weakness. (1 Corinthians 12:9-10)

The Lord Who saved us by going to the cross for us will be glorified within us if we will allow the Holy Spirit empower us to live according to God’s call in Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”

Our prayer each day should be that God would help us to glorify Him by helping us to remember His goodness to us and leaning on Him.

The parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson is the story of two men who didn’t grit their teeth to do the right thing, but who remembered the goodness of their master and so, enjoyed and used the blessings of the master to bring pleasure both to them and to the master.

It’s also the story of a third man who ignored the blessings given to him by his master, relying on his own personal sense of what was right and wrong, and so, denied himself a continuing relationship with him.

You know the story. A master, clearly a stand-in for God the Son, Jesus, is about to go on a journey. As we read Jesus’ story, we understand the “journey” Jesus is talking about. Since the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, we know that He has been enthroned in heaven, giving His followers millennia to share the Good News that all who turn from sin and believe in the crucified and risen God of all creation, will not perish in eternal separation from God, but will have eternal life with God! Jesus has been away from the earth on a long journey. As we talked about last week, there will be a day when the millennia cease and Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead and to establish His eternal kingdom, finally and fully making all things new.

Anticipating his journey, the master in Jesus’ parable entrusts some of his money to three different servants, just as Christ has entrusted the riches of the gospel to those of who follow Him (1 Corinthians 4:1-2).

Even the single talent (which is the word used by Jesus in this passage, not bags of gold, as the New International Version translates it, the master gave the third servant could be worth between 20 and 600 years of a day laborer’s wages!

In the same way, God entrusts a fortune of blessings to every human being. It’s called being alive. 

And that’s just the start for followers of Jesus Christ! Jesus expended His life on the cross so that all we fallen, sinful, imperfect human beings can, like the thief who was crucified next to Jesus on the cross, acknowledge our sin, turn from that sin, and turn to Him Jesus in faith to live with God for eternity. What a gift! 

Living lives that joyfully express gratitude for these two gifts--the gift of life and the gift of life made new that comes to us by grace through faith in Christ--is not a burden. It’s joy!

That isn’t to say that it’s easy. Throw yourself with abandon into the life of following Jesus--the life of Christian discipleship--and you’ll get bruised too. Maybe more than bruised. You may face rejection, ridicule. In some places today, following Jesus will put a disciple's life at risk. But even here, people may question your sanity or your judgment if you follow Jesus.

A woman told me once that she couldn’t speak with her father about her relationship with Christ. “He thinks I’m crazy,” she told me.

And the possibility of rejection is made greater these days by the public figures and “Christian” groups who claim to be Christians who live unrepentantly un-Christian lives or who turn Christian faith into a religion of good works and looking innocent while decaying inside from spiritual pride, what Jesus called "whitewashed tombs"! (Matthew 23:27-28)

But all of us who are bruised for believing in Jesus need to remember the words of Jesus’ earthly brother “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

In Jesus’ parable, the master came back, as Jesus one day will return to the earth, and, like Jesus on judgment day, the master demanded an accounting for how the servants had used all he had given to them.

The master was glad to see that the first two men had enjoyed and used their gifts and so brought glory to his name.

The last man, not so much. His failure to honor and enjoy either his gifts or the giver brought him total separation from the master, just as happens to those who refuse to honor or enjoy Jesus, the Giver of the best gifts of all.

In his book, The Purpose Driven Life, which Lutherans can heartily endorse though not agreeing with everything in it, Pastor Rick Warren gives five portraits of what people who glorify God look like.

First, they worship God all the time. As Warren puts it, “Worship is a lifestyle of enjoying God, loving Him, and giving ourselves to be used for His purposes.”

Second, they love other believers. Long before Jesus walked the earth, God had already commanded all people to love God and to love neighbors. But just before His crucifixion, Jesus told believers, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34) Jesus’ sacrificial love for us brought us eternity with God and He commands us to love our fellow believers in exactly the same way.

Third, they glorify God by allowing Him to shape them into the likeness of Jesus. Paul writes of Christian disciples in 1 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

We need to stand aside, lay down our will and submit to God’s will, which is to refashion us to be just like Jesus: loving, bold, fearless, forgiving, purposeful. If the third man in Jesus’ parable had simply used the gracious gift the master had given him, he would have had a productive, joyful life. But he didn’t. Christians who keep Christ buried, out of sight and out of mind, during the week, then try to resurrect Him on Sunday morning, are missing out on all that God has in mind for them.

Fourth, we glorify God by serving others with our gifts. No matter what our gifts or our limitations, God has gifted every Christian to glorify God by serving others in some way or another.

Finally, we glorify God by telling others about Jesus. Sharing our faith in Christ with others is the only way we will keep or grow in our faith. Use your faith and it grows. Hoard your faith and it dies out. Truly, faith in Christ is a “use it or lose it” proposition.

We can be like the first two men in Jesus’ parable. We can use the gifts our Master has given to us to glorify God. We do this when we worship God in our daily lives, love our fellow believers, ask God’s help to become more like Jesus, use our gifts to serve others, and tell others about Jesus and the new and everlasting life only He can give to those who turn from sin and believe in Him.

What is the purpose of our lives?

To put it another way, it's to take all the grace and blessings and forgiveness God has given to us through Jesus and our faith in Jesus and, in the certainty that we belong to God forever, give the grace and blessings and forgiveness to everyone we encounter.

First John 5:11, another one of our discipleship group memory verses, reminds us: “And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son, has life; whoever does not have the Son does not have life.”

You can never give away so much of your life for the glory of God that God can’t replace over and over for all eternity, if we will just trust in Jesus Christ alone. 

The purpose of our lives, yours and mine, then, is to spend our lives completely on glorifying God--Methodist theologian Leonard Sweet calls it "spending our last check," knowing that God has an eternity of life to give to all who live completely for Him.

God will never run out of life to give to those who daily surrender Jesus Christ!

So, Jesus calls us to a simple decision that can be framed like this:

Are we willing to give away the life that God gives to us in Christ for God’s purposes and so, allow God to grow our faith, our joy, our purpose for living? 

Or, will we hoard all of God’s grace and blessings given through Christ and die, whimpering about how hard this life is, and so, separate ourselves from God?

 Will we let God's grace in or lock it out? 

The choice is ours.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Caring for the Greatest Gift of All

[This was shared during worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, earlier today.]

Matthew 21:33-46
To begin, please turn to 1 Corinthians 4:1-2, page 794 in the sanctuary Bibles. It says: “This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.”

Some of you may have been trustees of the estates of loved ones or friends. You know that your responsibility is to see to it that the estate is cared for or distributed with wisdom and in accordance with the wishes of the one who conferred the responsibility of trusteeship on you. It’s a big job, not to be taken lightly.

In this passage, the apostle Paul wrote to show that his ministry was from the risen Jesus Christ. Christ had conferred it upon him.

But in writing this, Paul also taught an important truth for every baptized believer in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. It’s this: All believers are caretakers, stewards, trustees of the mysterious gifts God gives to all who trust in Christ. We’re to tend the gift of faith within us--through things like worship, Bible study, receiving the Sacrament, fellowship with other believers, and prayer--so that our faith continues to grow and continues show and to bring glory to God in lives of practical acts of service and love and witness for Christ.

Without careful stewardship of the mysteries of our relationship with Christ, Christians risk losing our own faith connection to God and fail to fulfill our life’s calling from God, which is to commend the hope that we have in Christ to other people.

When Paul wrote these words to the Corinthians about twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, he wasn’t presenting a new idea. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to the garden of Eden, the home of the first human beings.

Adam and Eve were given the undeserved gifts of life, relationship with God, and relationship with each other, the very gifts we receive when we are baptized into Christ and confess faith in Him. Adam’s and Eve’s task was to gratefully tend their garden, their lives, and their relationships. You’ll remember how that all turned out.

But God didn’t give up on the human race after the fall into sin!

Nor did He ever give up on the idea of having a loving partnership with us, of providing us with a “garden” or a "vineyard" in which, in response to His grace and love, we were to be good stewards of life and our relationships with God and others we were made for.

God’s passion for the human race led Him to call Israel into being, a nation that was to be “a royal priesthood, God’s own people, a holy nation,” trustees of God’s love for humanity, who by their faithful stewardship would act as “a light to the nations,” so everyone could know and have a new, eternal relationship with the God of the universe.

All of which leads us to today’s gospel lesson, Matthew 21:33-46, page 691 in the sanctuary Bibles. This passage continues a confrontation between Jesus and the leaders of the Jewish faith that we looked at last Sunday. In last Sunday’s lesson, Jesus made clear that His authority to forgive sin, perform miracles, and call His own people, the heirs of ancient Israel, to repentance and faith in Him came from God the Father. Today, Jesus talks about how essential it is to receive Him God and Savior of the world. 



It starts: “There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.”

The religious authorities to whom Jesus told this parable would have immediately understood what Jesus was talking about. As our Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 5 exemplifies, God often spoke of Israel as a garden or a vineyard. God gave His people a promised land in which the mysteries of His grace and the gifts of relationship with God and others were to be celebrated, respected, and tended. (Are you detecting a pattern?)

Their “vineyard,” their very lives, were to bear fruit: the power of God’s life, as they cultivated relationship with God, was to be visible in their lives, not in some calculated way but as the inevitable result of living in a relationship of daily repentance and renewal with God.

In the parable, the landowner--clearly a stand-in for God--who has invested everything in the lives of the tenants, sends his servants--representing God’s prophets--to collect the owner’s cut of the fruits, just as the prophets were repeatedly sent to Israel by God to seek out the fruits of faith and repentance--lives turned to God as their only hope--as freewill offerings to God.

Read on, please: “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way.”

The tenants--God’s own people--were indebted to the landowner--God--for everything. God sent His prophets. But the people, the caretakers of God’s mysteries, turned their backs on God and, in a bid to “be like God,” killed the prophets, imprisoned them, ignored them. Jesus lamented in Matthew 23:27: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” I wonder how often He utters the same lament over His Church today?

True story: There were two men who went to the same church, participated in the same small group Bible study, and worked at the same business. One guy learned that his Christian friend had found a way to siphon money from accounts he had charge of. But, the monthly accounts hadn’t been settled yet.

So, the guy went to his friend, confronted him with the facts, and asked him to make things right so that he wouldn’t have to report his friend. He assured the friend that God could forgive him.

But his friend was unmoved: “What’s God got to do with it? This is business.” Initially, like the tenants in Jesus’ parable, this man refused God’s authority over his whole life.

Happily, after prayer with his friend, he repented and didn’t follow through on his scheme.

For the Christian, all of life is God’s vineyard, a gift from God. That's to be remembered and relished and celebrated not just on Sunday mornings or when Bible studies are happening, but all week long.

The parable goes on: “Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said.“But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

After centuries in which God sent prophets to call His people Israel back to Him, He sent His Son to call not just Israel but all who would believe in Him back into relationship with Him, so that through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus, people could have a life with God that never ends.

But much of Israel--the Judea of Jesus’ first century world--wasn’t interested in repenting for sin and believing in Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life.” 

Like us, they wanted to do with God’s vineyard what they wanted to do.

Today, people say that their lives and their bodies and their time are theirs to do with what they will. But that isn’t true. Our lives (and our bodies and our time) have come from God.

And the new life we can have with Christ is not ours either. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”

Jesus Christ spent His body and blood on the cross to buy us out of slavery to sin and death. As Christians, we know that our lives are not our own. Our lives, our bodies, our minds, our time, our possessions are all sacred trusts from God to be used in ways that honor the Lordship of Jesus Christ and lift Him up as the only hope for this dying, violent world.

Jesus’ parable makes it clear, I think, that the religious leaders weren’t ignorant of Who Jesus was. They knew that He was (and is) God the Son. That’s why they wanted to remove Him from this world.

It’s why people to this day want to remove Jesus and His claims of ultimate authority from the life of the world.

It’s why when any of us allow our sinful selves to call the shots over our lives, we’d rather not think about Jesus.

We know we’ve been bought; but we’d rather forget that.

As John 1:11 notes: “He [Jesus] came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”

You and I are more subtle about deflecting Christ and His rightful claims over our lives than the first-century Judean religious leaders were.

Our favorite method of deflection is through busy-ness. We respond to the clamor of things we think we have to do and want to do, rather than the things we need to do.

We’re modern day Marthas, so busy doing that we fail to heed the one thing that’s needful, tending our relationship with Jesus Christ, being attentive to Him.

When Jesus asks the leaders what they would do to anyone who would spend their lives rejecting an owner’s rightful claims over his tenants (in other words, anyone who would reject God, the giver of life), they say: “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’[? “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.”

Jesus was telling the leaders that they were so hung up on maintaining their status--and the whole human race remains hung up on having what we think is ours when, in fact, every good and perfect gift comes from God--that their very salvation was going to be taken from them.

The world--even the Church of today--is complacent. We’re running the vineyard and we don’t want to cede control to God. We want to be in control.

Besides, we tell ourselves, Jesus walked the earth so long ago. And it’s been so long since He rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

But we must not be complacent! Nor egotistical! Our lives can come to an end in a flash and the course of our time on this earth can change more quickly than we can fathom.

When I woke up on one June morning in 2014, I had no idea that later that night, I would have a heart attack that would destroy 40% of my heart, that I would require not just a stent, but also a pacemaker and defibrillator. When I get out of the shower each morning and catch sight of the outlines of this machine in my chest, I remember that I'm just a tenant, that real life doesn't issue from being in control here, but in giving control to the One Who still has the whole world in His hands.

We must remember always that real hope comes from Jesus Christ alone.

God is still in control.

This vineyard will one day pass from existence and Christ will establish His new kingdom for eternity and those who have steadfastly followed Him will, by His grace, be part of it.

Jesus Christ is the sign and seal that God and His promises can be trusted.

And that this world is still His vineyard. We are still His tenants.

And if we will hold onto Christ, we will bear the good fruit of a life lived for Him and we will live in His good kingdom now and forever. Amen

Guardians of THE Story

Riffing off of Fahrenheit 451, that's what Deb Grant says that Jesus-Followers are meant to be. Excellent!