Living Life On Purpose - Part II - Deciding What's Important

Begin the message today, you want to get your outlines out of your notes right now, pull out that outline, by reminding you of what I think was probably the most exciting moment of Strike Force. Fred and Matt here are holding the remnants of the final feat. Now if you weren't here, this was a 10-foot, there's another section of this that went to about here. These are 2x4s that are blocked by concrete in between, and this was a feat that the guys had only done a few times. Two of the few times had resulted in injury. And if you were here Tuesday night, they said, well, come back tomorrow night because we're going to do this. And we got to the end of Wednesday night and they hadn't done it yet. And I walked up to Keith, and I said, Keith, you know, I think a lot of people want to see that. And he said, I know, I know. So, okay. And Jerry said he was willing to do it. So let's roll the clip. The video quality isn't quite as good, but this is what it looked like when they went. I mean, you got to understand these guys are going full force against three 2x4s. So watch your head, guys. Here it comes. Let's roll the clip here. This is it. I mean, it just calls for some kind of something. And that moment, you couldn't tell because of the music, but the place absolutely erupted. Those folks that were here, I mean, it was quite spectacular. And it represented to me what I think scripture means on the top of your outline. Let's look at it. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing and forceful men lay hold of it. Friends, listen, we do not easily shift into the things of God. Now we may go through a season when we seek and we're kind of quietly searching and anonymously looking. But listen, there comes a moment in all of our journeys, a moment of crisis, a moment of confrontation with self. Listen, it's oftentimes a moment of violence with the will. And I want everyone to tune in right now because I'm concerned that a lot of you think that you've already had that and it's over. Notice it says that forceful men, and the generic term mankind will fit there, okay? They hold it and they advance with it. The way you make advance in the kingdom of God is by doing so forcibly. You smash the old and you release the new. And what this series is about, this series of living life on purpose, is preparing to live rightly in the new millennium. It's about smashing the old paradigms of our lives and creating new ones where God's spirit can flow through us. All year long, we're going to be looking at practical ways and very specific ways within our households that we can align ourselves to flow in the things of God and advance in the things of the kingdom. And not just sit back and hope that we catch a little wisp of what God's doing. I don't believe God wants us to move right in the center of his flow, right in the middle of what he's doing. And that's where the great blessing is. Now, three weeks ago, Pastor Dave taught that God has purpose and calling for each of us. And he made some beautiful analogies in that message. And last week, Keith reminded us of God's greatest things. And he warned us against getting caught up in the lesser things of life. How many times do we just get all bent out of shape about the things that just aren't exactly the way we want them to be? I had one builder tell me a person in a new home they were constructing changed the tile in their kitchen 12 times. And he didn't care. He was just charging me every time. All right, I'll change it 12 times. All of us tend to look at the things that we don't have. Well, I'm not married. Well, you know, I'm not well-educated. I'm not the head of my company. I'm too tall. I'm too short. I'm not a parent. I don't have financial success. And you know what? That one thing eats away at us and blocks the flow of everything else that's good that God wants to do in our lives. Now, the only way to make a change when you get to that point is violently. You've got to smash through it. You have to forcefully advance. And that's what I want to challenge us to do today. Hundreds of people that are hearing me this morning have come to Christ, and you've entered the kingdom, and you know that you have security in God. But listen, I say this in pastoral love, but you're not advancing. It would be similar to walking into our beautiful foyer out here. You know, when we designed the building years ago, I worked with Roy Thompson and a number of our team. I just said, if we can do anything to make a bright, welcoming foyer with lots of windows and sunlight, because people think of this dark place where they go and just kind of maybe see this mysterious thing. I said, I want it to be welcoming and bright. And you know what? If you came into the building and just stayed in the foyer, you'd say, hey, this is a beautiful place, and it's a welcoming place, and there's a lot of love here because people are buzzing around. And you might hear sounds of people worshiping in here, and you might know that some classes for strengthening marriages and working with kids and dealing with issues in lives are taking place. But if you stay in the foyer, you'll never really know what God has for you. You'll just say, well, this is great. I just love it here. But it's just the foyer. And many of us, listen, far too many of us get satisfied with living our Christian life in the foyer when he wants us to advance. And sometimes you've got to do it by force. You've got to get real serious and advance into the things of God. Now, step one, as I noted on your outline, is to determine the values that matter the most, and then bring your life into harmony with those values. That's the foundation. You've got to know your values. The foundation is critical. How many people know if the foundation is bad, you're in deep trouble? I was up in this catwalk a couple days ago. We're trying to figure out how to get some better lighting things going on up here, so you can see different things when we're on the steps and so on. And there's all this complexity. You can't imagine what's up above there. I mean, you don't even want to think about it. Don't look up either, or it's not going to fall. But when we built the building, it was five, pretty close to five years ago right now, that we were laying the foundation. Remember, there was that 20 below zero. The January was 25 below one night or whatever. It was a world record. And I was out in Arizona then, as I recall. And I called back, and I said, Jack, how's the building? He said, they stopped construction. I said, what? He said, it's so cold that they can't pour the concrete. And it's got to be right, because if the foundation isn't right, you don't want to know what's going to happen two, five, ten years down the road. And I'm grateful they did it right, and this building is going to stand for a long time. Well, that's what we've got to do with our lives. We've got to make sure that our values are right. And the foundation for effective living, friends, is integrity. Living life according, not just honesty, but living your walk, the way you talk. I don't want to hear from Christians who talk a certain way and live another one. I mean, it is a huge black eye on the church. Forgive me, but the norm in American Christianity is such that we are not making a difference in our culture. From the January, February issue of Promise Keepers, let me quote this. If we were to be truly honest, we might admit that the problem with Christianity in America is not the content of our faith, but the failure of its adherence to integrate the principles of the faith into their lifestyles. For example, a recent study we conducted showed that born-again Christians substantially differ from non-Christians in just nine of the 66 variables in which we compared the two groups. Even more significant was the finding that Christians were virtually indistinguishable from non-believers on all 65 of the non-religious variables we examined, matters of core values, defining attitudes, and central behavioral tendencies. Those are things we're going to talk about. Behaviors, attitudes, and tendencies. Until Christ's followers think and act differently, motivated by faith principles, the world has little reason to take our evangelistic exhortations seriously. I really think that's true. In other words, we've got to walk our talk, or let's not talk, because people aren't going to listen. Now, do you know that your values affect everything about your life? They affect your stress level. They affect your success, your salvation. What do you mean? Well, you see, your values weave their way into your everyday decisions of life. The values that Jesus came and talked about were in the Gospels. He presented most of them in what's called the Sermon on the Mount. You read about it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. He introduced all these incredibly challenging values. He talked about loving your enemies, giving to the needy, whether they knew it was from you or not, making promises that you kept, about the golden rule, about walking in purity and not allowing your mind to control you with thoughts of lust and all the rest. This became what we call the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is an internal rule of God's dominion in our life, His values in our life. We call it the kingdom of God. People who look at it, people from the outside call it the kingdom, not the kingdom of God. They call it the other one. They call it the kingdom of odd. Oh, that's odd. Love my enemies, care for those who don't like me, give of my resources so that others can be taken care of. I mean, that's odd. Turn the other cheek, forgive those who hurt me. That's odd, but that's the essence of the values that we're called to live. You see, some of us are living in stress today because we haven't aligned ourselves with our values. Some of us, we have conflict and confusion because we say one thing in our homes, but we live another way. Some of us don't know how to measure success because we don't know how to establish its values. What is success? I'll tell you this, lasting values lead to lasting success. Every decision you make, important decisions about life, are filtered through the values grid. I mean, if it's growth and development and impact and success, all of these, if you're to experience those, you've got to put them through a values grid that's going to weed out the things that are going to pull you down. Your values affect your salvation. Many people who are hourly successful are spiritually bankrupt. You know that's true. You don't have to be spiritually in touch with God to be successful in the world. I know a lot of people who have it, quote, made in the world, but their lives internally are not right with God. But we have got to see the crucial nature of proper values. Well, how do we do this? Well, number one, you've got to choose your source carefully. Choose your source. The source of your values will always determine the quality of your values. What's a good source for finding values in life? How about the National Enquirer? How about a psychic medium? Do you know how many people literally get the essence of what they kind of measure the life from sources just like that? I mean, we laugh about it, but it's true, friends. Without any question, I can say that the greatest influencer of values in our culture today is the media. It's the media. I mean, and television above all else, but there's, you know, there's the internet, there's movies, radio, print media and so. You know, the average American, listen, watches 1,000 hours of television a year, about three hours a day. Now, if you went to church once a week, if you put those two side by side, in the course of your lifetime, you will spend over nine and a half years in front of the boob tube. Think of that, nine and a half years and a total of less than four months in church. Which of those two do you think is going to affect your values the most? And most Americans, it's not here. Our youth today, it's not really even the music that they hear. It's not the books and things that they read. Unfortunately, it's not their parents that influence them. You know who influences their values the most? It's their peers. The peer group acceptance is everything to a young person. And in the end, you see, you get the values from one of two places in your life. You either get them from the world or from the word. Write that down. You get them from the world or you get them from the word. Look what the Bible says. Don't love the world's ways, the lust for physical pleasure, the ambition to buy everything that appeals to you. That's a great thing to take to the mall, right? And the pride that comes from wealth and importance. These are not from God, but from the world. Right there, I've tried to circle in this living Bible the three essential values of the world. Look at them. Pleasure, possessions, and prestige. Say that with me. Pleasure, possessions, and prestige. Look at it up here. Write it down. Pleasure, possessions, and prestige. Most Americans, when you ask them, what do you want in life? They'll say, I just want to be happy. I just want to have a good life. I want to have fun. What's the number one industry in America? Number one in terms of revenues. You know what it is? It's entertainment. It's the number one industry in America. We are obsessed with pleasure. Tonight alone, the Super Bowl is going to generate, I think I read, 12 billion dollars of revenues. And that's more than the gross national product of a lot of countries. We're going to spend that one night of partying. We need to be on the radical edge of everything. The biggest rush. The highest high. The most pleasure possible right now. And then possessions. I mean, we love our stuff, don't we? And we are conspicuous in our consumption of it. Our clothes. Our jewelry. Our cars. Our houses. Our electronics. All these things we just kind of want to stack up and make sure that we have everything we need. The number one social phenomenon in the last 30 years is the development of the suburban malls because it's changed our attitude about stuff. And then prestige. I mean, image is everything, isn't it? We've created symbols that tell people we know where we stand in the pecking order. Look at, now don't do that now, but take a look at somebody's sweater, shirt, something on them probably has a symbol. Handbag, whatever. It says, well, hey, these are the real things. This is the good stuff. Sometimes we want people to know that we're in so badly that, I mean, we'll do it no matter what the price. Someone told me that a local country club here 70% of the members are financing their membership and 50% of them are behind in their dues. But they're in. I mean, sometimes it just gets weird to me. How about you? You know, I mean, it's weird to me when I see people driving toward me in their expensive car with a licensed place that tells me where they live. Like, okay, I get it. You know, I just want to see a guy driving a Rustadagio that says Wilmerding in the front, you know, or a Troy Hill or something different than, I mean, I don't need all this. And so we're told to buy grape, Poupon, mustard. And so, you know, we drive up in this world, not France, but grape, Poupon. So we drive in this world. How many people use mustard in a Rolls Royce? I mean, you know, eating bologna sandwiches in their Rolls Royce. I don't think so. But we do. Listen, church, we get quietly seduced. And some of us very consciously, and some of us unconsciously plan, think, and even pray that we'll get all the stuff that we want. Why? So we'll be in control. Let me just tell you that the world seduces you to be in control, to stay in control so that you don't need anyone else to get wherever it is that you think you need to go. And it is the spirit of the age, the spirit of control. Look at Romans 12 too in your outline. Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. I underline it. I want you to circle it. The problem I get concerned about is we don't even think about how easily seduced we are into the world's value system. And if you slip into it, you're going to drift away from God's purpose for your life. Well, can't I have both? Can't I be a successful answer of God? I mean, are you trying to make me feel guilty about doing well, Pastor Jay? Absolutely not. I believe you can. In fact, I believe it's God's will for us to be blessed. But the crucial question you must honestly answer is this. What is number one in your life? And not just by what you mouth with your words, but what you demonstrate with your energies and your resources and your time. That's the truth. And far too many people say, oh, God's number one. The kingdom of God is most important to me, but their choices and commitments and expenditures, their calendars and their checkbooks tell me something entirely different. It's seductive. And you need to be in loving accountability with someone that's going to say, hey, help me know if I'm walking the right path here. And that's a hard thing for us as American Christians. So number one, choose your source, the word of the word, Christ your culture. Number two, clarify what's important. Look at Job 34, three and four. We should choose to follow what is right, but first we must define what is good. You got to know what values you're really going to hold on to. If you don't take some time and sort it out and write it down, you know what? You're just going to assimilate whatever it is that your parents or the people around you kind of thought was important. Far too many people have some values that, you know, are okay that came from their generations of precepts, and some of them are just downright wrong and ungodly. Now this isn't as easy as it sounds. We rarely think about values until it's too late, until we crash and burn somehow. When things are going well, you don't ask the questions about, well, is this important in life? When you're hitting a home run in the stock market, you don't stop and say, well, you know, I wonder if this is really going to be a time that my wife and I are going to be a lot closer. We just keep adding zeros or looking for promotions or trying to be more in control of our world. You don't consider family or ministry or spiritual health or eternal values and rewards. We rarely ask, what are the end results of these decisions going to be? I doubt that many people who first take drugs think, where is this going to take me five years from now? I doubt that a few people who dabble in pornography think, you know, in five years, what's this going to do to my sexual relationship with my spouse? I really doubt that people who dive into materialism really ask the question early on, how does this affect the people that I care about and my relationships in life? But you see, that's what we have to learn to do. Listen, what I'm talking about here, and I've never thought about it in this way before, but listen, what I'm talking about here is, what do we worship? This is really a message about worship. You say, well, I thought worship is what we just did here when we sang. Listen, worship is what you give to the most important thing in your life. That's what worship is. It's what you have the highest value upon. Worship is something you can do on Monday, Tuesday, and all through the week. If what your thought life goes to naturally throughout the week is something other than the kingdom of God, then I want to tell you, you're not worshiping God. You're worshiping other values. And what is at the center of your life will determine what's at the circumference of your life. The quality of what you worship will determine the quality of your whole life. If your job or career is at the center of your life, if that crumbles, if that goes south, if you lose out, your life loses out. If there's a relationship there with somebody else and that's the core of your life, and that's the most important thing, if that relationship goes down, then you go down. And if it's success, if it's stuff, and you lose out, friends, I know person after person after person that walks away from God because they just feel like God let them down. That's why we do well to worship the one thing in our life that will never let us down, that will never leave us, that will never forsake us, and that's Jesus. He needs to be at the center, and He permeates everything about our lives. The key then is perspective. The key, turn your outline over, the key is perspective. Just ask the question, will this that I'm giving myself to last 10, 20, 30 years from now? Will it last when I stand before God in the judgment day? Will eternity reveal that what I've given my life to really mattered? You know what? This building, even on the great foundation in which it stands, one day is going to come down. Some days I think they're going to take it down with machinery that's next door. But maybe 50 years from now, who knows, 100 years from now, it's going to go down. But what's going to last forever are you people who are sitting here right now who love God. You're going to stand before His throne and give glory and praise and honor to Him because you make choices in your life that really matter. So many things that we give ourselves to don't matter. Look at the next scripture. The pleasure of sin lasts for a short time. Let me say something real kind of candidly here. Sin can be fun. I mean, if it was a bummer, people wouldn't do it, right? So people sin, but the pleasure lasts a short time, and then what happens? It bites. I mean, you get the kicks, but then you get to kick back. Stuff doesn't last. Even nice stuff wears out, doesn't it? I mean, even expensive stuff finally just goes away. You know, when a millionaire dies, people say, wow, I wonder how much he left. I'll tell you how much he left. He left everything, every time. And prestige, wow. Look at that third scripture. Many people who seem to be important now will be the least important in eternity. I often pray for our missionaries and realize that's a scripture that they live by because many of them would be important if they wanted to be in the world's ways. They've chosen God's ways. That's the kingdom of odd. That doesn't make sense to the world. I want to ask you, friends, what values are you building on? You know, in the end, I could point you to a man named Solomon. I won't quote the scripture that I took out, but read the book of Ecclesiastes in the Living Bible translation, and it'll tell you about a man who had everything he wanted. In fact, it said if he saw something he wanted, he went and took it. And he did it all to the max. I'm talking about money. I'm talking about stuff. I'm talking about pleasure. I think he had 300 wives, 300 mother-in-laws. I mean, trade-off, I guess, you know, whatever. He just maxed himself out. And in the end, you read about in Ecclesiastes, he said it's all vanity. He even said, you know, I work myself to the bone to give my stuff to somebody else. That's not fair, he says. That's not right. It's all worthless. So I want you to think about this. I want you to to ponder it. And in fact, in your notes, I think there should be a little a peach-colored sheet in there. Is there one in there for you? Should be. Yeah, that is something to take home with you. I mean, you can come on Sundays and get something out of this, but the main thing is going to happen when you go home and spend a little bit of time answering these questions. Don't do it now, but those are questions about your values. And then I want you to flip that thing over and on the other side of it, write a definition of what success would be for you. That would be a wonderful investment of about a half hour of your time. I want you to hear from someone right now who made a very difficult choice in their life. A choice that a lot of us wouldn't have the courage to make, but he saw the issues at stake and by God's grace, made an important decision to live his life as he understood it right now, according to the values of the kingdom of God. And he's coming here today. Let's welcome Bob Friar as he comes. Let's give him a hand. Hi, Bob. Welcome. Take some room up there for you. Before I get started, there's a lot of you out here in this audience this morning, in the congregation here, that are struggling just as much as I have struggled over the past years, the last 10 years, and mainly even the last several weeks. See, there's a lot of you in this audience right now this morning that are saying to yourself, I need more money in my life. If I only had a different job, if I only had an opportunity, maybe to be with someone else right now, because I'm unhappy with the person I'm sitting next to. All those things have been going through my mind for weeks. But right now, all I want you to do is open up your heart because many times when you're sitting in front of a group of people and you may want to be here right now, but yet those things are on your mind right now. And many times I've been in the same position you are. And that is when things are running through your mind, you don't pay attention. I want you to open up your hearts right now and say, Come, Lord Jesus, and just say, Lord, just open up my heart, my mind and allow this man to let me in and hear what he has to say. I just want everybody to say, Come, Lord Jesus, right now. Come, Lord Jesus. You see, the two directories I have in front of you, this book right here, and this much larger product right here, are significant parts of my life. For 10 years of my life, I've been involved in, right out of college, putting products like that out on the street. I'm in a yellow page business. For the first eight and a half years, I was consumed with what Pastor Jay has been talking about all day. And that is, society says if you're not successful, you're not successful if you don't have a fancy car, you don't dress well, you don't have money in the bank to burn, and you don't even write a checkbook. I didn't even keep checkbooks, I still don't. And I'm like, I'm learning that. But there are so many things in life that I was striving to be. I was trying to be someone else that I really wasn't destined to be. And the fact is that society, watching TV, like you were saying, society always says, You know what? If you're not successful, you're no one. But we always hear sometimes the richest people in the world are the ones that don't have a thing except Christ in their life. For the first eight and a half years, this product was put out. It's awfully small. It's not as large as this other product. For the first eight and a half years of my life in the business world, this is what I put out on the street. And I call this BC, before Christ. And the reason why I say that is the fact that I was consumed with one thing, and that is being a success. Not thinking of anything else, except being a success. And I never, when I got more money, I said, I finally had a few more thousand. When I got a raise, I said, Wow, thank you. The next day, I'm thinking, How can I get more? I never stopped to enjoy myself. Now, this big product is what you get your doorstep. If you live in the Pittsburgh area. This product, I call it AC after Christ, because I gave my life to Christ a year and a half ago at Promise Keepers in Pittsburgh. And during that period of time, a month and a half later, I was promoted to run the entire operation here in western Pennsylvania as far as the yellow page industry. And what's nice about that is the fact that after all those years and all those hours, I was given an opportunity to prove myself. But I still was struggling with one thing, and that is still trying to be a success and trying to earn more money. And I still didn't let that thing die. And what that created was a void in my life, a void in my life that maybe you're seeking right now that you may have a void in your life right now, and you may not know what it is. I didn't know what it was until this past week, several weeks ago. But that void had appeared to me. You see, several weeks ago, several weeks ago, I was in contact while I was on vacation over the holiday season out in California with the Yellow Page Company in California. And after several conversations with them and several meetings, they offered me a job. They said, here, we'll give you $5,000 more. No one's going to leave a job for $5,000 more. But what they gave me, they were going to give me $20,000 for a down payment on a house. But the best part about that job was the fact that I was going to be able to live in San Francisco part of the year, the Napa Valley another part of the year, and then Lake Tahoe another part of the year. I mean, I ski as often as I can. We have a house in Lake Tahoe, so I would, I love to ski. I go out there on the holidays. I have family in San Francisco and the Napa Valley I've visited many a time. But before I took that job, or before I was going to take that job, I said, man, this is great. You know, where do I sign? Something hit me that night and said, sit down, and listen. Just pray and think about what you're about to do. I had a lot of thinking to do. And one evening, it was Friday evening, and when I joined this church, I got heavily involved in my cell groups and men's group on Monday evenings, Kairos on Sunday nights. And I just had to sit there and I called my cell leader and I said, Kelly, I'm not coming tonight. I know I should be right with you right now and hear what you guys have to tell me. But at the same time, I can't have anybody in my life right now tell me what to do except myself. And I have to sit here and pray and fast with the Lord. That next morning, I get on a flight and I fly up to New York because I wanted to go see a play. And I was up in New York and the flight was delayed for three hours. And those three hours, I'm just sitting there. I'm thinking, what are you doing in airport for three hours? I mean, I've just been through the holiday season when all that snow was coming down. My flights were delayed for for almost a day when I was trying to come back. But this time I'm thinking, what am I doing? Well, you know what? I ended up still thinking I have to pray. I'm still searching for that answer. Like, do I take this job or not? My family didn't even know at the time that I was even offered a job. I was searching. I kept saying, why am I searching for a job? I mean, I have everything in the world that I need, but I want more. What happened through prayer and when I got off the plane that Sunday evening at five o'clock and five fifteen, I'm in my car and I said, I'm going to church tonight at Kairos. And I said, I have to get there. I got there and I don't even know what the whole message was about that evening. Just like you may not be thinking what the message is about today, because in your heart and in your mind, things are flying a mile a minute. But at the same time, what I learned from that night is that Dave was talking about the fact that, isn't it ironic every time you say, oh, if I only had a little bit more money or if I take another job, I promised myself I will be much more organized than at my last job. How many thought like, if I leave here, I'll promise I'll make it better at another place, right? We've done that many times. Or maybe you're thinking in another way as far as a relationship is saying, you know what? I promised myself the next person I meet, I will communicate with that person as much as possible. And what happens four months later down the road, you're going to hear, why don't you talk to me anymore? And that's what I was searching and struggling for. And I realized the void in my life that I created was the fact that I didn't have friendships outside of my job, outside my workplace. See, when you run a work and when you run a company, you can't be friends with all your employees below you. It's very, very difficult because sometimes they'll think you're playing favorites with others. And some of you who don't run a company are thinking when they see your boss, when you see the boss hanging around with a few individuals, you're thinking, favorites, am I right? Well, that's what I can't afford to do. And sometimes I used to do that and it would affect me. But see, once I realized that I wasn't going to take this job, the reason why I realized that is the fact that I