Mastering What Really Matters I, Winning the Human Race

Philippians 4, just a couple of verses. By the way, I just want to thank the band that's playing for us and the singers on Saturday. Aren't they doing a great job? Let's go ahead and thank them for their time. It's been a real challenge to grow together and Jan and Susie have been working hard to just draw on all these great resources that the Lord's put in our body. We really appreciate your leading us. Philippians 4, Paul says this, verse 10, I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in every and any situation, whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Him who gives me strength. If I could assure you tonight that when you left here you'd know how to be content in every situation, would you listen carefully? I can't promise that you'll get the message, but I can share what I believe the Lord wants us to know tonight about contentment. You know, I alluded to being in Southern California over the last, in that last week that we were gone, and by all consensus, Southern California has the most highly developed freeway system in the world, and the most congested. Any time, day or night, you can get on the freeways in Southern California and find four or five or six lanes of traffic going somewhere. Many times, midday, gridlock. Not two or three, four or five and six lanes of traffic. Experts predict by the year 2000 the average speed on the Southern California freeways will be 25 miles an hour. It's not hard to understand why a year ago freeway shootings were common. I almost bought a gun myself in the week I was there. Now there's a new addition in the Southern California freeway system that was not there when I lived there in the early seventies. It's the HOV lane, or high occupancy vehicle lane, which is for two or more people in the car. You know, let's pack them in, two people. And this lane is on the far left, so in some cases it's the fifth or sixth, in some cases the seventh lane of traffic. And it has a double, double yellow line. So once you get into it, it's saying to you, don't even think about going over that line to get out. And you get in that line, and I'm telling you, 65, 70, I mean you're going 75 and people are blinking their lights behind you, you know, get going. One day I got in that lane and you know there's no getting off. Once you're in it, you're in it. I mean there's no slowing down, there's no getting out until it opens up again to get out. Remember looking over at Carol saying, hey where are we? And she said, I don't know. She said, what are we looking for? And I said, I don't know, but we're going to get there fast, whatever it is. And it really struck me how much of a caricature of real life those freeways are, you know. People are on a freeway headed toward a destination that they call the happy, comfortable life. They get on the freeway 10 or 12 hours a day and they're cranking it out, going as fast as they possibly can. Multiple responsibilities, opportunities, and activities filling up their day as they zoom along at a pace of life that just is incredible to people of only a generation ago. And the key is it must be right because so many other people are in the same rat race. You know, isn't the freeway of the fast lane as packed as it ever could be? Dear ones, let me ask you a question. Have you ever found or met someone that's won the rat race? Are they all just kind of running it, going somewhere? Are we afraid to get off that fast lane of life for just a minute to check our bearings and see where we're going? We're afraid that maybe if we slow down for just a bit we're going to get passed by somebody else who wants to get to the goal a little bit more than we do. So we find ourselves like with a hammer down all the way, pouring out as fast as we possibly can. Yeah, I have to admit, every once in a while we get troubled by that individual, that person here or there whose life kind of spins out of control like a car that we passed. You know, ran into another one and slammed into the barrier and backed everybody up and sure we got a little bit upset about it. Hey, you know, it happens and life goes on and we'll pick up the pieces and keep moving together. But maybe we ought to, just for a couple of weeks here, risk the possibility of thinking about stepping out of that fast lane and looking at life. Now, if you're a person that's just kind of interested in what philosophers have said, Plato said that the life which is unexamined is not worth living. But I take the words of the Bible even more seriously. Lamentations 340 says, let us examine our ways and test them and let us return to the Lord. Well, how about Paul in 2nd Corinthians 13 5, examine yourself to see whether you are of the faith. Test yourselves, Paul says. What kind of life freeware are you on right now? Is it possible that you've just been going on by default? Maybe 10 years ago you got out of college and set a goal for yourself and you haven't looked back in 10 years. All you know is that every day you get up at 6 and put on your clothes and head out. Is it possible that some of you here today and all that you're concerned about on your freeway is just surviving life? I mean, just having enough to get to nighttime? Is it possible that some of you heard something from the Lord and you've set yourself 2, 3, 5, 7 years ago to do what the Lord said and now you're not even sure if you're into it right? You see, the desires and appetites that were once born of maybe something good possibly have gotten lost in the shuffle of things. And the cultural credo that we all tend to hear around us ever since World War II has been one word. Here it comes. Consume. I mean, use it up, baby. Consume it. Go for it. Use up as much as you can. I looked up the word consumerism in Webster's Dictionary. It means the economic theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is beneficial. In other words, what you consume this year, you should surpass next year. I mean, isn't that basically what we're kind of taught? The philosophy is he who has the most toys in the ends wins. Have you ever heard that? Kind of store it all up and who comes out at the end with the most? The highest consumer is the happiest. And it's kind of unfair because thousands of advertisers are paid millions of dollars to have you spend our billions of dollars and end up with nothing. It's the kind of way we all live out there. And somehow the pursuit of these values has not led to a balanced and peaceful existence. Let me just share with you, if I might, we have a graph here. Let me put that up, please, the graph. A generation ago, standard of living may have been measured in terms of relational things, the quality of family life, the value of people. Now, I just used out of this book the names of cars to kind of, you know, just give you a hint as to the growing nature of materialistic lifestyle, going from a Clunker to a Chevy on all the way up to a Mercedes. But you see, there's other things that make up standard of living. And as material standards of living have gone up, I think it's pretty agreeable that lots of other ingredients of our standard of living have gone down. The quality of our family life, the moral fabric of our culture, I believe, has begun to unwind as we've pursued more avidly the materialistic ingredient of our standard of living. You can turn that off. Do you know that 80% of our nation, 80% of the people in our nation owe more than they own? The average family charges $2,500 a year on their master charge and other credit cards. You know, you max out one, you get another one. One lady was real upset when she found out she couldn't pay master card with Visa. Gee, I mean, what are we getting to? You know, I mean, things have really changed. You talk to kids now, and you say, well, where do you want to go tonight? That was it in this case. Where do you want to go tonight? Hey, let's go to the mall. Let's go to the mall. Let's go to the mall. That's, you know, that's a night out for kids these days. But what is the number one source of conflict in the American home? Is it politics? No way. Is it in-laws? Close. What is it? It's money. It's money by far, actually. And what to do with money? I can tell you from 15 years of pastoral ministry, the number one source of conflict, and experts more than authenticate this, money causes more problems than anything. In premarital counseling, and sometimes I'll do a little bit of marital counseling and financial counseling along the way, I'll ask a couple. I'll say, how are you going to determine your standard of living? What ingredients are going to go into the decision as to what standard you're going to live at so that you can avoid some of these conflicts? What economic value system are you going to build upon? You know what the first answer always is? See, I never thought about it. People kind of automatically just fall into a value system in life. And I've discovered there's about usually three ways in which people sort of set their economic standard of living. See which of these kind of fits where you're coming from. All right? They model a lifestyle, one of three groups. Number one, they model it from their parents. They model it from their parents. Their parents perhaps were great providers. Maybe they had a nice home. Maybe they had two cars. Maybe they went on nice vacations. Maybe they provided good, you know, nice furnishings and all the rest. And most of us growing up with that kind of parentage look and say, wow, hey, well, it's part of my birthright. But how many of you know times have changed? Interest rates have changed. Expenses of things have changed. The economic climate of things is different than it was a generation ago. Occupations may vary. It may not be reasonable for you to make as much money as your dad. I remember very well 20 years ago when I decided that the Lord was calling me to go into ministry, almost 20 years ago, my dad, mom came down to visit us. We were living down in Quantico, Virginia. I was still in the Marine Corps then. And dad came down and I know it was hard for him because, you know, he wanted what was best for me. But he sat me down and he said in some kind of a way, in essence, he said, do you know that if you go into this ministry direction you're talking about doing, and I was committed to it, he said, you'll never be able to rise to the potential earning power that you could in another direction. And he's right. You see, we make choices that maybe fit our personality and fit who God's called us to be that don't let us rise to the same level, perhaps, that our parents have. And boy, this can be a real pressure or burden, you know. We can look and see our parents' stuff and say, well, gee, I love that. And maybe we're in a different place and we need to be able to be free from that and set some values that are not encumbered by what our parents did or who they were. Now, another place that we set a value system and get some models is from our peer group. Now, don't just write me off here and say, I'm just going to talk about keeping up with the Joneses, because I want, let's be real honest for a couple of minutes. Okay, the Joneses are sitting right beside us and so are the Calabrese's and the Guthrie's. Do we have any Joneses here tonight? We have Joneses on Sunday, I'm sure of it. But you see, it's sort of a subconscious thing that happens to us. It's, you know, over time we may be a disciplined, budgeted kind of a person, but when we see the Joneses kind of doing pretty well and we look at ourselves and we think, I'm at least as intelligent as Brother Rick here, you know. Or I'm, you know, I work as hard as Brother Steve does and, you know, and it's over time, you know what happens? We're out in our disciplines. It's not, we want, is it really worth hanging in there to keep our lifestyle where God has called us to be? If he or she can afford it, why can't I afford it? I mean, why do I have to stick to this budget that so binds me up? Last year, last May, we went to my 20th college reunion and three of my fraternity brothers made a point of inviting me and I hadn't seen them in 20 years. We all laughed about how each other looked, you know, and all that stuff. Then, inevitably, we just started talking about life. It's kind of fun. If you've not done this kind of thing, you've got to do it because it's just amazing to see the way the Lord takes different lives and, in some cases, the Lord doesn't take them at all. But we were talking about stuff, you know, and we were talking about each of these guys and their six-figure incomes plus, and if I hadn't been the spiritual giant that, I mean, you know, and I know these guys. I mean, these guys are no better than I am. I know it. I don't know it perfectly, but anyhow, you know, I saw it. It was just like, okay, praise God, you know, but folks, let's be honest with each other. You know, when someone sits down to you and they have a new suit on, or that gal that you know that husband has, and she gets a dress that, boy, I really like, and then another one next week, or you walk out there and that new car is sitting beside you, a piece of junk, you know. I mean, how many times did a neighbor near you get a new car, and he went and looked at your car, and he said, this thing is just, I mean, wax won't help this thing. This thing is awful. Honey, we ought to go down and look at a new car, really. Let's be honest. That's a pressure point, isn't it, and enough of that over time wears out our disciplines, and then it gets tough to stand. It really does, and you see, the third force here that kind of shapes our lifestyle is the press or the media, and how many of you know they are really experts, or experts, an expert at the process of creating and needing you for their product. I mean, they have the best actors and actresses. They have the best scriptwriters, the best musicians, the best production people. I mean, they can make cars fly. They can make you look so happy that, you know, have you ever watched a commercial and said, you know, if I bought that thing, my life would change. I mean, you believe it. It's sort of a conspiracy out there to make you spin, and then when you add those three pressures to just, you know, the normal little bit of greed and covetousness that's in every one of us, when you add to it the little bit of a low self-esteem that kind of makes you want some stuff just to feel good about, you know, well, I got a nice car now, and, you know, if you add to that the materialistic society that you're into day in and day out, folks, it's very easy to see why many of us struggle with living within our means. To talk about stewardship in the church without talking about setting a standard of living just puts you in a place where it's on you just out of touch. You've got to talk about where you're called to live, and you need to set a standard and pursue it, and when you think about it, folks, there's very few people out there encouraging you to live within your means. Everything's so easy. I mean, there's some things out there now. Bad credit, no credit, bankrupt, call us and we'll give you more credit. I mean, it's just amazing, and all this stuff, how many know, puts an enormous pressure on the average person? Now, I'm sure none of you struggle with paying bills and feel any financial pressure at the end of the month, but some people do, and that pressure can just lay on you like a wet blanket day in and day out. It's sort of an emotional bondage that comes from indebtedness. You know, the Bible says that the borrower becomes the slave of the lender. That way never gets, it just never goes away, that the sun can be out, it'll be a beautiful day, and you still feel down because you owe so much money that you're wondering who's going to knock at your door, send you a letter that day. People I know that get into this kind of debt never expected it. I mean, maybe they made a decision along the way that was ill-advised, maybe they just started to stretch themselves too much, and one thing they're going, folks, can I tell you? These are generally good people who just made some mistakes, and their life is really a mess right now, and one of the reasons why that happens is they wouldn't get off the freeway long enough to just look at their life, long enough to examine what were they living for. I want to end the message today by looking at just three things that we can examine to keep our life on a track that's sane and makes sense as a standard of living. Paul said this, as I read tonight, he said, I have learned the secret of contentment. Now, I don't know if you like secrets, but if you'll listen to this, you'll write these down, you'll pray about them, it might help you to find contentment with what you have. Here's the first one. Examine your faith. The first thing to examine when you slow down in life long enough to look is your faith. Examine your faith. What do you really believe about life, folks? Because what you really believe has an enormous impact on your lifestyle. Do you really believe what this Bible says about what's important, or do you just think this is a compartment that you have to keep, you know, file under religion? If you call Jesus Lord, what does that word mean? What does the word Lord, it's on that banner, I don't know if you can read the banner, it's just a little, what's that say? Master. It literally means, the word Lord means owner. Master, owner. And I want to challenge you sometime, if not physically, mentally, write the name of Jesus over every one of your possessions, would you? Write it over the windshield of your car, Jesus owns, over the door of your house, over the watch that you're wearing. He's the owner. I know people laugh and they say, yeah, if he owned this car, he'd get rid of it. I've heard that. But for most of us, we hold pretty tightly to our stuff. It's our stuff that maybe we'll let God buy. Just a couple of verses. By the way, I just want to thank the band that's playing for us and the singers on Saturday. Aren't they doing a great job? Let's go ahead and thank them for their time. It's been a real challenge to grow together and Jan and Susie have been working hard to just draw on all these great resources that the Lord's put in our body. We really appreciate you leading us. Philippians 4, Paul says this, verse 10, I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content, whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in every and any situation, whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength. If I could assure you tonight that when you left here, you'd know how to be content in every situation, would you listen carefully? I can't promise that you'll get the message, but I can share what I believe the Lord wants us to know tonight about contentment. You know, I alluded to being in Southern California in that last week that we were gone, and by all consensus, Southern California has the most highly developed freeway system in the world, and the most congested. Any time, day or night, you can get on the freeways in Southern California and find four or five or six lanes of traffic going somewhere. Many times, midday, gridlock. Not two or three, four or five and six lanes of traffic. Experts predict by the year 2000, the average speed on the Southern California freeways will be 25 miles an hour. It's not hard to understand why a year ago freeway shootings were common. I almost bought a gun myself in the week I was there. Now there's a new addition in the Southern California freeway system that was not there when I lived there in the early 70s. It's the HOV lane, or high occupancy vehicle lane, which is for two or more people in the car. You know, let's pack them in, two people. And this lane is on the far left, so in some cases it's the fifth or sixth, in some cases the seventh lane of traffic. And it has a double double yellow line. So once you get into it, it's saying to you, don't even think about going over that line to get out. And you get in that line and I'm telling you, 65, 70, I mean you're going 75 and people are blinking their lights behind you, you know, get going. One day I got in that lane and you know, there's no getting off. Once you're in it, you're in it. I mean there's no slowing down, there's no getting out until it opens up again to get out. Remember looking over at Carol saying, hey, where are we? And she said, I don't know. She said, what are we looking for? And I said, I don't know, but we're going to get there fast, whatever it is. And it really struck me how much of a caricature of real life those freeways are, you know. People are on a freeway headed toward a destination that they call the happy, comfortable life. They get on the freeway 10 or 12 hours a day and they're cranking it out, going as fast as they possibly can. You know, multiple responsibilities, opportunities, and activities filling up their day as they zoom along at a pace of life that just is incredible to people of only a generation ago. And the key is, it must be right because so many other people are in the same rat race. You know, isn't the freeway, the fast lane, as packed as it ever could be? Dear ones, let me ask you a question. Have you ever found or met someone that's won the rat race? Are they all just kind of running it, going somewhere? Are we afraid to get off that fast lane of life for just a minute to check our bearings and see where we're going? We're afraid that maybe if we slow down for just a bit, we're going to get passed by somebody else who wants to get to the goal a little bit more than we do. So we find ourselves like with a hammer down all the way, pouring out as fast as we possibly can. Yeah, I have to admit, every once in a while we get troubled by that individual, that person here there whose life kind of spins out of control like a car that we passed, you know, ran into another one and slammed into the barrier and backed everybody up. And sure, we got a little bit upset about it. But hey, you know, it happens and life goes on and we'll pick up the pieces and keep moving together. But maybe we ought to, just for a couple of weeks here, risk the possibility of thinking about stepping out of that fast lane and looking at life. Now, if you're a person that's just kind of interested in what philosophers have said, Plato said that the life which is unexamined is not worth living. But I take the words of the Bible even more seriously. Lamentations 340 says, let us examine our ways and test them and let us return to the Lord. Well, how about Paul in 2 Corinthians 13 5, examine yourself to see whether you are of the faith. Test yourselves, Paul says. What kind of life freeware are you on right now? Is it possible that you've just been going on by default? Maybe 10 years ago, you got out of college and set a goal for yourself and you haven't looked back in 10 years. All you know is that every day you get up at 6 and put on your clothes and head out. Is it possible that some of you here today and all that you're concerned about on your freeway is just surviving life? I mean, just having enough to get to nighttime? Is it possible that some of you heard something from the Lord and you've set yourself 2, 3, 5, 7 years ago to do what the Lord said and now you're not even sure if you're into it, right? You see, the desires and appetites that were once born of maybe something good possibly have gotten lost in the shuffle of things. And the cultural credo that we all tend to hear around us ever since World War II has been one word. Here it comes. Consume. I mean, use it up, baby. Consume it. Go for it. Use up as much as you can. I looked up the word consumerism in Webster's dictionary. It means the economic theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is beneficial. In other words, what you consume this year, you should surpass next year. I mean, isn't that basically what we're kind of taught? The philosophy is he who has the most toys in the ends wins. Have you ever heard that? Kind of store it all up and who comes out at the end with the most, the highest consumer is the happiest. And it's kind of unfair because thousands of advertisers are paid millions of dollars to have you spend our billions of dollars and end up with nothing. That's the kind of way we all live out. And somehow the pursuit of these values has not led to a balanced and peaceful existence. Let me just share with you, if I might, we have a graph here. Let me put that up, please. The graph. A generation ago, standard of living may have been measured in terms of relational things, the quality of family life, the value of people. Now, I just used out of this book, the names of cars to kind of, you know, just give you a hint as to the growing nature of materialistic lifestyle, going from a Clunker to a Chevy on all the way up to a Mercedes. But you see, there's other things that make up standard of living. And as material standards of living have gone up, I think it's pretty agreeable that lots of other ingredients of our standard of living have gone down. The quality of our family life, the moral fabric of our culture, I believe, has begun to unwind as we've pursued more avidly the materialistic ingredient of our standard of living. Do you know that 80% of our nation, 80% of the people in our nation owe more than they own? The average family charges $2,500 a year on their master charge and other credit cards. You know, you max out one, you get another one. One lady was real upset when she found out she couldn't pay master card with Visa. Gee, I mean, what are we getting to? You know, I mean, things have really changed. You talk to kids now, and you say, well, where do you want to go tonight? That was it in this case. Where do you want to go tonight? Hey, let's go to the mall. Let's go to the mall. Let's go to the mall. That's, you know, that's a night out for kids these days. But what is the number one source of conflict in the American home? Is it politics? No way. Is it in-laws? Close. What is it? It's money. It's money by far, actually. What to do with money? I can tell you from 15 years of pastoral ministry, the number one source of conflict, and experts more than authenticate this, money causes more problems than anything. In premarital counseling, and sometimes I'll do a little bit of marital counseling and financial counseling along the way, I'll ask a couple. I'll say, how are you going to determine your standard of living? What ingredients are going to go into the decision as to what standard you're going to live at so that you can avoid some of these conflicts? What economic value system are you going to build upon? You know what the first answer always is? I never thought about it. People kind of automatically just fall into a value system in life. And I've discovered there's about usually three ways in which people sort of set their economic standard of living. See which of these kind of fits where you're coming from. All right? The model, they model a lifestyle, one of three groups. Number one, they model it from their parents. They model it from their parents. Their parents perhaps were great providers. Maybe they had a nice home. Maybe they had two cars. Maybe they went on nice vacations. Maybe they provided good, you know, nice furnishings and all the rest. And most of us growing up with that kind of parentage look and say, wow, hey, well, it's part of my birthright. But how many of you know times have changed? Interest rates have changed. Expenses of things have changed. The economic climate of things is different than it was a generation ago. Occupations may vary. It may not be reasonable for you to make as much money as your dad. I remember very well 20 years ago when I decided that the Lord was calling me to go into ministry, almost 20 years ago, my dad, mom came down to visit us. We were living down in Quantico, Virginia. I was still in the Marine Corps then. And dad came down and I know it was hard for him because, you know, he wanted what was best for me. But he sat me down and he said in some kind of a way, in essence, he said, do you know that if you go into this ministry direction you're talking about doing, and I was committed to it, he said, you'll never be able to rise to the potential earning power that you could in another direction. And he's right. You see, we make choices that maybe fit our personality and fit who God's called us to be that don't let us rise to the same level, perhaps, that our parents have. And boy, this can be a real pressure or burden, you know. We can look and see our parents' stuff and say, well, gee, I love that. And maybe we're in a different place and we need to be able to be free from that and set some values that are not encumbered by what our parents did or who they were. Now, another place that we set a value system and get some models is from our peer group. Now, don't just write me off here and say, I'm just going to talk about keeping up with the Joneses because I want, let's be real honest for a couple of minutes. Okay, the Joneses are sitting right beside us and so are the Calabrese's and the Guthrie's. Do we have any Joneses here? We have Joneses on Sunday, I'm sure. But you see, it's sort of a subconscious thing that happens to us. It's, you know, over time we may be a disciplined, budgeted kind of a person, but when we see the Joneses kind of doing pretty well and we look at ourselves and we think, I'm at least as intelligent as brother Rick here. Or I'm, you know, I work as hard as brother Steve does and, you know, and it's over time, you know, what happens out in our disciplines. It's not we want, is it really worth hanging in there to keep our lifestyle where God has called us to be. If he or she can afford it, why can't I afford it? I mean, why do I have to stick to this budget that so binds me up? Last year, last May, we went to my 20th college reunion and three of my fraternity brothers made a point of inviting me and I hadn't seen him in 20 years. We all laughed about the way each other looked, you know, and all that stuff. Then inevitably we just started talking about life. It's kind of fun. If you've not done those kind of things, you ought to do it because it's just amazing to see the way the Lord takes different lives and in some cases the Lord doesn't take them at all. But we were talking about stuff, you know, and we were talking about each of these guys and their six-figure incomes plus. And if I hadn't been the spiritual giant that, I mean, I know these guys. I mean, these guys are no better than I am. I know it. Well, I don't know it perfectly, but anyhow, you know, I saw it. It was just like, okay, praise God, you know. But folks, let's be honest with each other. You know, when someone sits down to you and they have a new suit on or that gal that you know, that husband has, and she gets a dress that, boy, I really like, and then another one next week, or you walk out there and that new car is sitting beside you, a piece of junk, you know. I mean, how many times did a neighbor near you get a new car? And he went and looked at your car. He said, this thing is just, I mean, wax won't help this thing. This thing is awful. Honey, we ought to get down and look at a new car, really. Let's be honest. That's a pressure point, isn't it? And enough of that over time wears out our disciplines, and then it gets tough to stand. It really does. And you see, the third force here that kind of shapes our lifestyle is the press or the media. And how many of you know they are really experts, or experts, an expert at the process of creating and needing you for their product? I mean, they have the best actors and actresses. They have the best script writers, the best musicians, the best production people. I mean, they ca