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"Habits of Effective Christians: Thinking Abundantly"
February 15, 2004 The Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson
[spoke about having seen the movie Miracle] It kind of dovetails with what I want to talk about today. I've been doing a series of sermons loosely based on Stephen Covey's book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talking about habits of Christians. And I decided to go with Covey's idea of what he calls "win-win." I was thinking about the movie and I was wondering what does "winning" look like from God's perspective?
I want to read to you some Scripture. I added a few verses from the New Testament to what is already printed in your bulletin. First, from the Old Testament, Psalm 127, verses 1 and 2. Let us listen carefully to God's Word, especially as it applies to God view of winning and losing. The Psalm says:
Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain
In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat-- for the Lord grants sleep to those he loves.
And then Matthew chapter 16.
Jesus said to the disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to win his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will keep it. What good will it do for a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? And what can a man give in exchange for his soul? The Son of Man is going to come in all his glory with his angels and then he will reward each according to what he has done."
And from Luke chapter 22, 24 to 27:
A dispute arose among them as to which of them was considered to be the greatest. Jesus said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
"For he who wants to save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will find it."
Let us pray together. Father, when we hear your Word that's preached, you have a special message for each one at each particular place in our lives. We pray that your presence would be with us and that you would be honored, and that we would all be blessed in your presence and in your Word. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Take any ten chickens. Put them in a pen together and spread a little chicken feed, and you will witness an amazing phenomenon. In a matter of minutes the chickens, previously strangers, will vie for a hierarchy based on dominance. They will establish a pecking order. Instinctively, they will have a series of skirmishes to determine what chicken will be number two, number three, all the way down to the unlucky number ten. Much is at stake in this dance of domination. Chicken number one pecks at and intimidates chicken number two without experiencing any kind of retribution from chicken number two. Chicken number two will take it from chicken number one, but will turn around and peck away at chicken number three. The pecking order continues all the way down to chicken number ten who, needless to say, has a pretty miserable life: pecked, but no one to peck.
This is a story by Chuck Swindoll. And we might be tempted to think, "Well, these are only chickens." But if we just glance around us, we can see that we human beings also establish pecking orders all the time. We think in terms of winning and losing. And winning really is a lot of fun. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, "Winning is not just one thing--it's the only thing!" Often in life we see that. Where did it come from?
We can see it very early in our families, can't we? As children, we learn very quickly what behaviors will win our parents' love and what behaviors will lose it. Because as parents we sometimes make that mistake of withdrawing our affection when our kids behave certain ways. But even if we don't do that, and we try hard not to do that, our kids think we do it anyway. And they will compete, if they have siblings, for the love of the parents, or the affection, or the approval, and often will grow up thinking "they love you more than me." Siblings see the power of winning and losing.
We see it in school very early on. Just go stand outside the fence of an elementary school and you will hear some variation of "Na, na, na-na-na" or whatever it is. Because there are always winners and losers on the playground at school, growing up in this way or that way. As it progresses, we see the style change over time, but the principle is still the same. If you dress a certain way, you are cool. If you dress another way, you are something else. What is it--"loser"? There are always variations of the theme. It hasn't changed, no matter how ridiculous the style was. In my day, we wore big bell-bottoms. Now I think they're coming back. I was amazed that people can drag those things out of the closet. Or your hair style. Or your earrings, now. It used to be if you wore it in the left ear, that meant something, and the right ear meant something else. Now everybody wears both . . . and everyplace else . . . When I got to college, I grew my hair long. All kinds of things. And you're cool and you're a winner, or you're a loser.
Job. Status. Perks--all depend on who wins and who loses. On television, the "reality shows"--they're about winning and losing, aren't they? Eliminate or get eliminated along the way. Or the bachelorette or the bachelor. Every night you sit down and watch who in the wheel of life gets bankrupt, or loses a turn, or spells it correctly. Or answers the question with a question correctly. Even in the politically-correct world of Hollywood, it's no longer, "And the winner is . . ." It's, "And the Oscar goes to . . ." But we still watch to see who wins, who loses. What do we make of all that?
This is where I think Stephen Covey has a real point. He says that in the things that matter, the idea of winning and losing is a ridiculous concept. And I think he's right. I mean, after all, do we really want a husband and wife to think about who is winning and losing? Even in the relationships in the church, or in business where we often call it "dog eat dog," don't we? Winning and losing.
Covey says we really ought to have the idea of what he's called, "win-win." The idea is if we work hard enough, if we go beyond the idea of simple compromise, we can actually have people feel like they win. I think he has a point. He goes on to say, talking in a strictly secular way, that very often this idea of winning and losing comes from a "scarcity mentality."
It's the idea that there are finite pieces of the pie for everything, and as human beings we feel like we have to get our piece. We see it in the big picture. In that movie Miracle, they do a pretty good job of talking about what was happening in the seventies and eighties. In one scene you see gas lines. Remember that? Some of you might remember that. Cindy and I got married in 1979, and we had to plan our honeymoon trip because if your license plate ended in a certain letter, you got gas in that state, but if it was the opposite letter, you didn't. The states had different plans and we were traveling across many so we had to plan out when we could get gas in 1979. That was 25 years ago, almost. And people were saying we were going to run out of oil. Other people were saying we were not. And so far, we have plenty.
We see the scarcity-mentality in other ways. We hear all the time about the "population bomb"--how the population is growing so fast. That may be true, but a lot of evil comes out of that idea. Millions of abortions. And in the twentieth century, we have seen the other side of that in genocide. Not just in Nazi Germany, but in 14 cases in the twentieth century, hundreds and thousands of people were destroyed partly because the idea was, as Dickens said, "to decrease the surplus population."
But in a smaller way, we see it in relationships. Covey says this. He says, "People with a scarcity mentality have a hard time sharing anything--credit, power." There was a time when people could be generally happy with the success of other people, especially members of your own family, or friends, or associates. It's almost as if some people think it diminishes them when other people get some measure of recognition or success. Have you ever seen that happen? You can tell someone with a scarcity-mentality by their disparaging remarks when they point out someone else's success. That's the spirit of the scarcity mentality.
Covey advocates the idea of "win-win." He says that overcomes this mentality, and I think there's a certain "Christianess" about that. And you can think of it in terms of God and His love for us. These last few weeks I've been using letters. I turn to "R" today. I think behind the idea of win and lose, we have to think in terms of "reorienting ourselves."
Now, win-win does not mean there should not be competition or winning and losing. There are certain things we need to fight about. There is evil out there that we need to fight. And there is justification for things like World War II, and other wars. Sometimes people put us in a position where we have to win or great evil happens. And the same is true with truth. There is absolute truth out there, and we need to fight for it. And we need to win. We need to win the battle against all kinds of evil, and disease and heartache.
We need to reorient ourselves because God is a God who wins. We all know, for example, that we are saved by grace, and not by works. Let me just ask you a question: When you think about your Christian life at its very heart, what do you think about? Often people think in terms of "do"s and "don't"s, rights and wrongs. And certainly there is part of that in our faith. But the very heart of it has nothing to do with "do"s and "don't"s. Chuck Colson says this. He says,
Many people believe Christianity to be a contest with a set of rules and regulations we have to follow in order to win salvation and God's love. In this spiritual thinking, the winners are those who can be victorious over sin and demonstrate their piety through their works. But Christianity is not that. It's not about "do"s and "don't"s. It is about God working in us. We can boast about following rules or doing good things. We can't boast about the works of God in our lives. It is strictly a gift.
Paul says, "Where is the boasting? . . . It is excluded," he said. Read Romans again. It's in Romans 2 and 3 where he talks about it. It has to do with how we find God's favor, in an ultimate sense, because our relationship with God is based on grace. You know, I say that in a lot of my sermons. You'll hear it again and again, but I find that all of us--including me--need to hear it. If I'm going to reorient myself, I need to know that I stand before God and it's a gift of His grace. And it's wonderful! I don't have to win anything with God. Our goal in this life is not to compete with other people for getting to heaven. There's not finite space up there! It's abundant. It's so abundant to you and me even when we do fail, even when we do mess up so bad. The Scripture says it over and over again.
And we also need to reorient ourselves to what God's view of winning really is. Jesus says some very tough things. "If you want to be great in the Kingdom of God, you've got to be like a child." Greatness is something totally different for God than it is for us.
Most of us in this room probably remember Mohammed Ali. In 1971, he was set to fight Joe Frazier for the Heavyweight Championship of the World. And Ali was a showman, walking around going, "I'm the greatest! I'm the king. If I was a postage stamp is the only way I could get licked! I'm the greatest!" And so on and so forth. And, actually, that fight with Joe Frazier, he lost. I remember that. But later on, after he had kind of dropped out of sight, a reporter went to visit him. He had a farm, or a place out in the country. He took this reporter into a barn, and in the barn he had all his memorabilia--pictures of his fights with Foreman, and Frazier, and all the others. Trophies here, rings there, all kinds of things. And he showed them one by one. But what was interesting was, it was a barn and all these things--many of them--had pigeon droppings on them. And Ali came upon a picture and looked at it, and kind of turned it around so you couldn't see it. He looked at the reporter and he said, "You know, for a while there I had it all. Now, it ain't nothin'--it ain't nothin'."
Greatness the way the world talks about it is nothing. Yet how often we get trapped into this win-lose and think that if we get to the pinnacle in this life, we've won. The person who has the most toys at the end does not necessarily win. We need to reorient our lives and repent, if you will. I think that it's something that's in our hearts.
I like the story I read about a lady who had two sons. Every night they would fight over the biggest piece of cake or pie. And she would always determine each share and who got this or the other. Finally she got exasperated enough she came up with a different method. She came out with a piece of pie that was very generous and said to the boys, "OK. You've got to share this pie and you get to choose which piece you want, but the other one is the one who cuts it." She was surprised at how much surgical precision was involved in the cutting of the pie! She shouldn't have been surprised, because it's in all our hearts.
There are things in life we have to win. There is true competition out there. There's friendly competition. But it's in our hearts. Cindy and I were walking through a store yesterday and I noticed that there was a Trivial Pursuit game based on the Lord of the Rings. The first thing I thought was, "I could win almost every game!" because I've read the book so many times. It's in my heart, too.
But in the end, we believe certain things. We believe that God is going to win in the end. He is the winner. And what do we need to do in our lives to orient ourselves toward His view of winning? What do we need to think about? How do we need to think? We need to read things like, "If you want to be great, you must be a servant. If you want to be high up in the Kingdom, you must be lowly." Because part of what God has done is reorient, or reverse, almost everything. It's not that being the president of a big company is wrong, or achieving success in this life is wrong. But in the end, we are all sinners saved by grace. And it's not about how much stuff we have. It's about what the Lord thinks. And He thinks of us abundantly in His love.
What is greatness to you? Think about that today. Seek the Lord and ask Him how you can be great in your life, wherever you are and whatever you're doing. And in doing so, you will find great abundance.
Let us pray. Father, thank you for the abundant, infinite love you have for us in Jesus Christ. Thank you for the grace that saves us and your love that sustains us. Help us reorient ourselves, to repent, to reverse, that we may come to experience the abundance of all that you have given us. We pray these things in your name. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson Senior Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota
[Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00 a.m. worship service on February 15, 2004.] |
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