May 1 2005

You Were Shaped for God’s Service

May 1, 2005 Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

I was watching television just the other day and they were showing some pictures from the Hubble telescope and one of the things they do with the telescope is they point to places in the sky which appear black. Of course through the telescope this area is not black or empty; it actually shows thousands of little swirly-things and these swirly-things are galaxies, thousands of them. You would look up in the sky and there are thousands and thousands of galaxies in what seems to be a black space in the sky. Each of those galaxies has hundreds and thousands of stars. It’s mind-blowing, it’s incredible. And yet not only does the sky declare the glory of God, but the Scripture also tells us that we ourselves also declare God’s glory. God has formed us, has made us, each and every one and made us who we are. That’s what David is trying to say in Psalm 139:13-16. I’d like to read that to you and what I want you to hear is the emphasis on worship that he gives. He looks at himself and his life and even his own body and he wants to say, “God, you are something else.”

Oh, yes, you shaped me first inside then out. You formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you high God, you’re breath-taking. Body and soul, I am marvelously made. I worship in adoration, what a creation! You know me inside and out; you know every bone in my body, you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow, from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you. The days of my life all prepared before I even lived one day.

But, the Scriptures not only say we were made by God, we were called by God into service that we were saved, redeemed, for work. God has called us to make a difference in this life. God has not only called us to do this, He’s gifted us, He’s given us the ability to do these things. This is the subject of what Paul is talking about in Romans 12:1-8. Hear again what God has to say to us. I’m reading from Eugene Peterson’s The Message.

So, here’s what I want you to do, God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life, your sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around life and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God; you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what He wants from you and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you. He develops well-formed maturity in you. I am speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and what He does for us, not by what we are and what we do for Him. In this way, we are like the various parts of the human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we are talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and our function as a part of His body. But as a chopped off finger or a cut-off toe, we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all of these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts of Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we’re made to be, without endlessly and pridefully comparing ourselves to one another, or trying to be something we aren’t.

This is the word of the Lord.

There are all kinds of advertising out there. Some of it is quite false, but some of it is kind of fun. I was looking on my computer and I found several slogans I would like to share with you.

There was a slogan on a tow truck at a gas station in Ohio that said: “We don’t want an arm and a leg, just all your tows.”
At a photography shop, its slogan said: “First we shoot you, then we blow you up.”
Or at a restaurant in a fishing town which says: “Fishermen, get your first bite here.”
Or sometimes we get messages we don’t want to say, like at a church which was talking about their pastor’s recent bout with illness. It read: “God is good. Dr. Smith is better.”
Or a family named Husband which owned a pest control company. The name of the company is “Husband Exterminating.”
Or the fun-loving travel agency which says: “Go away please.”
A sign in the library which says: “Last of the big lenders.”
And a bank window: “Up a tree? Try our branch.”
And a clothing store: “Our clothing prices are trivial per suit.”
Or I like this one, an optometrist’s window: “We’re the best in sight.”
Or in a dance hall (this is the last one): “Good, clean dancing every night except Sundays.”

There’s a lot of advertising in our lives, not just on the TV or radio or in the newspaper but I think there’s advertising for philosophies of life. One of the philosophies that is out there –I consider it false advertising – is that we are accidents. We’re just cosmic accidents, having risen out of the primordial slime, mixed with a little lightning and a little heat and a few chemicals…life coming about by itself. We are basically accidents. We don’t know how we got here or where we’re going. I’m not here to talk about the theory of evolution and that sort of thing. I’m not even sure I know how I feel myself about the way things are taught in schools these days; it’s a big debate. I really do like the idea of intelligent design because scientifically it suggests that we could not have gotten here by ourselves. That things could not have been made just by happenstance. But what’s really going on is a philosophy. What we can say as Christians is that any philosophy that says we are by chance, that we’re just accidents is false. It’s false advertising. It leads to the wrong kinds of thoughts about ourselves and about our world. We are, in fact, fearfully and wonderfully made. I love what David says. He says this: “Like an open book you watched me grow from conception to birth. All the stages of my life were spread out before you. Days of my life all prepared.” Not only our birth but our lives have a purpose because God has given us this purpose.

You know I’ve told the story about my own life a couple of times. How my father was from South Dakota and was a farm boy but during the Depression he had to leave home. He wound up in World War II as a bomber pilot. He flew a B-17 and was shot down over Germany. He was not captured but wound up walking to Paris over a three week period and was picked up by the French Underground and stayed with them awhile. He was smuggled out of France over the Pyrenees, the Southern Alps, during the winter. How many times did this guy have a chance of getting killed? Lots. How many times did I have a chance of not being here? But, you know, I don’t believe that was a chance. The mystery of it is that God is in control. I like to say he was by chance, if you will, stationed in Memphis, Tennessee and married a young southern girl and here I am today. But you know, we think about not only our parents but our grandparents and our great-grandparents, down the line and how they met and fell in love and had children and they survived and here we are. If you don’t believe me that it’s not by chance…it seems like it is but again, this God that we worship who created all these galaxies…it is beyond how we can think but it’s true. We’re not here by chance. God has created us. But God has not only created us, God has created us for a purpose and it’s His purpose.

Another false advertising, I believe, is that we’re here just for ourselves. I was looking up on the Internet, searching on some words. And I looked up the word “pampered.” Of course there are pampered chefs, but there are pampered ladies, pampered husbands, pampered pets…everything is about being pampered. I’ve talked to you before about how you walk through the book store and see all these self-help books. They’re not all bad, some of them are pretty good, but they’re usually about taking your life and succeeding for your benefit. And the Scriptures tell us that that is not what life is all about. Life is not about serving us, but service. God has not only made us, He’s called us to make a difference in this life. He’s given us Jesus Christ who died on the cross for us, who has saved us from our sins, but it’s not just about fire insurance. Being a Christian is not just about fire insurance, keeping out of hell. A lot of people treat it that way; “I’ve got Jesus now, I’m safe.” Well, you are but it’s a lot more than that. God has redeemed us to be as Jesus was who said: “I came, not to be served, but to serve and give my life as ransom for many.” It’s about making a difference in this world.

I am going to say something to you and I want you to hear it in context. If you are not serving God in some way, your life is wasted. If you are not serving God in some way your life is wasted. Now again I want you to hear this in context, bear with me. I want you to understand what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that serving God means you all need to become pastors or even elders or missionaries. It’s not about that. I remember when I was at Duke University. I’d become a Christian and I was telling one of my professors how I felt like I was supposed to be a minister. And he said something very interesting; he said, “Why is it you guys always think you have to be ministers?” And all I could say to him was that this was what I felt I should do. But he had a point, not everyone is called to do this particular job, this particular calling. It’s kind of like the story I like to tell about a farmer who was in the field, he had been plowing all day and he’d been doing this for a couple of days and he was wondering whether this was all there was. He was praying to God and asking whether he was supposed to do something else with his life and asked for a sign. About that time, he saw a finger in the sky that spelled out ‘P-C.’ He thought that meant go preach Christ so he left the field and sold the farm. He spent his life miserable going from church to church and was not successful at all. He got to old age and passed away and went to heaven and stood before the Lord and said, “Lord, I just don’t understand. I tried to do what you called me to do. I saw that sign you wrote in the sky that said P-C.” And the Lord said, “No, no you got it wrong. ‘P-C’ didn’t mean preach Christ, it meant plant corn.” Some of us are called to plant corn. And I’m not talking about just serving in the church either. See I believe that God is a big God. And His kingdom is much bigger than Faith Presbyterian Church. And you are, in a sense, God’s missionaries out there in the world. It’s not really about what you are doing, it’s your attitude toward it. That’s what I’m trying to say to you. That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to work in the church. I like the other story about a football team that showed up at the stadium and the other team comes out on the field and they’re big bruising guys. They get ready to go out onto the field but all they send out is their quarterback and they stand on the sidelines saying, “Go quarterback, you can do it. We’re for you. Beat the other team.” A lot of pastors feel that way. That people are on the sidelines cheering them on. I want to say to you that one of the things that really attracted me of coming to Faith Church is the fact that you have so many people doing so many things. You really do. A lot of you do a lot of stuff that no one hears about. I like that too. I hear about it and maybe one of the things we ought to do is do a little better job of advertising all the things that are going on here. But many churches, and this one also, twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work. And maybe we’re up to thirty; I’ve always said as a pastor that my goal is to get it up to thirty percent, maybe even forty, who knows? Some of us do sit on the sidelines and cheer people on. I want to encourage you to make a difference for Christ.

And thirdly I want to say to you that not only has God made us and called us, but He’s also given us gifts and abilities to use for Him. One of the things that is happening on Friday is we are having a Life-Keys class. That’s a wonderful time of discovering some things about your personality, some things about your spiritual gifts, some things about your abilities that God has given you. Rick Warren uses the acrostic of SHAPE, how God has shaped us in certain ways. It has to do with several things that God has given us. One of them is spiritual gifts; by spiritual gifts, sometimes we get a little bit put off when we say that word, we think maybe it means speaking in tongues or something weird like that, but I’m not talking about that. God gives us special gifts like leadership, like preaching, like teaching. There’s one gift of helps; in other words, people are more in tune to helping one another. I just spent a few days at Fort McCoy doing some Army training and there was another chaplain there who I really liked and he’s a hospice chaplain over in Wisconsin. Hospice is that ministry that deals with people who are dying. This guy had the personality and the gifting, you just were drawn to him… very pastoral. He’s the kind of guy that if you had something wrong you would immediately like him and want to go talk to him. But you know he got up and did the devotion, kind of preached to us a little bit, and God bless him that wasn’t his gift. This is not meant as criticism; he was wonderful at doing what he was doing. He was called and gifted to be a hospice chaplain, not necessarily to be a preacher. We all have different things that we do and we need to explore that. We need to take some time thinking about what God has given you. If you don’t understand how to do that, take a course on spiritual gifts.

Another is heart; what’s your passion? What do you like to do? We all have to do things we don’t like to do. As a pastor, I’ve done so many things and ministries that either I wasn’t good at or didn’t care for. But, there are so many things that I have a passion for. That’s just part of life. God wants you to do mostly what you have a passion about, what your heart is. When I first got here, John Ward and I talked a lot about this. John and I are contemporaries, about the same time we’ve been ministers – over twenty years – and we noticed that a lot of people didn’t have the heart for ministry anymore, the passion for it. They’d been in it too long. As we talked about it with one another, we both said that we still have this passion of ministry. As long as we have it, we can still do this. What’s your passion? What has God given you that you are concerned about, that you want to do? What are your abilities? Abilities and gifts kind of overlap, but they’re a little bit different. Abilities are more in line with intelligence or artistry, even athletic ability. We have different things that we are able to do. What’s your personality? I shared with you a few weeks ago that I tend to be introverted; introversion doesn’t necessarily mean you’re shy, it can mean that, but it more has to do with your energy level with people. There are some people who are extroverts and when they walk into a room with one hundred people, their energy level goes up and they’re walking around saying hello and think it’s great. Introverts walk into a room of a lot of people and their energy just goes down, like a balloon deflating. No offense, by the way. It has nothing to do with you, it’s just when I’m here all morning and with you all morning, I love you but I just have to go home and take a nap when I’m done. We’re all different and it’s okay. I met a guy at the Army training and he has the same personality on the Myers Briggs as I do except that he’s an extrovert and I’m an introvert. Sometimes I really want to be an extrovert but God has made me who I am and that’s okay. We’re all different.

And then what’s your experience. I was talking also yesterday with a guy, in the Army you know we have to take a physical training test every six months. As you get a little bit older, it gets a little bit harder. We were walking back and I said, “You know, I’d really like to be twenty-four again. Except that I would like to be twenty-four and know all the things that I know now.” Because I wouldn’t want to give up all the pain and the suffering and the wisdom and the joys that I’ve had for those twenty-five years. I wouldn’t want to give any of it up; all those things make me who I am and make you who you are. And it really grieves me when I hear people say they’ve reached a point in their lives and they are just not going to do anymore. They say, “I’ve done my thing.” But that’s usually the time when you’ve had so much experience, you have so much to offer. And there’s no such thing as retirement in God’s kingdom. There isn’t anything such as retirement in God’s kingdom. We all have different places in life and sometimes we take a break and that’s okay, but there’s no such thing. What is God calling you to do and to be? How is God calling you to serve? It may be in the church or it may be in the world that you’re in but wherever you go, you’re God’s missionary, you are God’s representative. You are God’s, you belong to Him. He’s called you and He’s given you gifts. Find out what they are. Make a difference for Christ in this life. Make a difference for your life. Let us pray together.