Transcript
What I think of myself and I think of my relationship to the surrounding community, I have to be honest with you -- what I'm going to talk about right now, I find deeply personally convicting. I think I'm going to say the things I'm going to say to you because they really are portraits of my own failure. And I know if I've failed in these ways, if I've struggled in these ways, I don't think I'm unique. I think many of you have probably struggled this way, too.
What Thwarts a Ministry Lifestyle?
Think with me for a moment. What is it that thwarts a ministry lifestyle? You know this is true. If you're God's child, you've not only received God's grace, you've been called to be an instrument of that grace in the life of others. Ministry is not something a few have been called to. Ministry is something all of us been called to.
Ministry is not something you do occasionally that's scheduled by your church. Ministry is a lifestyle. And yet we can go through periods of time where we have no relationship whatsoever to the surrounding community around us, no real ministry to our neighbors, maybe little conversation even with this. We are not agents of light. We are not agents of love. We're not messengers of a message of awesome, glorious, forgiving, transforming, eternal grace. Why is that?
Well, here's the first reason. I think many of us are just too busy. We've loaded our lives with our personal happiness success agenda. We know what we have to do to keep our bodies fit. We know what we have to do to keep our wallets full. We know what we have to do to keep our bellies full. We know what we have to do to be fully entertained. We know what we have to do to keep the cool people that we want in our lives and by the time we're done pursuing that agenda, we have no time left for God's agenda.
I would ask you -- I think it's an important question -- what set of values determines your schedule? Whose agenda determines how you spend your time? And that busyness is maybe depicted by something we're all familiar with by the fact that we get irritated if somebody is walking slow in front of us or if we're in traffic because we're so filled with a sense of what we want out of our lives, what we want out of our schedule. We've so loaded ourselves with a frenetic, busy agenda, any interruption irritates us.
Monday Through Saturday for Our Agenda
And listen. And so, we live our lives Monday through Saturday filled with our agenda for our success and our happiness; and on Sunday, we give a couple hours to God's agenda, only to revert Monday back to a lifestyle that has nothing to do with the larger redemptive agenda of God.
Your life doesn't belong to you anymore. Your schedule doesn't belong to you anymore. You don't own your emotionality. You don't own your mentality. You don't own your psychology. You don't own your physicality. You don't own your relationships. You don't own what you own. It all belongs to your Master and He calls you to be a tool of His work.
I've said this to you before. Here's the agenda. A God of invisible grace makes His grace visible by sending people of grace to give grace to people who need grace. All of us are called to that. Is your schedule so loaded that you have no time to be an agent of grace in your neighborhood? Could it be that you're too busy to be part of God's gospel agenda?
