Bill's Bible Blog

🍎 APPLICATION

Even as ‘little Christs,’ we’re not going to be called upon to lay down our lives for the salvation of the world. Actually, we’re being asked to do something much more difficult…

There are several authors who printed variations of a saying used by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his play, “Hamilton,” which premiered in January 2015.

“Dying is easy, beloved. It is living that is difficult.” Leonide Martin, Dreaming the Maya Fifth Sun, published 2006.

“Dying is Easy, its Living that’s hard,” Alden Bell, The Reapers are the Angels, published 2010.

That is the difficult thing God is asking us to do as Christians, to live for Him. Paul puts it this way,

So then, looking at the three divisions of my study summary, here are some ideas about how we can live as Jesus died.

I. Foreknowledge. Have you ever felt like you already knew what was going to happen in a familiar situation? Maybe you knew there would be a person who would argue with you. Maybe you knew someone would get their feelings hurt. Our tendency as ‘nice’ people is to try and avoid controversy or hurting people’s feelings.

If we overcompensate and sacrifice our Christian imperatives, then we end up doing what Charlie Kirk warned about:

Jesus did not run away from what He believed in–His Heavenly Father and God’s plan of salvation–and neither should we.

Jesus did not stay silent about what was right and wrong about the Jewish leaders when it came to God’s commands, and neither should we.

Not arguing and not hurting others’ feelings are good goals, but maybe not the priority they often are over other more important goals. In the Navigators, we tried to always remember that “The good is the enemy of the best,” from Oswald Chambers:

This means accepting something that is merely good can prevent us from achieving something better. Like Jesus, we should prioritize the things that matter most to God. Those things are–being in right relationship with our Heavenly Father; and telling others about Him, His Son, and God’s plan of redemption for humankind.

However, we SHOULD be gracious in how we present Jesus and the gospel. Following are a couple of New Testament guidelines for doing that:

II. INTENTIONALITY / DETERMINATION:

A. There were words in the King James Bible I read in the 60’s that were not a part of common vocabulary. One of those was ‘diligent.’ I had a difficult time figuring out it’s meaning without any real-world usages. Here are a couple of examples from the Bible:

📖 DILIGENT is defined as by Websters as meaning:

Comparing to synonyms, DILIGENT suggests earnest application to some specific objective or pursuit.

B. Use of the word ‘intentional’ in Christian circles is a relatively new one. Websters defines it as meaning: 📖

A comparison of synonyms fleshes out the definition: Intentional stresses intent, an awareness of an end intended to be achieved. (I know our English teachers taught us not to use a word to define itself, but…)

I see the concepts of diligence and intentional as being very close in meaning, which I think is best summed up by a famous sports quote–

III. Those things related to our passage this week that I think we need to be intentional / diligent about are:

A. Sacrificial giving: John takes the concept of laying down one’s life introduced in his gospel a step further in his first letter,

At first glance, we might think John is advocating we be willing to die for each other. Maybe…, but he goes on to explain more specifically what he means,

:18 “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech only, but with actions and in truth.”

So, John makes it clear that our sacrifices for each other are to be more material–to sacrificially give of our possessions to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters in the faith (firstly), but also of all those around us.

B. Sacrificial living. As seen in Romans 12:1, we’re supposed to be living sacrifices. Paul elaborates on this concept in 2 Corinthians 5:15,

Peter himself put it this way in his first letter, 1 Peter 4:1-2,

:2 “As a result, they do not live the rest of their earthly lives for merely human desires, but rather for the will of God.”

Ultimately there should be a crucifixion going on in our lives. Paul fills out this concept in Galatians,

And most dramatically, Paul’s personal testimony in Galatians 2:20,

Whew! Very high standards indeed.

C. Sacrificial going. In our last section of Mark coming up next week, Jesus commissions His disciples by saying, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15)

⛪️ Our church is very much a sending church. Every week, our services end with the phrase, “Summit, you are sent.” (A church ‘sends,’ a person ‘goes.’)

❤ We’re in the middle of our giving commitment month and some of the stats and testimonies for how the church spent our donations this past fiscal year, and the results obtained, are quite impressive. Here is a summary of how our sacrificial giving should be used for the things that are on God’s heart:

1. The Great Commission:

🌎 Fulfilling the Great Commission includes preaching the gospel, baptizing those who believe, making disciples by teaching them, and taking these activities into all the world; and don’t forget, our city, our state and our country are all part of ‘the world.’

2. The Compassion Ministries:

🤟 Looking over the above two lists of ministries, you might think, ‘I can’t do that.’ But there are many things that anyone can do. Rather than focusing on the specialty ministries, such as proclaiming the gospel, teaching the Scriptures, baptizing someone, look at the compassion ministries. Anyone can give necessities–food and clothing–to the poor and needy. Get started somewhere, if you’re not already, and see where God takes you.

3. Widows and orphans (in our time, single mothers and their children, as well as orphaned children):

We have a ministry where single parents can bring their children for an evening of supervised fun while the parent takes a night off.  There are a lot of other giving ministries focused on single mother families too.

😇 Anyone can donate a Christmas present in an Angel Tree ministry for children who otherwise might not receive anything for Christmas. (We’ve got one of those too!)

👫 For our small group Christmas project this year, we bought Christmas presents for a boy and a girl in a Christian orphanage from their wish lists.

👀 We are surrounded by people with needs. Be intentional / diligent in finding ways you can give to meet those needs in the Name of Jesus.

✨️ CONCLUSION:

🎁 At work, our Christmas project this year is buying Christmas presents for three needy military families through a Service Assistance organization. One family lost their father to an IED in Afghanistan. Another family has their father, but he was totally disabled by an IED. In the third family, the mother is the service member whose husband divorced her and left her with six children. The other two families have 4 and 5 children.

🎄We have almost 1,000 employees scattered across the US, with about 100 in the office. Already the stack of presents for each family is impressive, along with many generous donations of cash from our distant employees to buy more. However, in my opinion there is going to be something very important missing; there will be nothing about God or Jesus Christ, except in the word ‘Christ’mas.

👑 We in the church body should not only exceed the generosity of those who are still separated from God, but we should also be taking a witness of who Jesus is, and what He did for us, to others via these compassion ministries. Meeting the material needs is important, but the spiritual and eternal needs need to be met too.

🤓 SUMMARY:

✝️ So, live for Jesus, give and minister to the needy, and take the message of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ everywhere you go. If you’ll do these things, you’ll be living up to the name you bear as ‘Christ’ians. 🙂