Step Up: To Deeper Significance

10-21-07 message by Pastor Rich Doebler

How do you define significance? Importance; influence; value; meaning?

Some people measure significance or importance by the titles and degrees they attach to their name: Ph.D. etc. Labels, titles, and positions often indicate something of the value or significance people attach to you.

You've perhaps heard a "mother" defined as a "domestic engineer"? That would make an "automotive technician" a "mechanic"; an "animal-control officer" a "dog catcher"; and a "kingdom nurture executive" a "pastor." Labels can raise one's importance factor considerably.

Author Tony Campolo said that when his wife, Peggy, was a full-time, stay-at-home mom and someone would ask, "And what is it that you do?" she would answer, "I am socializing two Homo sapiens into the dominant values of the Judeo-Christian tradition in order that they might be instruments for the transformation of the social order into the kind of eschatological utopia that God willed from the beginning of creation." Then she'd ask, "And what do you do?" [John Ortberg and Ruth Haley, An Ordinary Day with Jesus (Zondervan, 2001), p. 122]

Self-evaluation: On a scale from 1 to 10 (the highest), how important would you say you are?

How would you compare yourself to others we hear about—say a president or a senator or a Louis Pasteur or a Bill Gates or an Oscar-winning actor? Are your numbers as high as their numbers?

What if you were to pick the most important person in your life? Who has had the greatest impact on your life? Would it be someone like Matt Lauer or David Letterman? No! Most of you would name someone who is relatively unknown by the world's standards—a parent, a teacher, a spouse, a friend.

We should recognize some central truths about finding significance:

1. Significance is found in relationships.

Labels, titles, position, and accomplishments are not nearly so important as relationships. My wife is much more important to me than the president or the governor. My kids are more important to me than David Crowder. The most important people are those you're connected to—relationships.

And the most important relationship of all is the relationship we have with God!

¹⁶ And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. ¹⁷ He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.' ¹⁸ Then he said, ‘This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹ And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."' ²⁰ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life [NASB & KJV: your soul; Gr: psuchē] will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?' ²¹ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God." (Luke 12:16-21, NIV)

What does it mean to be "rich toward God"? You can be rich toward God in a number of ways, but one key way to be rich toward God is to have a relationship with him. Let him influence your life. Instead of investing your energy and time chasing after success, wealth, and all the activities and pleasures of the world, make the Lord your key ambition!

The Message paraphrase: ¹⁹ ‘...I'll say to myself, "Self, you've done well! You've got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have the time of your life!"' ²⁰ Just then God showed up and said, ‘Fool! Tonight you die. And your barnful of goods— who gets it?' ²¹ That's what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God." (Luke 12:19-21, MSG)

To find a deeper significance, we should fill our barns with God, and not with Self. We need that life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ to find significance and meaning in life.

Relationships are not the only measure of significance, however.

2. Significance is found in eternity.

The question here is: What will you do that will last? When your life on this earth is over, will there be anything that lasts to eternity?

¹² Now anyone who builds on that foundation may use gold, silver, jewels, wood, hay, or straw. ¹³ But there is going to come a time of testing at the judgment day to see what kind of work each builder has done. Everyone's work will be put through the fire to see whether or not it keeps its value... (1 Corinthians 3:12-13, NLT) ...the fire will test it and show its real quality... if anyone's work is burnt up, then he will lose it. (1 Corinthians 3:13, TEV)

John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, wrote a book called Don't Waste Your Life. In the book he writes:

"I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider this story from the Feb, 1998 Reader's Digest, which tells about a couple who [quoting from Reader's Digest] ‘took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast...when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.' [end quote] [John Piper continues:] ...This was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: ‘Look, Lord. See my shells.' That is a tragedy." (pp 45-46)

Well, of course, we say. Collecting sea shells isn't a very significant thing to do.

But the reality is—it's all sea shells! Everything from this world is like sea shells. Adrian Peterson and his rushing record for the Minnesota Vikings? Sea shells. Bill Gates and his mega-millions of dollars? Sea shells. An award for forty years of work at the mill? Sea shells.

Someone has said: Too many people climb the ladder of success only to discover, once they reach the top, that it's leaning on the wrong wall!

What good is it to reach the top—to be successful and achieve your goals—if you're chasing the wrong goals? What good is it when you stand before God if you've spent your entire life collecting sea shells?

Even religion can be sea shells! Paul in the NT wrote about all his religious efforts to be righteous. Here is what he concluded in his letter to the Philippians:

⁷ I once thought all these things were so very important, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. ⁸ Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I may have Christ ⁹ and become one with him... (Philippians 3:7-9, NLT)

That Scripture leads to the third thing we can say about significance:

3. Significance is found in knowing Christ.

Everything else is like garbage compared to the supreme value of knowing Jesus—having your sins forgiven, getting a fresh start in life, wiping the slate clean.

Some people never discover the joy of knowing Jesus because they're hanging on to their garbage. There's no room for the Lord because they've filled their lives up with other things.

This past week I decided it was time to clean out the garage. Over the past couple of years, we've been collecting furniture and all sorts of odds and ends. We were anticipating having a garage sale, but we just never got around to it. So we had all this stuff in the garage, but we didn't have any room for what the garage was built for—to put our cars in. Today our garage looks much better, but I have to say, even though it's a 2½-car garage I still have room for only one car. I'm still hauling stuff to Goodwill, so I hope we can do even better.

It's one thing when we accumulate junk in our garage, but it's something far worse when we accumulate junk in our lives. It's one thing to have no room for a car, but it's devastating to have no room for Jesus.

To find real significance, we need to make room for Jesus. We need to make him our highest priority. We need to desire him above everything else.

And if we're going to make room for Jesus, we'll need to downsize. Simplify. Clear out the junk: "garbage" (NLT); "worthless trash" (NCV); "rubbish" (NIV); "less than nothing" (LB); "dung" (KJV).

If you do this, be prepared to be misunderstood. The world cannot understand why you would throw away something they value highly. The things Paul calls garbage are things the world calls treasure.

The world cannot understand. The world sees someone who pours his life out to follow Jesus, and they say, "What a waste!"

When the woman poured out her expensive perfume on Jesus, those around her said, "What a waste!" (Matt. 26:8)

The world sees someone like Jim Elliot, so passionate to serve Jesus that he and five friends were speared to death in the jungles of South America bringing God's love to a people who had never heard about Jesus. The world sees that and says, "What a tragic waste!"

Jim Elliot, however, understood something the world cannot. A number of years before he died, he wrote in his journal: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."

That thought, I think, leads us to one final point about finding significance:

4. Significance is found in "wasting your life" for Jesus.

When I say "wasting your life" for Jesus, I'm talking about pouring out your life in an extravagant way—like the woman poured out her expensive perfume to honor Jesus. Her gift seemed like a waste to others, but to Jesus, it was a beautiful thing that she did.

Paul "wasted his life" for Jesus. He wrote to Timothy:

⁶ As for me, my life has already been poured out as an offering to God. The time of my death is near. ⁷ I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. (2 Timothy 4:6-7, NLT)

Everyone spends their life for something. You get to choose how you will spend your life—on something that will last for eternity or something that is trivial and meaningless. Will you waste your life for Jesus or will you waste your life on something else?

Either way, at the end of your life—it's the end of your life.

A couple years ago my wife and I vacationed for a couple days in central Minnesota. We visited the Sinclair Lewis house in Sauk Center, where he was born in 1885. From that humble beginning (he was 18th in his graduating class of 19), Sinclair Lewis became a famous author of satire such as Main Street and It Can't Happen Here. In 1930 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He became well-known, part of an elite social circle.

Yet, for all his renown and wealth, Lewis died in Rome of alcoholism in 1951. When he died, he was cremated, and his ashes were sent to Rome's U.S. Embassy for disposition. One morning someone noticed a worker on her knees with a dustpan and broom. Next to her was an urn—tipped over. "What are you doing?" she was asked, and she replied nonchalantly, "Sweeping up Sinclair Lewis."

A lot of people want to make their mark in history, to do something memorable, to be known for something significant—like Sinclair Lewis. But every human effort, every human accomplishment, every human work done in this life is worth nothing more than a pile of ashes. You can spend your entire life—80, 90, 100 years—getting stuff, doing stuff, learning stuff. And at the end, when they come to take inventory of your life, all they'll need is a dustpan and a broom. [On This Day, (Crescent Books 1992); Clifton Fadiman, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, (Little, Brown & Co., 1985)]

...Everyone's work will be put through the fire to see whether or not it keeps its value... (1 Corinthians 3:13, NLT)

A life lived for this world ends up as nothing but ashes. Only a life lived for God—only a life wasted for Jesus, a life lived with eternity in view—will keep its value and be significant.

Will you "pour out" your life to find deeper significance? It's not what you do; it's not your career choice; it's what is left for God at the end of your life—a pile of ashes or something that lasts for eternity.