Life . . . such as it is
How’s your life?
If you were asked, how would you rate your life? Would it be “dull but not dangerous,” “stable and steady,” “out of control,” or “life to the full”?
Is it a life that has achieved great things, or a life that has just gotten by?
I’m still young enough and naïve enough to be surprised sometimes at the number of people who have settled for a mediocre life. I’ve met and talked to people who have been tossed around by life and didn’t like it, so they retreated backwards, settling for a leashed life, a bound life, a milk-toast life. They’ve cut themselves off from risk in order that they might not have to live with regrets. It is true that they know no great pains, but neither do they know great joys.
But I wonder . . . is that life???
Let’s face it, sometimes life is pretty scary. That could be a reason why people turn back from an abundant life, a life that is unleashed to its true potential. But in that process of self-preservation they lose something vital to really living.
Life . . . wild and untamable
In his first letter the Apostle Peter says in chapter 5:8, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” Your enemy is Satan, and he is a powerful enemy, so much so that the Apostle John says in I John 5:19, “We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.”
Now, 1) if Satan is your enemy and 2) the whole world lies under his power to manipulate, to corrupt, to destroy and to break and 3) he is looking to devour you, then how do you think life is going to look? Is it going to be a nice, soft, fluffy pillow kind of life? Should we expect a life free from pain, free from anguish, free from hurts and scars?
No, we should not! The Apostle Paul himself says in our reading for today, “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” That’s pretty serious . . . that’s a pretty good picture of living life in a world that’s under the control of your powerful enemy.
Satan is your enemy, and he would like nothing more than to devour you, to destroy your life. Because Satan is out in the world, prowling around looking for prey, life itself is like a wild animal, an animal sprung from its cage, unleashed on an unsuspecting population. You don’t know where it’s going to attack next! It could be anywhere! Your family, your friends, your home . . . you. That wild and untamable animal called life doesn’t care if you are young or old, if you are rich or poor, and it doesn’t discriminate and it isn’t picky. It will swallow up anyone and everyone in an attempt to feed its voracious hunger. Just living is dangerous . . . for instance, listen to these stories where life turned on someone:
A 27 year old man wanted on drug and weapons charges was arrested in his girlfriend's apartment after he was caught by the police literally with his pants down. He was already under arrest for warrant charges related to heroin distribution, but when the man asked officers to hand him his pants from the bedroom floor, his luck went from bad to worse.
Before the police gave him his pants, they checked the pockets, where they found 12 rocks of crack cocaine and some Ecstasy.
Looking around, the police then noticed the handle of a gun sticking out from the pillow of his bed. Confiscating the firearm, they saw that it turned out to have a defaced serial number. As a result, the young man faced several additional offenses beyond the original warrant charges.
In addition to the original warrant, the man was charged with possession of a Class B substance, crack cocaine, with intent to distribute, possession of a Class E substance, Ecstasy, possession of ammunition without a firearms identification card, possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm with a defaced serial number and possession of a firearm while having three prior drug convictions. I don’t know if he ever got his pants back . . .
In Amherst, Ohio a woman applied for a job as a police dispatcher. However, when they did a background check, the police found she had 17 traffic convictions, including seven speeding tickets and two citations for driving without a license.
The police called and invited her in for an interview. When she arrived in her car, she was arrested and charged with failing to appear in court and driving without a license.
A man walked into a convenience store, put a $20 bill on the counter and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the frightened clerk promptly provided. The man took all the cash—which was a grand total of fifteen dollars—and fled the scene . . . leaving his $20 bill on the counter!
One afternoon, a young hoodlum walked into a small "Mom and pop" grocery store and pulled a "stick-up." Brandishing what appeared to be a large black handgun, he took the owner, a lady in her middle sixties, into the office area and demanded all the money from a small floor-safe. As the frightened woman unloaded the contents of the safe into a paper sack, the young hoodlum turned the gun barrel toward his face and pulled the trigger, emitting NOT a bullet but a stream of red, sugary liquid. The woman, angry at being robbed by a kid with nothing more than a squirt gun, turned on the young man and beat him senseless with a bag full of rolled coins.
Police later determined that the "gun" had been "loaded" with cherry Kool-Aid.
With all this against us, with everything in life going wrong . . . with life itself prowling around like a wild and untamable beast, what can we do? Should we hide in our closets? Shall we fight back, struggling in a futile effort to win a battle we absolutely, utterly cannot win? Shall we surrender?
Life . . . true life
Would I be here if that were the case? Better yet, would you be here if that were the case? Have you come before God Almighty, have you come to God’s house today in order to hear a message of despair? Or are you here because you have heard that there is yet hope?
When life comes a-knockin’, should we go a-runnin’? Or when life comes prowling around can we boldly stand up to it, take its knocks, and keep on praising God? Who’s going to be the winner in the end . . . Satan, or you? Are we conquerors?
Oh, we’re conquerors, all right, but not by our own might. Keep that in mind. We are conquerors not on our own, but through Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:57 says, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” There is no question who’s going to win in the end, because Jesus Christ has already taken the worst life has to dish out, he took the hardest knocks, he took the hardship, the persecution, he endured hunger and danger, and when he was put to death on the cross and it looked like Satan had finally won and the ref was giving the 10-count, Jesus Christ got back up, stared that pretender in the eye and said, “Is that the best you got?” And BAM! Down went Satan! Jesus Christ is the winner.
Is it possible that I could stand before you week after week, preaching a message that all is not lost, that there is yet hope . . . could I do that if we were still lost in our sins, if we were still trapped by life?? NO!! Paul says that in these things we are more than conquerors!
Now, here’s something interesting about the Greek Paul is using. The three words “more than conquerors” in the Greek is actually just one word made up of two parts. The one part, the root word, essentially means “winner.” That’s pretty cool, but it’s the front part of the word, the prefix, that really gives it a kick. The prefix is the Greek word u,per, which in this case has the meaning of “above and beyond,” “more than.” We get our prefix “hyper” from it, if that helps you to grasp the meaning. By putting these two words together, Paul is saying that, in Christ, we are not just mere winners, but that we have something far above and beyond a normal victory.
It’s the same type of concept that Jesus is speaking about in John 10:10 when He says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” See, Jesus Christ is not the type to give something half way to us; He gives us above and beyond. In Christ we have life—true life—as it was meant to be! Not this tired, abusive little sham of a life that Satan tries to press upon us, but the real, full, abundant life that can only be found in Jesus Christ.
And if that weren’t enough, Paul tells us that, once we have received that life from Christ, there is nothing that can take it away from us! Earlier in his letter to the Romans, Paul says in chapter 6:4, “For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.” Jesus Christ has bonded Himself to us, forging an eternal link that no external pressure, no circumstance of life, nothing in all the world can possibly break. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, no any powers, neither heath nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of god that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We cannot be separated from the love of Christ by mere life, but we are given true life, eternal life, abundant life in and by and through the unbreakable bond of the love of Christ. Yes, life throws us hard curve balls, yes, it knocks us down, but it can’t keep us down because it cannot separate us from the love of God that is ours eternally in Jesus Christ.
Life . . . Unleashed!
Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, and in that truth our lives are unleashed! In Christ—and only in Christ—are our lives set free to their full potential. In Christ we find our purpose, and secure in His love we are freed to express that purpose in our lives.
If you knew that no matter what the end result would be, no matter if you got knocked down, no matter if the world thought what you did was a failure, if you knew that through it all you would still be firmly connected to Christ, would you attempt great things for God? If we—you and I—could be secure in the knowledge and experience of Christ’s love for us, could this church attempt great things for God? Could we do the impossible—not just for God, but in God and through God?
In the movie We Were Soliders, Mel Gibson plays Lt. Col. Hal Moore. Col. Moore is about to lead his men, the 7th Air Calvary, into one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history, the battle of la Drang—what some called “The Valley of Death.” In the clip we’re about to see Col. Moore is giving his men one final speech before they leave the States for the war in Vietnam. In the beginning of his speech he says some admirable things about all of the troops being bonded together because they are all American, but it’s the end of the speech I want you to pay special attention to. Think about what we’ve been talking about today—about living life in a wild, untamable, hostile world and about being given true life, true, abundant life that sets us free to live for God despite what our enemy Satan tries to throw at us. Think about that . . . and listen.
(play video clip)
(Reading from 2 Corinthians 4:6-10) “For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. 7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”
Col. Moore and his troops won that battle, and in the movie you can see that the reason they won is because each and every one of them gave it their all, they went above and beyond mere duty . . . in those few days, they lived life to the full and they achieved the impossible. And each of them gave it their all because their leader was willing to go before them, and they had his promise that he would never leave them behind. They fought not just with their own strength, but fought on the strength of their leader.
I can’t promise you that life will never knock you down . . . on the contrary, I can virtually guarantee it. We’ve all been hit hard by the enemy and most of us have the scars—some emotional, some physical—to show for it. But I can promise you that, no matter what life may bring, Jesus Christ has gone before you, that He is the first and the last . . . that He is there fighting for you. And in His strength and in His victory, we can indeed achieve the impossible for God. In Christ, we are more than conquerors, because nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
“Lord, we thank you for the message you have given us today, the message that your unfailing love is always ours in Jesus Christ. Strengthen in us a resolve to live out an abundant, unleashed life for you, an unleashed life that brings glory to your Holy Name, an unleashed life that attempts great things for you, a life that binds up the wounds of the hurting, a life that ministers to the needs of the downcast, a life that brings lost souls to your cross where they, too, may experience the eternal, unchanging love that you have given us. In Jesus’ most precious name, Amen.”
