WHAT WOULD JESUS ASK?
WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL LIFE?
DR. JIM DIXON
SEPTEMBER 15, 2013
MATTHEW 6:31-33
In 1922, the British archeologist Howard Carter unearthed the gold-laden burial chamber of Tutankhamun, the king of Egypt, the man who was Pharaoh of all Egypt more than 1,300 years before the birth of Christ. Three years ago, in the year 2010, right here in Denver at the Denver Art Museum, there was an exhibit called, “Tutankhamun: the Golden King and the Great Pharaohs.” And you might’ve gone to that. Many people did. And the massive building was literally surrounded by lines of people wanting to see the gold and the treasures (or at least a portion of the gold and the treasures) that were found within Tutankhamun’s tomb. People came with bumper stickers. They came with t-shirts. Many of them had these words: “He who has the most toys when he dies, wins.”
I suppose, in a sense, that is what the Pharaohs thought. I mean, they took their toys to the tomb with them. They took their gold, they took their wealth, into the tomb with them. And I think this world is just shallow enough that there are people out there who actually believe that he who has the most toys when they die, wins. And it’s all about wealth accumulation, like some kind of a giant monopoly game. And there are a lot of people who think that way.
Jesus tells us that that way of thinking is completely wrong. Jesus said, beware of all covetousness, for a person’s life does not consist in the sum of his or her possessions. That’s what Jesus said. And of course, Jesus told the parable of the rich man and his barns, and at the conclusion He said of this man, fool, for this very day, your soul is required of you. And the things which you have accumulated, whose shall they be? So Jesus cautions us that success in life has nothing to do with the accumulation of wealth.
Now, most people think a little deeper, and I think most people look for success in other areas. A lot of people look for success in career advancement. This is almost the American way, to think of success as career advancement. And there are many components to this—education, credentialing, degrees, the right job in the corporate world, promotion, ascendancy, authority, power… all of this is part of success in the eyes of the world.
Again, in Matthew chapter 16, Jesus tells us this is wrong. Jesus poses the question, what does it profit a man or a woman if they gain the whole world and forfeit their soul? Obviously there need to be higher priorities. Jesus said it again in Mark’s gospel, the eighth chapter, the same words: what does it profit a man if he gained the whole world and forfeit his soul?
So many people look for success in other areas. Some people look for success through pleasure, through relaxation, through comfort. I think some people literally live in a constant pursuit of pleasure. They seek to sate themselves with regard to pleasure. So when you watch TV, you notice that commercials oftentimes focus on food and a lot of food. They focus on booze, from vodka to beer. They focus on vacations and Viagra and Cialis. And I mean, this is the world we live in. This is the world we live in, and people are in a constant pursuit of pleasure.
The Bible tells us, again, that this is ultimately vacuous. This is not related to success. So you come to the book of 2 Timothy, the fourth chapter, and the Apostle Paul warns us. He contrasts two words in 2 Timothy chapter four, the word “philedone” and the word “philotheos.” And he’s saying that, in the last days, people will be lovers of pleasure, philedone, rather than lovers of God, philotheos. So that’s to characterize the last days, and perhaps we’re in the last days. I mean, what drives our culture? Love of God or love of pleasure? Certainly the latter. So some people seek success in the cost and pursuit of these things.
I think most people think deeper. Certainly most of you think deeper. Perhaps many of you think of success in terms of relationships—family, kids, marriage, perhaps. And that would be a better choice. That would be a better definition of success. But even this, Jesus tells us, is misguided. That is not the key to success. In fact, when you come to Matthew’s Gospel, in the 10th chapter Jesus warns us, “He who loves mother or father more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Then you come to Luke chapter 14, and Jesus puts it a different way: “He who would come after Me and not hate his mother and father and his wife and children and brothers and sisters is not worthy of Me and cannot follow Me.” Now, He’s using Hebrew hyperbole, a Hebrew teaching style. And of course, it’s a relative use of the word “hate.” So Jesus is saying, “You have to love your family less than you love Me.” But there are higher priorities in this life even then your family.
So what does the Bible tell us about success? What does the Bible tell us about significance? How can we find success and significance? I would submit to you this morning that the Bible’s very clear, and our Lord Jesus Christ is very clear that success and significance is found in one place. And that one place is the kingdom of God. We enter the kingdom of God by means of the gospel. The Bible says, “Jesus came preaching the gospel of the kingdom. Repent and believe.” So we enter the kingdom of God through the gospel. And when we enter the kingdom of God, we become sons and daughters of God. And when we enter that kingdom, we take up His cause. And of course, His kingdom is eternal.
So the reason I chose the passage of scripture for today, “Why are you anxious about your life, saying, what shall I eat? What shall I drink? What shall I wear? For the nations seek after these things, and your heavenly Father knows you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all these other things will be yours as well.” This is the clear message you see of the scriptures. So what exactly does it mean to seek first and foremost the kingdom of God? What does it mean to seek first and foremost it’s righteousness? Because this is at the very heart of significance and success.
Biblically, we must remember two things to understand this priority. First of all, we must remember life is finite. Time in this world is finite. We should be thoughtful of that every day. And that’s why the psalmist writes, “Teach us to number our days, that we may have a heart of wisdom.” Of course, earlier this week I went to Starbucks. I wasn’t coming into the church that day. I had a bunch of errands to run. I thought, well, I’ll go get a coffee at Starbucks. And I was going into Starbucks and a woman is right behind me, so I open the door for her and then she goes through first and she thanks me. We get inside Starbucks and she said, you go first. You were before me. I said, oh, no, no, it doesn’t matter. You go ahead and you go first.
So she goes up to the cash register and I go behind her, and I’m thinking maybe she’ll order a caramel macchiato, maybe she’ll order an iced venti soy milk cappuccino with sugar-free hazelnut, six pumps. And everybody self-identifies at a Starbucks, they find their identity there. But I notice she reaches into her purse and she pulls out a list and she orders for the office. She orders for the office, and she’s just got this long list of orders—drinks and sandwiches and muffins and desserts. And of course, the gal behind the cash register and the barista start lining up the cups and writing on every cup exactly the specificities of the order. And time is passing. The line is growing behind me. And the thought occurs to me, time is finite. We have experiences like this every day of our life. Time is so brief, and you don’t want to waste it. It took me a half hour to get a cup of coffee.
Of course, our days are short. Life is short. There are 24 hours in every day. That’s true of all of us. There are 1,440 minutes in every day, 86,400 seconds in every day, 168 hours in a week. And how do you use your 168 hours? I mean, if you’re average, (and we know that in this room you’re all above average) it’s been about 50 hours a week sleeping. And that would be just about seven hours a day. That counts napping and nighttime and sleeping in church. Then you spend 50 hours a week working, on the average.
So there’s a hundred hours. And so your 168 is now down to 68. So what do you do with that 68? Well, there are meals to eat. Sometimes you have to prepare them clean up after that. There are 21 meals a week if you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. And of course there are bills to pay, there’s work to do out in the yards, kid to raise. It all takes time. So those who examine such things tell us that the average American has about 10 to 20 hours a week of truly free time.
What do you do with yours? Maybe you have a few favorite TV programs. Maybe you have a few sporting events you like to watch. I mean, what do you do with your available time, and what does it mean to seek first and foremost and above all else the kingdom of God? What does it mean in terms of how you live out your days?
Of course, you’re going to carve time out of your lives for God, for prayer, for bible study, for sharing your faith, for service, for all these things. It’s going to be a bit of a sacrifice. But you have to remember, every day, that time is finite. “Teach us to number our days, that we may have a heart of wisdom.”
Then you have to choose every day to invest in the infinite. If you’re going to seek first the kingdom of God, you have to choose every day to invest in the infinite, because that’s what the kingdom of God is all about. There’s only one thing that is infinite, and that is the kingdom of God and all that is in it. The kingdom of God is infinite; everything else is finite.
You can go to the city of Milan today and you can go to the Milan Cathedral, the Duomo di Milano, and there are five doors at the front of the cathedral. The three middle doors convey in Latin a message to the world. So, on the left of the great center door in Latin is the message, “All that pleases is but for a moment.” On the right of the great center door in Latin is the message, “All that troubles is but for a moment.” And then on the great center door, above it in Latin it says, “Nothing is important save that which is eternal.”
Now, if you remember nothing else today, remember these three statements, because this is at the heart of success and significance. Most of us spend all of our time focusing on the left and the right doors. I mean, most of us go through our days and our focus is on what pleases and what troubles. We spend almost all of our time participating in and thinking about what pleases us and what troubles us. And most of us spend virtually no time on the great center door. “Nothing is important, save that which is eternal.” So God wants us to focus on that which is eternal as we live out our days.
I think a great example of this is the Apostle Paul. And when you look at 2 Timothy chapter four, you see Paul coming to the end of his life and he’s looking back on his life in Christ. And remember, Paul sought first and foremost the kingdom of God. And so Paul looks back and he says, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race, and I have kept the faith.” I would submit to you today that if you are going to find significance and success in your life, you must do these same three things. You must fight the good fight, you must finish the race, and you must keep the faith. This ultimately sums up what it means to seek first the kingdom of God.
So what does it mean to fight the good fight? If you look at it, it literally says in the Greek, “I have agonized the good agony.” The Greek word is “agonizomai,” from which we get the word agony. I have agonized the good agony. So we know that if we’re going to find any significance, if we’re going to find any success, if we’re going to seek first the kingdom, there’s going to be at least some agony. We know that. But I promise you that out of that agony will come purpose and meaning and joy beyond anything the world experiences. I’ve agonized the good agony.
What’s the word for good there? There are two Greek words for good—“agathos,” which refers to that which is good in the sense of being beneficial in its effects, and then the word “kalos,” which refers to that which is intrinsically good (good morally, good theologically). Moral and theological truth is good. So the word kalos is the word that Paul uses in this statement, “I’ve agonized the good agony.” So he has fought for moral and theological truth, and you really can’t separate kalos and agathos because moral and theological truth is beneficial in its effects. So you can’t separate these two concepts of goodness. But Paul has poured out his life fighting for moral and theological truth in every sense.
So I would ask you, do you spend any time fighting for the good? Do you spend any time fighting for, agonizing for, moral and theological truth? I mean, do you do it personally in terms of your own sanctification? Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness? Do you struggle against sin? Do you spend time every day in the Word, time every day in prayer? Are you in a small group of other kingdom people, other members of the church of Jesus Christ, and do you encourage one another and build one another up as you seek the good? Is there any agony, any fight? Do you seek good in the world? Do you seek that which is true in the world?
Barbara and I were having dinner this week with some old friends. We had a couple from our church that we’ve been friends with for 40 years. They became our friends before this church started. And then we had another couple in town that we knew years ago and were very close to, and their names are Don and Mary. We hadn’t actually seen them in 25 years, although we’ve written through the years. They live in Florida. So we all got together for dinner. And you know, Don is an attorney and his wife Mary is a therapist. And Don told me he’s retiring in December. And of course we have common ground there. So we talked a bit and laughed a bit.
I said, well, Don, what are you going to do when you retire? And he said, well, Mary and I are going to go to the Philippines for a year. We’re just going to leave our home here, go to the Philippines for a year with a Christian ministry, and we’re going to fight against human trafficking and the slave trade and the marketing of prostitution in the Philippines. And I’m going to use my legal background and my legal degree to seek to change laws in the Philippines that will protect children. Mary is going to use her therapy to work with these kids and to help them come out of this and to cope. So we’re just going to go do that for a year. And there are cartels in the Philippines behind all this sex trafficking that’s abusing all these kids. They have great power and great greed and great wealth. And this is dangerous, what Don and Mary are going to do, but they are wanting to agonize the good agony, knowing that meaning and purpose and joy itself is connected to it.
So what are you doing? I mean, take an honest look. What are you doing? And realize that when we invite you to go into a Sunday school class, when we invite you to sing about goodness and join the choir, when we invite you to serve out in our parking lot, we’re asking you to do relatively simple things. We’re not asking you to go on a year mission. We’re asking you to do relatively simple things, but they all serve that which is eternal—not that which is pleasing or troubling, but that which is eternal, the only thing that’s important. We’re asking you for just a little agony.
I just talked to a wonderful guy in our choir after the second service, and he was telling me there are some Tuesdays where work is hard. And he thinks, oh, I have choir tonight, and I just would rather go home. He said, but you know, I take that drive down to the church and we have choir practice, and pretty soon I’m singing and what felt a little bit like agony becomes joy that just fills my soul. You’ll find that is so true when you make the decision that you’re going to serve that which is eternal and you’re going to seek first and foremost the kingdom of God.
And of course, you must finish the race, just like Paul. If you’re really going to be successful in your life, you must finish the race. And we’ve traveled in many parts of the world, Barb and I, through the years. We’ve been to Asia many times, and sometimes we travel with large groups from the church. Even this next march and the spring, we’re taking 200 of you with us to Israel and the Holy Land, and we’re looking forward to that.
But sometimes we’ll travel with a very small group, just a few friends. And that was true some years ago when Jo and Gary Oakley, who are elders here at the church, took us with them. We went to Turkey and we got into a van and we drove around much of western Turkey for a thousand miles, looking at ancient ruins and biblical sites, places like Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, Alexandria, Troas, Colossi, Hierapolis, which is now called Pumakkale. These are all biblical ruins. And we went into this one valley where the ruins of Colossi reside, and there are also the ruins of Hierapolis in that same valley. And it’s just beautiful. And then there are the ruins of Laodicea in that same valley.
Then there’s the ruins of another archeological dig of an ancient city called Aphrodisias, conducted by Ivy League schools. We went and looked at that and they were unearthing this massive hippodrome, bigger than the Circus Maximus and bigger than the Hippodrome that was in the city of Rome. You can still see that they’ve unearthed the tunnels where the lions came out and the animals came out. You can go down in and there are stone cells where the animals were kept. It is a 200-yard field, with more than a hundred thousand seats for people around this hippodrome. Imagine what it was like, and realize that Christians died there. Christians were killed there. Christians were martyred there. They finished the race there.
Understand that, in the sight of God, “Be faithful unto death” is the message. So if we’re going to have a successful life, if we’re going to have significance in our life, it’s as long as we draw breath in this world.
So I’m retiring from the church in terms of being senior pastor, but I’m not retiring from the kingdom of God. I’m retiring from this role, but I’m not retiring from fighting the good fight. I must finish the race. I’m just like you and you are just like me, all of us who have entered the kingdom by the gospel. I’m called all the days of our life to share the message of the kingdom. And we do this at Starbucks. We do this with friends in our neighborhood. You do this when you’re at work, wherever you work. You do this at play. You do this relationally as you’re getting to know people you invite to enter the kingdom. Significance, fulfillment, and success are all tied to that. It’s all tied to the kingdom and to the great cause of the kingdom.
And of course, finally, you must keep the faith. This doesn’t mean to keep on believing. It does mean that, but that’s not all that it means because the faith has content. So we contend for the faith that once and for all was delivered to the saints. To seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, we must contend for the faith which is under attack in our culture and in our time. I mean, why have we established The Institute here at Cherry Hills Community Church? Why do we care? Why does Lee Strobel care? Why does Mark Mittelberg care? Why does Blake Lamunyon care? Why does Gary Poole care? I mean, it’s all about seeking first the kingdom of God and inviting people into the kingdom and defending the faith, which is so fervently under attack.
So we invite you to join with us. We’re in the midst of transition. A lot is going on, but some things aren’t going to change. I can tell you that Shane Farmer’s really excited about the institute. He’s so glad that we have Lee Strobel here and Mark Mittelberg here, and Blake Lamunyon on our staff, and Gary Poole too. He’s just excited because he seeks first the kingdom of God and we’re in these things together. And it takes time. You must carve out time. It’s going to take money. We seek first the kingdom of God with everything, and it’s really truly what success and significance is all about. Well, let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.