Living for Ourselves
Year Delivered or Published: 2007
Author: John Wimberly
Author's Faith: Christianity
Date Submitted to Inspiration and Issues: August 17, 2007
Topic: God
Citation: Romans 14:7-12
Living for Ourselves
a sermon by John W. Wimberly, Jr.
Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
August 5, 2007
Text: Romans 14:7-12
If anybody can advise us, with total and complete integrity, that we need to devote our lives to God, it was Paul. For his entire life, this somewhat strange man dedicated himself body and soul to the service of God. First, he devoted himself to God as a Jew. As a young prodigy of the Pharisees, he studied the Torah and learned the customs and rituals of his faith. In early adulthood, he ascended to a leadership position where he zealously guarded the Jewish faith.
By his own admission, Paul was obsessive in his religious commitment. He pushed himself and then pushed himself some more, desperately wanting to prove to himself and others that he was worthy of God’s favor. Not surprisingly, Paul’s obsessive behavior drove him to a spiritual or emotional breakdown. I have seen it happen to people in this town more times than I care to count.
Maybe Paul’s emotional/spiritual meltdown came on the road to Damascus, maybe earlier. But at some point, Paul’s lack of self-worth short-circuited his spiritual and emotional wiring. He could no longer go on living life as he had lived it.
When Paul emerged from his profound spiritual crisis, he declared himself a follower of Jesus. Jesus taught the tortured man from Tarsus that God loves us because we are, not because of what we do; that a true sense of self worth is a product of God’s grace, not our works. Jesus message was a revelation that lifted an enormous burden off Paul’s heart. He finally realized that he didn’t have to prove himself to God, himself or anyone else. He could just be.
But did he...really? I wonder. While Paul’s religious affiliation changed, his zeal and fervor for living a life acceptable to God, proving himself worthy, do not seem to have changed in the least. He reminds me a bit of some of today’s neo-cons. Years ago, some of them were fanatical liberals. Today, they are fanatical neo-conservatives. The consistent theme is fanaticism.
Paul went from being a person consumed by his Jewish faith to someone consumed by his Christian faith. Whether committed to the Torah or Jesus, Paul always put his own needs last. He put his ministry first, God first.
Throughout his letters, Paul complains about the way he had to fend for himself for food and shelter, how he ended up in jail, how friends didn’t understand him. In all candor, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for his complaints. After all, he chose his way of life.
Surely Paul knew that preaching the Gospel, particularly in the Jewish diaspora community, would generate a rude even violent reception. Surely he knew that taking the Gospel to the Gentiles would create friction with the Jerusalem church. If Paul had come to me for pastoral counseling, I would have had to say to him, “Paul, what did you expect?” (Providing warm, fuzzy support to whiners is not my greatest strength!)
Don’t get me wrong. Paul surely deserves his status as a saint. He was a fabulous church planter/builder/organizer. He was one of the church’s best theologians. He was a fearless, courageous disciple. It is a valid question to ask whether or not the church would exist today if not for Paul.
But I’m not sure the guy was all that happy. And I think God wants us to be happy as well as being faithful. As the first line of the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, “The chief end of humanity is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” Enjoy God! It is at the heart of our faith.
In my experience, personal happiness and personal faithfulness do not have to be juxtaposed. We do not have to put aside all of our hopes and dreams in order to walk the Way of Jesus. Joy and faithfulness walk hand in hand.
Indeed, Jesus’ approach to life presents a stark contrast to Paul’s life. The calmness with which Jesus lived life is very different from Paul’s anxious, driven life. Looking at the birds of the air and lilies of the field, any anxiety Jesus possessed simply evaporated. If God cares for them, he thought, surely God will take care of me. Paul was too busy working to notice the birds and lilies.
Jesus had good friends, enjoyed fine food, possessed a great sense of humor and was attracted to all kinds of different people. He was a well-balanced person leading a well-balanced life. He enjoyed life even though he suffered many of the same things Paul suffered: friends and even family who sometimes didn’t understand him, people who harshly rejected him, and an untimely, unjust death.
But Jesus didn’t whine about his problems. He accepted problems as part of life, things to be worked through. I’m not saying Jesus was a stoic who internalized or sublimated everything bad that happened to him. I am saying he accepted the good and the bad as the intrinsic parts of life they are.
So Paul and Jesus offer us two, very different models of how we live for God rather than solely for ourselves. Personally, I prefer Jesus’ non-anxious model even as I respect the religious Type A personalities who have chosen Paul’s approach.
But whatever approach we take to life, we cannot lead our lives solely, exclusively and entirely for ourselves. On this point, Paul and Jesus were absolutely on the same page. Both of their lives were absolutely oriented toward God. As Paul said to the Romans, “we live to God.”
I rarely use illustrations from the world of sports. But surrounding the induction of Cal Ripken into the baseball Hall of Fame, there was a story that speaks directly to our Epistle lesson. Early in his career, Ripken lost his temper and got ejected in the first inning from a ball game. Later, he learned that an entire family from rural Maryland had saved money to come to Baltimore to see him play that night. When he was ejected, the youngest child in the family cried for the rest of the game. Cal ruined that family’s night.
From that experience, Ripken began to realize that his life was not his own. He lived for others and others lived for him. It caused him to change his behavior. He refused to become the self-absorbed personality that so many celebrities become.
The kind of self-absorption the young Ripken displayed that night is all too typical of human behavior. How many of us unwittingly ruin another person’s day with our rants and rude behavior; make people feel they don’t care with our indifference to them; harm the environment with our self-absorbed behavior? Too often, we act as though the only thing that matters is what we want.
This summer in Mexico, the water utility temporarily shut off the line to our colonia/neighborhood. I had just come home from the gym and went on a mild rant to Phyllis saying, “I can’t believe this. I really need to take a shower. How could they cut off our water, now of all times?” She calmly responded, “John, they didn’t shut off just our water. They shut off the water to everyone in the colonia. All the mothers with babies, the guys coming home from a long day mixing cement, the old folks who are thirsty....” I finally said, “Okay, okay, I get the message.”
When we live for God and others, we don’t forget about our lives. But we zoom out from the details of our lives so they can be seen in context of a bigger picture. We do not think solely in terms of what is happening to us. We consider what is happening to everyone. As we do so, we begin to consider how out actions impact the lives of others. We begin to live for others and God.
It is not just individuals who can become self-involved. It happens to entire peoples. As a nation, we surely have a right to defend our safety and other genuine national interests. However, increasingly, we are doing so in ways that are completely and utterly self-absorbed. It is as if we have no concern for what other people around the world think or how our actions impact them.
When we start building physical walls around our nation’s borders, do we understand the message that gives to the world, let alone to our immediate neighbors? When we say that we will unilaterally attack terrorists wherever they are located, do we, even for a moment, consider the way other sovereign nations then perceive us, how we become a threat to them? As the world’s largest consumer of opiate-based drugs, how can we place the blame for our problem on farmers in places like Bolivia and Afghanistan? As a nation, we are becoming totally self-absorbed, unconcerned about how anybody else feels or how our behavior adversely impacts them.
Whether it be as a nation or you and me as individuals, we don’t live in this world alone. When Paul asks us to live to God, he is asking us to look outside ourselves, to look around. He is telling us to stop being so self-absorbed, self-centered, and self-indulgent.
For thousands of years, humanity thought the sun revolved around the earth, around us. It wasn’t until we figured out that we revolve around the sun not vice versa that we were able to figure out how other things in the Universe work. Until you and I comprehend that we are meant to live to God, not to ourselves, we too will totally misunderstand the nature of the Universe and what life has to offer.
So as we come to the Table, may we commit ourselves to a life lived unto Almighty God and all of God’s children. As we do so, we will experience joys in life of which we were totally unaware.
Let us pray: Gracious God, you call us out of ourselves into a life for you, a life for others. Help us as we move in your direction. We ask this in the name of the One who leads us in your direction, Jesus of Nazareth. Amen.
