Building Up the Body

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

 Sunday, August 12, 2007

“Let’s go on. Time.” “Are you ready?” “Yeah.” “Sure, I’m ready.” “Alright, 60-second spot on time. Can I have a clock in the corner?” “It’s there.” “Thank you. Roll ‘em.” “Rolling.” “Action.”

Okay, here’s the deal. We all know that life is busy. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things we want and need to do. In fact, you’re probably thinking of all the things you need to do next week right now, wondering how you’re going to squeeze it all in. But the fact is, no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter how much is on your plate, we all have the same gift of 24 hours each day. 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. All the money in the world won’t let you buy one single second more than the next guy and once that second is gone, it’s gone forever. Look, there goes one right now. Another one, gone. You think that we would judiciously use such a limited and viable gift. You’d think that we would choose wisely how to spend, no, invest our time but do we? Really? I mean, after taking the time for eating and sleeping and all the other basic necessities, do we really use this gift the way we should? Think of all the great things you can do in 24 hours, all the lives you could touch, all the significant changes that could be made in your life and others. The fact is you could actually make a difference in this world in 24 hours. Or not. So how are you investing your time?

“Time.”

Time. It’s going to be the number one thing on your mind four weeks from today. Four weeks from today, Gloria Dei is going to host a Ministry Fair. We’re going to fill the center wing of our building with table after table, opportunity after opportunity of all the various ministries that Gloria Dei has to offer, hundreds of ways in which you can be a part of what we’re doing here at Gloria Dei and the number one thing that will be on your mind is time. Or maybe the lack thereof.

Because as you walk through that center wing and you see the various ministries, some of them are going to kind of interest you. Some of them are really going to interest you. Some of them you’re going to get downright excited about and wish that you could be involved in that and there’s only going to be one thing that stops you. And that’s time. Because you’re going to ask yourself the same question that I ask myself probably a dozen times each week. “Do I really have the time?” Well, the truth of the matter is we all have the same amount of time. There are 24 hours in every day. There’s not one second more, not one second less for anyone else. The real question is how do we spend, no, no, no, what did he say? How do we invest our time?

The challenge for this morning then is for us to take a look at and evaluate how do we invest our time and, more specifically, do we invest some of our time in serving others? Isn’t that what God’s word just said to us? Each one of us should use the gift that God has given to us to serve others. So in all the many demands that we have on our time and all the different ways we get pulled one way or the other, how can we discern, how can we determine what is the best place for us to invest our time?

I believe God’s word helps us on that. In fact, I believe through St. Peter here, we have three guiding principles on how we should invest our time. The number one thing we learn is we invest our time with the right motivation. If we don’t invest our time with the right motivation, then we end up resenting the fact that we have invested our time in something. In fact, the number one thing that really is the wrong motivation but I think often times is our motivation, is guilt. And guilt simply won’t cut it. If we’re investing our time, if we’re doing something because we feel obligated to do it or we feel we have to do it or we’ll feel guilty if we don’t do it, that is the number one wrong reason to invest your time. And in fact, as I was preparing this message, the worst possible scenario I could paint in my mind is that you would walk out of here today feeling guilty enough to sign up to be a teacher or sign up to be an usher or a greeter. The number one thing that would be a tragedy four weeks from today is that as you walk through the Ministry Fair, you signed up for a certain ministry because you’d feel guilty if you didn’t. It’s the absolute wrong reason to do anything. Guilt motivation only leads to feeling resentment towards what you’re doing.

Now if there’s any consolation to that, it’s nothing new. We can go back 2,000 years. St. Peter said, “Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.” Hospitality was a big deal back then. There were no Super 8's, no Motel 6, no Hilton’s, no Sheraton’s. So as you traveled around, you had to rely upon the hospitality of whoever was in that town. So hospitality was a big deal. But St. Peter says here, “Don’t do it out of guilt.” In other words, don’t come home some evening and say, “Honey, we have house guests again. I’m sorry, Daughter. You’re going to have to move out of your room once again because no one else would do it.” That’s not what God’s looking for.

We’re not to invest our time because we feel guilty. Now trust me, I know there are all kinds of demands upon your time, more than what you can do. Right? You have work. You have a new initiative or they’ve cut back on staff or there’s some new project they want to get done and it takes more time. The kids are going to be going back to school pretty soon. You have to get them to the right place at the right time and that all takes time. When it’s retirement, you thought everything was going to be laid back, right? Nothing to do. But by the time you spend time with your friends, with the grandkids and doing the work around the house, you want to go back to work so you can have a break, don’t you? Yeah, because there are all these demands on your time. And each one of them wants to make you feel guilty and have that as the motivation. But I can’t think of anything worse than spending time with your grandkids because you feel guilty about it. Or coaching the league for your son or daughter because you feel guilty if you don’t do it. That’s the wrong motivation because pretty soon you feel resentment towards your kids or resentment towards your grandkids or resentment towards work or resentment toward your friends. You don’t want to feel resentment. That’s not the proper way to invest your time, not motivated by guilt.

Scripture says you invest your time because of love. Peter says this, “Above all, love each other deeply.” Above everything else, love each other deeply. If you’re going to invest your time, you invest it out of love for other people because you want to serve other people, because you care for other people, because this is something you want to do. It’s something you desire to do. He says, “Above all, love one another.”

I like the way John puts it in his first letter. He says, “This is love. Not that we love God but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” God’s motivation was one of love. It wasn’t one out of guilt. It wasn’t one out of obligation. It’s not as if God was in heaven after creation and Adam and Eve fell to sin and He looked down at them and He says, “Man, they made a mess of things. Wow. Look at that down there. Well, I created the mess. I guess I have to clean the mess up.” That wasn’t God’s motivation. It says, “God so loved.” God was motivated by love to come down and redeem His people. He wanted to restore His people. He didn’t want sin separating Him from His people. In one sense, God couldn’t help Himself. I mean, why didn’t God just turn His back and walk away from us and just leave us to our own self destruction? But God couldn’t do that because God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son. God had such a compelling and compassionate love for us that He couldn’t help Himself and so He sent His son into the world and Jesus has such a love for you, He was willing to lay down His life for you and He was willing to take your sin upon Himself and die for that sin so you could be restored to the Father. That’s not motivated out of guilt. That’s motivated out of love.

Now having been touched by God’s love, we then love one another. And our motivation is one of love. In other words, we spend time with our kids because we love them. We go ahead and make the extra effort for the grandchildren because we love them. Even if we do extra time at work, it’s because we have a love and a passion for what we do. You see, being motivated by love, all of a sudden it becomes easier to invest our time. So if you’re going to invest your time, invest it with the right motivation.

If you’re going to invest your time, then employ the gifts that God has given you. Employ the gifts that God has bestowed upon each and every one of us. You see, don’t be doing something that you’re not gifted in, that God hasn’t given you a special ability or skill. It just leads to frustration. Instead, each one of you has received some gift from God, some special talent, some ability that He’s bestowed upon you. Now it never fears that after I get done with one of these messages, someone will always come up to me and say, “Pastor, I know that’s true but it just must not be for me because I just don’t have a gift that God has given to me.” Well, then you must be the only one in all creation. Wow. Because scripture is crystal clear about it. Peter says, “Each one of you,” no exclusions, “should use whatever gift he has received to serve others.” St. Paul picks up on that, too, in his letter to the Romans. He says, “We,” meaning all of us, “have different gifts according to the grace given to us. Or when Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth, he says, “Now to each one the manifestation of the spirit has been given for the common good.” There are no exclusions here. So let it be known right now every single one of us has some special gift, some special talent that God has given to us. And if we’re going to invest our time, then let’s be smart about investing our time and invest it in the way in which God has blessed us. Invest it in the way in which God has gifted us.

Now the really neat thing about this is when we invest our time in our area of giftedness, it really doesn’t seem like much of an investment. In fact, maybe that’s the reason we don’t recognize it as a gift from God because it comes so naturally to us that it’s something we just simply enjoy doing that we don’t really think of it as work. We don’t really think of it as an investment of time. We don’t think of it as a gift. That’s the area you want to zero in on. Because when you’re using the gifts God has given to you, it almost seems like a privilege for you to be able to use that gift. You’re thankful for the opportunity to do something you enjoy doing.

Maybe the best way I can explain this is via example. I mentioned the Ministry Fair that is going to be here in four weeks. Now that Ministry Fair is the brainchild of a small group from Gloria Dei. One of our small groups has been getting together and for several months, they have been praying and thinking, “How can we be of a service to the congregation?” They landed upon the idea that they wanted to do something so others could understand the joy of serving God and serving one another. They came up with the idea of the Ministry Fair. Now Heather Schmidt is the leader of that group and she’s the point person for the Ministry Fair. Now if you know Heather, that makes perfect sense that Heather would lead the effort. Why? Because Heather is the epitome of organization. If you want something organized, you want an event pulled off, ask Heather because she’ll do it. I know this for a fact because Heather was on staff here for awhile until she decided to do a really tough job and go full time at home with her two boys. But Heather knows how to organize. She knows how to pull off an event. So sure enough, when Heather came for a staff meeting, she had handouts for everyone. She had a spreadsheet for everyone. Pretty soon, the e-mails starting coming from her. Then the reminders of the e-mails were coming from her. A staff member just said to me on Friday, “You know, I just love working with Heather. She just has everything all laid out. It’s just a joy.” Now mind you, it has been a lot of work and still a lot of work to pull off the Ministry Fair four weeks from now but if you would ask Heather if that’s work, she would not say so in the negative sense. In fact, if you’d ask her, she’d say, “It’s been kind of fun.”

That’s the beauty when you invest your time in your area of giftedness. It’s kind of fun. It doesn’t seem like work at all. So what is that way in which God has gifted you? What is it you have a passion for? What is it that you’ve had success in the past doing? What is it that comes naturally to you? What is it that brings joy in your life when you’re involved in it? What is the way in which God has gifted you? Then invest your time in that area.

Third and finally, invest your time, at least some of it, in something that’s going to make a difference. Invest your time in something that will make a difference. Peter puts it I think a rather unusual way. “Each one of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve one another faithfully.” And then it says this, “administering God’s grace in its various forms.” Isn’t that a curious statement? Serve one another faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms. St. Peter is telling us here that when we’re motivated by love to serve other people, when we’re using our giftedness and the building up of the kingdom of God and we’re serving other people, we’re actually conduits of God’s grace. We’re administers of God’s grace. Through us, God is spreading His unconditional love and touching the lives of other people. Can you think of anything more significant than faithfully administering God’s grace? Can you think of anything more powerful than being a conduit to spread God’s grace, to touch people’s lives with His unconditional love. I can’t think of anything that could change the world more than God’s love. I can’t think of anything that could change a person’s life more than God’s love. And when we serve one another, when we’re motivated by love, we’re conduits for that grace as God touches other people through us.

And then he says something really interesting. He says, “in its various forms.” What does that mean? In its various forms? In the various forms of service, the various things we do in service to one another. Sometimes do we not get into the trap that we think serving God, somehow you have to be front and center. You have to be out in front where people are noticing what you’re doing. I need to tell you it’s a whole lot more than just the guy up front preaching. It’s a whole lot more than the person standing up in front of the classroom teaching. It’s a whole lot more than just a staff member and the various things they do. Everything we do in service to one another, it’s the smiling face of the greeter when we come in the door that makes you feel welcome. It’s the helping hand of the usher as we find our seat and we get our Weekly Word. It’s the tech team, the silent invisible partners back there, some of them not even in this room. You don’t even see them and yet how would the service go without them? We don’t notice them unless there’s a technical difficulty at the beginning of the sermon, then possibly.

But it’s the pie that’s baked. It’s the stitch that’s put into the quilt. It’s the thank you note that’s sent to someone, the card of sympathy that’s offered, the pat on the back, the word of encouragement. It’s everything we do in service to one another motivated by God’s love. And we get to be conduits of His grace as He touches other people with His love.

If you’re going to invest your time, invest it in something meaningful. Invest it in something that changes lives, I dare say, changes the world. But it all comes down to time, doesn’t it? And having the right amount of time. And investing that time.

Well, four weeks from today, you’re going to have to decide how you’re going to invest your time. And at the Ministry Fair, you’re going to walk through the center wing and see hundreds of opportunities, ways in which you can invest your time. Now some of you may be saying, “Well, if it’s four weeks from today, then why are you talking about it right now?” Simple reason really. Time. You see, I want you take the time. I want you to take the time to think about it and to pray about how God wants to use you in our ministry. I want you to take the time to go over the front page of the Weekly Word and see just some of the opportunities. I want you to take the time to go to the web site and to see all the details of the various ways in which you can be involved in ministry in large ways and in small ways. I want you to take the time to really discern how is God calling you, how is God leading you to use the gifts and the talents He’s given to you, motivated by His love to invest that time in other people’s lives.

So that’s my challenge to you over the next four weeks. Take that time so when you come back here four weeks from today and you leave service and you head into the center wing, you stand ready, you stand willing to invest your time. Amen.

Copyright 2007 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church