None of This is Yours - Audio
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It is Veterans Day, and I'll mention a little bit more during the benediction, but we do want to honor and thank those who've served and gone to difficult places and gone through different difficult things. It's a major sacrifice and we do appreciate it. We are in a series right now called The Rich Harvest. It's a harvest time, and so, I mean, well, no one harvests anymore because we have agribusiness, but if we did, this would be the time when harvesting took place, and we are celebrating Thanksgiving, and we have our Thanksgiving feast tonight. And so to do it, we're looking at the parables of Jesus, and so we're looking at the parables where he's really talking about agricultural stuff, harvest stuff, and seeing how those sort of work and what they have for us now, especially given the fact that our church is in kind of like a space, like a sort of a spiritual space of looking to really be a part of the harvesting of God's fruit, right? As a church, we're really looking to be a place that's gathering in people who don't know Jesus or who know him a little bit, but really don't know a lot and want to get deeper and know him more. And as we're being a part of this, as we're looking to be a part of this harvest, these parables specifically speak to that sort of mentality. And so last week, one of the things we found is that when churches and Christians really start to look outwards, we find that God starts gathering in people, and a lot of us can start to be really jealous about the way that God blesses and gives good things to people that we don't think deserve it. And that was last week, and one of the things we have to be on guard against is having the sense that I'm being left out because God's giving this incredible grace to so-and-so. This week, I would like us to think about how we can avoid being at that place where 10 years from now, we look back at this moment in our personal lives, in our church life, our spiritual life, where we're looking forward, looking forward to being a part of the harvest. We want to make it so that 10 years we don't look back and go, "Oh, no, what happened? How did we screw that up so badly?" The question I would like to have bouncing around in your head today is that question, how do we start? We've got these great intentions, this great desire to see God's will done and then we end up doing something that is opposing God. We've all seen this in our lives. We've seen ministries, we've seen people that we've loved, we've been a part of, and everything's great, and it's awesome, and then somewhere along the line, things go off track, and we get to a point where we're looking back and being like, "What happened there?" Now what started out as something awesome is now actually opposing God. It doesn't have to be church, it can actually be just in your own life, like you start out and you're like, "You know, my relationship with my spouse, I really want to see it in a good, healthy place." And 10 years later, you look back and like, "What happens?" We had all the right intentions, and something got messed up in business where you say, "I'm going to have a career that's ethical and it's God-centered and it's going to bless people." And 10 years later, you look back at a person who said that and they've either gotten too big for their britches or they've forgotten who they were or something has gone wrong. I suggest that this parable of Jesus starts to get at some of that, amongst other things. I didn't do a translation this week. The New King James is totally sufficient here, but this is Matthew 21, 33 to 45.
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How do we start with good intentions and end up opposing God?