As We Have Opportunity
Love Without Fences • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Reading from God’s Word
Reading from God’s Word
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.
Introduction
Introduction
Most of the good you'll ever do, you won't have planned.
It shows up.
A phone call comes.
A name turns up in the bulletin.
Somebody lets you in on something that is needed and you know you can help.
That's the way Paul talks about doing good.
He treats it as a window that opens in front of you, and he writes as a man who assumes you'll be tempted to let it close.
Before we get into the text, let me tell you what we're doing this month.
Today, we officially begin the last quarter of this year’s vision plan.
Our theme for this quarter is on page 22.
Working Together in Love — built on the same passage in Ephesians 4 that has carried us all year, we are built up in love by the proper working of each individual part.
That's where the fall is headed. October and November will take us there.
September is going to face the other direction first.
Here's why. Look back over this year and count with me.
Bearing burdens. Encouragement. Humility and service.
Handling conflict and learning to forgive.
All of it good, all of it needed, and nearly every bit of it aimed inward — at how we treat each other inside the family at Cornerstone.
So we changed the plan.
Before we talk about building each other up, we're going to spend this month on the neighbor, the stranger, and the person who has no claim on us at all.
Paul prayed both directions at once for the Thessalonians.
He asked that the Lord would cause them:
12 And may the Lord cause you to increase and overflow with love for one another and for everyone, just as we do for you.
One another, and everyone.
September takes up the second half of that prayer. The rest of the quarter takes up the first.
That brings us to Galatians 6. Look at verses 9 and 10.
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.
There's a clause at the end of verse 10 I'm going to leave alone this morning.
It's a good clause and a true one, and it will get its own hearing in a future lesson.
What I want today is the line that comes before it.
As we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all.
Paul chose every word in that sentence on purpose.
Let's take them slowly.
As Opportunity Comes
As Opportunity Comes
Let’s focus on Galatians 6:10 for a moment.
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.
Opporunity: kairos.
It doesn't mean time on a clock.
It means a season, a window, the right moment for a certain thing.
A farmer knows the difference.
There's time, which passes whether you do anything about it or not, and then there's the week the harvest is ready, and that week does not wait on your schedule.
Paul says we have one of those. As we have opportunity.
While the window is open.
Notice how opportunity works everywhere else in Scripture. It isn't a project you invent. It shows up in front of you.
27 When it is in your power, don’t withhold good from the one to whom it belongs.
To whom it belongs.
No fences. Whoever/whatever …
The good you have in your possession is owned by someone else.
Don’t withhold it from them.
Paul says the same thing another way.
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
Prepared ahead of time.
The work was laid out before you ever heard about it.
So, the opportunities that come belong to someone else and they have a date, and neither one was chosen by us.
We don't schedule the storm, the diagnosis, the layoff, or the moving truck that pulls in across the street.
We find out about them. And the finding out is the assignment.
And here, is another passage we need to consider:
17 So it is sin to know the good and yet not do it.
Most of us don't think that way.
We think of sin as the thing we did.
James says the open window we walked past gets counted too.
Good is something you work
Good is something you work
Now, back to Galatians 6:10…
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.
Work is the word for labor.
It's what you'd say about a man who works a field or a trade, and it's the root behind the word for the wages he's handed at the end of the day.
Paul could have written feel compassion for all. He could have written care about the good of all.
He wrote work it.
Everybody in this room is in favor of good.
That costs nothing.
What Paul asks for is real.
It has a Saturday morning in it.
It might involve some heavy lifing .. something your back will remind you about it on Sunday morning.
Good, in the New Testament, requires a little sweat equity.
It also isn't a personality type.
Some people are wired warm and the rest of us have to work at it,
You knowPaul already settled where thisg comes from.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
23 gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.
Goodness made the list.
It grows in the person the Spirit is working on, whether he or she was born generous or not.
There are two different words for good in these two verses, and the difference is important to see.
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
doing good.
This is descriing what is fine, noble, admirable, the sort of thing you'd want people to see.
Now, verse 10:
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.
This is the good that actually helps somebody.
Put them side by side.
The noble thing and the useful thing turn out to be the same thing.
Hauling somebody's storm damage to the curb helps.
It's also a beautiful piece of work, if you know what it cost the people who did it.
Then there's that little word at the end of the phrase.
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.
The scope of the wording is wide.
The man whose house gets destroyed in a storm doesn't get asked what he believes before somebody helps him rebuild.
You may not know whether gotes to church somewhere or if he hasn’t set foot in a church building in decades.
The storm didn't ask him either.
That word is where the month is headed.
Next Sunday we'll take up the stranger who comes to us.
Two weeks from now Hunter has the Good Samaritan, and you already know what that parable does to a man who wants a definition of neighbor he can live inside comfortably.
This morning is the simplest version of it.
There's a window open in front of you and a set of keys hanging by your door.
The tired part comes later
The tired part comes later
Back to v. 9:
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
Nobody's tired at the start.
You know at the begining it’s excting.
We’re planning. Getting the the sign-up sheet ready
making the phone calls
the sense that we're finally doing something.
Paul isn't planning. He's writing about when the need drags on.
He uses two words in this verse and we need to see them.
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, …
Tired: means to lose heart, to run out of the will to keep at a thing.
It isn't your body giving out.
It's the inside of you deciding the work isn't worth what it takes.
It’s the same working Paul used in 2 Thessalonians 3:13.
13 But as for you, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary in doing good.
Now the second word sits at the end of the verse
9 … we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
if we don’t give up.
It means to go slack, to come unstrung, to collapse.
Matthew uses it of a hungry crowd.
32 …I don’t want to send them away hungry, otherwise they might collapse on the way.”
That's the picture Paul had in mind. A body that simply quits partway home.
So why do we quit doing good?
We quit because we can't see it working.
You pour a year into somebody and watch them end up about where they started, and you begin to wonder what the year was for.
We quit because the need is bigger than we are. Whatever we do this month, there will be more of it next month, and somebody will do that math out loud on the way home.
We quit because it may all happen again. You fix it and it breaks. You help a man to his feet and six months later he's back down, and a person can talk himself out of a whole day's work with one sentence about next spring.
We quit because nobody thanks us. Sometimes they don't. People in the middle of losing something are not always at their best when you meet them, and you can go home having been spoken to sharply by the very person you gave your day to.
There's one more, and Paul's readers knew it better than we do.
These Christians were being pressured toward a religion you could measure.
13 …they want you to be circumcised in order to boast about your flesh.
A mark you could point at.
Something finished, something countable, something you could hold up at the end of the year.
Doing good never works like that. It doesn't hand you a number, and it never lets you say you're done.
The harvest is on God's calendar
The harvest is on God's calendar
Paul's answer is short.
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
Go back three verses.
7 Don’t be deceived: God is not mocked. For whatever a person sows he will also reap,
He's been farming this whole paragraph — sowing, reaping, seasons, harvest.
Now, back to v. 9.
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
at the proper time.
its own season, …
and the word for season there is the same word Paul uses one verse later when he says as we have opportunity.
Same word, twice, doing two different jobs.
Two seasons in two verses. One of them is ours. The other one belongs to God.
Ours is the working season.
It's open right now and it will not stay open.
God's is the harvest season. He sets that date, and He hasn't told anyone what it is.
That's what keeps us going.
A farmer doesn't dig up the seed on Thursday to see how it's coming along.
He put it in the ground, and the ground and the rain and the sun are not his department.
He goes back out on Friday and does Friday's work.
In the meantime, he’s waiting on God’s work.
6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.
You don't get a receipt.
You may never learn what a thing you did meant to the person you did it for.
Nobody may ever mention it to you again.
Paul says the harvest is coming anyway, on a schedule you don't control, and there is exactly one thing that can keep you from it.
If we don't give up.
That's the only condition in the sentence.
He doesn't hang the harvest on how much we accomplished, or on how it turned out, or on whether anybody noticed.
He hangs it on whether we were still at it.
He told Corinth the same thing.
58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
Not in vain. Not one hour of it.
Look to Jesus
Look to Jesus
I want us to look at the Lord before we're done, because everything I've asked of you this morning He did first.
I want you to think of Peter, in Acts 10, standing in a Gentile's house, the first time in his life he's done such a thing, and he sums up the entire ministry of Jesus in one line.
38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil, because God was with him.
He went about doing good.
Peter had three years of material and that's what he reached for.
Notice the room he's standing in when he says it.
Caesarea. The house of a Roman officer.
Peter is telling a crowd of Gentiles about a Jewish Messiah who went around doing good to whoever was in front of Him.
He did it tired.
John tells us the Lord came to a well outside a Samaritan town around noon, worn out from his journey, John 4:6.
5 so he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph.
6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon.
Worn out.
He sat down because He needed to sit down.
A woman came out to draw water, and He was the one who opened the conversation.
She came for water.
She left having met the Christ, and she left her water jar sitting on the ground.
He was tired, and He gave her the water anyway.
Then there's the deepest form of it.
6 For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.
There's our word again. Kairos. The right moment, the appointed season.
God had one, and He didn't let it pass.
8 But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Look at who we were in that sentence.
Helpless. Ungodly. Sinners.
We had no claim on Him, we hadn't asked, we couldn't have paid, and a good many of us were still running the other direction when He came.
If that's what was done for us, then the question of whether the person in front of you has earned your trouble has already been answered, and it wasn't answered in our favor either.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Who's the opportunity you already know about?
Who moved in this summer that nobody in this room has met?
Who buried a husband in March and hasn't had a meal brought to her since April?
Who sat three rows behind you this morning and hasn't been himself since spring?
Who works at the shop you stop at every week, and you've never once asked how he's doing?
Whose name came to your mind while I was asking that? Somebody's did.
Most of what I'm describing isn't dramatic.
It's a meal carried to a door.
It's an hour with somebody's children so a young mother can sleep.
It's sitting still long enough to let a man finish what he was trying to say.
Take the next one.
Whatever window is standing open in front of you this week, go through it before it closes, and then go through the one after that.
Read verse 9 with me one more time.
9 Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.
The window is open.
It won't stay open.
There's a harvest coming that we had nothing to do with scheduling, and the one way to miss it is to sit down before it gets here.
So don't sit down.
Invitation
Invitation
One word before we sing, to anyone here who has never come to Christ.
Doing good will not save you.
Paul spends most of this letter saying exactly that.
The good we do is fruit that grows on a life already rescued, and the rescue happened at a cross.
If you've never been buried with Him in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4), that's the opportunity standing in front of you this morning.
And if you're a Christian who has drifted, the way back is open today, and there are people in this room who will walk it with you.
