Joy in Fatigue

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

Engagement

Mary and I enjoy hiking - obviously not right now where we’re setting record high temperatures each day - but especially in the spring and fall hen the weather is cooler. One of our favorite places to hike is Catalina State Park, so every year we buy an annual pass. We have hiked a number of trails in the park, but I want to focus this morning of two distinctly different hikes there that I think are a great illustration of two different ways to approach our lives as disciples of Jesus.

The trail we hike most often is the Canyon Loop Trail. As the name suggests, it is a loop of about 2.5 miles that begins and ends at the trail head. It’s a fairly easy hike, with only a couple short stretches that are fairly steep. The main reason that we enjoy that trail is that for much of the year, there is water flowing in the streambed that runs along a good portion of the trail.

The other trail that I want to talk about this morning is the trail to Romero Pools. It is a much longer, rockier and more difficult trail, but there is a reward at the end of the trail - the pools themselves. I’ve only done that trail a couple times, the most recent being earlier this year when we did it with Pam and Derek and our grandkids.

While I enjoy both trails, they do have one important distinction. The Romero Pools trail is all about getting to the destination - the pools at the end of the trail. And no doubt, getting to the pools does provide a sense of accomplishment. But I’m not sure that I would say that I really enjoy the hike itself. While we do stop occasionally to take in the scenery, the hike itself is more a means to arrive at an end.

The Canyon Loop Trail, on the other hand is mostly about enjoying the hike itself, since there is really not destination per se. So when we hike that trail I find that I’m much more attuned to the scenery along the way. I notice the wildflowers and listen to the water flowing down the streambed.

Tension

As I mentioned a moment ago, I think those two trails represent two distinct ways of approaching life, and especially our relationship with Jesus.

Some people are all about getting to the destination - getting a promotion at work, buying a nicer house, obtaining their degree, retiring, or whatever else that might be. And for them, the journey to get there is merely a means to arrive at the destination. And it’s easy to approach our relationship with Jesus like that. So Jesus merely becomes a means to some end rather than becoming the end Himself. I know it is possible to do that because I have been there myself. The first time someone shared the gospel with me I prayed the “prayer of salvation” because I thought that was my ticket to heaven. But I had no intent of having the kind of relationship with Jesus that would actually impact the way I lived my life here on earth on my way to heaven.

But as we’re going to learn this morning, there is another, better approach that views life, and our walk with Jesus, as a journey to be enjoyed, an adventure to be lived. While there is an important destination ahead of us that does play an important role in our lives, we are not so focused on it that we miss out on the joy of the journey itself.

Truth

If you’ve been with us during this current series - Joy for the Journey - you have hopefully noticed that each week the message has focused on how to have joy in some particular season of life - in loneliness, in suffering, in death, in chaos, in humility, in ministry, and in opposition. But to be real honest, the principles that we’ve been developing each week are not limited to those particular seasons of life. I’m confident that if you begin to incorporate any of them into your life, they will increase the amount of joy in your life regardless of whether any of those particular situations apply to your life right now.

Today, we will be talking about joy in fatigue, and at least to some extent, we could all say that we experience that in our lives pretty regularly. But once again, even if you’re not in that season right now, what we’ll learn together today can help all of us to have more joy in our lives.

Philippians 3:12–4:1 ESV

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved.

Let’s jump right in with the big idea and then we’ll use this passage to develop it further:

Joy results when my walk with Jesus is more about embracing a journey than arriving at a destination.

If there was ever anyone who could have considered the Christian life to be all about a destination and claimed that he had arrived there, it would have been Paul. Paul’s walk with Jesus started roughly 25 or 30 years before he wrote this letter. One day when he was on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians, he was knocked to the ground and blinded and had a personal encounter with Jesus. And from that day forward he had given his entire life in service for God. During that time, he had other miraculous encounters with God in which God revealed mysteries that had not been fully revealed before, like the time when he was taken up to the “third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2). By the time he writes this letter, he has planted 14 churches and has finished writing most of the roughly 30% of the New Testament that he authors.

I get tired just thinking about all that Paul had done during that time. Certainly if anyone deserved to retire and consider that he had reached his final destination here on earth it was Paul. But he begins this section by writing:

…Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect...

As we’ll see clearly this morning, Paul is still on a journey with Jesus and he is just as committed to that journey and finds just as much joy in that journey after several decades as he did when he first began. So he is still “pressing on” to incorporate the things we saw last week - knowing Jesus and sharing in His sufferings - into his life. Once again, I’ll just say that if Paul hadn’t already arrived there at this point in his life, certainly none of us are there yet either.

Application

So let’s see what we can learn from Paul about...

HOW TO EMBRACE THE JOURNEY

Make sure I have the right “ticket”

You can’t embrace a journey that you never start. That would be kind of like an athlete trying to run a race by just watching some YouTube videos about how to run without ever getting out on the track and training and then actually entering the race.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are trying to embark on a journey without ever obtaining the right ticket. They are trying to please God by living a good life and doing what Christians are “supposed to do”. But they have never done the one thing that is required to participate in the journey - putting their faith in Jesus alone.

In verse 12, Paul writes these words:

…I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own...

Once again we see this tension that we’ve seen throughout this letter. On one hand, Jesus has done everything that is needed for us to have a relationship with God. As we saw in chapter 1, He is the one who “began a good work in you” and who will "bring it to completion” (1:6). Or as Paul puts it here, He is the one who has “made me his own”. But at the same time, because of what Jesus has done, I also have a responsibility to “press on” and to strive and pursue Jesus with all that I am. I do that not to earn God’s favor, but rather out of gratitude for what Jesus has already done for me.

If you have never made Jesus your own by putting your faith in Him alone, then nothing else I am going to share today will cause you have the kind of joy that He wants you to have. So please let us know if we can help you in any way to make sure you have the right ticket.

Cultivate a “holy dissatisfaction”

Throughout history, progress has often been the product of people not being satisfied with the status quo. I’m pretty sure that the person who invented the wheel did that because he was dissatisfied with carrying heavy loads around on his back.

Unfortunately, there are far too many disciples of Jesus who have become satisfied with “good enough”. They just want to do whatever is the minimum required to squeak their way into heaven some day. But Paul shoots that idea right out of the water here. If there was anyone who could have rested on his laurels, it was Paul. But he had this holy dissatisfaction that led him to understand that he hadn’t arrived yet. And he goes on to say that anyone who thinks they are completely mature and has nothing more to learn is actually just fooling themselves. Look what he writes in verse 15:

Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. (v. 15)

The obvious question is what is “this way”? Certainly Paul is looking back to the mindset that he described in verse 12 that admits that I am not perfect and that I have not reached my destination. But I think it goes back even further to chapter 2 where Paul described the mindset of Jesus. The word translated “think” in verse 12 is the same Greek word that is translated “mind” back in chapter 2 when Paul exhorted his readers to have the “mind of Christ”.

In other words, anyone who thinks that they are mature is actually only fooling themselves. We’re all a work in progress and a spiritually mature person has this sense of holy dissatisfaction because he knows he or she has not yet arrived.

Martin Luther rightly observed:

The nature of a Christian does not lie in what he has become, but in what he is becoming.

Learn from my past, but don’t live there

I think that a lot of people misunderstand what Paul writes in verse 13:

…forgetting what lies behind...

We tend to think of forgetting as something passive - losing our memory. But earlier in this chapter Paul had recounted some significant items from his past so he can’t have that in mind here. I think Paul is giving us an invitation here to do what I would describe as “active forgetting”. What Paul is saying here is that he no longer allows the past to control his present. For Paul, and for us, that means two things:

I don’t let my relationship with Jesus to be hindered by my past failures. Even though Paul had persecuted the church in the past, he didn’t allow that to keep him from serving Jesus in the present.

I don’t allow my relationship with Jesus to be impacted by my past successes either. Paul didn’t allow all he had done to advance the gospel to puff him up to the point where he figured he didn’t still need to grow in his relationship with Jesus.

One commentator that I read this week put it this way:

Satan’s plan for our past is to define us.

Jesus’ plan for our past is to refine us.

Satan wants us to live in and be weighed down by our past. Jesus wants us to learn from it and use the pain and the sorrow to help us become the people He wants us to become in the present.

Focus more on direction than destination

We live in a culture that tends to value completion more than it values direction. When we go to school the goal is to finish our course of study and get our degree. And to a large degree, the church, especially here in the United States, has often adopted that mindset. So we encourage people to complete a course of “discipleship classes” and give them a certificate when they do. And even though we might not say it out loud, that approach implies that it is possible to reach a place of spiritual maturity where we have “arrived” and can now retire.

But Paul takes a different approach. Twice in this passage, he says that he is “pressing on”. The verb that Paul uses there was used by the Greeks to describe a hunter eagerly pursuing His prey. It could be used in either a positive or negative sense, depending on the context. For instance, Paul uses that same verb back in verse 6 when he described himself as a “persecutor of the church”. But now Paul no longer pursued disciples of Jesus for the purpose of harming them. Instead, he now pursued Jesus for the purpose of knowing and loving Him.

In verse 13, he also writes that he is “straining ahead”. The verb he uses there pictures a runner straining for the finish line at the end of the race.

Essentially Paul is saying, “I’m not where I want to be yet, but I’m going to keep moving in that direction.” He reinforces that idea in verse 20 when he writes:

…But our citizenship is in heaven...

We have made mention of this idea several times already in this sermon series, but what I want to call your attention to right now is the verb “is”. It is a present tense verb, so Paul is not saying that “one day” after we die we will be citizens of heaven. Heaven is not, as I imagined that day I “prayed the prayer”, merely a destination that I strive to reach when I die. It is a kingdom in which I live right here and now.

Yes, one day Jesus is going to completely remake my body into something completely new. And that idea should certainly give me hope. But what gives me joy right now is knowing that the same power that makes that makes it possible for Jesus to do that in the future is the very same power that enables Him to run the entire universe today.

So my goal should not be to try and measure up to the spiritual maturity of someone else. I will always be frustrated if I take that approach because there is always someone else more mature than me. But what I can, and should do, and what will give me joy, is to periodically take some time to evaluate my walk with Jesus and determine if I’m moving in the right direction - if I’m further down the road than I was six months ago, or a year ago, or five years ago. And if I’m not, they I need to figure out what changes I need to make in my life so that I get headed in the right direction.

Surround myself with like-minded disciples

In verse 17, Paul gives what appears at first glance to be a very arrogant instruction to his readers:

…join in imitating me...

Now Paul has already made it clear that he isn’t perfect, so he certainly isn’t saying “Follow me because I have it all figured out.” Given the context here, I have little doubt that what Paul means is, “Follow me in the way that I continue to pursue Jesus because I don’t have it all figured out either.” This is undoubtedly connected with what we saw earlier in verse 15 where Paul invited his readers to have a mindset that admitted that they weren’t perfect.

Then in verses 18-19, Paul contrasts those who have that mindset with the “enemies of the cross of Jesus”. These were likely the very same Judaizers who Paul had called out earlier in the chapter. So he is writing here of “insiders” - those who claimed to be Christians, but who actually weren’t, rather than “outsiders” who had nothing to do with the church.

When we put all this together, we see the importance of surrounding ourselves with like-minded disciples - those who are growing in their relationship with Jesus, but who don’t claim they have it all together. We need to be hanging out with other disciples who will challenge us and hold us accountable, but who will do that with a great deal of humility, understanding that they, too, are still on the same journey as we are.

View my life as a marathon, not a sprint

We live in a world that is focused on instant gratification. On Monday morning, we talked about why a microwave is such a good illustration of our culture. It cooks food fast, but it doesn’t really cook it well. Mary and I like to watch a program called “Restaurant Impossible” where chef Robert Irvine helps fix struggling restaurants by remodeling them over a two day period and by training the staff and revamping the menu. And every time that he goes into a kitchen and sees a bunch of microwaves, we immediately know he is going to get them out of there because they aren’t capable of preparing fresh, quality food.

Too many people look at the Christian life like that. They want instant spirituality. They are always looking for the latest and greatest shortcut that will allow them to be mature in their faith so that they can get on with life. But our walk with Jesus isn’t a 100 yard dash - it’s a life long marathon.

When I was in high school I was on the track team and one of the events I often competed in was the 440 yard dash - yes I’m so old everything was in yards rather than meters back then. One day, one of the guys on our team who usually ran the 880 yard race was sick and so the coach asked me if I could fill in for him. Although I’d never run that distance in a meet, I had often gone on training runs with some of the long distance runners so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem.

At the end of the first lap I was pretty far out in front and I was wondering why the other runners were running so slowly. Well, about ten yards into that second lap I found out why. I was out of gas and while I did finish the race, I was probably at least a half a lap behind everyone else who had paced themselves a lot better than I had.

In our walk with Jesus we need to have the mentality of a marathon runner. Even if we’ve been a disciple of Jesus for 40 or 50 or 60 years, we can’t start thinking, “I’ve finished the race. I don’t need to run any more.”

Action/Inspiration

Joy results when my walk with Jesus is more about embracing a journey than arriving at a destination.

I want to close by just letting you know how encouraged I am to see so many of you who are already doing many of the things we’ve talked about today. It gives me great joy to look at your lives and to see where you are today compared to where you were six months or a year or even five years ago. My prayer for you is that you’ll continue to embrace the journey and continue that progress.

But I also know that there are some who would have to honestly admit that you’re not really finding joy in the journey. My guess is that that has happened for one of two reasons. Some of you feel like you’ve already arrived or maybe that you’ve “put in your time” and now you’ll just rest on your laurels. And others of you may have been so focused on the life to come that you’ve failed to find the joy that Jesus wants you to have on the way there. For all of you I pray that today you’ll take these principles to heart and ask Jesus to help you “press on” and apply them in your lives.