Failure is not an option

Introduction

·         Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in 1828 in Maine.  Upon entering school, he quickly demonstrated that he was a fine student.  In college, he met his future wife.  During his tenure as a professor of language and rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, their family grew from two to seven.  When the Civil War began, Chamberlain offered his services to the state of Maine and to the Union Army.  His status as a professor earned him the rank of lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine Regiment.  He was engaged in battle on various occasions and he proved to be a quick student in the school of warfare.  In July of 1863, Chamberlain, now colonel of the 20th Maine, led his men to Little Round Top, a small hill at the extreme left of the Union line, just outside of Gettysburg, PA.  Upon arriving, a superior officer informed Chamberlain of his position on the Union line and told him that he was to hold this position at all costs.  Not too long afterwards, Chamberlain and his men found themselves engaged in battle with Confederate soldiers from Alabama.  Relentless, the Alabamans charged up the hill repeatedly, hoping to break through the Union defenses.  At one point, in order to thwart repeated Confederate flanking moves, Chamberlain made the bold move of taking part of his line of troops and deploying them in an angle to his left, all done while his troops were under Confederate fire.  The relentless charges took a toll on both men and munitions.  The 20th Maine soon ran out of ammunition.  In a most daring move, Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets and to charge down the hill into the oncoming Confederates, the angled line swinging around and down into the enemy like a door closing.  The men from Alabama were thrown into confusion, and scattered in retreat.  The boys from Maine pursued the Confederates, and over 400 prisoners were captured.  For gallant action in battle, Chamberlain received the CMH.  What makes a person, in a situation such as this, able to do what Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain did?  Other men might have retreated, but Chamberlain did not.  Why?  Say what you will, but it all boils down to the fact that Chamberlain understood one thing:  failure was not an option.  It didn’t even factor into his thinking.  He knew that if he did not do something, his regiment would be driven from its position, that the Confederate troops would hold a flanking position, and that the entire Union army at Gettysburg would be vulnerable.  Failure was not an option.

Transition

·         Perhaps we hear stories like this and desire to cast ourselves in the role of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.  How we would like to be the hero, the one to save the day.  We are not in battle, though, so the opportunities to do something gallant and heroic like Chamberlain is not within our reach.  Or is it?  I think that it is.  We are engaged in battle on many fronts as believers.  But, is failure an option for us?  Divorce rates in the church equal those outside of the church.  Pornography rips Christian families and marriages apart.  Parents give their children everything except what they need most, which is parents who take seriously their role as their children’s primary spiritual teacher and mentor.  The list could go on and on.  The battle rages, casualties are high.  Too often, failure becomes an option.  The stakes are too high for failure to be an option.  Christian friend, brother, sister—failure is not an option.

Scripture

·         Read Romans 12:1

·         Pray

Main message

·         The Apostle Paul commonly wrote his letters in this fashion—he wrote theology first and then practice second, which seems a little backwards.  When you tell your kids to do something, do they ever ask why?  Does it send anyone else in here into orbit, or is it just me?  Paul wrote the “why” first and the “do” second.  I try that at home with Steph and I get told, “Cut to the chase.  What do you want me to do?”  I guess I just talk too much. 

·         In this message, I am not going to try to outdo Paul.  I am going to follow his same order.  The “why’s” before the “do’s.”

·         Therefore – what is the therefore there for?  In this case, it refers back to what Paul has been discussing in the first eleven chapters of Romans.  It primarily refers to the first eight chapters, where he writes a theology of salvation.  In chapters 12-16, Paul urges the Romans to live in the exalted state that they enjoy as believers because of the great salvation that Christ won for them on the cross.  Now, Paul makes a conclusion with an application.

·         In view of God’s mercies – Paul spent eleven chapters talking about this.  We spend a lot of time talking about this in church.  We talk about Jesus and what He has done for us.  I don’t think that it is necessary for us to go into that this morning.  What we might need to do is to look at our lives with brutal honesty, asking ourselves tough questions to see if God’s mercies, plural, has really affected us and changed us fundamentally.

·         Urge – to exhort, to encourage someone to do something; used of exhorting troops who were about to go into battle.  Paul uses this word, in addition to the word “brothers” to show that the reason he could not command them to do something is because he was a fellow servant, a fellow soldier in Christ’s army.  Paul is acting like a coach giving a pre-game speech.  Paul appeals to them to obey, and his appeal carries weight because he is an apostle, one who speaks, writes, and acts with the authority of Christ.  Although I am not an apostle, I am one who stands before you today, a fellow servant and soldier in Christ’s army, to exhort you, to urge you, to encourage you – failure is not an option.

·         Present – in the original language, this is a priestly term (LXX); it means to present once and for all; sacrificial term

·         Bodies – not just the person, but the person in all of who he or she is, in all of the complex relationships to the world.  We are not simply a body, we are a person.  We have friends and families, jobs, and hobbies.  When families lose a loved one, they do not mourn because their body simply ceased to function.  They mourn because the totality of who that person was has been removed from their lives.  Their physical presence is gone and the relationship is gone.  Life is disrupted as friends and loved ones who remain are left to take up the slack.  More than just the physical body is missing.  This is what Paul is getting at – we are to present more than just our bodies.  We are to offer all of who we are.  Message paraphrase of text.

·         Living sacrifice – this is an oxymoron.  Like jumbo shrimp or dumb Aggie.  How is a person both alive and dead at the same time? 

o   Romans 6:10-14 – dead to sin and alive to Christ

·         Holy – set apart and pure; set apart like good china; pure like free from sin; used to describe the spotless lamb presented for sacrifice in the OT.

·         Acceptable – not like OT where a priest assessed or determined what was an acceptable sacrifice; we are priests; when we look at our lives, we see our sins and we wonder if we are acceptable;  this is not talking about a one-time check for acceptability—it is talking about the goal of the Christian life, to be holy, to be pure and set apart for God’s use

·         Spiritual – reasonable; it is the logical thing to do—God did this for you, so you must do this for Him; you are a priest and priests sacrifice, so do it; also means more than just external actions or a going through the motions—it means having an internal motive for an external action

·         Worship – worth ship; external display of love based upon the worth or value placed on the object being worshiped

·         What is Paul saying?  All of who you are should be changing fundamentally, in light of what God has done for you, and as a priest you should be continually dying to sin—the sacrifice part—and living for Christ—the living part.  And he’s saying it in such a way as to communicate that failure is not an option.

·         So there’s the theological why’s, now for the practical do’s. 

·         You may be thinking, but I fail every day.  We need to define failure for the believer.  Failure means that when we do sin as believers, instead of learning from it and being transformed through the process, we look for a way out because we are human and it is just too hard to live the Christian life, so that will be my way out. You are right—living a perfect Christian life is impossible.  If you are open to the “way out” then you are making failure an option in your life.  Paul says to us today, don’t even let failure be an option for you. 

·         One reason that failure may be an option is that we never really intended to follow Christ.  Listen to this quote from William Law’s book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life

o   Why [is it that] the lives of even avowed Christians are thus strangely contrary to the principles of Christian­ity[?]…Now the reason for…this [is]: Men have not so much as the intention to please God in all their ac­tions….It is for lack of this intention that you see men who profess religion living in swearing and sensual­ity—that you see clergymen given to pride, covetousness, and worldly enjoyments. It is for lack of this intention that you see women who profess devotion living in all the folly and vanity of dress and wasting their time in idleness and pleasures. And if you will stop and ask your­self why you are not so devoted…your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance or inability but purely because you never thoroughly intended it….Now, who can be reckoned a Christian while lacking this genuine sincere intention? Yet if it generally existed among Christians it would change the whole face of the world…Let a clergyman but have this intention and he will converse as if he had been brought up by an apostle. Let a tradesman…and it will make him a saint in his shop. His everyday business will be a course of wise and reasonable actions, made holy to God, by being done in obedience to His will and pleasure…Here is no plea left for ignorance…[e]verybody is in the light and everybody has power. And no one can fail except he who is not so much a Christian as to intend to please God.

o   William Law says that failure is an option in the Christian life because we have allowed it to be one and we have taken the most meager of steps to alter this course of living.

·         Why do we do nothing to alter our course of living?

o   Answer lies in verse 2.

o   We resemble the pattern of this age too much.  The pattern of this age is to have many gods, the primary one being the god ME, and God has said, “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

o   It has been said that the problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar.  Why does it keep crawling off the altar?  Because it keeps pursuing other gods and because failure as we defined it earlier has continued to be an option. 

o   Paul uses specific language to urge the believer to present their lives as living sacrifices ONCE AND FOR ALL.  Failure is not an option.

·         Yet, we let failure become an option in our spiritual lives, and it quickly spreads to our families, our relationships, and to the church.

o   In our families, failure is an option in marriage.  Marriage is no longer “’til death do you part,” but until we stop loving each other, until the romance is gone.  Maybe the romance is gone because husbands have failed to love their wives as Christ loved the church, instead choosing to spend too much time at work chasing the American dream (“do not be conformed to the patterns of this age.”)  When they come home, they are too tired for their wives and children.

o   In our families, failure is an option in parenting.  Between games and school and church and my activities and all of the running around that we do so our kids can be successful, the very thing that they need the most is opted out of because of busyness.  Children and youth are dropped off at church so that the church can disciple them.  The church has a role, but Scripture places the primary responsibility on the parents.  When children do not see parents presenting their lives as living sacrifices, is it any wonder that they do not know how themselves?  Refer to ethics paper.

o   In our relationships outside of church, at work and in the neighborhoods where we live, failure becomes an option when we do not live as his hands, his feet, his voice, out of his heart, earning the right to be heard, ready to preach the gospel. 

o   In church, failure is an option when ministries suffer from lack of commitment.  Failure is also an option when people don’t forgive one another. 

o   Part of the problem in these areas that I have described is in the area of relationships.  Relationships can get really messy.  We want our way and others want their way.  Story of Sydnie.  She got her way.  Sometimes we just have to be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the relationship.  Mutual submission to one another out of love.

·         The overwhelming part of the problem is that we have these other gods.  Our worship of those gods make failure an option.  God says that we are to have no other gods before Him, yet we get down from the altar and go serve those other gods.  If we are to take God’s words seriously, we have to understand that we must get rid of these gods, and we must understand that getting rid of them is going to be difficult.  As much as we would like to say that they aren’t, they are deeply connected to us.  Want to test it out?  Try giving up food for a week and see if it isn’t like a god to you.  Try taking money that you worked hard to earn and were saving for that special purchase and give it to someone who really needs it and see if money isn’t a god to you.  And the truth is that when you start getting rid of those gods, they aren’t going to want to let go.  You are going to have withdrawal symptoms.  And those symptoms aren’t going to be pleasant.  When those symptoms get more and more unpleasant, is failure going to be an option for you?