Rich in Heart: Vision
October 16, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
I Corinthians 9:24-27
Ephesians 3:20-21

We’re continuing our series on what it means to be rich in heart. And here’s the premise. It’s two things that are about all of this series. The first is that there are certain principles that make us rich in heart. It’s not about money. It’s about other things that make our lives full and rich.
The second thing is that it’s those same things that make our lives full and rich that drive our generosity that are the motivators behind our being generous.
So listen today. We’re going to hear two Scriptures today, one from Corinthians and one from Ephesians that speak to vision as one of those key principles.

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives a prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one.So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air;but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. (I Corinthians 9:24 NRSV)

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine,to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all the generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21 NRSV)

Pray with me: O God open us up, open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then O Lord open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
You know, when you meet someone for the first time if you’re sort of a polite person, you shake their hand and say, “How do you do?”
That sentence makes no sense. “How do you do?” “How do you do what?” How do you do? How do you do? Now you might say, “What do you do?” which might imply something about vocation or what you do with your life and what you spend your time doing. You might say, “What do you do?” and they say, “I play tennis” or “I’m an architect” or whatever.
I want to invite you to think about a different question you might ask and that is, “Why do you do?” Why do you do what you do?
It’s not appropriate grammar, I don’t think, but it’s really a more important question than “What do you do?” or “How do you do it?” It’s what matters to you. What is the driver, what is the reason behind what you do every day?
So again, we’ve been talking about what makes a rich and full life and how that rich and full life are the drivers, the motivations behind our generosity. And rather than focus always on generosity what we need to do is focus on the things that undergird it. The things that make us generous.
Last week we talked about gratitude, which I think is really the foundation of it all. That’s what’s underneath it, that we give because God has given to us, because God has blessed us in so many ways, because we’re grateful for that, because God gave us Jesus Christ. And in that gift of himself we then respond by giving and paying it forward. God gives to us and we give to others. And as we claim gratitude then our lives even become fuller, more full, richer. And we find ourselves wanting to give more because we’re grateful.
When you walk into the new Johnson Education Building, you see there’s a plaque there that’s says that the Johnson family has given this building in memory of Ruth and Willard Johnson. The truth is that all of their family, the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, all of those people felt so blessed by their grandparents, their parents, and their great grandparents that everybody chipped in to be able to build a building.
The idea is that we are so grateful for what we’ve received that we want to give to pay it forward. And it’s not just about a building. That’s the driver behind our giving. That’s the foundation. So I want you to imagine that idea of gratitude behind us, propelling us into a life of generosity and giving us a full and rich life.
But on the other side of our life, not behind us but in front of us, there is a vision and that’s what I want to talk about today. What pulls us forward? What invites us, beckons us, pulls us to give our lives away? And that’s a life of vision, of purpose, trying to accomplish something with the days that we have here, wanting to give our lives toward something that matters. And that pulls us forward.
So our Scripture today is about that kind of vision. Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” I will tell you that’s true. If there’s not a vision, there’s not a place you’re going. You just wander around till you die.
So let’s look at this Scripture from I Corinthians 9. Here’s the context: Paul is writing to the Corinthians, and in fact, this whole chapter is actually about money. In this chapter he’s sort of making the case that he should be able to draw a salary. He says, “Look, I’ve been an evangelist, it’s been hard, I should be able to draw a salary.” Then he goes on and says, “A farmer gets to eat from the fruits of his labor.” Then he goes on to say, “But I haven’t. I haven’t drawn a salary, because I’m willing to sacrifice whatever it is to accomplish my vision.”
Here’s the passage today, and I want you to look at the Scripture and follow along because I think it will help you to see it. I want to start with verse 26, then I’m going to go back to verse 25 next. He says, “So I do not run aimlessly nor do I box as though beating the air.” Man, I like that phrase. The idea of shadow boxing. How many of us run aimlessly? Or we’re just flailing about in our lives fighting, but we don’t even know what we’re fighting for. We just don’t have a direction, we don’t have a target. To live a life of purpose and vision means you set a target.
I’ve been talking to physical therapists lately about balance. This isn’t for me, those of you who are worrying about my standing on this step. Some of you might be thinking, “If he’s off balance it’s going to be bad.” I get more e-mails about that than anything else asking, “Why do you stand right on the edge of the step?”
We actually have a class here, by the way, about balance here at St. Luke’s. So the physical therapists say that balance is built on a lot of different things. It’s built on your hearing, on the sensation in your legs and in your feet. But it’s also built on your vision. So the physical therapist will take you and ask you to look at a target straight ahead and then will move your head back and forth and see if your eyes can stay focused on that target. If they can’t – if your tracking doesn’t work right - then you begin to lose balance very quickly. So what the physical therapist says to do if you want to improve your balance while you walk pick a target ahead of you, and just keep your eyes on the target. Don’t look round while you’re walking, just keep your eyes on that target and you’ll keep your balance. I think that really applies to our life as well. When we run aimlessly, when we don’t keep focused on something that matters to us, our life gets all out of balance. We just begin to chase things that aren’t real.
When we began this project we talked about St. Luke’s vision, and our vision is to be one family in Jesus who puts our faith to work in love. So we want to be a congregation that is so vital, the Holy Spirit working in our midst so significantly, that it propels us, that it throws us out of here. And we send out apostles, inside out as we say, into the world around us, that what happens here is so significant that it sends us out. That is our vision of who we want to be.
So when it came time for a Capital Campaign, we established a vision. We talked about “what if?” That’s the vision. What if this…? Now, here’s what I would tell you. The vision is not “What if we had some really cool buildings?” That’s not the vision. Having really cool buildings is not a vision. It may be a symbol for a vision or something we can put our eyes on and see and picture in a better way. But the real vision is the ministry behind that.
I hope while you’re here today you pick up one of these really cool fans that we had our communications team do. Now the communications team – the printer actually – must be left handed, because they open from right to left, and no one should open a fan from right to left. But they open backward, and these are all over the campus, and I hope you pick one up because we printed a bunch, and otherwise we’ll have a bunch of fans lying around. But on one side is this very cool map of the facility. That’s not the vision. The vision is on the back. This is the vision – it’s of the ministry that those facilities will create.
In the little write-up in the bulletin there today I talk about how it’s like a farmer buying a new plow. We’ve got a really nice new plow, and it’s really cool to go out and hook up the new plow to the tractor. Maybe you have a new tractor and a new combine, too, and you get to play on all those things. But that’s not what’s significant. What’s significant is the work you do on those things.
So our vision is broken down into some pretty specific pieces, that we would launch a whole generation of young people into the future and into the world to change it, so that we wouldn’t just be focused on the now, we’d be focused on the generations ahead of us. So we built a student ministry building, and we built a children’s ministry building, because we want to form Christians that will change the world. We want to make a really big impact so we focus on the things that will last after you and I are dead.
Second thing we said was we wanted worship to be so powerful that the sound was heard far away, that what happened didn’t just stay in here, but we carried it out into the world to make a difference out there. So we renovated this sanctuary. I don’t know if you guys even remember – it’s hard for me to remember what this place looked like when the choir looked at each another and sang happy songs to one another, when they might say, “Hey, you guys look really pretty.” And then the other side said, “You look really pretty, too!” You’d sing that way.
We renovated the sanctuary so we could have worship that was more powerful and more transformative. We determined that we wanted to create The Story Houston, a new faith community that reached people that we’re not reaching with our traditional worship or our Encounter worship that was a whole new picture of discipleship with higher commitment levels. So we built a building for that.
But the vision is what we’re trying to do. It isn’t having a building. We said that on our Gethsemane campus we wanted to be the place where hope has an address, that would be an epicenter of renewal for Christ in a neighborhood, the Gulfton–Sharpstown neighborhood. So we renovated the building and put in a soccer field out there and built a fellowship hall. And there’s more yet to come someday.
But in all of those things the buildings are not the vision: The vision is what we’re called to do to make an impact for Jesus. So we’ve called this, I think kind of coolly, “What if?” becomes “What is?” Like “what is?” I’m going to hear about that from my kids, I know it.
But the truth is that it’s not “what is?” it’s still “what if?” To live a life of vision means you live with “what is- what if?” all the time. You’re always propelled toward “what if?” And what we’re called on to do is to be that community that has the presence of Christ so powerfully in our midst that we are sent inside out as apostles, not just as disciples, but as apostles sent into the world to make a difference. So to have that kind of vision is what drives us.
So here’s the second component of that. Let’s go back one verse where Paul says, “Athletes exercise self-control in all things.” Okay, I must not be an athlete then if that’s the definition of an athlete. But the word “self-control” is sometimes translated “self-disciplined.” It’s about having a discipline about continuing to do something over and over.
I had the opportunity to hear John Maxwell talk about leadership a few weeks ago at the Global Leadership Summit. He had a great phrase that I just love. He said, “Anything worthwhile is uphill.” Oh, man, doesn’t that resonate. “Anything worthwhile is uphill.” Nothing comes easy if it matters.
Then he went on to say, “Most of us have uphill dreams but downhill habits.” That’s so true! Living a life of vision doesn’t mean you take hold of something, and you chase it till it kind of gets hard. Or, “I’m going to chase something until I see something else and then I think I’ll go chase that over there. Or I’ll go chase that over there.” I have the greatest respect for the people who week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade live an entire life pursuing a vision that God has put in their hearts. Eugene Peterson calls it “a long obedience in the same direction.”
Gene Ellison is here – he’s going to be embarrassed that I’m using him in my sermon – sorry, Gene. I was talking to him yesterday out here at about 6:30. He’d been working fifteen hour days for I don’t know how long. I saw him and said, “How are you doing, Gene?” He said, “I’m great.” I said, “You look horrible, man.” He looked like he’d been working 15 hour days for six weeks.
So he showed me this thing on his phone. It’s a picture… Am I going to get you in trouble, man? I might? Okay… It’s a picture on his phone, and at his house they have a chalk board by the door, and you can write messages on it. His wife had written, “St. Luke’s Church – one more day I get my husband back!” Long obedience, it’s like day after day after day of work. Discipline. Vision means you have a target and you’re disciplined in pursuing that target.
Then he goes on in verse 27, and this is kind of a weird verse: “But I punish my body and enslave it so that after proclaiming to others, I myself should not be disqualified.” It’s a weird verse to say “I punish my body.” The passage just above it says, “I will become all things to all people so that I might win one.” What he’s saying is, “Look, I’m going to do whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to make this happen.” Paul believed he had a ministry to the gentiles that he was going to reach those who were not of the Jewish faith with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And he was going to do whatever it takes to make that happen. See, real vision means that you sacrifice, that you have to give up some things.
One of the reasons I’m so awed by our ability to raise the funds we raised and build the buildings we built is because so many of you made sacrifices. It’s humbling for us to realize that we have a congregation of people who are willing to make sacrifices to accomplish that which God is calling us.
There’s an elevator in Belgrade that says something interesting. Have you ever been to one of those places where they try and put something in English and they enter it into the Google translator and it comes out kind of weird? But it’s trying to give instructions in English on how to use the elevator. It says, “To move the cabin press the button of wishing floor. If the cabin enter more persons each one should press the button of wishing floor driving is then going automatically by natural order. Button retaining pressed position shows received command for wishing station.”
How awesome it would be to just have a “wishing floor?” I wish we could do that – Ta! Da! Push the button… Nothing is that way. The Bible doesn’t talk at all about wishing, it talks about sacrifice, it talks about being a workman.
When I was here many years ago – 30 years ago – Jim Moore preached a sermon that really made an impact on my life. In the sermon he quoted a poem. I’ve read it to you before, and it’s from Sara Henderson Hay and way back then I memorized the first stanza of it because it made such an impact on me. “It is a piteously thing to be enlisted in no cause at all, unsworn to any heraldry, to fly no banner from the wall. To own nothing that you would sweat or try for, bruise your hand or bleed or die for.” It’s a piteously thing to be enlisted in no cause that you would give your whole life for. See, when we have that vision, something we believe in then our generosity doesn’t feel like generosity. It feels like “This is why God has given me this. It’s why God has given me a life. It’s why God has given me resources. It’s why God’s given me time. So I can give it to this.” That’s the way Paul felt about it. To make that kind of sacrifice.
Here’s the most awesome thing. I want to close with the verse that we used as our theme verse from Ephesians 3. ^“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine,to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.” Amen. (Ephesians 3:20:21 NRSV)
What he’s saying is that God will take whatever it is we offer and work miracles with it. The vision we have is so much bigger than buildings or even our little ministries. It’s the Kingdom of God.
Dorothy Day was a social activist in the twentieth century. She was converted to the Christian faith and that conversion lead her to really give her whole life to making changes in the world. She was one of the leaders of the Suffrage movement – for women to get the right to vote – and many other things. Later in her life she wrote these words: “Young people say, ‘What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. We can be responsible only for the action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions and know that God will take them and multiply them as Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes. We’ll take what little bit we can do.”
The one insignificant life that each one of us has we will offer to God and God will multiply it like loaves and fishes. We’ll use what we do to do even more than we could ever ask or imagine. The real vision we have is the Kingdom of God that one day “alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.” I love that verse from “America the Beautiful.” That one day “every knee would bow, and every tongue confess Christ is Lord.” That’s the vision we’ve been given, the kingdom, the reign of God. We can’t make that happen you and I by ourselves. But we can put just a little piece of it in, and God can take that and do evermore than anything we could ask or imagine.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, you have given to us so much and we are grateful. We feel that underneath us, and we want to pay it forward. You have called us to be a part of an incredible vision for your church, for your world. And we want to be a part of that. We feel it beckoning us to give our lives to it. So, God, help us to keep our eyes focused on the vision and target you have presented to us. Make us an inside-out church, sending apostles into the world to put our faith to work in love. We pray in the name of Christ. Amen.