Goals and Ambitions

My name is Chris McCartney. If I haven’t met you yet, I’d love to do that. I am a tiny little part of the leadership team here in the deacon role. And I’ll tell you a little bit about about what that means in a moment. But before we do that, can we just give a hand to Dale and Adrian in the music that we just experienced? Thank you guys for ushering the Spirit of God into this place. That was wonderful. That’s one order of business. Here comes the next order of business. I was here before, and you may not have been here when I was here. I think I taught in the middle of this. I preached in the middle of the summer at some point. And I kind of gave you a sense of who my family is and all of that kind of stuff. And I put a picture up there that that was really, really old. It was probably five years old. So all my kids are far flung. They were watching on the video and I heard about it afterwards. So here they are.

This is the updated photograph of the family from, from this last summer on our family vacation. That cute little girl in the. In the flower dress. She’s on her way to see Pop-Pop right now, so I’m a little distracted right now. So you’ll you guys will bear with me on that, I hope. But a little bit quickly, just a little bit quickly about what the deacon role as a deacon in our church body, which is the Lutheran Church, Missouri, said a deacon has completed. When I did it, which was many moons ago, the first ten classes of the seminary. And, that I think has changed somewhat. And it’s in adult ed fashion. It’s not in the way Pastor Ben, is doing it currently. It’s a little less, little less intense than that. Probably a lot less intense than that. And the position is designed to be a support role for pastor, band pastor Tim pretty much do whatever we can do to lighten the load on those guys. Like, worship, for example, today, funerals, other events that we might be directed by the pastors to assist in pastoral care, to shut ins, pastoral care to the congregation and those who are perhaps ill. Bible study administration. My name may be familiar to you because they’ve asked me to pick that up, and I may have sent an email to you.

If you’re leading a Bible study or you’re leading a life group or a home church or something like that, you may have gotten a note from me. I’ve been tasked to support you guys in all of those efforts, in whatever way we can do that in small groups like groups and home churches. So that’s a little bit about what the deacon role is. Let me just invite you also in. Excuse me. In January we’ll be picking up our genesis. Probably what, two, two and a half years study in Genesis. And we’ll be picking it up with a character named Joseph. So if you were not able to join us in, you know, fourth quarter of last year or missed a couple of days, it will be totally self-contained. So you can just jump right into that. And of course, we’d love to have you. We’d love to have you do that. If you’re a member here, you’re a long term attender, whether you’re a guest from out of town, whether you’re a member and you’re traveling. And so you were watching us on video. We’re certainly glad that you’re here with us today.

So let me start with a question that you probably saw coming a mile away. What is your New Year’s resolution? Anybody got one? What’s your New Year’s resolution this year? Nothing. We’re just not going to bother this year. Well, I googled it. I went to Parade.com. And here’s a couple for you to think about anyway. Right. Giving one compliment a day. Now, I’ve been working on this for about a month or so. That’s been really sitting on my heart. I think that’s a good one. It’s very, very simple to do, right? Here’s another one. Maybe not so simple to do. Stop gossiping for 2025. Here’s one that I absolutely will not do. I will not go a whole day without checking my email that this is not in me. This one I thought was a was a cute one. Travel on a small budget. Anybody who’s been traveling these days knows how to travel on a big budget. There’s you just can’t get away from that, right? But finding out ways to travel on a small budget actually sounds like a lot of fun. And this last one is one of my wife would love me to adopt, but that’s probably not going to happen either. Cleaning out my car. And by the way, how did you do on this year’s anyway?

Back in 2003, you couldn’t even remember them. Anybody? Anybody by the thousand. Do you remember what your resolutions were? Well, as we look at this notion of resolutions and ambition and things like that, I’ve always thought of myself as an ambitious person. At about this time each year, I do kind of an agonizing reappraisal of how this year went and what the goals and ambitions might be for the following year. But this year got turned upside down a little bit, because in March of this year, I was laid off by my firm, Christian Broadcaster. After 20 years with the business. So at the end of last year, I set up income goals right out the window, set up savings goals, gone sports and fitness goals. I actually improved because I had had a lot more time to do it. So I actually improved in that career goals actually went better than you might thought. I had an opportunity. I had started a little micro business while I was still working. Obviously I had more time to work on that, and that’s been encouraging. I’ve been for the amount of time that I can commit to it with what I’m doing here at the church and other stuff that’s actually thriving.

So I feel good about that. And family goals, right? What are you gonna do for vacation? What are you gonna do about screen time? What are you going to do about prayer life and teaching your children about the faith? Those kinds of things. So when you think about ambition, what do you think about the word sort of gets a bad rap, doesn’t it? When you think about ambition, what kind of stuff does it conjure? Right? It might be that it conjures this idea of maybe greed being greedy, avarice, a single mindedness of purpose and self achievement. Well, here’s the definition. The definition is a strong desire to do or achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work. And the implication is, of course, at the expense of other interests, the word itself. We’re not going to do a word study here, but the word itself comes from the Latin root and bura, which means to go all ways. So if you’re ambidextrous, you can you can hit the golf ball from the left and right side. You can bat from the left and right side right. So same root in there suggesting that you’ll do anything it takes without hesitation to get what you want.

There was a guy way back when named Thomas Brooks, 15th century Christian pastor from the Puritan tradition in England. Pretty high profile at that time. Big writer in his day and Puritan pastors back then. Really homed in on Satan’s attacks on us and on the nature of temptation. So anyway, one of his many commentaries, Thomas Brooks, defined it. And in this way, ambition is a gilded misery. A secret poison. Ambition is a hidden plague. The engineer of deceit. The mother of hypocrisy. The parent of envy. The original vice of the angels. And Adam and Eve. And he actually I clipped it. He actually went on from there to continue to debase this notion. Pretty damning description, right? So let’s explore, though, this notion of ambition in the context of our year and a year ahead and how we look at life as Christians. Now, after what I just said, you probably agree with me. Life is super complicated, and after this year, I’ve come to believe that our approach, our approach as believers to the Christian life can be much simpler than we make it. And that might have important implications for resolutions or goals or ambitions for 2025 to begin with. Bible actually warns us about ambition. In an Old Testament book called Jeremiah, he’s a prophet in the Old Testament, and he says this in chapter 45. But you are you seeking great things for yourself? Do not seek them. Well, just by way of context in this passage, the author is condemning ambitions because of a coming calamity that he is prophesying to the people of Israel about.

So he’s pretty much just saying, hey, why bother? Because there’s a calamity coming. So why bother with ambition? Sort of like me planning my income goals, my savings goal, every other goal, not realizing that in March my whole world is going to flip upside down. So I can tell you the argument resonates with me right now. So ambition, you might conclude, has no place in your life or mine. Because life can be so un predictable. But let’s look at Second Corinthians chapter five. Paul is one of the writers of the New Testament. That may ring a bell. Maybe it does not ring a bell. I’ll just give you a little sense of who he was. Paul was very unique in this way. He was a Jew, and he was also, through his father, a citizen of the Roman Empire, and was in the business of arresting and prosecuting Christians for the crime of being Christian. In fact, he was the most prolific prosecutor of Christians in the Roman Empire. One day, on his way to Damascus, he’s walking down the road. He has a supernatural experience. This radical encounter with the risen Jesus who says pretty much just says, excuse me. Pretty much just says, hey, why are you persecuting me? And as a result, he became the most prolific preacher of the good news of Jesus Christ in the entire world. So while he’s traveling and preaching around about Jesus, he writes a bunch of letters to various churches, one of which is this church in the town of Corinth. And he says this, therefore we have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing, to be pleasing to him. Also pretty clear, right? Paul, the greatest evangelist ever, says our approach to life, our ambition, is just this simple.

To please God. So on the one hand, ambition is condemned. On the other hand, it’s applauded. It’s encouraged. At first blush, sounds like a clear conflict, right? But let’s look closer. Let’s let’s not miss this. This Jeremiah passage that we just read from the Old Testament is saying that ambition directed solely at seeking great things for myself is to be a is to be aborted. Paul, on the other hand, urges a complete one and an outward focused ambition to be pleasing to him. Capital H, meaning God. Remember, he’s writing to a church here. He’s writing to the church in this town of Corinth, and he’s writing to the church today, capital C. Notice also this is interesting in the Jeremiah passage. It works in the plural, talking about great things for yourself, giving us the sense that giving us the sense of doing anything we can to get everything we can, no matter what the expenses. Paul’s ambition, however, has a singular, laser like focus on just one thing. God himself. So one more thought on this Second Corinthians passage where Paul says that phrase, whether at home or absent his resolution, his ambition is to please God. Well, Paul’s not talking about whether he’s in his earthly home or whether he’s on the road. He was on the road a lot.

He’s talking about whether he’s here on Earth or whether he’s in heaven with Christ. It seems to him it made no difference. The ambition of the believer is still the same. To be pleasing God. So nothing really ever changes for us as believers through this life or the next. There’s something beautiful about that. There’s something to me is something poetic and comforting about that. So what drives us? What drives us to please God? Well, someday Jesus will review our performance with us. I know that sounds weird. It’s not about sin. It’s not about heaven and hell. He was already in heaven, and we’re having a meeting with Jesus, and he’s reviewing our performance. It’ll be about determining your eternal reward. So there’s no downside. It’s all this is all good. What drives us is to please God. The encounter that you and I will have with God himself should be what motivates us as believers in that moment. If we’re believers in that moment. We want to be found pleasing to him. So at Shepherd’s Gate, what does it mean to be pleasing to him? What does it mean to be found pleasing in his sight? And I think we can we find a clue about that with Paul in yet another letter that he wrote to the church at Rome, in which he says this, I aspired to preach the gospel not where Christ was already named. So I would not build on another man’s foundation. But as it is written, they who had no news of him shall see, and those who had not heard shall understand.

Again, Paul had a simple, selfless ambition to see the church in Rome. The church in that town of Corinth and beyond pleased the Lord by preaching the gospel to those who had not heard Paul’s task, the church’s task. Our task at Shepherd’s Gate, then, is very simple. As believers, we have one person to please, one teacher to be accountable to, and that’s Jesus Christ. In fact, in another letter, he’s a prolific writer, as you can tell in another letter, his first letter to the church at Corinth. Paul says this to me. It’s a very small thing that I might be examined by you or by any human court. In fact, I don’t even examine myself for I am conscious of nothing against myself. But the one who examines me is the Lord. Here’s a story that may help clarify that. So for many years I played the trombone. I took it up in grade school, like many people do, I took it, I took it through high school. I put it down for college. I put it down for many years as an adult, as I’m raising my kids and doing my work and all of that. And, I picked it back up about 15 years ago, something like that. My wife’s nodding her head picked it up about 15 years ago, again, as the kids were all moving out of the house and going to school. Right. And all that stuff. And I didn’t want to just be good. I wanted to be really, really good. So I tracked down his teacher. The guy was a he was on the trombone section in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Young guy. He went to northwestern, majored in music, obviously majored in trombone, played with the Chicago Symphony, traveled all over the world doing recitals and clinics and all. I mean, this guy was the real deal. And he took me by surprise. Surprise took me on as a student. And I was so humbled and so challenged by that, that when I performed recitals, concerts, whatever the case may be, as far as I was concerned, I was performing in front of an audience of one. It was that guy, my teacher. I really didn’t care about what anybody else in the audience thought about it. Not quite true, but pretty much I was performing in front of an audience of one I cared about pleasing my teacher, about what he would say about my performance. In the same way, that’s what motivates us as believers to please God. His review of our life. So then there’s a church at Shepherds Gate. We preach the gospel, but what do you do? What do you do to please God? And really, when it comes down to it, how do you know? How do you know what pleases God? Well, you can start from a from from this foundation, yet another letter to another church that Paul helped found in in a town called Ephesus. Very simple group of verses. For it is by grace that you are saved through faith, this not of ourselves, lest anyone should boast. And a partner verse that I think. If you ever quote Ephesians 289, you should be quoting this one to there that close faith, that faith that the Ephesians quote is talking about, that faith comes from hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ.

This is how we know what pleases God. Reading about God, we’re hearing about God. We’re therefore learning his nature, learning his character, learning his justice, learning his mercy, getting. We’re just getting to know him. And by getting to know him, we’ll understand who he is and will understand. How to please him. So let me wrap with three questions. So where are you? Where are you? Today? Do you feel hopeless? Do you feel helpless in your specific circumstance of life? You feel hopeless or helpless about a loved one state in life about their circumstance. No chance for rescue. These verses in Ephesians two eight and nine. Romans 1017. That’s your roadmap. You can be saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ by hearing God’s words, not by doing. It’s not by resolutions and it’s not by ambitions. All right. Question number two. Where are you? Or maybe in this context, the question is where are you going to be? In 2025 and beyond, you’re not stuck. You’re not stuck in your sin forever. Jesus sacrificed himself for your sins and beat death by rising from the dead, showing us the way to follow him to heaven to please him. They’re both here and there forever. All right. Question number three. Where where are you? Well, if you’re within the sound of my voice. You’re right here with us, either digitally or live and in person. And you’re receiving that mercy. You’re receiving God’s mercy and forgiveness through his word and his sacraments. You’re growing in him, and you’re learning what pleases him. And I’ll leave you with this.

You know, a lot of people are making resolutions. You’re probably one of them, but a lot of different things in 2025 income goals, savings goals. Going a day without checking your email, which is crazy. And cleaning your car out, which is a close number. Two resolutions are as complicated as you and me, and they’re all over the board for 2025. Our highest ambition, our resolution list as a church and as individual believers has just one item on it to be pleasing to God. Deep breath. Can it really be that simple? Yes. And as you think about your 2025 and our 20 2025 together as a church, think about it in those terms. Your resolution for 2025 is to please God. That’s all God ever asks of you. Let’s pray. Well, father, we thank you for the day. We thank you for this time together. We thank you for the birth of your son, Jesus and what it means to our eternal destiny. Father, place on our hearts, the will and the desire to please you. Bless the days and weeks ahead as we celebrate a New Year guide and direct us in 2025. In your precious name we pray. Amen, Amen,