Text: Ephesians 1:3-14 | Listen to Message
Don’t Waste Your Life
There’s a power-packed piece of advice that goes something like this: Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the wisdom and courage to build your life around your answer.*
Modern people tend to build their lives around some combination of career, possessions, a few key relationships, and the constant drive to be happy, comfortable, and successful. In the end, they die and go to meet God. How does that conversation go? “I’d show you my vacation home and my boat, God . . . but I wasn’t able to bring them with me. Same for my bank accounts. Would you like to see my golf swing, though? Or I could catch you up on some popular shows from my latest Netflix binge, if you’d like. By the way, a lot of folks at my funeral, huh? That’s what I lived for, you know – to be liked.”
Let’s be completely honest with ourselves. How many hours a week/month/year do we spend building our lives around things that don’t matter one bit in the end? In moments of clarity, we’d probably even admit that these things aren’t ultimately that important. But everyone else around us is living for these things, so it just feels like the right thing to do. Everyone else makes a god of The American Dream, so why shouldn’t we?
Why? Because we’re followers of Christ – which means we ought to let go of the temporal and the trivial in favor of the eternally substantial. It means we have every reason in the world to instinctively prioritize what he prioritizes. And Ephesians 1:3-14 makes his priorities really simple. At any moment, God is giving us everything we could ever need in Christ to the praise of his glory.
In other words, God’s purposes are twofold:
1. We get infinite joy in Christ.
2. And he gets the glory.
Is this what’s important to you right now? Are you striving to glorify God in what you do and say, in how you spend your time and money, and in what you do with “the other 99%” of your life outside of church? Are you living to enjoy Christ and to help others enjoy him too? This is your WIN. This is what’s important now.
Sermon Notes & Application Questions
*Note: No citation is given because this oft-paraphrased statement is widely attributed to a number of different writers, ancient and modern.