Live Like a Champion – Week 10
“The Promise of Faith!”
Romans 12:3 (NAS95)
In this sermon series, we are learning how to live like a champion by learning how to live according to the victory of the promises of God. Our guiding image for this series is being a member of an NFL team who wins the Superbowl. Never forget, the victory is ours in Christ Jesus and we are invited to play like a championship team, today. We live like champions so that others will come to know the One who gave us His Victory—Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and coming again!
The play of the week is the “Promise of Faith!” Let’s walk through the 4 steps of living like a champion by learning how to live according to the Victory of the promises of God.
STEP #1: Know God’s playbook! The memory verse for this promise is Romans 12:3, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.”
Step #1 Faith is a gift!
Hebrews 11:1-3 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.” Hebrews 11 illustrates faith in people’s lives through stories of real people in real history with real faith. Mark it now and read it later.
Historically, the church has defined faith as, “an aptitude (not a one-off, but a gift by which to live)… In faith is God, ‘communicating Himself to the soul’” (Iain Matthews, The Impact of God, 103-4).
Faith is not only God’s gift of communicating Himself to humanity, but it is also His gift of our aptitude to grasp and interact with Him and His invitations to us, thus allowing for a relationship, now and eternally. Remember, relationships require the ability to communicate with one another—faith makes this possible.
The good seed of faith has been sown into the field of your soul! What are you supposed to do with your allotment of seed? Cultivate it into your “heart, soul, and mind” so that you love God with all of who you are and are becoming; hence, obeying Jesus’ Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:37-38).
STEP #2: Faith is a gift that must be grown.
A friend commented to me about this process of cultivating the soil,
Cultivating the soil “looks like” having sound judgment. We cannot take for granted the gift of faith, assuming it will grow simply because we made a profession of faith. That would be “thinking more highly” than we ought of ourselves. In using sound judgment, we create an environment full of people, habits, and disciplines that becomes our “trellis.” We weed out (pun intended) that which does not strengthen the trellis.
We develop faith habits by building a trellis for our allotment of seeds to grow on! Because we don’t want our faith to be hidden in the field, but to mature and bear fruit, we build a trellis which is a framework by which a fruit tree or vine is supported so that it bears much fruit.
From John 15:5, Jesus promised us about our Christian life, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”
Faith is a gift of God intended to be grown through relationship with Jesus so that we can bear much fruit!
The trellis is the image of the ancient church practice of having a “rule of life”—not “rules for life”, but a “rule” or as the ancients would have heard that word: a trellis of life. The trellis support a loving relationship that already exists; it flows from love. Just like the rhythms of love in friendship or marriage or parenting.
Here are two practical applications of the trellis that I am building in my life. Each of these is what is called a keystone habit, which means it is a habit that shapes/holds together all other habits:
- Fasting from media when I first get up and before I go to bed! More simply, this is the trellis of “scripture before phone.” This means that when I first wake up I pick up an old fashioned paper Bible and read it before I turn on my phone or look at any other version of media. At night, this means that my phone and all other versions of media are off at least thirty minutes to an hour before I go to bed. My goal is to sleep from 10-6, which means I am free of technology & media from approximately 9/9:30 PM to 7 AM. I don’t do this perfectly, but because I have been working on this, my sleep patterns are healthy and I wake up rested and ready for the day, wanting to spend time with Jesus first. This shapes my day!
- Protect a sabbath day! First off, let me say that this is not selfish, this is obedience to God’s creative design and redemptive work. Obeying the sabbath as God’s creative design for humanity and as part of God’s redemptive strategy means intentionally planning for one day a week to cease striving and know that He is God. For many of us this includes prioritizing gathering with your church family, eating a meal with others, resting in grace, trusting God’s provision by stopping, and delighting in God. I take my personal sabbath day Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. I go for a long run or take a long hike, I enjoy a big late breakfast afterwards, I leisurely play with my kids, spend time with my wife, enjoy some quality time with Jesus, and have fun resting and delighting in the Lord of the Sabbath. I not only look forward to this day, but I also bring the refreshment from it to Sunday services. This shapes my week!
The truth of step #2 is that faith is a gift that must be grown. The reason for doing this is step #3.
STEP #3: Faith is a gift that must be grown for the purpose of loving your neighbor.
Remember, that earlier in the sermon I referenced the Greatest Commandment, but listen to all of Jesus’ words from Matthew 22:37-39 because it’s really the Greatest Commandments: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Jim Elliot, modern martyr of the faith, said it this way, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Just as in Jim Elliot’s life where his very blood became the necessary seed in the ground by which an entire lost people group would come to know the gospel of Jesus Christ, so our gifts of faith are to love people with the love of God and provide for them the means of receiving faith themselves!
To learn more about the Jim Elliot story, you can watch the 2005 movie End of the Spear or you can watch the 2013 Voice of the Martyrs Torchlighters video on RightNow Media called “The Jim Elliot Story”. FBC provides this vast library of Christian resources to you for free. Talk to Pastor Ken if you need help.
Jesus taught us this about faith in His parable from Matthew 13:31-32, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”
How can your faith bring refreshment to others, just as the mustard seed became a tree so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches?
Here are three practical applications in real and relevant situations that you may face in your daily life:
- Friendship: Your trellis provides boundaries for you to have the emotional health and mental energy to be a good listener to your friend. Imagine making space for a daily conversation with a loved one or a weekly meal with a friend where you have both the time and energy to help them.
- Focus: Your trellis builds structure to your life so that you have the focus to say “no” to things that will distract you from what is most important. Without the trellis you may try to do everything and in doing so, do nothing. Without focus, we never arrive at where we need to go. We are caught in the tyranny of the urgent without a trellis to frame our growth in loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
- Freedom: Faith brings freedom from anything that binds us! Specifically and relevant to many, your trellis teaches you how to put your smart phone or computer in its place—those are helpful tools, but tyrannical masters. This frees up your time and energy. It helps you to be proactive with people and to know who you are in a world that is trying to define you so they can then market to you and keep you in slavery to consumerism and materialism, and blind to your true identity as a beloved Imager Bearer.
Take a step of faith and return to the sound wisdom of Romans 12:3, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment [sober, sincere, lens of humility], as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.”
You cannot think soberly about yourself when you are intoxicated by everything that is clamoring for your attention (time and money) and, ultimately, your identity. To return to a right view of God, yourself, and others you need to remember that faith is a gift that must be cultivated, so that love of God may grow and bear the fruit of love of neighbor.
STEP #4: Faith is witnessed through our fellowship!
Paul teaches from Romans 12:4-5, “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”
As the seed grows, it sends out roots! Our roots are intertwined so that we are better together! You are not a single tree, facing the world and all of its problems alone. You are part of something much bigger, from which God is growing us to bear the fruit of the tree of life, so that many may come and find rest in Jesus.
How will the watching world know we are growing in our faith? Jesus taught us this important truth of why we gather as the people of God in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is the good fruit of our faith—this is the promise of God!