Running To Win

Dave McAllister: Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. The Apostle Paul made missionary journeys to many places, including Greece, where he founded several churches. Letters he wrote to these churches are part of our Bibles today. From them, we learn that commitment to Christ involves caring, even in the midst of persecution.

Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, I imagine Thessalonian believers were not unlike us, facing pressures of many kinds. A caring touch between believers helps us endure in uncertain times.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Dave, I love the way in which you characterized that: believers who are able to help one another and willing to do so. And this connects beautifully with a resource that we're making available, and this is the second to last day. I'm holding in my hands a book written by Chuck Swindoll entitled Grace Awakening. It enables us to see how grace saves us, but how grace also keeps us and helps us in our marriages, in our relationship with other believers with whom we disagree, and in all of the struggles of life. Once we understand grace, we can endure and we can be a blessing to others, and we can do so with joy.

At the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you this contact info again, but I want to simply point out, and I hope that you have a pen or pencil handy, that what you can do is go to rtwoffer.com or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. The book is entitled Grace Awakening, and it is grace that enables us to be successful all the way to the finish line.

Secondly, the Apostle Paul says, I not only cared because of what I said, but also because of what I did. And here we come to that verse seven. But we proved to be gentle among you, even as a nursing mother—that's the idea there, not just a nurse, but a nursing mother—tenderly cares for her own children. Now we get to where caring costs something.

Now, what does a nursing mother do for that infant that is in her arms? First of all, she nourishes that infant, she feeds it. And as she nurses the infant, actually her own strength and what she eats eventually is translated into nourishment and is eaten by the baby. That is to say that the baby imbibes the nourishment given the mother so that if she eats the wrong things, the baby can get sick.

Paul is saying in the very same way, I absorbed the word of God into my life so that I might be able to feed others based on what I myself have been fed. So Paul says, when I was among you, I provided food. Another thing that a mother does is she protects the baby. Paul says, I want to protect you from those who are critical, from those who speak evil against the apostles, and from those who have wrong doctrine.

Today in a day of eclecticism, we don't speak much about wrong doctrine. Everybody is allowed to believe as he wishes, but the Apostle Paul said to the people at Ephesus, he says, wolves shall come among you and they will not take care of the flock, but they will divide the flock. And they will begin these little groups where there will be factions and disagreements and arguments and they will be led astray. Paul says to the elders of the church, guard the church. That's the responsibility of caring.

And then, of course, you give an example to your children, you model behavior. Paul did that. That's why later on he says that we didn't receive any money from you. Sometimes the Apostle Paul received money from churches and even asked for it, but not here because it was an issue of criticism. That's why he says we labored night and day. We made tents during the night and we worked during the day. We did all that we could so that we might be able to model behavior that was beyond criticism.

Children learn from example. We're learning with our own children that even after they grow up and go to college and don't need us anymore, they still need our money, which is an interesting twist on becoming parents and having children that are growing up. Also, no doubt Paul nursed those believers, healing their hurts, healing their hurts. And how important that is. You say you want to care, you find someone who is hurting and you listen to their hurt and you help them bear it through your prayer and through your interest.

I read this past week that 15 million Americans are in something like 400,000 self-help groups throughout America. You have all these various self-help groups that are springing up for every kind of difficulty and aberration. Do you know that that may well be that the church has failed and that's why people are seeking their sense of identity, their friends, and their help through sources that are not based on the scripture, that may give some limited amount of help but ultimately cannot do for them what Christ alone is able to do.

Now the Apostle Paul says, I not only said the right things, but I did the right things to help because I cared. But there's a third level of caring, not only based on what we say and what we do, but also on what we are willing to endure, what we are willing to endure. Now the Apostle Paul put up with an awful lot there in Thessalonica. If we took the time to read the 17th chapter of Acts, we would find out that there was persecution. When he came into the synagogues, there were riots among the people.

Interestingly, Paul was not intimidated. Paul didn't run for cover because he had this overwhelming sense of conviction that he had been brought there by God to do something. And so he was willing to endure persecution. He was willing to endure criticism. You see, that's why he says in verse nine of the second chapter here, for you recall, brethren, our labor and hardship, how working day and night so as not to be a burden to any of you, we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and so is God, how devoutly and uprightly and blamelessly we behaved toward you believers.

Paul is saying that we were willing to have our lives examined. We were willing to have our lives as an open book so that the gospel might not be spoken against. And Paul says that was part of what we were willing to endure as we gave you, middle of verse eight, our own lives we communicated to you. It's one thing to communicate information. It is quite another to communicate your very own life.

So Paul says, we cared for you by what we said, we cared for you by what we did, and then we were willing to endure. You see, the extent of our caring, the extent of our love is dependent on how much we are willing to endure and how long we are willing to endure it. And sometimes God brings people into our lives that need a lot of care and a lot of help and a lot of attention, and they may appear to be a burden, but they are God's invitation for us to show forth Christ.

In order to tie all this together and to help us get a handle on it, let me say that our caring for one another is first of all to be based on Christ's caring for us. If we read the first chapter of First Thessalonians, he says in verse five, for our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction, just as you know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake. He says it was the gospel that came in power. And it was the gospel that changed us and changed you and made you into a caring kind of person.

In the Bible, when God gives us commands, when he tells us to love one another, for example, all those commands are always based on something that Christ has already done. The reason that I point that out is I feel very uncomfortable preaching a message that exhorts people to do A, B, and C unless I point out that there is a reason why we can fulfill the command because God has graciously supplied the strength to do what he commands us to do. We don't have those inner resources.

Left to ourselves, we are just as selfish as the person next door. We are basically into our own lives. But then we experience Christ's caring. we experience his work on the cross and we ask him and say, Jesus, how much do you care for us? And he stretches out his arms and he dies. And now he says, I have given to you the gift of the Holy Spirit that you might be able to get beyond yourself and begin to love even as I love. To be able to have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts that beat with mine.

You realize, of course, that if all of us every week entertained one stranger, if we had 100 families that did that over a course of a year, we would entertain and we would help 5,000 people as a church. 100 people every week, 5,000 people. The resources are endless if only we can understand what caring is all about. Remember our vision statement, that we want to be a caring, culturally diverse community because we believe as the old saying goes, that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that is exactly the work that we are expecting God to do in our own lives.

A moment ago, I talked about all the caring groups that exist, all of the self-help groups. The singles have about 15 small groups and under the leadership of Mike Middlekauff, we have about another 15 in the church. And soon we will be making the whole congregation aware of these opportunities. It is our way of saying we believe that the best kind of caring takes place in the context of the one who cared the most for us, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you know what caring means? Caring means that you and I give away our natural selfishness, because we are all naturally selfish. By nature, we do not want to give consistently to the church. We would not want to trust God regarding giving. We would not believe that he would give us the grace to be able to give generously and proportionately and regularly. That is contrary to who we are.

And that's why when you look at all the people who have meant something to God throughout the centuries, who have done great things, they all say as did George Mueller, there came a day when George Mueller died, when George Mueller died. Where we finally have Christ's ambitions and his work and the release of the Spirit in our hearts becomes a more powerful force than our own inclination to selfishness.

So if you can visualize with me a selfish part of our lives, every time we are generous with our time in helping somebody, every time we are generous in listening to those who may be difficult to listen to but we want to hear their heart and help them with their burden, every time we give, we are actually giving away a bit of that selfishness and we are becoming more like Jesus Christ.

Now I need to tell you this, that if you're here today and you have never personally believed on Christ, if you've not received him as Savior, in a sense, this message doesn't apply to you because it isn't simply getting out and beginning to care, important though that may be in a certain context. Unless you have received the caring work of God through the cross and the gift of eternal life, you really don't know God personally and all your caring will not get you to heaven. I invite you to receive Christ and then having done that, to actually for all of us, for myself included, to break out of our natural comfort zones and inclination to selfishness, to smash that through Christ's power and to begin to care about people's needs.

Remember that legend about Saint Francis of Assisi? It may not be a true story, but there is a story that has floated around that Saint Francis once had a dream. One of the things that Saint Francis did not like was lepers. He feared them, something like we may fear those today who have AIDS, though the experts tell us we have no reason to do so. But Saint Francis of Assisi feared lepers. And in his dream, he was running away from a leper, though he heard the voice of Christ asking him to hug the leper. And he turned around and he hugged that leper, and that leper in his arms became Christ, became Christ. It's only a dream, but it's a powerful message.

One last word: Christmas time, we like to take all those pop shots at that innkeeper at Bethlehem who said no to Jesus. And what we forget is this, that what he did ignorantly, we do knowingly. He didn't know that he was saying no to the Son of God. He thought Mary was just your average peasant woman. But Jesus said that someday in the day of judgment, he's going to say to some people, you know, I was in prison and you didn't visit me.

My, if Jesus were in prison today, you couldn't find enough room at the Cook County Jail to take care of all the crowds that would like to come and visit him in prison. If Jesus were naked today without clothes, you couldn't find enough trucks to haul all of the boxes of clothes that we would bring to clothe him.

But Jesus said, someday I will say, I was in prison and you didn't visit me, and I was naked and you didn't clothe me, and I was hungry and you gave me no food. And everybody is going to say, Jesus, we know you know all things, but this time there's been a mistake in your computer. No way. When did we see you hungry? When did we see you in prison? When did we see you unclothed? And Jesus will say, inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you've done it unto me. Whether it's to the homeless in Lincoln Park or whether it is to your friends across the street, wherever you live, you and I today can actually do something for Jesus. We can visit Jesus. If we do it for him, we do it to him. Caring, that's what the Christian life is all about.

And let's pray. Our Father, we want to thank you today that Jesus Christ included us among his circle of friends. And we thank you that he cared enough to go to the cross. And then Lord, he says to us today, be my hands, my feet, be all that I could be here on earth as my body.

Now Father, what is it that you have brought to our attention that we must do today? Who is it that we must see? What phone call is it that we must make? What letter must be written? Who should be helped? For whom should groceries be purchased today? We pray that we might understand that we can do these things for you, Christ, inasmuch as we have done it for the least of yours, the brethren. Before I close in prayer, you ask the Lord what he would have you to do based on what his word has said today. Thank you, Father, for hearing us in Jesus' name, amen.

My friend, this is Pastor Lutzer. I want to ask you a random question. Do you think that too much emphasis on grace will lead to unholy living? Is it possible that grace can be misunderstood? Absolutely. There are many people who use grace as an excuse for sin. But did you know that grace properly understood means that we are interested in living righteous lives? It's the motivation for holy living.

I'm holding in my hands a book by Chuck Swindoll entitled Grace Awakening. What I love about this book is its balance, understanding that, yes, we are saved by grace, but we also have to live by grace, and that changes everything. This is the second to last day we're making this book available for you, and I hope that you have a pen or pencil handy because in a moment I'm going to be giving you some contact info.

Some of the chapter titles in the book have to do with marriage, of course, grace as a free gift in salvation. I love the chapter that talks about, isn't grace risky? Are we risking when we talk about grace, so afraid it's going to be misunderstood? Well, yes, it can be misunderstood, but properly understood, it gives us joy and peace in obedience.

Here's what you do: you go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com and when you're there, you can also if you wish click on the endurance partner button. But rtwoffer.com will give you the info you need so that this book can be yours. Or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now as I've already emphasized, it is the second to last day we're making this resource available for you, so let me give you that contact info one more time. Go to rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Dave McAllister: It's time again for another chance for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Today, Pastor Lutzer, you'll need to put on your premarital counseling hat to help Ruth, who emailed this story asking for your advice.

She says: I've been dating a man who's had previous sexual relationships. We are happy together; I really would like to marry him. What troubles me is that he has at times lied about his past, so I don't know if I can trust him. He is a Christian, but sometimes I don't think his attitude is right before God. He comes from a nice Christian family, he has a good job, he can be kind and caring. In other words, he's the kind of man I'd like to marry, but I have doubts.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Well, Ruth, from my heart to yours today, you have a right to have doubts. If he has not been totally honest with you, I think that that dishonesty could be a dealbreaker, so to speak. You see, it is much better for you to be unmarried than it is to be married to someone who in the end is going to betray you.

Now I need to tell you that this is the way in which most men think. They think to themselves, if I tell my wife-to-be my whole story, she will reject me. What they don't understand is that if they don't tell, or if they are dishonest, it will only create within her more doubts, more questions, more unsettledness. Actually, at the end of the day, it's better to just lay out everything on the table, and you need to tell him that.

You also need to tell him that because of his dishonesty, your relationship has to be put on hold. And I think in order to test him, you have to test him in many different ways, and this is going to take some time. Test him in terms of what he says to you. Test him in the small things, test him in the large things, because you see, the Bible says that a double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways.

If he's dishonest, he'll show it not only in his relationship to the past and the past women that he's been with, but he will also show it in other ways. If he is continuing to be dishonest, then run, don't walk, from this relationship. Next, what you need to do is to enlist the help of others. What about his friends? Trust God to have conversations with people who know him well. Check him out, so to speak.

Third, give the relationship totally to God and mean it. It's easy to say that, but mean it. So my dear friend Ruth, there are many, many people who have proved this adage: it is much better to want what you don't have than to have what you don't want. And I just hope that you'll take it to heart.

Dave McAllister: Thank you, Dr. Lutzer, for answering Ruth's question. If you'd like to hear your question answered, go to our website. You'll find us at rtwoffer.com, all one word, rtwoffer.com, and click there on "Ask Pastor Lutzer." Or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337.

You can write to us at Running To Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running To Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Those of us who have jobs sometimes wish we had better ones. In Erwin Lutzer's series on Commitment to Christ, we're turning next time to vocational challenges, finding words in Ephesians chapter six about how to express our commitment at the office. Plan to join us. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running To Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.