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Closure. Check My Forehead:
#1 Lost Life or Last Life
Choosing Between an Aimless, Sensual Life as Prey, Or a Directed, Unselfish Life as Assistant to the Great Deliverer
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Upland Indonesian Church Youth Retreat. Pine Springs Ranch, California
Delivery: 2006-05-26
Publication: LastGenerationTheology.org 2006-07-22 02:42Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.lastgenerationtheology.org/lgt/doc/mis/ccyf/kir-ccyf1.php
Our purpose this weekend is to better grasp why we exist as a people. To examine ourselves and see whether God has a strong path for us. How does He desire to use us? We want to understand what He is trying to do, where we may be hindering His sealing process. In short, we want to consider afresh what it means to be followers of Jesus in the last day.
The world we live in treats us as though we were mere numbers, mere cash-extraction units. It is dehumanizing us. You go through the check-out line and the corporation has decreed that the sales clerk will make the pitch to you for the suggestive sale—a sale that is spontaneous, that squeezes just a bit more money out of you, that squeezes just a bit more humanity out of you (and the sales clerk too). You are being urged to dispense with self-control, to indulge yourself. They have a good profit margin on the item, but they justify the practice by saying that they are treating their customers to a particularly good value.
Right. Like similar good values offered by the companies who help senior citizens make low-cost travel arrangements to Las Vegas.
You are treated like you are egg-laying chickens, cows to be milked, berries to be picked, morsels to be consumed. In the secular mindset there exist the sheep and the shearers. They call their theory the survival of the fittest, but in effect it is cannibalism; consuming their own.
When you are designated as sheep to be sheared, all higher purposes are denied. They do not want you to see yourselves as empowered people partaking of the image of God, but only of the images provided by the marketer. They want you to desire to buy their product. That is your value to them. The game is exploitation.
Not every person or every company is so cutthroat, but many are. And you consent to be milked, you allow them to shape you as their obedient little consumers. You buy what they pitch. You step into the mold and then they squeeze you into a new shape. Good little droids you are.
But God calls you to be Christians. In these last days He calls you to be Seventh-day Adventist Christians.
Consider the picture in Revelation 14:1:
And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with Him an hundred forty and four thousand, having His Father’s name written in their foreheads.
Here is the end-time picture. Jesus standing victoriously and with Him a vast group also standing victoriously. Notice, they are not in this picture kneeling, casting their crowns at His feet. This they will gladly do. But In this picture we see God lifting His followers up. They are standing with Him.
Remember the promise of Genesis 3:15? The seed (singular) of the woman will come and crush the serpent under His feet. And Jesus comes and at the cross does that. But many years after the cross, in Romans 16:20 Paul writes, “The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.” Who? Under our feet, the feet of those who follow Jesus in the last days. And so Revelation 14 portrays them as standing victoriously with Jesus on Mount Zion. For He has then crushed Satan, fulfilled the promise of Genesis 3:15 in two ways, (1) by crushing Satan under His own feet at the cross, and (2) by crushing Satan under the feet of His followers in the arena of the end-time.
You’ve heard of a “cage match,” haven’t you? Two opponents are locked in a cage to fight it out. Only one leaves the cage victorious. Satan and Jesus are having it out and only one will leave the end-times victorious.
We may choose the lost life or the last life. We may live as if we are caught against the backdrop of an arbitrary, valueless universe, or we may frame our lives so that they are lived with purpose and with an eye to the final, all important events just on the horizon. Our life can be meandering, arbitrary, built on sand, meaningless, or it can be a nexus-point of radical intersection between the kingdom of God and Satan’s counterfeit kingdom. One takes us to freedom in the highest, the other recapitulates Pharaoh and the bondage of Egyptian slavery. Which will it be?
Lost Life
Let’s talk about lost life.
Lost life is what we spoke about before, life as prey. It means living down to the sensual, the fleshly. It means that when Satan, with kindly smirk offers you a cup of poison—and you take it and stupidly drink it down.
We are a bit like Solomon. After all, we do live like kings and queens. Hear his story.
I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life. I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards: I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees: I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me: I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces: I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun (Ecclesiastes 2:1-11).
How would the same kind of thing sound were it written today? I bought my self iPods and Beemers and Blackberries, I dated Hollywood people, television and movie people. My face was plastered on Time and People magazines, I sat with presidents and royalty. I took designer drugs and cooked my brain. I partied hardy. CDs? You would not believe my collection. I hammered my life with immorality in all its forms. And after doing all this I looked at myself and saw that I was not full; I was empty.
No wonder Jesus asks the poignant question, “What will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26; Mark 8:37). Hear a warning to we who live in prosperity:
In the midst of prosperity lurks danger. Throughout the ages, riches and honor have ever been attended with peril to humility and spirituality. It is not the empty cup that we have difficulty in carrying; it is the cup full to the brim that must be carefully balanced. Affliction and adversity may cause sorrow, but it is prosperity that is most dangerous to spiritual life. Unless the human subject is in constant submission to the will of God, unless he is sanctified by the truth, prosperity will surely arouse the natural inclination to presumption (Prophets and Kings, pp. 59, 60).
Prosperity is the most dangerous influence against one’s spirituality. Now you don’t have all the things you want to have. But if you are honest with yourself, you experience a dramatic prosperity. That is the hardest thing to face; not persecution, but prostitution. Filling your life with stuff tends to do what? Lead you to want more stuff. Solomon began to fill his life with more and more stuff. He began to drift. His personal spiritual identity began to float, to lose shape, to become amorphous. He lost his way and almost his soul. When we settle for the lost life, we misuse the opportunity of life. God gave us life to enable us to choose life; Satan prompts us in so many darkling ways to squander away the opportunities until it is too late and all that we leave behind us is a slime trail of wreckage.
Yes, there is pleasure in sin, but only for a season (Hebrews 11:25). Its pleasures are fleeting. And sin also comes with its consequences of guilt, shame, loss of hope, ever-deepening self-hatred and loathing, a descent into wretched self doubt and despair. These are the fruit of sin. Buy one, get one free. Go ahead and sin but with it you get the despair of sin, enticement toward self-destructive behaviors. Is it worth it? A moment of self-indulgence traded for hours and days of guilt and shame? Even eternal death?
The lost life takes you to the place where you have no hope; where you sink down, curl up into the fetal position, roll under the bed and die. All while devils laugh uproarously at you. They sport, you die, they laugh, you cry, but the worst is that God cries. He has so much better things for His children.
Last Life
God calls man to hope. There are, of course, the classic hope texts:
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11 NKJV).
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10:10).
Yes, He wants the best for His children. But He calls us closer. He actually invites us to be involved in healing His universe. He calls us to finish by standing on Mount Zion in company with Jesus, a group of overcomers led by Jesus Himself.
The trend today is to preach sappy sermons of sloppy agape. The focus is on love so-called and on a plain, brown paper bag kind of Christianity. Doctrinal distinctives are muted. The harder edges are trimmed off and laid aside, and adult men and women sit in rooms trading “ice-breakers” about what their favorite color or kind of ice cream is. If there is a trend in the non-Adventist world, some in our midst are like golden retrievers, dutifully scooping up the stripped and beaten bones of Babylonian church fads, gleefully to bring them to Adventism where we can do the same things. But overcoming doesn’t fit in this gospel. If the power of God is not in it, then it is not the gospel of the power of God (Romans 1:16; Galatians 1:7, 9). It is a pale substitute.
In this substitute, this fake, is found no place for the understanding given in the book of Revelation. Consider Revelation 3:21:
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne.
The formula is not hard. We are to overcome as, in the same way as, Christ overcame. In fact, we must. God does not leave people in Egypt; He delivers. Some deliver pizza; God delivers souls. And He wants us to to deliver them by His side too.
Last life means that we recognize that creation’s clock is ticking; the judgment hour is upon us. We live in the last moments of time in which we can make a difference. Instead of a life focused on self, spent on me, I can live so that my God can use me to help save others from lostness.
Lostness is slavery to self, focus on sensation, a kind of prostitution to the material. Higher values are sacrificed so we can have other things we think we need. But remember, because Adam and Eve sinned, we have inherited natures that lead us astray. There are destructive elements in our nature and we tend to embrace them. The last life is a life that says I will embrace God’s values, His goals, His purposes, His gospel, His Son, His Holy Spirit, His salvation.
The last life says I have a purpose, I have a vision, I am working in tandem with Jesus for the salvation and uplifting of others. It means forsaking the entertainment mentality. Others misguidedly may approach us with this, but we need to kindly take them aside and help them to understand that we have a higher purpose.
If we understood the great controversy war, I don’t think we could settle for the bizarre tinsel and emptiness of the generic in religion. In God’s Word He has laid out the essential pattern and issues in the war.
Great Controversy War
Here’s what is going on in what we call the great controversy war. God wanted to create a universe and populate it with free beings. He wanted to share goodness with others. However, only free beings could choose goodness. It is no part of Christ’s mission to compel men to receive Him. So He made men with free will. Evil is not needed to balance good. Evil cannot balance good. Goodness accepts moral boundaries, chooses self-restraint, chooses unselfishness.
But Satan, a created being, decided that he had been mistreated. He began to put himself and his imagined grievances ahead of the greater good. He challenged the primacy of good and offered an alternative moral base for the inhabitants of the universe. “Laws might be necessary for the inhabitants of the worlds,” he said, but “angels, being more exalted, needed no such restraint, for their own wisdom was a sufficient guide. They were not beings that could bring dishonor to God; all their thoughts were holy; it was no more possible for them than for God Himself to err (Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 38).
This is actually a problematic argument, since he is denying his own premise—God is erring, he said, in exalting Christ, in requiring angels to live according to divine laws. He did not state his reasonings directly and systematically. He subtly inferred, he concealed his real purpose, he insinuated his doubts, he intimated this and tangentially suggested that. He came indirectly. The universe was young. No one had ever lied or intentionally deceived before. The deception was very successful. Many of the angels aligned themselves with Satan.
God&rsqou;s law was the bottom line: unselfishness versus selfishness. Satan urged that God was exalting Himself, that God’s character was flawed. Time would reveal who was right.
Satan proceeded to deceive and lead Adam and Eve to choose to sin. Their organism was catastrophically damaged. God intervened with a plan not only to save man but through him to demonstrate the falsity of Satan’s claims but the verity of God’s. God chose to put His goodness on the line. Knowing man’s damaged nature, knowing the awful internal clamor of that nature toward the satisfaction of self, still He said, “these will be My character witnesses.’ Few have matched the clarity of M. L. Andreasen’s description:
The final demonstration of what the gospel can do in and for humanity is still in the future. Christ showed the way. He took a human body, and in that body demonstrated the power of God. Men are to follow His example and prove that what God did in Christ, He can do in every human being who submits to Him. The world is awaiting this demonstration. (Romans 8:19) When it has been accomplished, the end will come. God will have fulfilled His plan. He will have shown Himself true and Satan a liar. His government will stand vindicated … Through them [the last generation] God’s final demonstration of what He can do with humanity will be given. He will take the weakest of the weak, those bearing the sins of their forefathers, and in them show the power of God. They will be subjected to every temptation, but they will not yield. They will demonstrate that it is possible to live without sin—the very demonstration for which the world has been looking and for which God has been preparing. It will become evident to all that the gospel really can save to the uttermost. God is found true in His sayings … When God commands men to keep His law, it does not serve the purpose He has in mind to have only a few men keep it, just enough to show it can be done. It is not in line with GodŐs character to pick outstanding men of strong purpose and superb training, and demonstrate through them what He can do. It is much more in harmony with His plan to make His requirements such that even the weakest need not fail, so that none can ever say that God demands that which can be done by only a few. It is for this reason that God has reserved His greatest demonstration for the last generation. This generation bears the results of accumulated sins. If any are weak, they are. If any suffer from inherited tendencies, they do. If any have an excuse because of weakness of any kind, they have. If, therefore, these can keep the commandments, there is no excuse for anyone in any other generation not doing so also … But this is not enough. God intends in His demonstration to show, not merely that ordinary men of the last generation can successfully pass a test such as He gave to Adam and Eve, but that they can survive a test much harder than such as falls to the lot of common men. It will be a test comparable to the one job passed through, and approaching that which the Master underwent. It will test them to the utmost. (http://www.lastgenerationtheology.org/lgt/doc/mis/tlg/and-tlg1947.php).
God will use the last generation to make His case once and for all. That’s where we come in. The great controversy is about God vindicating His character. It is about sin versus righteousness. It is about ending suffering once and for all. For many decades Seventh-day Adventists have been reluctant witnesses. They have yet to come through; God’s case has yet to be made. Previous generations of Adventists limped through life and chose funeral rather than translation. you can change that. You can show the universe what happens when we accept the work of the Carpenter Jesus and cooperate with Him according to His purpose.
The revolution has already started. For you, it can start here. You can live a lost life or a last life, be a lost generation or a last generation. You can stand with Jesus in the end on Mount Zion with the Lamb, according to your free response to the riches of His grace. You can live like an animal and die like a dog, or you can be the very people who make a difference and bring 6000 years of sin and suffering to an abrupt end. We may let God write His law in our forehead, grow us into Christlikeness, and move the whole project of heaven toward closure. Or, settle for American Idol. May God grant us eyes to follow the Lamb Jesus all the way home to our father’s house. LGT
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