Zambia Hunt

Glorifying God with Your Life – Part 4

From a sermon based on Philippians 1:9-11

This is Part 4 of a 4-part series on glorifying God with your life.

In Parts 1-3, we explored Paul’s passionate prayer and the four aspects of glorifying God: growing love, choosing what’s best, living with integrity, and bearing fruit. Now we come to the urgent application: Don’t waste your life.

Don’t Waste Your Life

And to you this morning, don’t waste your life. So several years ago, someone gave me a book by John Piper titled “Don’t Waste Your Life.”

I want to borrow those words to press home the urgency of living for the glory of God.

Don’t Waste Your Influence

There are those; every one of us has a circle of influence that none of the rest of us have. You are connecting with people at your workplace, in your community, amongst your neighbors, or where you play your sporting events. Influence them for Jesus. Dads don’t waste the influence God has given you inside the four walls of your home because your little children are watching your life. And they’re listening to what you say and watching your priorities, and you have a tremendous gift to influence the next generation to grow and glorify God with their lives.

Don’t Waste Your Education

Young people, don’t waste your education. Get your education, get those master’s degrees, and whatever else you need, get it! But then offer it to God and say, “God, I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but would you like me to use this education to establish a beachhead for the gospel in some restricted access country in the 1040 window?”

Don’t Waste Your Dysfunctional Family Upbringing

Some of you sitting here have stories that you could tell. I grew up as a teenager and became very bitter towards God because my dad had what that time they were calling a nervous breakdown in and out of the mental hospital. I tried to kill my mom one morning with a knife. Later that day, he wanted to kill me. I became angry and bitter and took great delight in dreams of how I could make my dad suffer the way he was making us. To great joy in thinking of painful ways that he could be killed. I would think, how come everybody else has to have a typical family but not us?

God, by His mercy, when I was 18 years old, moved into that wrong thinking and began to reveal the incredible grace, mercy, and forgiveness that God had extended to me. And that I was to extend that attitude toward my father, which changed my perspective.

You say, well, why would God let you have to go through all of those things? Because He’s sovereign and because He knows what’s best. And what I’m saying to you is if you’ve got your story to tell, don’t allow yourself to be bitter. Don’t waste all those things you must go through in your path because you can’t go back and change it. Allow God to use it for His glory as you minister to others in your world who are hurting and facing the same things. Don’t waste it.

Don’t Waste Your Death

Now I say one more: don’t waste your death. You only get to die once. Don’t waste it.

The first administrator at Faith Children’s Village was saved at the Riverside Church in youth outreach and married one of the young ladies in our church who was also a convert through the ministry. Joe became a deacon and song leader in our church. And eventually, when the ministry of Faith Children’s Village opened, Joe and his wife were called to that ministry. And they left the city and went out into this rural area and labored there, and they’d been married for four or five years. They had not yet had a child, so we’re all praying that God would bless them with a child and the joy of all joys. We learned his wife was expecting, and she gave birth to a beautiful little girl, and you know, about eighteen months later, she was expecting again. We were all thrilled.

When she was about five months along, one evening on a Friday, she developed complications. Joe got his wife in the vehicle and brought her into the city and to a hospital. Later that evening, she miscarried. But there was no doctor. They were waiting for the doctor to come on Monday.

On Monday morning, the doctor came in, and they took her into the theatre, but when they lifted her off the bed to put her onto the gurney, she died. In human terms, this death was unnecessary; it would have never happened.

The funeral was the largest attended funeral ever at our church. There were probably 700 people in and around that building. I sat in the front row next to Joe, and on his lap, he had this little girl, a year and a half old, in a little white dress. Joe told me, “I want to say something.” I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted.

So I invited Joe to come up, and he stood behind the desk, and there in front of him was the coffin with his wife, the baby boy who had been born prematurely. Joe looked at that crowd and shared his testimony of how he came to know Jesus Christ as his Savior. He then shared the testimony about how his wife had come to know Jesus Christ as her Savior. Then he said, “I have this confidence that I will see my wife again someday.”

Joe stood there with their little girl in his arms, and he said, “On Friday before my wife began the miscarriage, we had our family devotions, where we read the Word together, and we sang. Keziwe picked her favorite song, and I’d like to sing the song we sang in our family devotions on Friday evening.” Joe lifted his voice and began to sing, “When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, It is well. It is well with my soul.” Joe’s testimony of faith is something that has deeply impacted my life.

The Ultimate Call

Beloved, when God orchestrates the dark valleys and the deep trials of your life, don’t waste them. Don’t waste these opportunities to magnify Christ. Allow Christ to saturate you and so permeate your life that the very presence of Christ is a fragrance to the world around you, whether by life or by death; glorify Him.

And this is the culmination of Paul’s prayer. Paul’s passionate plea on their behalf all points to this as its highest end. Look at verse 11. I pray that your love may abound more and more. A life that glorifies God begins with a love that is constantly growing. A life that glorifies God means that I choose what is best over what is merely acceptable to approve what is excellent. Glorifying God with my life means my life is characterized by integrity, sincerity, and without offense. A life that glorifies God is a life that is filled with the fruits of righteousness, and all of this culminates unto the glory and the praise of God.

This is the culmination of Paul’s prayer. Paul prayed that the Philippians’ love would increase through a growing knowledge of God that would result in the discernment to spend their life for what matters by living as men and women of integrity so that the righteousness of Christ might bear abundant fruit in them to the glory and praise of God.

Are you wasting your life or spending your life on something that will count for eternity? Is your life bringing glory to God? What a tragedy it would be for you one day to stand with your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and to look over the portal of heaven and to catch a glimpse of what you gave your life for as a child of God and for it to suddenly dawn on you that you did little more than push around balls of dung.

Suppose you do not know Jesus Christ as your Savior if you’ve never been forgiven of your sins if you’ve never responded to His grace. You’re wasting your life. Not only are you wasting your energy in this world, but you are wasting your eternal soul. Jesus himself said, what does it profit if a man gains the whole world? And in the end, he loses his soul.

Is your life bringing glory to God?

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This concludes our 4-part series on “Glorifying God with Your Life.” May we live with the passionate pursuit of God that Paul demonstrated, choosing what is excellent, living with integrity, and bearing fruit that brings glory and praise to our Lord Jesus Christ.