Finish Strong

I asked all of you to pick a cause that you believe in and fight for it. I said, if we wanted to change the world, it’s not good enough to show up to church and pray about it in passing. I said that we would need to pick up everything and throw all our support behind it. In fact, this idea, is sort of what we did when we first launched redemption. I asked you whether you were willing to throw your entire weight behind the belief that we have an obligation to bring those who are far from God and give them an opportunity to be closer to Christ in ways and by means that we would like to get close to God. So we decided that those ways and means would be through worship and community service. I took it even further and said that it was also through counseling and classes and just being real people with real lives and with real dreams striving to live as hard as we possibly could. So we get to a place in pursuing these goals or any dream that we may have and see small success and things changing slowly and all of a sudden we get smacked in the face and find ourselves in a rut of discouragement. In times like this, I encouraged, this was the last few weeks for you all to defeat your discouragement and work through these difficulties and times with integrity, that is, determination and faith. That get’s you to the final straw. We are on our very last week of the summer and I want to ask you one last time: “have you fought for your cause yet?” Because if you have, you may have changed the world as you know it. If you haven’t, then you will never know what world was supposed to be shaken by your efforts and you lost some more opportunities. Let’s read Nehemiah 6. So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days. When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God. – Nehemiah 6:15-16 The wall was repaired and it was done in 52 days despite all the things in the world going against him. Nehemiah perservered and God enabled him to survive. In fact, I told the kids to underline this sentence in the morning and I want you to underline this right now—“they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God.” Underline that. If you’re at a place right now where we don’t know if you’re going to make it—I want you to repeat this verse in your head until it speaks to you. Often times, when I take on projects, I can see the life cycle of a project form beginning to end. I can see what is required, how much dedication a project will take and then I can even seen the snafus and problems that may potentially arise. So based on what I know, I either accept or decline a project or task. In fact, we all do something similar in our heads. Except the pattern goes like this—if and when we see a problem or project hat will consume a lot of our resources, we put it off until later. Or we don’t do anything at all about it. In fact, this is probably the number one reason why we do nothing. Why we would rather rot away at home making social commentaries about what is wrong with the world, than do anything really productive or proactive to fix it. Why we can complain about stupid things and instead of trying to change the way the system operates. If that is your distracter. If that is your problem, I want you to understand that all those projects you are facing alone, “God is helping us.” He is helping us in a scary way and we have to wake ourselves up to the reality of that. It is a powerful reality and that we need to grasp and take hold of. That is how Nehemiah built the wall successfully. His enemies were not lying to him trying to discourage him. They knew what it took to do something as ambitious as and crazier than that. 1Now when the wall had been built and I had set up the doors, and the gatekeepers, the singers, and the Levites had been appointed, 2 I gave my brother Hanani and Hananiah the governor of the castle charge over Jerusalem, for he was a more faithful and God-fearing man than many. 3 And I said to them, “Let not the gates of Jerusalem be opened until the sun is hot. And while they are still standing guard, let them shut and bar the doors. Appoint guards from among the inhabitants of Jerusalem, some at their guard posts and some in front of their own homes.” 4 The city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt. 5 Then my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles and the officials and the people to be enrolled by genealogy. – Nehemiah 7:1-5a [story about taking on a big project and not seeing it through to the end.] — so I have this problem where I start something but hardly ever finish. I’m totally great at starting projects but I completely suck at finishing them. The last project I started in my house is still sitting there in pieces. I have this tv cabinet in my room. I started building it, put the frames together and then I just stopped. Now it has no back and no doors in the front. When I was getting my first master’s degree five years ago, I was at an impasse. I had started writing my thesis and begun the research. I had enough done and written for the paper that all I needed to do was put it together and write it. But it took me forever to write it. I could have written in a few days into the semester and been done with it. So nothing happened and nothing happened for a long while. In the end, I pieced together the worst piece of writing I have ever written to barely pass, as opposed to flying through it. Nehemiah knew that what he had done in 52 days was just the beginning. If he had stopped at building the walls, then it would all be a waste of time. A lot of us waste time because we start strong and then everything sort of fazes out in a sad attempt to live a worthless life. So he institutes a methodology to keep going. He continues to envision a development. You see, once we start changing the world, we have to keep envisioning the world to change in more and more drastic ways. It’s not enough to rid the world of AIDS, you have to do more, find vaccinations, do prevention work, etc. It’s not enough to eliminate the human trafficking ring in your neighborhood, you have to do more, and it has to grow so that there is nothing left of a syndicate to allow for future growth. When we finish strong, we allow God to continue to speak to us directly, in ways we never anticipated, and we have to be flexible enough to allow God to work through them. So here we have the beginning of the end of the church as we sit in here. By the end of this week, there will be lots of people gone and a few people remaining. The next time most of you will step forth in this church, we might be different because when we finish strong, we’re willing to change to reach a prize and change the goals along the way. That means, as we finish this summer series, we are now open to a new series and new changes and new things happening here as we close a season in our lives. Are you ready for that change? I’m ready for that change. Let’s go to 1st Corinthians 9. 24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. 25 Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. 26 So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. – 1 Corinthians 9:24-26 I would show you a video clip of Usain Bolt and how he doesn’t finish strong in any of the events he competes in, but here is what Paul says to us Christians who have been Christian for any length of time—you are looking to finish with more fervor than you started with. At Notre Dame, we have this tournament called Bookstore Basketball. It’s the largest outdoor 5 on 5 basketball tournament in the world. It’s in the Guinness World Record Books. One year my team was stacked! We had two people that could dunk, we had a 3 point sharp shooter, we had a point guard, and we had me, who can grab rebounds and block shots and be a tenacious defensive player. And the first two rounds was easy. We played jokes for teams. One team we played ran around in underwear and lathered up in peanut butter and jelly and tried to sandwich everybody on the opposing teams. Another team we faced, was made up with a bunch a engineers who built a catapult to launch the ball for three points each time. Then we faced our first real challenge—it was a team with two future NFL players. And if you ever have a 300 pound man charging at you trying to dunk the ball, lesson from the wise—move away! But we were in the round of 128. Our names were in the school newspaper for getting this far. Four more rounds and we could be champions. It was the shortest game we played. We got dominated and it was a bad type of dominated. Some of us don’t finish strong because we kind of do things without rhyme or reason. We have nothing in mind. We have no strategy. We have no goal. Paul says those people are beating the air. He’s absolutely right. Just like Nehemiah had purpose, a singular purpose in building the walls around Jerusalem, Paul says that the Christian faith, our struggle, our beliefs is a singular purpose. Coming to church is not the purpose of our faith. Our faith was meant to change the world through the intentional actions we take. In doing so, we are able to finish strong. I want us to look at, why Paul did the things he did and further, why Jesus did the things that he did at a ripe age of 33. 16 For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! 17 For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward, but if not of my own will, I am still entrusted with a stewardship. 18 What then is my reward? That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel. 19 For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. 20 To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. 23 I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. – 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Everything he did, and we know he finished strong, despite the fact that he lived in prison most to finish out his days and was executed in Rome for no crimes in particular that would suggest that he didn’t finish strong. He finished strong because what he did. Everything he stood for. All of that was so that people would have more opportunities to know God. Finishing strong is not about outcomes, it is about the intentions toward doing what we are doing and for having purposes that don’t give up at the end or because of exhaustion. It is about moving stronger in faith, knowing that there is good news awaiting. Let’s pray.