Video Transcript: Life with God
Welcome back. We're continuing with our course developing great commission skills. Today we're starting into the final skill, the final six videos, and the particular skill that we're going to be looking at is leaving a gospel footprint. The idea this might be a new concept. The idea is that everywhere we go, we're going to leave evidence of the gospel. We're going to leave tracks that the gospel has been here. And so we're going to just dive in the first skill topic we're going to be speaking about, in regard to leaving a gospel footprint is called life with God. So let's, let's get started. I want to share with you. I know this is a little bit of a play on words. Of course, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, if you will. But you know, according to the Nature Conservancy, a carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide and methane that are generated by our actions. The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons. Now I have to confess, I don't really know what all that means, but somewhere along the line, I was confronted with that phrase, gospel footprint, I mean carbon footprint, and I thought to myself, hmm, as Christian people, what if we were to leave a gospel footprint wherever we Go? So I came up with a little definition, leaning into the Nature Conservancy, and I framed it like this, a gospel footprint is the total amount amount of gospel influence, including word, deed, attitude, behavior, etc, that is generated by our actions wherever we go, so whenever we go any place, perhaps we could be thinking, How do I leave footprints of the gospel here? I suppose it was a few years back when I first had this idea, but I have to say, it's become very much a part of my routine. Everywhere I go these days, I do have this in mind. What might I be able to do that leaves the gospel footprint, whether it's going to lunch, meeting with someone, whatever the occasion might be, wherever I happen to be, am I leaving a gospel footprint? Now, here's a question. What do you suppose is the average gospel footprint for the average Christian? Now, I don't really have a metric for this. I'm not going to measure this in terms of tonnage, like 16 tons. But you know, the idea here is we're not trying to be scientific. We're trying to be we're trying to be faithful to the Great Commission, faithful to going and make disciples. So as we go, why not leave gospel footprints wherever we go. So here are a couple of questions I'd like for you to consider. What is the relationship between epidemic plateau and decline in the American church, and I think that is true in churches in some other countries as well. What is the relationship between epidemic plateau and decline in the American church, and the likelihood that the average gospel footprint for a Christian in the US is small. Now, I think that's reasonable to to presuppose, I think that the typical Christian walking through life on a typical day all over the globe tends to be leaving little to no evidence of the gospel. Oftentimes, our faith is something that's very private. Well, here's another question, what if, through prayerful vision, strategy, training and implementation, the average gospel footprint could be expanded by a factor of, say, two or five or 10 or even 20. Imagine what the impact of that might be.
Well, let's turn to the Apostle Paul for a moment writing to the Ephesians. In Ephesians 6, we find this Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness and as shoes for your feet having put on the readiness given by the gospel. You know that really caught my attention, the idea of the shoes for your feet having put on the readiness given by the gospel. Well, we're talking about footprints, right shoes for your feet, and what? What are these shoes the readiness given by the gospel of peace? So that's our job. That's our mission. Wherever we go, wherever our feet set down, are they leaving gospel footprints? So let's get more specific about our topic for today, our skill topic is life with God. Life with God to leave a gospel footprint, pastors and leaders must make personal spiritual formation a priority. See, here's the thing, we can't take people as leaders. We can't take people to some place we haven't been ourselves, or to some place that we've been but we've drifted away. So if we're going to encourage people to leave a gospel footprint, to take the gospel with us everywhere we go, we've got to be living that life, and that begins with spiritual formation, of our own spiritual formation, and then later spilling over into spiritual formation of others. Now at the Go center where I serve, we have an approach to Church Health that's based on two Church Health platforms. One is called spiritual renewal, and the other is called strategic initiative. I want you to think for a moment about those two, those two items on the platform, spiritual renewal, of course, has to do with our faith, our beliefs, our understanding of God, our our grounding in theology and Bible, the spiritual element of renewal needs to be there. But it's not enough. There also needs to be strategic initiative. We need to take action and and move forward with vision and strategy, so that we take the spiritual element with us into people's lives, leaving a gospel footprint. Now here's the thing, I've discovered, that spiritual renewal and strategic initiative must work together for a church to be healthy. Either one is incomplete by itself. Spiritual renewal without strategic initiative, leads to what I'm going to call momentary spiritual spiking in our lives, where we get very excited and motivated and moved, but it's not lasting because we don't have any strategy to put with that. But if we skip the spiritual renewal element and go just with strategy, we become manipulative. But you know, the heart of God, the mind of God, the power of God is not in it. We're acting in our own strength. So we want to blend these two together, spiritual renewal with strategic initiative. Now when it comes to book references, the book that we lean into for strategic initiative, is a book that we've mentioned numerous times throughout our study. It's the book called simple church, returning to God's process for making disciples, by Tom Rainer and Eric Geiger. Now obviously there are many, many books that could qualify to serve as the primary reference for strategic initiative, but we can't run out and grab every book that's out there. So I just narrowed this down to one book that. We find particularly meaningful. Simple church connects us with strategic initiative. Now when it comes to
spiritual renewal, the book that we favor is a book called With this book is what has prompted this particular skill topic, life with God. Now this book is written by a man named Skye Jethani. I highly recommend this book for spiritual formation. It's very interesting the approach that he takes, first of all, probably the first half of the book walks through wrong ways to relate to God, and so he talks about life under God, where we try to win favor and control God through religious practices, rituals, morality. And then there's life over God, where we view God as the watchmaker who wound the watch, but then took more of a hands off posture so we understand how the watch works, we try to control life over God. Then there's life from God where we believe that God exists simply to satisfy us and provide for us, and so our approach to God is more or less a consumer approach to God. What have you got for me? What have you done for me lately, this is what I want. Give me what I want. And then there's life for God. This is a little tricky. Life for God is when we're living to accomplish God's mission. We're serving God. We're moving forward for God. And in some ways, that's a very good thing, but I have noticed even in my own life, it's very easy to make the mission the god. I begin to idolize the ministry that God has called me to, and I begin to lose touch with God Himself. I'm serving, I think I'm serving for God, but I'm actually setting God off to the side while I run with this mission. So that, of course, brings us to the right way to relate to God, which Skye Jethani refers to as life with God. He says this that life with God posture is at the core of the cosmos. It's the center of the world. God the Father, with God the Son, with God, the Spirit and the wonderful thing is God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit are with us. They're with us. Now you're probably familiar with John 15, I am the vine. You are the branches. It's a very significant scripture. Most folks who've been around the faith, who've been around the church for any length of time, have tapped into to this concept. Well, the analogy of vine and branches. We know that the branches can't live unless they're connected to the vine. That's the imagery that's being painted with that analogy. But it's more than imagery. It's it's absolutely real. You see, if we're not connected to Christ, we're not gaining in terms of spiritual formation, we're not receiving the spiritual nutrients that we need to keep our faith alive and active and meaningful, and so we need to stay connected now Jesus, The coming of Jesus, changed everything. God with us, Emmanuel. So the key is to abide in Him, because He is the vine. And I think there's a danger sometimes, particularly with that life for God concept, where we actually detach from Jesus and go our own way, even in ministry. So here's a question for you, if your life is not with God in this abiding sense, who or what is your life with? You know we're plugged into something, whether we know it or not, something is influencing us, whether we know it or not. Now, if we're wise, if we're wise, people of faith, we make sure that we're plugged into the vine who is Jesus. So here's a couple of questions. If the footprint you're leaving is the footprint you're leaving a gospel footprint, or is it
something else you see? Here's how it works. If you're plugged into the vine Jesus Christ, and you're being fed spiritual nutrients on a regular basis, it's very likely that you have that opportunity to make gospel footprints into the lives of others. But if you're not abiding, if the footprint you're leaving is not a gospel footprint, it is going to be a footprint of something else. You are going to be influencing something else. What influences you tends to enable you to influence someone else. So what is influencing you? Is it a secular culture footprint? You know all of us have to navigate life inside of some culture, and the secular culture has been gaining power and authority all around the world for years and years and years. You know, the world is not like it used to be. There are influences that are tremendously destructive. And with the technology being advanced the way it has in recent decades, that information goes everywhere all the time. You can't escape it. So we're constantly bombarded by messages, images of this secular culture, and if we're not plugged into the true vine Jesus Christ, we can't help but be influenced by that. So is the secular footprint? What is stepping into our lives, and is that what we're taking to others? How are we influencing others? Are we leaving a gospel footprint? Now I want to introduce you to a concept that has developed for me in recent months, and the concept is called providential availability. Let me read you a brief quote from Wayne Grudem, who has provided us with a very helpful systematic theology in regard to Providence. He writes, this God cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do. Now let me, let me unpack this for you. There's a category in the world of theology called Providence, and it speaks to what Wayne Grudem is speaking to here how God operates in the world in connection with created things. Now, the created things we specifically have in you are people, specifically Christian people. How does God work with us? How do we work with him as his providence in people's lives unfolds. Now here's what I think. I think that there are many times when people use the word or the concept of Providence incorrectly. They'll use it more as a substitute for the word coincidence. So I'll hear someone say, for example, you know, I probably I providentially ran into so and so at the at the coffee shop the other day. Well, was that providential, really? Maybe this was just a coincidence. Maybe it was just that I wanted a cup of coffee the same time this other person wanted a cup of coffee. We were geographically close to the same coffee shop and we happen to be there at the same time. You see, that's not necessarily providential, if there's no godly purpose attached to that. But think about this, what if? What. If I decided, as a follower of Christ that I wanted to be leaving gospel footprints everywhere that I go. And so one of the things that I did was I began to pray for opportunities to speak with people about matters of faith, matters of the soul, I began to study to prepare myself to have those kinds of conversations. I've learned how to articulate my testimony. I learned how to ask questions to get beyond simply
saying, Hi, how are you and actually getting to deeper levels of conversation with people. I studied the Bible. I studied theology so that I could understand how God works when he's drawing someone to faith. The kinds of things that
people are interested in, that they want to understand, that I have the antenna up so I can start to spiritually detect if something serious is going on in their lives that might open the door for me to share the gospel. So now, with that preparation and that mindset and those prayers, I decide I am going to routinely go to the same coffee shop, and over time, I'm probably going to run into some of the same people, certainly the people that work there, as well as regular folks that stop by for A cup of coffee. So on one occasion, I go to the coffee shop with that in mind, and I happen to run into so and so, and a conversation ensues, and I discover there's a need in this person's life, and I have an opportunity, maybe to pray with that person, or to just share a little bit of truth from God's Word. See to me, that is Providence, and we have a role to play. We have a a volitional role to play in Providence. What makes that providential is the cooperation between what God is doing in that person's life as well as mine, and what I'm doing to prepare myself to be used in that way. I am deliberately attempting to leave gospel footprints. See what you think of this. We have the capacity to make ourselves providentially available, providentially useful, through prayer, through intentional preparation, through practice and through moving through life with the spiritual antenna. Let me share something with you that occurred in my life not long ago, within the last two months, my wife and I were at home on a Friday evening. I think we were just watching television, something like that, and a text thread started to come by that involved a half a dozen or so friends of ours from back in our high school days, and trust me, that was a long, long time ago. But here's the thing, people my age are in the later years of life, and even for those who haven't thought much about faith, as you get older, you start to realize, maybe I need to tend to some of these things. Well, this particular thread was just it was just silly. It was just fun. It wasn't anything serious. People were talking about their favorite pop songs and this kind of thing. And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, one of our number sent a text that said, By the way, as we have been waiting for my wife's upcoming surgery, it's been discovered that she has cancer, and we're facing an operation in a couple of weeks, we would appreciate your thoughts and prayers. Wow, all of a sudden, the mood shifts. Well, as it relates to this idea of providential availability, my immediate thought was, there's an opportunity here, and so I sent a text, and I said this. I said, I have an idea. Instead of just praying for her, why don't we all get together and pray with her? And that's what we did. We set a time a group of us got together, and we had a time of prayer. It was a very meaningful time, very special time. And God was honored, and the presence of the gospel was brought to bear, providential availability. So in wrapping this up, I want you to think about the doing and the being. The doing and the being
leaving a gospel footprint is founded on life with God as true followers, abide in Christ as the basis of their being and intentionally make themselves providentially useful as the basis of their doing. No doubt we need to be people of God, but in being close to God, in abiding in Christ, we have a duty, an obligation, a responsibility, an opportunity to actually do something. And as we follow through with the doing side, we leave gospel footprints everywhere that we go. So that wraps up our session for today, life with God. I pray that you will continue with your studies. Well, next time we're going to be talking about personal outreach and evangelism. So until then, may God bless your efforts on his behalf and bless your efforts with your ongoing studies. Amen