Introductions
1. The Purpose Driven Death. An awesome title for this conference!! (Piper was ticked off that people were bent out of shape by the title...) At the end of John, Jesus showed Peter by what death He would glorify God. A purpose driven death. Of course their is a purpose driven death along with the rest. Praise God their is purpose in my death!
2. Matthew 24:14 --> This Gospel will be proclaimed to all the nations... then the end will come. Join up or miss out. But also V. 9 You will be hated by all the nations for His name sake. Lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold... Cold people don't finish the Great Commission. But it will be finished! Things will get bad, but those who endure to the end will be saved... A 'spiritual glacier' will come at the end of the age and spread over the world. One city does not necessarily have freeze. Many will! But there will be pockets of fire all over the place. People with torches making holes in it all over the place! The glory of God will be shone through.
3. John the Baptist was SENT to be a witness to the light, and was NOT the light...
THE MESSAGE
Will you choose to suffer... if it were offered to you as a gift (Phill 1:29)? ... If you knew that God had appointed for your neighbor or you, to have a child who was profoundly disabled, would you choose to be the one? ...
There was a Roman Catholic Abbott (one who doesn't talk all their life except when singing or confessing). An interviewer asked: What if you were to learn that atheism were true? Even without the promise of reward, my sacrifice was worthwhile and beautiful. To the same question Paul said that we would the people most to be pitied in the world. What a fool I would be if Christ was not raised!! Paul's life was a life of consiously embraced suffering.
2 Cor. 11:23b (Paul is listing off his accomplishments) - imprisonments, countless beatings (he could not count them there were so many), often near death. five times with four lashes (trained executioner - opened lacerated back, thrown on the ground, infected for weeks on end!, heals all wrong, scar tissue all knotted, healed months later all wrong... and then it happens again, and again, and again, again... 3 times beaten with rods, shipwrecked, he was never out of danger! Every night he went to bed wondering if it would be his last... Daily the anxiety of the church... How would you answer the question: What if Christ did not rise from death?
Why did Paul embrace suffering? Col. 1:24 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh (his suffering flesh), I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of His body, the Church... It almost sounds heretical.
What is missing in Christ's afflictions? Nothing in their atoning worth. Paul cannot add anything to the atoning value of Jesus Christ. Nothing is missing from it. Paul taught us that...
So what's missing? The presentation of those afflictions to the people for whom He died. The personable, touchable, visible, seeable presentation of His afflictions. There are those who have never seen His afflictions. Making a presentation, not adding. Paul's suffering as a visible reenactment of Christ's love for them... The idea comes from Pill 2:27-30 --> Apaphraditus took gifts to Paul, risking his life, almost dieing. Paul tells the Phill church how amazing the man was. 2:30 he came close to death TO COMPLETE, WHAT WAS LACKING in your service. What was lacking? There was distance between Paul and the Phill church. There is distance in time from Christ and the Cross to us. A representative (Apaphraditus) was SENT! So that the love of the Phill church for Paul could be supplied, complete, could be filled up in the person of Apaphraditus.
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake. And for your sake I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's sufferings. His purpose is that ALL tribes of people will be with Him. He could have appointed angels on completing what was lacking. He appointed people to fill up what was lacking. To take the sufferings of Christ to the world. The afflictions are there for someone. They must be taken somewhere.
I rejoice in my sufferings! for your sake! and in my suffering flesh I fill up!
The greatest love is for someone to lay down their life for their friends. Persecutions, sufferings are a design, a strategy for the completion for the Great Commission.
When Jesus bids a man to follow him, he bids for him to come and die! - Detreich Bonhoeffer
The world gives us momentary, mirroring glimpses of eternity... It was an honor that my dad was counted worthy to die for Jesus (a 13 year-old missionary kid)... Things here are all about something else. Sex is real good! But it points to something else one-thousand times better! ... In Heaven we probably will say - 'How could we have overeaten so much.. fornication... how did we make gods out of all of those insignificant pleasures?!'
"now I rejoice in my sufferings..." We cannot take that lightly. 17 year-old in a coma in his church. He does not lightly say to her parents, 'rejoice!' You dont blather about "Praise God anyhow!" ... Paul put it this way 2 cor 6:10 "Sorrowful, but always rejoicing" ... That's how it always will be in this world. ALWAYS! If it is not always then you are not connected to enough people. We weep with those weep. We rejoice with those who rejoice. There are always people weeping, rejoicing. and so Christians have this miracilous life of crying all the time and being happy all the time. It is a miracle. Outsiders think it is mumbo jumbo because they don't know how it is to weep, but not as those without hope.
SO Paul is rejoicing in his sufferings as he is completing his work... When you are called to the "calvary road" - It is not joyless. Painful? Absolutely! ... You cannot escape pain anyhow, why not make it meaningful. Hebrews 4 - for the joy set before him at the cross. It was joy that carried him through. The joy of the future was streaming into the present. There is a miracle there. Yes it is way out there, it is just over the horizon. It comes over like the dawn and holds you. It is present joy... It is a call to the deepest, longest satisfactions the world has ever known... Every missionary will testify to the pain AND to the peace they have falling to sleep at night, even without "fruit"... How peaceful do you feel in your American securities?
An indigenous missionary was preaching in India. He came to a certain village and was driven out of town. He slept from exhaustion at the edge of town. When he woke up he saw the whole town hovering over him. The town came to look him over and saw his blistered feet. They concluded that he was a holy man and that they had been evil to have rejected hum. They wanted to hear the message that he was willing to suffer so much to bring them. And so the missionary filled up in his feet what was lacking in the afflictions to Christ.
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