What Are You Living For?

Welcome to the Enduring Grace Sermons Podcast.

This is the home for the weekly teaching and ministry of Pastor Ben Hill.

Our mission is to share the timeless truth of God's Word with a world in need of hope.

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And now, here is this week's message.

Man.

God is so good, is He not?

Man, it's been a good, wonderful, worship-filled morning.

And if you have your Bibles, I want to encourage you to continue to worship through the preaching of His Word by turning to Acts chapter 14.

Acts 14 · chapter mention

We'll be in verse 15 here in just a moment.

And as you make your way there, I want to ask a simple question.

What are you living for?

What are you living for?

It's a question that I think many of us ask and wrestle with in our lives.

Is what are we really living for in life?

What are we trying to strive to accomplish?

It might fill our mind as we drink our morning coffee, as we think about our day.

It might be as we lay in bed that we have it just persisting in our mind, making us unable to sleep.

It is the thing that grows even when stillness remains.

What am I living for?

For some, it might be that we are living for success.

We want to be successful business people.

Or we want to be a successful mother or a father.

We want to be successful in the eyes of our neighbors and friends.

It might be that we're pursuing a worth in our wealth, that we determine our value based off the money in our bank account.

It might be that we're living for our pleasure.

We want to simply enjoy life to the fullest.

But there is a greater cause in life than to live for money, wealth, success, popularity.

And it is really what drives our pursuits.

It is Blaise Pascal that was famous for saying that the human heart has a God-shaped hole or a God-shaped emptiness that only God can fill.

The pursuit of man oftentimes is a pursuit of filling that void.

The reality is if you listen to the Jeff Bezos and the Steve Jobs of the world of the past and present, they will tell you you can never have enough money.

You can have never enough pleasure because it never completely fills that void in your life.

So the question is: have you had that void filled?

Are you living for the Lord?

Are you living for yourself?

Paul and Barnabas in the book of Acts are on a missionary journey.

We picked that up a few chapters in the previous chapter.

And on their process, they have ended up in a city called Lystra.

Here in Lystra, it is a Roman colony, a Roman city, and they have a big presence there with Greek and Roman God influence.

And so one of their primary gods there is Zeus.

And so Paul and Barnabas get into the city and they begin with really healing, which is abnormal in the book of Acts.

Normally they would go to the Jewish synagogue, but in this particular city, what's recorded is they don't go to the synagogue first.

They actually heal a lame man who is in the street, who's been lame since birth, and the city goes crazy.

They get excited.

I think everybody would get excited, especially if we witness somebody who has been lame from birth getting healed miraculously in Georgetown with two people that are foreigners that just said, hey, rise, walk, and you're healed, and they get healed.

So that we would also be like, who are these people?

So the city goes crazy.

They get excited.

The Zeus priests, in fact, gather a calf, or they gather animals and begin sacrificing them, preparing a meal essentially, to celebrate Zeus and Hermes coming to see them.

The reality is, it's Barnabas and Paul.

And Barnabas and Paul find out what they're doing, and they are horrified.

In fact, they're so horrified, they tear their robes and run out into the street, crying out what we're going to look at this morning.

So if you found your place in Acts chapter 14, verse 15, would you say a word?

Acts 14:15

And look along with me.

It says simply, Men, why are you doing these things?

I can hear Paul's voice actually.

He's probably more like, Men, what are you doing?

Why are you doing this?

This doesn't make any sense.

Nothing at all makes sense about this, guys.

Because he has the truth.

He says, We also are men like you.

He says, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news.

Paul says, you've missed the whole point of this healing.

You've missed the whole point of why we're here.

Men of Lystra, listen, I need you to lean in and hear me.

I am just like you.

There's no difference between me and you, other than we know the good news and you do not.

He says, you're doing it the wrong way.

In other words, I'm not Zeus, or I'm not Hermes, is what Paul is saying.

And what Barnabas is over there saying is, I'm not Zeus.

Now the reason why they thought Barnabas was Zeus is because he wasn't talking a whole lot.

Hermes did all the talking.

Zeus did not.

And their mythology.

And here's Paul, who talks a lot.

He's Hermes.

And so Paul's the one that is crying out, going, We're not who you think we are.

We're just common people.

We're common folk, just like you.

And that we have good news.

And that he says then that you should turn from these vain things to a living God.

Now I want us to hone in on that vain things for just a moment this morning.

Because it's really the driving force of the whole message of Paul to the people of Lystra.

What he's saying is, you are worshiping vanity.

You're worshiping something that is worthless.

That you are pursuing something of no value.

You're living for something that's not worth it.

He says that these vain things to a living God, he wants them to turn, turn their attention away from the vanity of their worship, the vanity of what they're pursuing, the vanity of what they believe, to something worth living for.

The living God.

And then he says, in past generations, he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways.

He says, hey, God has permitted you to walk however you saw fit for a long time.

Yet, verse 17, he did not leave himself without witness.

Did you know the Lord actually provides a testimony of himself in creation?

The very creation is a testimony to him.

Look at what Paul says.

He says, For he did good.

The Lord did good by giving you rains from heaven.

Praise the Lord for rain.

Praise the Lord for the good days that we get to enjoy his created order.

By giving you rains from heaven and by and fruitful seasons, your harvests are the blessings of God.

Satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.

In other words, he says, hey, you get to enjoy these pleasures because of God's goodness.

But in spite of all that, in spite of God's grace, common grace that they experienced, the reality was that their worship was worthless because they had a worship of false gods.

So he talks about the worthlessness of false worship.

He says, this is absolutely worthless.

It is vanity.

It is something that is not worth pursuing because it is simply a man-made religion.

When it came to idols, the Bible is not afraid to call them what they are, which is basically tools of death in Satan's hand.

The psalmist says in Psalm 115, verse 5 and 8, that about idols that they have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see.

Psalms 115:5

And then continuing in verse 8, those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them, saying that whatever you worship, you become like.

Jonah from the belly of a well says, Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love, saying that when you pursue idols, you are forgetting the love of God.

You're not remaining in God's love.

Isaiah talks about the mockery of idols.

He says, A man in Isaiah 44, 19, no one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say half of it I burned in the fire, I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten, and shall I make the rest of it an abomination?

Shall I fall down before a block of wood?

Idol worship is something that is not worth pursuing.

It is vanity, it is worthless.

And yet so many fall into idolatry even today.

Paul tells us in Romans 1, 21 through 23, all about it, saying that in verse 22, claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

People claim that they're wise, but they're actually fools.

The fact of the matter is simply this.

We live in a world that is more and more less religious.

We live in what's called the post-Christian age.

You have more and more people who claim to be atheistic or deistic, meaning that they don't believe in really any certain God.

They definitely don't believe in the biblical Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

And what they say is, I don't worship anything, but the reality is that they worship something.

They worship themselves.

They worship the pleasure, they worship the things that they pursue, because every person is designed by God to worship.

The reality is we often choose to worship something not worth pursuing rather than the God who is worthy of all of our worship and praise.

So what does modern idolatry look like?

Because we know that we don't bow down in our in our context here in America, typically, to idols.

Now, if you go to uh uh you go to India or you go to a Hindu temple, guess what?

You're going to see people bowing down to idols.

Because they still practice that.

There are nations all across our world who still worship idols in the sense of what the Bible describes as idolatry.

But Satan also understands in American culture and in American Christianity that he can't get us necessarily to bow down to an idol, but he can get us to bow down to idols in our heart.

So, what do those look like?

They look like these things success without surrender.

We try to achieve success at any cost, building a life that ultimately has no room for God.

If you doubt that, just look at the consistency of worship attendance.

When a third of the church attends about a third of the time or less, there's a lack of surrender to the Lord.

There's a lack of prioritizing worship.

There's plenty of time to work overtime.

There's plenty of time to try to achieve success at whatever it costs.

Even sometimes our own families.

But there's little time to actually stop and worship the Lord even in the morning for five minutes to do a quiet time.

Or to stop at lunch long enough to pray and say, Thank you, Lord, for this meal that I'm about to eat.

Or to invest time in serving in the church.

Mothers are some of the most successful people who surrender their lives to their children.

But are you still making Jesus a priority over your children?

Or are you more concerned about the success of your children than the success of your walk with the Lord?

The Lord has to be primary.

Success comes through the Lord, not through our own means.

There's also pleasure without purity.

Just look at sexual immorality in our nation.

The pursuit of pleasure.

Sexual pleasure is at an all-time high.

But it also takes the form of comfort, the pursuit of just simply enjoying life, taking it easy, the good life, as some might say.

There's also experience the highest of goods, that we want the best of the best at all times.

Can't ever settle for second best.

Even if it means I have to sacrifice something else.

There's also religion without repentance.

We make church a priority, but we've never repented of our sins.

We have a religion that we love, but a God we do not know.

We have to have repentance in order to walk with the Lord.

Is your idol the idol of religion, of church, rather than the reason we gather as the church to worship the creator God, the God of the universe.

There's also the idol of spirituality without truth, that we love being spiritual.

We like sounding spiritual, but there's very little truth.

It's not derived from the Bible, but what we've heard from personalities that claim that they love the Lord.

It is not what we have developed as we've read God's word.

There's the comfort without Christ.

That we try to comfort ourselves with the blessings of the Lord without ever surrendering to the Lordship of the Lord in our life.

God, I I worked really hard for the comfort of my house.

The comfort of having a bank account that is in good standing.

I've worked hard for these things.

Why would you want me to use them for you?

There's the identity without the image of God.

That we define our who we are based off what other people say.

Another way of saying it might be people pleasers.

That we are more concerned about pleasing others rather than pleasing the one true God.

Are we worshiping the other people and their opinions over what God says about us?

Which, by the way, is that He loves us, but He died for us because we're separated apart from Christ.

And that He wants our full worship.

If you want to lead your home well, moms and dads, Jesus has to be the center of the home.

It cannot be that your identity is built into your kids and their success or your work and your success at work.

Cannot be built in what other people say about you, but what God says about you, and then your home will experience the blessings of the Lord.

There's also the blessings without the blesser, that we love the gifts of God, but we do not love God Himself.

Are you more satisfied in what you have been given by God rather than God?

These are just a few of the idols that Americans worship.

If we actually looked at our society 2,000 years from now, we probably would say, man, those people love their idols of sports.

They had men that gathered around and hit each other and they called them athletes.

They built statues of these people.

Stadiums were designed where thousands of people would gather once a week to worship what was taking place on the field.

If their team lost, they'd leave depressed.

If they won, they'd be celebrating and screaming and acting out like a fool.

And the fact is, in many of those cases, they would gather around and they would burn sacrifices because they ate before they went into these arenas to worship.

Sounds a whole lot like what we do about the Romans, doesn't it?

People pay thousands of dollars just to watch these mighty men go into battle.

Or music.

They have stars on the streets of all these actors.

They worship these people.

Isn't it crazy?

Idolatry takes many forms.

But all of it is worthless because it is not a worship worth pursuing.

Now, a lot of those things aren't bad in and of themselves.

Let's be honest.

I enjoy a good sports game.

I enjoy music.

I enjoy going to the beach and enjoying the pleasures of the sand that you can't get off your body when you get off the beach, but I love sitting in it.

I don't know why, but I do.

It's relaxing.

I enjoy going on walks.

I enjoy looking at the birds with my wife.

It's fun, it's enjoyable.

The difference is, is it just something that we enjoy or is it a priority in our life that takes precedence over the Lord?

Are you elevating the things that God has given that are good above the things that is most important?

The thing that is most important, which is worshiping the Lord.

There was a man who was shipwreck, and he escaped with a bag in his hand.

He finally got to shore, tired, heaving from the hard swim on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere.

And so he began to gather sticks, but he never let go of that bag.

He just kept holding the bag as he went around.

He grabbed sticks, polyma.

He eventually was able to get a fire started somehow, one-handed, with a piece of string and his feet putting together because he didn't want to let go of his bag.

Over time, weeks passed.

And he couldn't get to the food that was on the trees because he couldn't climb, because he refused to let go of his bag.

He became shriveled, malnourished.

And eventually, nearly to his death, the sailboat saw the flare of fire.

They get to the shore, find the man there, and in hand, while he's laying there, Nearly dead, they see a bag.

They see plenty of fruit available to him.

There's clean water that he would have nourished him from the coconuts if he had just simply gotten them and opened them up.

So they asked the man, what was so important that you risked your life holding on to that bag?

The man opened it up and showed them that it was filled with gold coins.

He was willing to die if it meant that he got to hold on to his gold.

Too often we in life hold on to the things of this world that are pleasures instead of holding on to the living water.

We fail to worship the one who can truly transform our lives.

And we hold on to the things that are supposed to be good for us to enjoy that are gifts from God.

And the reason we worship him is because he is the living God.

Do you have the wonder of the living God that Paul talks about?

He says, a living God who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.

Do you see it around you?

The beauty and the wonder of God.

I can't help but think when I'm out on that beach.

And I'm out there just deep enough for my legs to hit the waves, right?

And you feel the power of the ocean, the vastness of it.

It reminds me that our God is powerful.

Then when you look at the universe and how small Earth is, you see how great and grand our God is because he holds the whole universe, every single galaxy in his hand.

And yet oftentimes we just put God off to the side and we don't have that wonder and awe that we sung about just a few moments ago.

When was the last time you just stopped and looked at the complexity of a simple flower and realized the beauty of the creation God has made?

When was the last time that you stopped and thought about your own eyes and the complexity of your eyes?

And how the Lord has designed them to see millions of colors, to be able to enjoy the vastness of the world.

Yet you have some who will tell you that your eye was created over a long period of time as you evolved from a single cell into the human that you are today.

We don't look at a camera and say, how did that just happen?

We know a camera was designed and engineered and put together by someone.

We don't look at a great painting and say, hey, I wonder how that just happened.

We know that there was a great artist that designed it and painted it and crafted it.

Do you still have the wonder of the Lord in your life?

Do you have the wonder of the mighty power of God, the living God?

But not only do you have the wonder of the living God, then also there is the witness of common grace.

That God is good both to the evil and the good, that God is a loving God, that he is a just God, that even though we deserve death, God is still gracious to us.

That he is merciful.

Notice what he says.

He says in verse 17 that he is good.

God is good because he gives rains from heaven, fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.

The good things that God gives is through his common grace.

But here's the problem with common grace.

Common grace doesn't save anyone.

It only reveals that there is a creating God, a God of the universe.

And without the gospel, without us proclaiming the good news, none of us can be saved.

We must proclaim the good news of great joy because God has revealed Himself to all.

Romans 1 tells us for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made, so they are without excuse.

Every person in this world is without excuse.

Yet we often choose to worship creature or created thing rather than God.

We have information coming from all sorts of different places.

We have pleasures that are far greater than we can describe in oftentimes, but God is still greater than even the best of pleasures.

This morning, my challenge to you is have you elevated something higher than God in your life?

Have you allowed something in your life to take root that is a higher priority to you than worshiping and spending time with the Lord who created you?

But for others in a room this size with this many people this morning on this wonderful Mother's Day, there are some who have never repented.

You've been in church off and on your whole life.

But you've never repented.

This morning, would you repent and turn to Jesus?

There is no better way I can think of for your mother to celebrate Mother's Day than to celebrate their child finally saying yes to Jesus.

I know that's the greatest joy Catherine and I have.

With every head bowed and eye closed this morning.