Northside Church - Sydney
Success or Significance? Week 1: New Beginnings
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Well, Happy New Year for some good to see so many faces back in the church for the New Year. How exciting. I saw half of them at the Sydney Festival last night, floating around, few people in there. It was good to see Northside out and force. Look, you may not have come across it. I only saw it this week. It had only been uploaded for about two days, but it was a YouTube clip of one of our dear prime ministers, Bob Hawke, at the SCG at the Indian Test. And Bob, on his way back up from the front rows there, wherever he's going up to his corporate box with his minders, took the offer of an Australian or obviously loved his work and sculled an entire beer in front of all the cameras, much to the cheers of the people around him. Whilst I don't condone that sort of irresponsible drinking, 363, 977 hits later, that's in two days. This thing has gone around most of Australia. And part of my deep concern, while I'm sharing it with you tonight, is that if there were any young school kids that have seen this YouTube clip, and they go and wander the halls of the great Parliament House and see those beautiful paintings and other bits of oil with Bob there, they in front of their classmates proudly are going to declare to their teacher, see teacher, there's the man that drank the beer. Successful, yes, significant, not really, hopefully for a lot of our young people that may have seen that clip. He's not going to be remembered as a guy that drank the beer, but for some as the guy that made one of the most economically momentous decisions in our country's history when he floated the Australian dollar, many will remember him as a great prime minister. There's a big difference between how we define success and significance. And that's why I want to walk through this series as we head into a brand new year because a new year, new beginnings, resolutions, excitement, possibilities, all sorts of things that we're beginning to start to think about for 2012, and this is what I want to ask it tonight. What are you seeking for 2012? Success or significance? The next four weeks we're going to travel through the book of First John. You might not have known that John wrote some other books other than the book of John, and I thought we'd just keep the theme going because we'd been in the book of John in his prologue for about six weeks before Christmas. Tonight we come to a passage that sounds pretty similar to what we'd been reading in First John in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and we beheld his glory and the word became flesh, and we see very similar words in the passage tonight. That's because it's still the same guy, and you can use your own material. I do that from time to time, but tonight what this passage teaches us is that we can source our significance in the things of the world, or we can source our significance in a relationship with God. Simple choice that he poses with us tonight from the book of one John, we're going to go through every chapter over the next four weeks. First John chapter one verses one through two four. That which was from the beginning which we have heard and which we've seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the word of life. He's talking about Jesus, of course. The life appeared, we have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you may also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. I believe that we all desire significance, right? We all desire. No wonder some people upload crazy stuff onto YouTube. Some people go about it in the most unconventional ways. We see this at one of the, they have these annually, the Darwin Awards, the chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost his finger in a meat cutting machine and submitted a claim to his insurance company. So the company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. The guy tries the machine and he also lost his finger so the chef's claim was approved. Then there was this American teenager who was in hospital recovering from a head wound and when they asked him how he got the head wound, he said simply that he was just seeing how close he could get his head to a moving train before it hit him. Oh, there was, this guy took the cake and when he's 38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold up in Long Beach, California, the would-be Robert James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again and this time it worked. See, what I'm getting out of this is you can actually be successful quite easily. That guy was successful at pulling the trigger, it did its intention. These guys were successful, the guy who got his head close to a train, it was successful in working out how close he could get his head to a train. You can be successful quite easily but here's the thing, how can you be certain that your success won't land you in this year's episode of the Darwin Awards? This is difference between success and significance. Success can be easy, significance on the other hand is a little bit more elusive, right? And so we can approach this year in 2012 in one or two ways. We can try and derive our significance from our success or we can live successfully from a position of significance. That's where we're going to go tonight. We can either steal our significance from our success or we can live successfully from a position of significance. You see, my question to you tonight firstly, are you trying to steal your significance from your success? You see, John the writer here puts it this way that we can source our significance in either the ways of the world or in the realities of a relationship with God. There are two ways we can go about this and he puts it like that in chapter two verses five to six which was a continuation of this reading. He says, "God is light, in him there's no darkness at all and if we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and we do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sin." You see, in the context of what we're saying tonight, John is saying that we all try and steal our identity from various sources in the world around us. We try and steal identities from the world around us and to do so is a sin. Now I say sin. Why don't you talk about sin so early in the new year, Sam, a bit more positive, but I'm not talking about sin. We think of sin as bad and purer, I'm good and so sin is just bad things are good things. But sin in this context is saying when you build an identity for yourself on anything other than God, when you build a life that's drifting away from God, it's not about good or bad. And so the primary method of this theft that we have often is achievement and success. It's a Roxette principle. We get dressed for success, getting it ready for the big times, baby. I love, and I love each week when I'm getting ready to preach how God often shows me what I've got to preach on and gives me good examples of what's happening. I was catching up with a great friend of mine for lunch this week. I see him about once a year he lives in Dublin and he works for one of these top tech companies. And so he will ask him how his year was and he will say it was fantastic. The guys are strong Christian. He said it's the best you he's ever had. He got promoted. He's now to a department head. He's the youngest guy at his level in the company. And when I asked him how his relationship with God was, he was a little bit more silent on the issue. He said, you know what, Sam? It's made me realize that my own successes and my own competence in what I'm doing in my work life has meant that I don't need to rely on him as much anymore. I become too reliant on the things that I know my systems and my frameworks that the guys in MBA graduate, you know, all sorts of great grids and weighted averages and spread sheets and all sorts of stuff that he can for his decision making, but he realized in that moment he'd become too reliant on his own learnings. You see, the potential risk that achievement and success poses to us is that our sense of security and our sense of value and our sense of acceptance now becomes entirely resting on our own wisdom and strength, not God's, right? John says you can either walk in darkness, your own way, or you can walk in the light, and that is we possibly could be stealing our significance from our success from the things we do now. Come on, mate, this is a beat up. You're just beating up on people that are successful, look, I'm not trying to make the distinction to say that God is good and success is a bad thing. In fact, success is not a bad thing when you look at Joseph in the Old Testament, he was raised up and became one of Egypt's best prime ministers. We have all sorts of incredible, successful Christians in our world at the moment, Andrew Scipione, the police commissioner is a Christian. It's not that success is a bad thing. That's not what I'm trying to say here tonight. What I'm trying to say is that the question that you need to ask yourself in 2012 is not will I be successful, but why do I want to be successful? Are you seeking success in order to just be your own savior in order to stitch up your life? You're secretly saying to yourself, if I've worked hard enough, then the bank balance is going to be all right. If I look good enough, then I can be accepted. If I accomplish this, then I can prove it to my mom or dad or my friends or maybe even to myself. It's not will I be successful, but why? Because the result is a life characterized by that sort of talk to yourself. It's going to be a life characterized by fear of failure or a life characterized by pride in past successes or a life of anxiety because you're constantly going to be asking yourself, how can I keep up with it all of this? How can I keep doing all of this constantly asking yourself that and see if your significance is from your success and your success is an outworking solely of your own efforts, then your significance, what you earn for most guys get this is being driven by you. If you're getting your significance out of your own success and it's your own efforts, then your significance is being driven by you and you're constantly asking yourself, how can I keep this up? Look, there is an order of priority to success and significance that the Bible lays out right throughout its pages from Genesis through to Revelation. I call it the Jenga principle. I don't know if you've played the game Jenga, it's this funny block thing if you're in Gen Y, I'm sorry it's not digital, but it's old school, it's how we used to entertain ourselves. Jenga is this funny block game where you stack up all these blocks and you put them on the coffee table and you have to progressively take a block out of the bottom of the Jenga pile and then place it on the top and it becomes ever more increasingly unstable. So what I'm trying to say tonight is when you steal your significance out of your success, you're jingering your life, you're taking these very things that should be the foundation of your life and you're turning them upside down, you're elevating these things, you're taking these good things like influence and power and privilege and they're good things if used for God's purposes and you're elevating them to the ultimate position in your life and it's becoming increasingly unstable. You're turning good things into ultimate things and life is becoming unstable when you steal your significance from your success. You see more than anything else that significance and that success can get themselves confused in its order of priority and the Bible has set it up, set it up in this way that don't steal your significance from your success but live successfully out of your significance, you're with me. You see you can either derive your significance from your success like we said or you can do it the other way around and why is Christianity radically different in that sense? See every other major religion in the world is you're always having to go around trying to get the attention of the gods, clanging symbols, smoke, bells, whistles, prayers, sorts of stuff. You're always trying to get the gods attention Christianity is radically different because the Bible consistently teaches us that it's not a matter of us trying to get gods attention but it's actually God trying to get our attention. God paying us attention and that's what significance is. Significance is to deem something worthy of attention. You can feel it and so the gospel in that sense is God in Cindy's own son to die for us went to these incredible lengths in order to be in a relationship with us. That's what John was saying in this passage here tonight. God goes to all these lengths and it means two things if you can be in a relationship with God. It means a biblical significance is grounded in knowing your purpose and knowing your value. Biblical significance is grounded in knowing your purpose first up. It's like if you went and took brand new Lavaza, tricked out, doubled your boiler, smicked as coffee machine and you began to go and use it as a doorstop. It would work as a pretty good doorstop, wouldn't it? It would be a fantastic doorstop, it would be an ornamental doorstop but that's not its intended purpose. It's not what the designer, what the maker had intended for it and so in that sense it's being a successful doorstop but it's not a significant coffee machine, are you with me? Something that's not being used in accordance with its intended purpose and design and so what I'm trying to say tonight is a relationship with God as simple as it means, wherever you're at, whether you're a Christian for all of your life or whether you're even just trying to seek God tonight, a relationship with God means you can know your maker's intended purpose. It can mean that your life tonight doesn't have to be a Lavaza or a special machine sitting at someone's front door. You could be cranking some skinny lattes like you have never known in your life, it's what you were meant for. Let me put it this way, biblical success as a guy called Ron Jensen, Christian Guy, big into life coaching, that sort of stuff. He came up with a definition for success that I've been living with for the past five years or so and that is he says biblical success is the progressive realization of all you are meant to be and do. Success is the progressive realization of all that you are meant to be and do. I mean if I thought success in my life was being a professional basketballer, for those on the podcast, my whopping five and a half feet of height probably wouldn't give me the best chances of success. If I look at it objectively, that's probably not what God has meant for me to be and do. What is it for your life is when you move into a relationship with God, you move into a relationship with your maker and your designer and you begin to read through his manual and get his guidance through his Holy Spirit. You can know God and in knowing God discover the purposes for which you are created. But also biblical significance is grounded in knowing your value. It's grounded in knowing how much you are worth, how precious you are. My uncle Bruce, I love my uncle Bruce, he's a bit of an eccentric guy, but he, my uncle Bruce when he went into an elevator, speaking of Bob Hawke, bumps him to the man himself. He wasn't sculling a beer at the time, he was just hanging out there in the elevator and my uncle Bruce bumps into Bob Hawke and I'm thinking, "What do you say to a man like that?" My uncle, as soon as he gets up to him he says, "Mr. Prime Minister, would you mind just asking me, aren't you Bruce Haddon?" And I was a kid at the time thinking, "That's stupid uncle Bruce, you could've asked him so much you could've asked him what he was thinking when he floated the Australian dollar or something like that." But then he said, "No, it meant that every time I told that story he said I could go to people and said, 'Hey, you know what, I met Bob Hawke in an elevator once. The first thing he said to me was, 'Hey, aren't you Bruce Haddon?' We desire significance. And if significance is to desire to be worthy of attention, then it's one thing to gain the attention of someone unimportant, but to have the attention and the recommendation of someone who's ultimately important, isn't that a whole other thing? "Hey, aren't you Bruce Haddon?" I call it the gospel according to Twitter. Now, I'm not much of a Twitter user, I was feeling a bit inadequate the other day. I have seen some other pastors, one pastor has 4,333 tweets. I've got about 25. So if you want to follow me, it's not going to be the most exciting thing on Twitter at Sam Haddon. It's all there, but I'm not a Twitter user, but then when I see people who are using Twitter, apparently part of the deal with Twitter, even though I only get to use 126 characters or whatever to say, 'Hey, I'm going to the bathroom. If people want to know, I'm going to the bathroom.' But apparently the deal is you try and come up with the catchiest phrase so people will retweet you, and again, it's the same sort of concept. You can follow all sorts of celebrities. You can follow Brad Pitt. If you're Christian, you can follow John Maxwell, who's the Brad Pitt of the Christian world. You can follow all these incredible people on Twitter, and the most amazing thing apparently that could ever happen to you is if that incredible person retweets you. If they see your lowly 165 character, I've got to go to the bathroom tweet, and somehow thinks that's catchy, and retweets that on to the 165,553 users that follow them on Twitter. To be retweeted is the ultimate thing. Where am I getting at? Look, what was Jesus doing at the cross? The gospel Jesus was retweeting us. You see, if God ever owned a Twitter account, he'd sort of be a bit like Rupert Murdoch. He would be quite elusive on Twitter and not use it all that much. But I believe that God would only have one person that he would ever listen to as far as a Twitter sphere is concerned, and that is @JesusChrist. What happens at the cross is when Jesus takes on our life and our record, he takes that on, and from his account, he retweets that to the Father. And God looks at Jesus' profile and says, "If Jesus, the ultimate of the Father profiles are concerned in my life, if Jesus retweets a Michael or a Kieran or a Brad or a Sam, if Jesus has retweeted him, then, wow, that's got to be significant." It's one thing to gain the attention of someone unimportant, but to have the recommendation of one who is important is the ultimate. You know, Jesus Christ, when you place your trust in him, recommends you, the ultimate person, recommends you to the Father and says, "He is acceptable on my account." And God accepts us in that way. You can know your value. That's how valuable you are to the Father. You don't have to go around making noise, trying to get the attention of the God. God wants your attention tonight. He wants you to move into relationship with him tonight, and my question is, are you applying the gospel to every aspect of your life? Are you thinking through the implications of that gospel that, you know, John's talking about, that we're sinners, and yes, we're sinners, but it doesn't mean good or bad. It just means people that have drifted away from God, trying to run their own life, and as Luther says, we are similar, used as et peccatur. We are simultaneously more sinful than we dare imagine, but at the same time, more love than we dare believe. It's important we get the gospel, guys, because outside of the gospel, you will always steal acceptance and significance from other sources. You'll always go around the career and the friends until you get something at the very center of your, a center of gravity, something deep within you, an affirmation, a significance deep within you that extends far beyond anything else around you when you walk out your work where you will always be stealing it from other sources, and the gospel is the most affirming thing in the world. Romans 5.8 says, "But God demonstrates His own love for us in this, that whilst we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Anyone that's saying in light of the passage tonight, whilst we were bad, bad boys and girls, but whilst we were off stealing our significance from other things, Jesus, God was trying to get your attention. To be grounded in a relationship with God, guys, is to be sourced in a significance that is unchanging, unfading, unfadeable, sustainable. It means we no longer have to keep stealing it from everything else around us, but we live our lives successfully out of the significance that we see, that we have garnered the attention of the most attention-worthy person in the universe, Jesus Christ Himself. Are you living that truth tonight? That critical truth John is trying to convey in this passage, and he does that. He says, "God felt you so worthy of attention, they became human in order to be in a relationship with you. It gives you purpose. It gives you worth. Guys don't live a life that is in a espresso machine at the front door." And can you be absolutely confident that when you go into that elevator, the ultimate elevator up into the sky, wherever it might be, that when you see, not the Prime Minister, but God Himself, that the first words are out of your, out of His mouth, well, hey, it will be, "Hey, aren't you one of those ones that's in Jesus Christ?" Is it true of your life tonight? You can step into that tonight. You can own that significance tonight. You can have that wellspring within you that is going to mean all the other different things are going to distract you in 2012 are simply going to fade off into the distance. Have you got that this evening? If you want to talk to one of the ministry team, you just need to accept Jesus Christ into your life tonight. We're going to have a time for that later on. But guys, I just want to start simple. What are you desiring for 2012? Success, significance. We come at a point where we will be thinking about all sorts of decisions this year, all sorts of distractions this year. God wants you to understand your worth, God wants to understand your purpose. God wants to, and I believe in this place, He wants to build people that are successful, that are influences, that are impacting our city and our world in ways for the Kingdom of God that we can't imagine. I believe God wants us to be there, but He doesn't want our success to take us to a place where our character can't sustain us. That's why we're going to go through the book of one John. What it means to live the Christian life, what it means to know the difference between success and significance for the first four weeks of this brand new year. I pray that He might speak to you in profound ways. I pray that He might begin to change you from the inside out. I pray that if you just come in and check in all out, that you might seriously consider what it means to follow Jesus Christ this year. It may not guarantee success, but it will guarantee significance. It's available to you tonight in him, and let's pray. [BLANK_AUDIO]