Page 2. money. It’s not a distraction. Love can be a diversion, a tremendous distraction to your spiritual life. If you get caught up in the romance phase of it where you’re chasing someone and you’re constantly thinking about that person, they’re on your mind 24 hours a day and you’re romancing them, trying to win them, this can be a distraction to your spiritual life. A promotion at work can be a tremendous distraction, especially if you get preoccupied with the power and the success that you have because success has the danger of taking you into the field of approbation. Once you become addicted to approbation then you get diverted from your spiritual life. Approbation, people like to approbate you and you like to hear it. You like to hear how smart you are. You like to hear how wonderful you are. You like to hear what a great job you’re doing and you wind up doing things just to get that approbation. Another thing that can cause you to be distracted and diverted from your spiritual advance is achievement. When you achieve certain heights and you get that recognition, this can cause a distraction as well. Paul talks about this in the book of Philippians and this is what I wanted to share with you today in the few moments that we have on our show. He said in Philippians 1:20, “According to my earnest expectations and my hope that in nothing shall I be ashamed but that with all boldness, as always and so now also, Christ shall be magnified in my body whether it be by life or by death.” Allow me to exegete this verse for you, to break this verse down. “According to my earnest expectations,” he said. The correct Greek word for earnest expectations as it was written in the original koine Greek is apocaradokia and this means an intense anticipation, “According to my intense anticipation.” This is nothing but Paul’s personal sense of destiny. Like Paul, you must have a personal sense of destiny. This is part of the FLOT line of your soul. If you remember me teaching this, it’s problem- solving device #6, it’s called a personal sense of destiny. When you get to this personal sense of destiny as Paul did, he left his agenda behind and now he was living to fulfill God’s will for his life. In other words, he shut the door on his past and he moved into God’s appointed future for him. Let me say that you will never ever know God’s plan for your life without learning at least some theology. Sometimes I’m heavy on theology and I have to be because the Christian faith without basic theology is usually just an exercise in emotionalism. This is not how you live the Christian life. What is this personal sense of destiny that I’m talking about? I want to go back and review it with you just a little bit so we’ll know we’re on the same page. 1. A personal sense of destiny requires us to understand the plan of God and how to utilize the provisions that God provides for us. 2. Arrogance can cause us to go down the My Way Highway and we miss God’s appointed destiny for our lives. We miss it because we justify why we do the wrong thing instead of in humility doing the right thing. Arrogance always justifies why you’re right and everyone else is wrong. For example, a woman may know the Bible says if you’re a believer, don’t marry an unbeliever but she does it anyhow because she thinks, she justifies, “Once we get married, he will change, I’ll change him.” This is not true, it’s not going to happen, 99% of time it’s just not going to happen. Unrealistic expectations are the futile function of this arrogance that I’m talking about. When you have this attitude of unrealistic expectations then you think you’re something that you’re not. You have this unrealistic self-image and if you have an End of page 2.
Page 3. unrealistic self-image you are obviously going to expect people to treat you in a way you’re not worthy of being treated. You cannot fulfill God’s plan and glorify God with the function of human power, human dynamics or human good. It doesn’t work this way. Our Lord came into this world with a personal sense of destiny. He knew what His destiny was. He even told the disciples what they could expect. In Matthew 16:21 this is what our Lord said concerning His personal sense of destiny, “From that time on Jesus began to teach His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests, and the experts of the law, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” Would you call this a personal sense of destiny? He knew why He was in the world. He knew He was going to go to the cross. He knew this and He tried to tell them this. Each one of us who believes in Jesus Christ has the option to fulfill God’s plan for our life. Our Lord fulfilled God’s plan for His life. He used the prototype spiritual life. It was the spiritual life before we ever got it. He used it first. He was the one that introduced it to us. It was through the filling of the Holy Spirit that He operated as a man. It was through His Father’s Word that He was able to defeat Satan through the temptations. These are the things that He used and left for us. Now they are ours. We have the opportunity to fulfill God’s plan for our life just like He did by using the spiritual skills or you can ignore God’s plan and you can get diverted and put other things as priority in your life like marriage and children and job and family and recreation and everything because you’re having such a wonderful time in life. Oh, you’ll find a little time for God on Sunday. You will be one of those nod to God crowd type people, one of those caricatures of Christ. You’ll show up and say, “Hello God” and “Goodbye God” and “See you next Sunday God.” In Matthew 22:5 Jesus, speaking to the Sadducees and the Pharisees, used a parable about a king and a wedding feast said this, “They paid no attention when they were invited to the wedding feast and they went their way, one to his own farm and another to his own business.” This is kind of the way it is today. Most people pay no attention to the claims of God’s Word, to the teaching of God’s Word. They go about their own way, back to their own business, to their own farm, to their own house, and live life the way they want to live it. If you love God, if you have a personal love for God, then this love mandates that you obey Him. Here’s what 1 John 5:3 says, listen very carefully, “This is the love of God, that we keep His mandates and His mandates are not a burden.” This means God is not going to ask you to do something you’re not capable of doing. He’s not going to put you in over your head. As a matter fact in 1 Corinthians 10:13 He tells you that you’re not going to be tested more than you can stand. I’ve been watching a show called The Selection on television. It’s a reality show. It’s about some civilians who want to go through SEAL training and Special Forces training to see if they can endure it. The whole deal is to break them and send them home, the weak ones that can’t handle it. Out of all of the ones that started I think there may be only five left on what I’m watching right now. Most people just can’t handle it. If you love God, the question is can you handle it? See, if you love Him, He’s not going to ask you to do something that’s going to destroy you. He’s not going to put you to such a test that you can’t handle it and try to break you. In fact Jesus said in Matthew 11:30, listen to these words, “My End of page 3.
Page 4. yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Does this sound like something you cannot do? If you want to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, if you want to grow in spiritual maturity, if you want to replicate His life, and you want to bring maximum glory to God, then you must love Him, but you can’t love Him if you don’t understand Him. How could you have any reciprocal love motivation for a God that you don’t even know? You have to learn some theology. You have to learn His plan. You have to learn how His plan works, that He has a destiny for you. This destiny for you, as Paul said “It’s my earnest expectation,” is so far over and so far beyond anything that you could ever ask for or even anticipate or imagine in your life. That’s how great it is. If I gave you a piece of paper and I said, “Write down what you think would make you happy,” and you did, you would not even get close to what God has for you. His destiny for you is so far beyond what you can imagine. You have been given a portfolio of invisible assets. These assets which you have will help you fulfill God’s plan in your life. They are invisible assets. If you don’t use the divine resources He gives you this guarantees you will never live your full potential as a believer. At best you’re going to come to your grave frustrated over failed opportunities. On occasion we wish for our hardships to be removed, don’t we? We get sick, we go through financial hardships, health hardships, or family hardships and we just yearn for them to go away. Paul endured this in 2 Corinthians 12:8-9. You can read this for yourself. Paul is asking for this hardship that God has allowed into his life to be removed. It’s called a thorn in the flesh and he’s praying three different, separate times for God to remove it. Every time God kept saying, “No, no, no.” Listen to what he says. “For this thing I besought the Lord three times that it might be taken from me. And He said unto me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ [Paul’s response was this] Most gladly then will I glorify in my afflictions so that the power of Christ may rest on me.” Here we have it, his personal sense of destiny. Not only does God have a plan for his life and for your life but God equipped him and God will equip you with invisible assets. There are at least 40 things He gives us at the moment of salvation. God dumps out on you phenomenal invisible assets and they’re all designed for one thing, to bring Him maximum glory through your life as you advance, grow, and replicate the life of Christ. Paul says, “It is my earnest expectation that I not be diverted [that I not get off track, and then he says these words], and my hope.” This is not hope like you use the word. This word means confident expectation. Expectations and hopes are our projection into the future. You may say, “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow.” This is not what this word hope means here. The Greek word here is elpis and it means confident expectation. The job that we have to do is to turn it into absolute expectation. When we have a personal sense of destiny we have confident expectations and as we grow spiritually that morphs into absolute expectations about our eternal life. God said, “These things are written so that you might know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). We are confidently, absolutely expecting eternal life We have confident expectations about our spiritual destiny and what we face as believers in the angelic conflict as the war we’re in the middle of rages on, and we’re trying to replicate the life of Christ. It’s important that you remember this. When you have a personal sense of destiny, you have hope and confident End of page 4.
Page 5. expectations. The unbeliever has no confidence, no expectations. Listen to Ephesians 2:12. “That at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Having no hope means no confident expectations. Paul went on to say, “I am looking forward to, I am having confidence in.” Let me read it again, “According to my earnest expectation and my hope that in nothing shall I be ashamed,” nothing in any phase of his spiritual life. You have three aspects to your spiritual life. The mental aspect, the spiritual life is lived in your mind. Your soul is between your ears, you do know this. The body is going to go back to the ground and it’s going to be turned back into dust, but your soul and your spirit are going to go to heaven. You are going to get a new body and you will take your knowledge to heaven with you. The mental aspect of the Christian life is very important. You do not want to be afraid. You do not want to commit mental attitude sins of worry and jealousy. You do not want to go into these areas. Paul said, “I’m confident that in nothing will I be ashamed” [not in the way I think]. It is very easy when you suffer the hardships that Paul did to get to feeling sorry for yourself. If you ever read in Acts about what he went through, you will wonder how did he do this? He never complained. He never felt sorry for himself. He handled it with God’s grace. Then the physical aspect of the spiritual life is real as well. Just as you must stay in shape physically to live, work, and survive in the devil’s world, there is a physical aspect to your spiritual life also. Staying in shape and trying to keep yourself from getting too overweight, trying to be able to stay awake and study, it’s important. It’s important that you are able to handle yourself so that, “In nothing [not mentally, not emotionally, not physically] shall be ashamed.” This Greek word ashamed is the word aischuno and it means to be disfigured or to be dishonored. He never wants to be dishonored or disfigured. There is a shame that can cause you fear and stop you from doing something, there’s a shame like this. Are you ashamed to bow your head and pray over your meal? Is this you? Can you do this or would you be ashamed if someone asked you to pray publicly? Would this cause you to be afraid and then stop you from praying out loud in public? Would you be ashamed that someone would say, “There’s one of those stupid Christians over there bowing his head and praying?” That’s the shame I’m talking about, the shame that causes fear and stops you from doing something you should be doing. Are you ashamed to bow your head, to pray over your meal in a public place? Are you ashamed to be seen reading the Bible? Are you ashamed to be associated with “right-wing Christians” that some people may consider crazy because of what they believe, “those Bible thumpers.” There is also a shame that arises from something that you did. This kind of shame is what we call guilt. It’s possible that maybe you did something as a believer, maybe in the past, and even though you rebounded, you named the sin to God but you keep going back to that skeleton in the closet, open the door and look at it. You have the shame, you have this guilt, the shame that arises from something you did and it can overwhelm you. Satan will use this against you if you don’t put it behind you. Don’t look back at your failures, focus on your progress. Look ahead at what God has for you. Satan is good at laying a guilt trip on you. God’s not going to lay a guilt trip on you. If you go to Him and admit the sin, 1 John End of page 5.
Page 6. 1:9 says “He is faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from it.” It only takes one time. It doesn’t take you having to do penance to make it up to God, it’s not the way the Christian life works. There could be a shame that arises when your past guilt overwhelms you. There’s another shame and that’s the shame at the appearance of Christ. In 1 John 2:28, “And now little children, abide in Him that when He shall appear we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming.” You want to hear, “Well done My good and My faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21). You don’t want to hear “Have a seat over there and I’ll get to you in a few hundred years.” You want to be able to look Jesus Christ your Lord in the eye and you want Him to look you in the eye. You want to know you hid nothing from Him. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Yes, you were a human. Yes, you had a sin nature. Yes, you failed, but you always confessed your sin when you failed and you always got up and you drove on. You moved on. You stuck with God’s Word, you never abandoned doctrine, you didn’t get distracted after your conversion. You hung in there. This is what God is looking for so that you don’t have to stand there with your head down being ashamed that you did not fulfill God’s plan and you wasted your time since you became a believer. Oh, there is so much more to talk about in this. We’ll have to come back next week and go a little more in-depth with it. I hope it’s clicking. I hope it’s making sense to you. I care about you. We’re on this show every Sunday. God always provides our needs. I love hearing from you. I love hearing from you that call and write, those of you that are listening in cities that I’ve never heard of and in small towns. Thank you for encouraging me and letting me know that you’re out there. We drive on in a New Year complemented by the grace of God, sustained by the grace of God, thanking Him for the privilege of serving you in Christ’s name. This is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening. End of page 6.
