Begin with the End in Mind
Stephen Covey once famously wrote…
“To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.”
— Stephen R. Covey
So if we were to begin with the end in mind today, what would that mean for us?
It might mean that we have to start by asking this question: What matters most?
What Matters Most?
Just a few weeks ago when we were in the middle of the summer heat one of our air conditioning units went out.
So I called the AC company and, you know what happened next. There was no way that they could come that day. In fact, it was going to be a few days before they could get to us. It was so hot everyone in DFW was having AC issues.
When your AC goes out in the middle of the summer in the middle of this Texas heat, you find out real quick what matters. What’s important!
Loss Reveals What Matters
More often than not, this is how it works in our lives.
LOSS reveals what matters.
When we lose something we love even if we never knew we loved it, even if we took it for granted, even if we never really thought about how much we needed it, when it’s gone… that’s when the truth of it’s importance in our lives is revealed.
So when the pandemic hit and we realized we could no longer gather safely for worship, we were quickly reminded what matters.
When we were asked to shelter in place for a few weeks and not have any contact with anyone else, we were quickly reminded of what matters.
When someone we love gets sick and the doctors inform us that it’s serious, we are quickly remind about what matters.
When we read in the headlines about innocent lives lost, we are quickly reminded about what matters.
Loss is a significant reminder of what matters.
Loss is a Source of Fear
But loss scares us. It’s a constant source of fear. In fact, it may be the primary source of all of our fear. Whenever we become afraid, it’s most often related to the fear of losing something.
It may be the fear of becoming ill because it means the loss of our health and our way of life.
It may be the fear of unemployment because it means the loss of our ability to provide for our family and live the life we planned.
It may the fear of a broken relationship because of a failed marriage or a fractured friendship and the loss of someone who is important to us.
It may be the fear of change because it means a loss of the way things used to be.
More often than not our greatest fears are tied to some kind of loss or potential loss. We’re afraid of losing something that matters to us.
Loss of Identity
And this isn’t just true when it comes to our jobs, or our families, or our health… its true in the church as well.
In fact, it was this loss of something that had mattered so much for so long for people who considered themselves the people of God that triggered so many problems the early church faced some 2000 years ago.
For thousands of years, the people of God had been identified as the people of God by the law of Moses.
Torah was, is, and always will be good. But it wasn’t sufficient. The law was insufficient because by definition law keeps a record of wrongs. But as Paul would say in another place, LOVE keeps no record of wrongs.
On this side of the cross, Paul wants these Galatian Christians and us to know that now something has happened that changes everything. Now, what matters most isn’t what happened in the clouds at Mt. Sinai, it’s what happened on the cross at Calvary. Now, it’s not the law that was given so Israel could come to God, it’s the Son of God who was given so that the world could come to God.
Jesus Changes Everything
So Paul writes to these early Christians and he says…
Galatians 5.1, 5-6; 13-14:
“So Christ has truly set us free. So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.”
What had happened for these early Jewish Christians is that their primary identity was tied up in the law of Moses. And you can understand why.
Before the Messiah came, this was how they experienced a relationship with God. But they should have known as well as anyone what had happened… the law had been given so they could be in relationship to God but it had been leveraged by those in religious power to actually keep people from God.
What was intended as a covenant and a way of life to make the people of God distinctive became a rigid list of rules to keep and laws to enforce that ended up separating people from people and ultimately people from God.
And if we’re not careful, we can do the same kinds of things with our own systems of belief.
The reason they reverted to the law is the same reason we revert to our own rules and traditions that we’ve set up. We default to what we know and what we feel like we can control.
“Fear will always try to talk us into settling for lesser things.”
— Bob Goff
Faith + Love
“For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised.”
This was the central point of the law of Moses that these Jewish Christians wanted every person, Jew or Gentile, to follow because this was a source of IDENTITY. This was what marked you as a keeper of the law of Moses and what signified that they were the people of God.
But Paul says… this is no longer what matters most. This is no longer what marks you as the people of God. Then, Paul says this… and you may want to highlight this, mark this, underline this…
“What is important is faith expressing itself in love.”
This is WHAT MATTERS MOST!
It’s your FAITH, your belief in the message about Jesus, his death, burial, and resurrection, his saving love and sacrificial love demonstrated on the cross, it’s your faith in Jesus that is lived out in that same kind of love, self-sacrificing love, for others.
THIS IS WHAT MATTERS MOST! FAITH EXPRESSING ITSELF IN LOVE.
So what matters most to you?
If Stephen Covey is right, if… “To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination,” then perhaps it might be helpful for you to imagine what you want to be true of you at the end of your life.
When all is said and done. What do you want to be know for? What matters most to you?
Maybe you’ve tended to elevate things that are not all that important to a place of primary importance in your life. And the thought of changing that causes fear to rise within you. That’s because LOSS reveals what truly matters.
And it may be that you need to lose something in order to gain something new.
Love
Ultimately, what matters most is loving others the way Christ has loved us.
How do we do that? What does faith look like expressing itself in love?
You already know the answer to that.
This is what faith looks like expressing itself in love. It’s loving others. It’s sharing with others the joy of God. It’s working for peace for the sake of others. It’s being patient with others. It’s being kind to others. It’s sharing with others the goodness of God. And the list goes on.
It’s allowing the Spirit of Jesus to work in your heart and your life to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit of Jesus in your life for the sake of others, so they may taste and see that the Lord is good!
And this is my prayer for us. That we may express our faith in love. That we won’t allow other things define us or get in the way of our primary identity. That we won’t settle for anything less than loving our neighbors so much that there isn’t anything we wouldn’t do to help them come to know Christ.
This was Paul’s primary message… Let your faith expressing itself in love be what matters most so that everyone, everywhere, can know about the great love of God revealed in Christ Jesus and so that everyone, everywhere, will have the opportunity to see that love expressed in you.
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