Becoming All Things

Empty me. Fill me. Use me. 

What if the key to reaching the people around you started with a simple three-line prayer? This message unpacks how Paul's radical approach to connecting with wildly different people can inspire all of us to slow down, show up, and let God do something wonderful through our ordinary lives. Spoiler: you're going to mess it up — and that's actually the best news you'll hear all week.

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Glenys Freeman 0:00

The sermon text reading for today is First Corinthians nine chapters nineteen through twenty-seven. You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page seventeen forty-one. Please listen as I read God's word. Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone. To win as many as possible. To the Jews, I became like a Jew. To win the Jews. To those under the law, I became like one under the law. Though I myself am not under the law. So as to win those under the law. To those not having the law, I became like one not having the law. Though I am not free from God's law, but am under Christ's law. So as to win to those not having the law. To the weak, I became weak. To win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel. That I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run? But only one gets the prize. Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last. But we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore, I do not run like someone running aimlessly. I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No. I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave. So that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.

Dave Hammond 3:04

It's good to have uh a Sunday morning with you all. Glennis, thank you very much for reading. If you are new to the room or if you're watching us online for the first time, my name is Dave. I am uh I get to serve as a director of Next Gen Ministries here at Elmwood. Let me be another voice that says, Welcome. It's good to have you here with us. As a part of my role as a director of Next Gen Ministries, one of the things I do is I get the chance every once in a while, as we all leave the sanctuary. Uh, we gather with the the kiddos and the students that stay in the room here during the sermon. We go down to classroom B and we we have a conversation, we debrief the service and specifically the sermon. We call it our next gen sermon debrief. Two weeks ago, after John's sermon, we we went down and we did a recap of the sermon for the youth who were serving in children's sermon time and the nursery because they wanted to know what John was talking about. We told them that we were back in 1 Corinthians, otherwise known as this week on how not to run a church. And we said John had talked about the fact that it was important to give up his rights as a free man and free men or women in Christ, and instead engage in radical self-giving love. I explained that John had asked us to maybe consider our schedules might be a little too full. And out of love, we may need to remove things from our schedule for the purpose of giving yourself to someone else so that Christ might be formed in them. The question he asked was, What am I willing to lay down so that Christ may be formed in others? And the eruption that I got to watch in the room. Hey now, hear me out. It's not that bad, I promise. It might have been my daughter. Uh I was not picking on her. John wasn't picking on me when he said that sermon. John was identifying something that's true in our culture. It's true that we we run at 1,500 miles an hour as fast and as hard as we can. We fill our schedule full of anything everything, and then we try to downshift super fast so that we can connect with people around us. Luckily, those people are also flying at 1,500 miles an hour, so it's okay. Kind of. But then we try to slam in there into our schedules somehow, some time with Jesus, and we end up praying prayers like Lord Jesus Christ, risen Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner. Amen. Okay, what's next? It's a good prayer. If that's the sum total of your relationship with Jesus, you're gonna end up with problems. John's sermon two weeks ago hit me between the eyes as I looked at my schedule. I know it probably hit some of you between the eyes as well, but I bring it up because this week's passage is kind of a continuation from the thought from that passage. The passage we read that week could have ended, or the sermon from two weeks ago could have ended with to be continued, or Paul will return in exploring the life-giving way of Jesus. That week we talked about emptying our schedules and laying down our rights for the sake of others. This week, as we look at our passage today, we're gonna see the life-giving way of the cross on display once again in the way that Paul fills up his life in a new way to live, and also how God uses that new life. Before we dive in, could you please pray with me? Lord, your word encourages us to value others above ourselves. Tells us to look after the interest of others and to ultimately have the same mindset of Christ Jesus. Jesus, we know this is hard. And so we ask you once again for help. We thank you that we have this chance to interact with one another and to be your hands and feet to each other as we journey on this life. Father God, we ask you, please prepare our hearts and minds to worship you as we listen to your word. Holy Spirit, I ask, convict us today once again of our need for you. God, thank you for showing us your love by sending your son, the second person of the triune God, to die that we may live. Lord, empty me, fill me, use me. We love you, Jesus. Amen. As I alluded to, we're kind of in the middle of a sermon series looking at the letter we call 1 Corinthians. It's a letter from Paul, who was an early church planter in the Jesus movement, a follower of Jesus, and it's sent to the church in Corinth. This is not the first letter that was exchanged between these two, but is the earliest we have in the Corinthian correspondence. The letters between Paul and this church. This letter always gives me so much hope. It gives me so much hope because I'm a sinner in need of saving by God. I'm a sinner in need of God's grace, and I still mess up. And when I read this letter, and I start reading this letter, and it starts with Paul and our brother Sosthenes to the church of God in Corinth. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. Paul goes on to name some incredibly ugly sins that are present in this community, but he starts by thanking God. He starts by wishing them grace and peace. I may be a mess. We may be a mess. We have a ways to go before we catch up with Corinth. But one of the things that is true is that if God Paul wrote a letter to us, he would start by thanking God for us. And he would desire for grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ to be made manifest here in our church and in our cities. And so it gives me hope. It gives me hope because in some way that that church in Corinth is going before us, boldly going where no one's gone before. And so we can learn from their mistakes. We can learn and say, oh, we can we can join the life-giving way of Jesus because Paul is helping them, and the way that Paul helps them, in some way, he's helping us as well. Now, uh anyone who's spent any amount of time uh in ministry with me knows that I like my two-word phrases. I like my two-word phrases here at Elmwood, better together, gospel witness, ordinary obedience. You hear these uh week after week from me. Even uh, what is it, being with God, that's the fourth one. It sounds like three words, but it's really two, right? Being with God. Uh two? No. Uh those are for church. In marriage, there's super important two-word phrases. We've got I do, yes, ma'am, I'm sorry. Marriage set. Gentlemen, take notes. That's all you need. Ready to go. Uh, in Bible study, you get God is, I am, I will. That's all you need. You got Bible study down for you. There's a pattern with this Dave that's standing up here. Uh, I need to keep it simple, sweetie. Like I need, I need some simpleness in my life. I need two word phrases to help me. And as I was studying this passage that we're looking at today, I was looking over and reading it again. I found uh it kept reminding me of a simple prayer that I'd heard recently. Often as we we hear songs and hymns and listen to the prayers of others who've gone before us, or as we read the scriptures, those songs and hymns and prayers will come to our minds because the people that wrote them were reading the same Bible we are. And the prayer that kept floating into my mind has been made famous by Mother Olga. She's the founder of the daughters of Mary of Nazareth, and a person who some are calling our generation's Mother Teresa. The prayer is simple. God empty me. God fill me, God use me. Amen. If I could sum up John's sermon from two weeks ago, the one I already talked about, I would use the phrase, empty me. Don't trample over each other as you exercise your rights. Allow yourself to be emptied. Follow the pattern of Paul, who follows the example of Jesus, who emptied themselves for your sake. What does Dave need to lay down so that Christ can be formed in others? How does Dave need to be emptied? It was a call for me to downshift. You got it? Thank you, Kevin. See, this this totally works. We just needed a downshift. Get out of the rat race. We don't need everything to be perfect. We need to see our brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. So we need to slow down. We need to see that our neighbors are chasing after Jesus, even though they may not know it yet. We need to see the way that our frantic pace of life is affecting those closest to us. We need to turn off the afterburners and be emptied of ourselves so that God can do something wonderful with us. Seriously, the sermon was wonderful. Go listen to it online. I highly encourage you. But think, empty me. This is where Paul jumps in this week to guide us on the way to follow the life-giving way of Jesus. Once we've allowed God to empty us, he starts to fill our lives back up. God empty me, God fill me. The example Paul sets before us, the example of someone following Christ, is once we're emptied by God, he fills us with an incredible love for him. And out of that love flows a love for our neighbors. So that the process of reaching out to them doesn't feel like a burden, but rather it's a privilege all of a sudden. Paul talks about this process in this way in verse 19. Though I am free, I belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone. Paul undertakes this incredible task. He tries to adopt the cultures and practices of others around him. He commits himself to being filled with these new ideas, this new way of life because of his devotion to Jesus. Paul then goes on to name somewhere between three and five groups, depending on how you count them, that all need to know about King Jesus, all need to know about a new way of life. The five groups that I count, the Jews, those under the law, those not having the law, those that are weak, and then in the end, Paul just does everyone else. Culturally speaking, uh it those who do not have the law and those who have the law, those those who have read the Hebrew scriptures and those who have never read the Hebrew scriptures are gonna be pretty different. They're gonna be different, and yet Paul found a way to study their way of life, their practices, and become like them for the sake of spreading the good news about Jesus. In order for us to just consider how do we maybe apply that for today, we're gonna do a little story time with Dave. That's I I would invite you all down for a children's sermon, sit down on front, but you can stay in your pews. I'll stay standing. My knees hurt a little bit too much today. Um I grew up, story time with Dave, I grew up in West Bloomington. Uh it was it was not prestigious West Bloomington, that was the other side of the park, but I grew up in West Bloomington in an upper class, middle suburbanite home. I was born in New Jersey, yes. For those of you that know me, there's a little East Coast in me, but I grew what Bloomington was my home. As I prepared to plant a church in my late 20s and thinking, where does God have me? Where does God want me to reach out to to help people know and follow Jesus? I realized I wanted to reach a different people group than I had known while I was a kid. I wanted to reach blue-collar workers in northeast Minneapolis, was where we landed, and I knew I was gonna have to fill my way of life with something new in order to reach this new, different group of people. And so I ended up with a job at UPS in Northeast Minneapolis working the midnight shift. I learned the ways of the city. My wife and I had bought a house in South Minneapolis just off of Lake Street. At UPS, I learned the ways of a union shop and also how not to ever sleep again. Those of you that have worked the second or third shift know exactly what I'm talking about. I picked up some language at the union shop that I'm sure would not communicate the same ideas to back in my hometown. I tried my best to pick up the cultural practices of people I was trying to reach to the UPSer. I became like a UPSer. I gotta tell you, when I planted my church in Northeast about a decade ago, I was nowhere as near as good as Paul is. Let's just be clear. But it doesn't really matter how good of a job I did. Each of us has people in our lives, in our spheres of influence, that they do life, they have slightly different cultural practices than us. They do life slightly differently, but through those people you can reach out with the love of God. But in order to, we need to spend time getting to know them and how they interact with the world. To the people of Arden Hills, become like one from Arden Hills. We need to be filled with their culture in some ways. To the people of Columbia Heights, become like one from Columbia Heights. We need to consider their ways and how they're different from our ways. To the people of New Brighton, we need to become like people from New Brighton. We need to learn their language and their daily rhythms. To the people of Roseville, become like one from Roseville. We need to be curious about the people around us. To the people of Minneapolis, become like one from Minneapolis. We need to be close to the lost people in our lives. To the people of Fridley, become like one from Fridley. We need to meet people where they are and not expect them to come to us. To the people of St. Anthony, we need to become like one from St. Anthony. We need to figure out how we can become like them so that we can witness to them about King Jesus. Doesn't matter if you're living in Blaine or in Spring Lake Park or in St. Paul, even. As a Minneapolis person, that hurts a little bit. But even the St. Paul people in the room, I love you. To the people of wherever God has planted you, become like those people so that you might save some. We need to be emptied by God so that we can be filled by Him with the love for our neighbors, so that the process of learning their ways of life doesn't feel like a burden, but rather it's a privilege. Let's be clear. Just because we may be filled with God's love for our neighbors who live differently than we do, that does not mean that the process of being filled with this new way of life is going to be easy. Paul talked about the process of becoming like others to communicate the good news of the gospel to them in the language that they would understand. He uses language that's intense physical training. He talks about runners and boxers and strict training and striking blows to his body. Any runner in the room will tell you that physical pain that they have when they tie up their shoes for the first time after way too long of not going out on the trails. Even in youth group, we'll have people at the beginning of track season, oh, my legs hurt so much. While runners might be able to enter a zone eventually where they're doing more meditation than running, there's an incredible amount of ice and time and energy and consistency and self-discipline that it takes. And it's not for this faint of heart. The other example, boxers. I have to be honest, I don't completely understand boxing or uh MMA or jujitsu or sumo wrestling. I understand the rules. I get it. I understand the rules. Um I have all the respect in the world for people who engage in those sports. Uh they're doing something and that they train for them. They're doing something that I know I can't do with my body. It's impressive and awe-inspiring, but uh the thing I don't get, why are we beating on each other until one of us has a traumatic brain injury? It just doesn't, it doesn't quite make sense to me. But I know those athletes are engaging in something incredible. They're in control of their bodies in ways that are awe-inspiring. They know exactly what they should and shouldn't eat. They know exactly how many push-ups they should do, how many hours of jump rope they need to engage in. They know exactly how to position their bodies in order to survive and win. Do we have that same kind of purpose? That same kind of resolve as we try to reach people with the greatest news we've ever heard. Paul had a certain dedication to his craft. Do we? Paul trained himself to share the good news. He emptied himself of his rights as an apostle. He allowed God to fill him with love for those who are culturally different from him, and then he reached out and has allowed his life to be changed and filled with a new way to be human, loving others by adopting their cultural practices so that he could tell them the good news. Guys, you're a sinner in need of saving by God. Are we there? All with the goal that others might be saved. He wanted to be used by God. If you're the kind of person that underlines things in your Bible, uh, I want to suggest that you go ahead and underline 1 Corinthians 9 22. The passage says, I have become all things to all people, so that by all possible means I might save some, so that by all possible means I Might save some. All that cultural study, getting ready to enter into life with a different group of people, becoming like the other people that were wildly different from Paul and how Paul grew up was for the other people's sake. He saw people running straight at a cliff and then ran to join them and beg them stop, turn, follow Jesus. Paul heard the good news about Jesus and then was transformed from the inside out and wanted to be used by God for the rest of his life so that by all possible means some might be saved. Now, when I talk about evangelism and I talk about reaching out to people with this good news, there are some of you in the room that might be a bit intimidated by that concept. You may have experienced a way of doing evangelism that uh some might label more arguing people into the kingdom of God. I don't know if any of us have experienced that in the past. That's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about the kind of evangelism that is motivated by kindness and love and the mercy of God. Paul's letter to Titus, one of his proteges, says, uh, says this in chapter three When the kindness and love of God, our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. The righteous things we do, all the emptying, the filling, all of the learning other people's cultures, the becoming like a UPSer to save UPSers and to tell them about Jesus, the early morning Bible reading, the hours spent in prayer, the volunteering at a church to the serving, the widows, the orphans, all of our actions do not save us. God saves us because of his mercy. He extends to us grace that we do not deserve. He loves us even while we are still sinners. And it is out of a heart of gratitude and an excitement for his love and grace that evangelism flows. While there might be some that were have been intimidated by evangelism for seeing the arguing into the kingdom of God, I know there are our souls, those of you in the room, that as I say, as I say things like, empty me, fill me, use me, there's there's a way that your heart resonates with that song. There's a way that you can feel a stirring within your chest as the Spirit of God vibrates a chord. It it gives you this energy and this passion that you can't quite ignore. And it only the only way to explain it is to say it was a spiritual moving. I learned from King Jesus, my Savior, that out of an overflow of my heart, my mouth will speak. I learned from a guy named Dave Lindy, who's a leader in the Evangelical Free Church of America, that oftentimes uh the overflow of a full heart will pour out through the tears that fall from your eyes. If you've been filled with the love of God, if your heart has truly been changed, I encourage you, out of an overflow of your heart, speak the good news to others. If your heart's singing as God works in you, allow the tears of gratitude to flow from your eyes so that the world can see our good God that is changing you. Every single one of us is called by God to reach other people with the good news that God demonstrated his love for us, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Every single one of us has a different part to play. Every single one of us has a way we can interact with our neighbors to tell them about who Jesus is. And so I'm not going to stand up here and say, This is exactly what you need to do. This is exactly what you need to do. This is exactly what you need to do. Because all of us are different. But I will invite you to join with the rest of the Elmwood family that we might invite all people into the life-giving way of Jesus so that some might be saved. And I'll encourage you that maybe, maybe the first step in the process is likely found in something somewhat of a simple prayer. It might be found by praying a prayer as simple as, Lord, empty me. Lord, fill me, Lord use me. Amen. I actually I want us today. I told you I wasn't gonna tell you exactly what to do, but I want us today to practice. We're we're gonna do a little practice today. Uh, we're gonna do this together in the next gen ministry world. We use the phrase, our our hands we fold, our heads we bow. So we can talk to God right now. This is this is how we do. This morning, I'm gonna, we're not gonna do that. Uh sorry guys, I apologize. I know, keep it simple, but we're gonna do something different. This morning, I want to invite you to take a slightly different posture. I'm gonna invite you to close your eyes and bow your heads, but I'm gonna invite you to hold your hands open on your laps. There's nothing special about this posture of opening your hands, but sometimes what we do with our bodies, they help remind our minds what we want in our spirit. And so please, everyone, now I ask you, please just close your eyes, bow your heads, and open your hands and pray with me. Lord, empty us. Lord, fill us. Lord use us. Amen. Before I invite you to communion, we uh I want to share some incredible news. Uh we just prayed a really, really big prayer. Like that prayer, that's gonna change things. I know, and I don't know what it is, but it's super exciting because we prayed a really big prayer and we have a really, really big God. Uh, so the best news that I could ever share with you right now, the best thing that I could ever tell you is this news, you're gonna mess it up. Yes, yes, thank you. Yes, this is the best news. As you try to be emptied, try to be filled, try to be used by God, you are going to make mistakes. The reason that I'm telling you that you're a sinner and that's the best news you could ever hear is that I know a God who loves and saves sinners. The elements that are at this table, they're a physical representation of the broken body of Jesus, broken so that broken people can be made whole. The blood of Jesus shed for the forgiveness of the sins of sinners who are trying to be emptied, trying to be filled, trying to be used and missing the mark over and over and over again. This morning, as I invite you to the table, don't let any sin in your life stop you from coming. Instead, let the grace and the mercy and the love of God invite you to the table because he has overcome your sin. And he has called you his child. Each week we come to the communion table as a physical demonstration of our empty state before God, as a way to remind ourselves that we need to be filled by him, and as a way to commit with our feet as we walk down the aisle, as a way to commit with our hands as we receive the element, with as we commit with our very bodies to be used by him as we head out back out into the places where we live, work, learn, and play. And so, as I invite you to the communion table, let's take just a few moments of silent confession and reflection as we prepare our hearts to worship God through communion.