What Defines You?

Can I ask you, brothers and sisters? I'm sure you've all heard the saying. Maybe you've used the expression that something is your life. Maybe in your thinking or in your life, you could say my wife is my life, or my hobby is my life, or my job is my life, or whatever that may be for you. What do we mean with that expression that this something or this somebody is my life?

I think what we mean with this is that that thing that we identify as being the thing or the cause that gives meaning to our lives, that gives inspiration to our lives. That's this is what drives us. This is what we put the majority of our time and our love and our effort into. That thing is what you can define as this is my life. What is it for you?

What is it that defines you? And today, we can also probably ask, what is it that defines a Naran Community Church? What do people read when they see your life or the life of your church? In decades further down the line, what will Naran Community Church, what will you be remembered for? If ever your name and your history would be recorded somewhere, what will the essence of it be?

I don't think I'm far off the mark if I say that most of us would like to be remembered as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. Am I right? I'm pretty sure that everyone here would say we would love for Naran Community Church to, in years to come, be remembered for a church that's faithfully served the Lord Jesus Christ. I suspect that most of us would like to say that God is our life, that being a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ is what we would like to be the thing that defines us. I think most of us would like to be able to stand up here and give a testimony kind of like this.

I know that the Lord rescued me from my sin and eternal death as a consequence of my sin. So because Jesus rescued me and he bought me to be free, I now belong to Him, and I now give my life to Him. It is Jesus Christ who provides me with everything I need both now and for eternity. It is the Lord that puts the food on my table. The Lord that gives me the strength to be able to provide for my family.

It is the Lord who heals me when I'm ill. It is He who picks me up when I'm weak and down in spirit. So, yes, God is my life, and I want to praise Him, and I want to serve Him. I want to walk closer to Him every day until one day I can be in His presence forever. And until that day, I want to tell about His goodness to me day by day to everybody I could.

Would this be a kind of testimony that most of us could relate to? If this is something you feel you can agree with, it is indeed very good. And I say it is, if it is something that we want to agree with. Because if you're like me, brothers and sisters, then you'll have to confess that this kind of testimony for most of us is more like a wish than a reality, isn't it? There is that weakness of the flesh in us that Paul talks about, that there are certain things that we want to do.

Yes. We really, really want to do it. God knows in our hearts. We want to be people of this nature, of this. But when people read our lives, they don't see that quite as clearly, do they?

So there are the things that we want to do, but we do not do it. And this, of course, translates to the reality that even servants of the Lord Jesus Christ fail. Because if you say, this is what Jesus is to me, and this is how I want to live for Him in gratitude for what He's done for me and for who He is, then we have to confess that we all fail. As servants of Jesus, as followers of Jesus, we fail. One of those followers of the Lord, one of those faithful servants of the Lord who failed was King Hezekiah.

In Second Kings chapter 18, you can go read this at home maybe if you want. It is said about King Hezekiah that he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, that he followed God, and God was with him, and God blessed him. So Hezekiah was one of those few kings of Israel that walked faithfully most of the time before the Lord. One of those kings that God appreciated as a king of His people. It is said about him that there was no king as righteous as him before him or after him.

What an accolade is that? Yet even this remarkable King Hezekiah failed. God has blessed him so much during his life. That's why I read those both of those chapters. God has blessed him so much throughout his life and in his office as king over God's people.

The story of Hezekiah's life was basically, God has been gracious to me. And this, brothers and sisters, this testimony that God is God, that He is good, and that He saves, I think, is the testimony that God wants to see proclaimed from the lips of Hezekiah. This is what God wanted Hezekiah to say and to testify about because he has experienced God's goodness in many ways, and God wants him to be open about it, be bold about it. In fact, Hezekiah, when he got sick, understood that this was the purpose of his existence. This is why God made him, and this is why God put him in that position.

This is why God blessed him so immensely so that he would speak of the goodness of God. He knew that this was what he was alive for. But, unfortunately, this was not, as we said before, what he lived for. Do you see the difference? This was why Hezekiah was alive for, but that was not what he lived for.

It turned out that his priority was not to bear fruit for God, but only to consume the fruit of God's goodness to him. You see when Hezekiah got ill, he said to God, Lord, I am in the prime of my life. Maybe, you know, maybe he was in his mid-thirties, early forties. I'm in the prime of my life, Lord. Are you really going to rob me of the rest of my life?

Go read that chapter again. This is what Isaiah said to God. Verse 10, are you going to rob me of the rest of my life? And he pleaded really hard with God not to let him die. And then God heard his prayer and gave him another fifteen years to live.

Afterwards, Hezekiah acknowledged that in hindsight, it was a good thing that God did this to him. It sort of woke him up a bit. He taught him that there is that he was here to praise God. He learned that the reason why he was alive was so that he could tell about the goodness of God. In verses eighteen and nineteen of chapter 38, he says, for the grave cannot praise You.

Death cannot sing Your praise. Those who go down to the pit cannot hope for Your faithfulness. The living, the living, they praise You as I am doing today.

This is Hezekiah saying the same thing as what we have talked about a few moments ago. We know that God is good, don't we? We know God is good. We know that He saves, and we know that He alone saves. We have seen His plan of salvation unfold through history until it culminated at the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross where He saved you and me from our sins and the consequences of our sins.

For Hezekiah, the shape that God's mercy took on was not Jesus on the cross at that time. For him, it was to be healed from that disease that was going to kill him and the gift of another fifteen years added to his life. And in those fifteen years, God says, the children that were going to be born to you, you know, later on was going to go into exile. But so he got more time to live, and he was going to have children still. But in Christ, God has shown us, you and I, the ultimate healing of the disease of sin.

And for those who come to Christ in repentance and faith, God has a complete healing from all our sins and an extension of life, not just fifteen years on earth, but for eternity with Christ in heaven. We know that the response God is now waiting for from us is a jubilant response of praise. We're alive, and we will live forevermore because of the atoning work of Christ. But what happens when we are tested? What happens when God comes along to this fig tree and look for the fruit that testifies about the goodness of God?

It happened to Hezekiah, and he failed. And I'm wondering whether what your thinking is. Do you fail to produce the fruit that God wants from you? That testimony of His goodness. God tells us here in this passage.

It's a very interesting scenario. It's like a drama that plays off here. And God wrote this script very carefully and cleverly. He tells us that he tested Hezekiah when those people from Babylon came to ask him about this miracle that happened, that he was healed. What is amazing here to see is that lost people, the people from Babylon, people who do not know God, they come to a man who has tasted and who has experienced the grace and the mercy of God and how God's grace and mercy has changed his life.

People who don't know God comes to this kind of man and ask him, what has happened to you? Who's done this to you? From what they have heard, this God that Hezekiah serves must be a wonderful God, and they want to find out more about Him. I don't know. Maybe they had a burning desire to find real meaning in life.

And Hezekiah has an opportunity to just tell his story and point these people to the one and only God who can really save, but he doesn't. He talks, get this. He talks about himself. He shows them his riches and his splendour, what he has accomplished in his life. It's like the tree that Jesus used in the parable in Luke 13.

God has invested so much in this man, so much love, so much patience, so much mercy and grace. He's blessed him so richly. God has prepared him to be such a great witness for Him, to bear such wonderful fruit as a witness for God, but nothing. I don't know if I'm reading too much into this text, but I think it could easily have been the case of God saying to Hezekiah, okay. I have healed you.

I've been so gracious to you, but you don't seem to want to go out and tell people. So I'll bring people to you so you can tell them. But even then, Hezekiah failed. Why? Because his pride got in the way.

Remember, I'm the king. Come see what I have done and accomplished. He had a false sense of security that his position and his accomplishments meant something. And even after the prophet Isaiah came and told him that all his riches that he had and that he's so fond of, even that was now going to be taken away from him. And then you cannot believe this.

Then, chapter 39 closes with the thoughts of King Hezekiah. He thought, she'll be right. There'll be peace in my lifetime. Others can deal with the problem. If you were this fig tree that Jesus walked past, what would His observation be of you?

In fact, let's be real about this, folks. Each one of us, you and I, each one of us represents a fig tree this morning. If you believe that Jesus is your Saviour, if you believe that the one whose birth, whose incarnation we celebrated a week ago, the purpose of that incarnation was to become your Saviour, then much grace has already been poured out into your life. Just like yesterday and Friday and Thursday and Wednesday and last month and last year, Jesus, gardener of the garden in which you stand, is and was walking past you and past this congregation looking for fruit, anticipating that this tree that He has nourished so richly and that He has watered and protected and provided for day by day for the last, however long, which surely have some fruit for Him to enjoy. And so as He, Jesus, stops here this morning, whether it be looking from the back or looking here from the front over His church or sitting next to you and looking down into your heart, searching your thoughts and attitudes, what would He find?

Even though the fruit that the Lord expects to see in us could be defined as many things, witnessing and bringing others to Him is surely one of them, isn't it? Our Lord did tell us in Matthew 28 that He wants us to go ahead and make disciples. And sometimes He even brings those people to us that we could make disciples of. How is it with us? How is it with you as an individual?

How is it with you as a church? Are you discipling? Dominic Steele from Christians in the Media in Sydney, an author of the evangelism course introducing God. I don't know if you know introducing God. It's a very, very good evangelism course.

He says that by their behaviour, you can see what really matters to someone. So if you look at someone's life, you just observe them living or whatever, and you can very quickly see what matters most to them. And then applying this to us as Christians and the mission we have to go and make disciples, Dominic says, you can tell how much something that is lost matters to the seeker by looking at the behaviour of the one who is seeking. In other words, you can tell by what we do what really matters to us. And so in closing, I'd like to suggest three practical things we could do to be better witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ in the year ahead of us.

I mean, isn't it? Every New Year, we sit down kind of with a clean slate, and we review our plans and goals, and we hope and pray that we'll be able to reach them for the glory of Christ. Here's three suggestions that I would put to us. First of all, pray that God will give us a heart for the lost, that God will make our hearts really hurt when we think about those who do not know Him and those who do not know His glorious salvation. Let's pray that God would do this.

Make us really hurt for the lost. Secondly, participation. Let us become involved with activities to reach the lost. Get involved in people's lives. And thirdly, in this year ahead of us, may the Lord grant you and me in feeding on His word, the gift of feeding on His word so that the wonder of your own salvation shown to you by God Himself through His word may spur you on.

That it will make you uncomfortable with the way things are. And perseverance in prayer with others and for others, those who are lost and those who are with you in the battlefield seeking and leading the lost to our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.