Deuteronomy 30:15-20 John 15:5-8

Frequently, Jan and I walk our dogs in the cemetery behind our church. We have two other favorite cemeteries where our parents are buried that we also like to walk. There have been times when I've walked through these places when I've looked at the names on the headstones, the tombstones, and seen familiar people, people's whose funerals I've had and strangers. I am always struck with the fact that there is a birth date and an ending date, a date of death. So in your bulletins this morning, I've put a “tombstone”. Please look at it. With your pencil, I would like for you to write your name on it. You can put your birth date. If you don't want the person next to you to see your birth date, cover it. (Laughing) I know that it may be a sensitive issue with some people. You can't put your death date on there. So just put a great big question mark in that blank. Then I would like for you to think about it. As I've looked at these tombstones, what jumps out at me is the dash that is between birth and death. We can't control the birth date. That is God's predestined decision. And we can't control the death date. But what we can control is the dash between them. We have some say about what goes on between birth and death. That has always fascinated me. How much control do we have over that? I actually put dotted lines in the picture instead of a solid line to indicate that the dash between these two dates is made up of multiple moments. As you know I have been giving a sermon series on Seizing the Moment. This morning I want you to consider seizing the moments that are most important to you between the date that you were born and the date that you will leave this earth.

Scripture tells us to choose life. Scripture tells us that there are decisions to be made and the last sermon I gave was on choice and that we can decide how we are going to live this dash and what we will do with it. As we contemplate that, one of the major decisions that we need to think about is the decision to really live so that our life gives honor to God. The first task of every infant in the first six months of the infant's life is to choose life. Then throughout our lives, we will have other moments where we can choose life as well. People who are baptized as adults are reminded that this is a new beginning, a new life that occurs in and through your baptism. For those who are baptized as infants, we have confirmation as a moment of imploring the Holy Spirit to dwell within us which then brings about a new creation, new life within us. The Bible says in John 10:10 that Jesus has come to give us life and to give it more abundantly. The Amplified version of the Bible says, “To give it to us to the full where it is pressed down and overflowing.” The imagery is of a basket filled with life and it is pressed down to make more room for more life and then it is overflowing. So that is the imagery we need to have about how to live our lives between birth and death.

The preachers I check out on television recently have all been using the phrase, “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” (I John 4:4) I want you to think about that phrase for a moment. It jumps out at me when I hear it from other preachers and the significance of it just can't be ignored. “Greater is He that is in you&” When you have the new life of Christ in you, you've got divinity dwelling in your body. Paul says we are temples of the Holy Spirit. So we've got the Holy Spirit within us, especially when we have been baptized by the Holy Spirit. How do you get baptized by the Holy Spirit? By imploring the Holy Spirit to dwell within you. Romans 8 in the Bible makes no distinction between Christ dwelling within you and the Holy Spirit dwelling within you. That is one of the sections of the Bible that theologians use to prove the divinity of Christ to show that He is the same as the Holy Spirit. There is a triune God and that God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - has the capability of living within your heart, soul, and your mind, and occupying your will. As that happens, you have the capability of having incredible life. I've said it before, Christians should be the most excited group of people in the whole world. I have shared with you this example once before. I was attending a conference in Canada and the presenter at our workshop decided that she would have a ten minute break in the middle of the workshop. It was a three hour workshop. So the break was well needed. We were all tired of sitting for the first hour and a half. Then when it came time for us all to get back together, only about half the group returned. Everybody else wanted longer than ten minutes. They wanted to run out and get a Coke, run to the bathroom, talk with their friends or something. She said, “Now all of you who are in the room, I want you to do something. I want you to all laugh hysterically. Think of anything. Tell each other a joke. Think of anything where you laugh hysterically and watch how everyone comes back into the room real quickly.” Well, sure enough, we started doing it. (Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee) Before long, everyone in the room was spontaneously laughing at our fake laughs. After that, people from outside started flowing into the room. Not only that, people who weren't even attending our workshop came in to hear the second half of the workshop. Wow! What was going on here? What was going on here was that the witness of enjoying life and enjoying the workshop was the kind of witness we Christians should be giving each and every day of our lives. And it works like a magnet  drawing people in. We should be that joyful people of the resurrection. Unlike other religions that have a cross with a body of Christ on it as their major symbol, we Protestants don't have the body of Christ on our crosses. Why? Because we are celebrating, get that word, celebrating the resurrection of Christ and His potential to dwell within us, to provide us with new life. We therefore are joyous people of the resurrection. We are the happy ones. We are the excited ones. We are the enthusiastic ones.

Now wait a minute. I know. Sermons can be boring. You look like you're dead this morning&oh my goodness&you are the happy ones and excited ones? Get happy and look excited right now just for a moment. It's easier said than done. Right? OK. You are not with it (laughter). Now that's better. So we want to fill our lives with this kind of way of living. “Greater is He that is in you&” Who is that? That is Jesus Christ. That is the Holy Spirit dwelling within you. “&than he who is dwelling in the world.” Who is that? That is Satan, the devil, the power of evil in the world. If you and I really register that, if we get it, oh my gosh, what a difference it would make in each and every one of us. What are the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Love, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, faithfulness, and goodness. (I got them all!) If we were filled with those gifts of the Holy Spirit because we worked on those gifts of the Holy Spirit, and we invited Him to dwell within us to create those gifts, imagine the quality of life we are capable of having. We are capable, if we have love, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, goodness, joyfulness, and self-control within us, of having the abundant life Jesus promised us. What an exciting life we'll live!

There are some characters in the Old Testament that got it and lived that way. Two of them that come to mind are Caleb and Joshua. Perhaps you remember the story. They were sent out with ten others to see the Promised Land and predict whether or not the Israeli army had grown big enough to go in and claim the Promised Land for themselves. Twelve came back and ten were negative. Joshua and Caleb said, “We can do it. Why can we do it? We can do it because God dwells with us.” God dwells with us. He is present with us. How was He present in the Old Testament? He was present in the column of smoke that guided them through the wilderness. He was present in the Ark of the Covenant that sat right in the center of them and was considered the seat of His throne where He lived among the people. Caleb and Joshua said, “We can get there.” But the leaders said, “We are not believing you guys.” The leaders were negative. Negative thinking can defeat people. Positive thinking which should be the hallmark of every Christian doesn't defeat ourselves. It enables us to defeat the enemy in the world who is Satan “roaming about like a lion seeking who he can devour.” Wow! So guess what happened to Caleb and Joshua? They had to wait 45 more years before they entered the Promised Land and the leaders would agree with them that they could do it. They entered in at the age of 85 and finally they got to enjoy the milk and honey of the Promised Land. What happened to the other ten? They died. They didn't get to go in at all. So there is a physical reward to those of us who invite the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and God to live among us. That physical reward is a joyful life and when we have a joyful life and really experience living, we can live longer. We will live healthier lives. Even the cells of our body respond to joyous living and so that is one of the rewards of being “in Christ”. This is an exciting message. This is part of the Good News for everyone and I want you to internalize it.

A man by the name of Lanny Bassam was the Olympic Gold Medal winner of the small bore rifle shooter contest. He said an interesting thing. Listen what he wrote in Sports Illustrated. “This sport is a controlled non-movement sport. We are shooting from 50 meters, over half of a football field, at a bulls eye ¾ the size of a dime. If the angle of error at the point of the barrel is more than 5/100's of a centimeter off, you drop to the next circle and lose a point. So we have to learn how to make everything stop. I stop my breathing. I stop my digestion by not eating for 12 hours before the contest. I train by running to keep my pulse around 60 so I will have a full second between heartbeats. You do all of this and have technical control but then you still have to have years of experience so you know how to play the wind. Then you have the other 80% which is focusing your mind.” Imagine a person doing that as Paul would say for a perishable crown. A gold medal. See the intensity of this person's work and focus to earn a gold medal which Paul would say will tarnish and disappear or sit on a shelf and maybe be passed down among the kids who will say, “What was this all about?” We have something so much greater than that. We have God dwelling in us. We have the joyful life of Christ promised to us. What should our focus be? Where should our effort be? What should we intensely seek? Our focus should be to invite the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and our effort should be great to produce those gifts of the Holy Spirit which God through grace gives us the power to have. Wow!

Think of this. I like basketball as you know. The analogy that came to my mind to end my sermon this morning is&you are not in a pre-game warm up. As you are making the dash, you are in the game. The clock is ticking. How much time you have we don't know. How much time I have I don't know. But this is the real game. We are in it. Let's be in it for life and let's truly live&give it all your effort.