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Evangelistic Talk at
a Pub Quiz
I love
trivia. When I was
growing up my favourite book was called ‘the Big Book of Amazing
Facts.’ And it was full of all
sorts of trivia like… how many stomachs does a sheep have? 6.
True or false, the squid has two hearts. False – it has three.
True or false all polar bears are left handed. True.
How many times do you need to fold a piece of paper in half before
its thickness would reach the moon?
44. But of course, how
many times can you fold a piece of paper? 7. The Big Book of
Amazing told me all those things and all this trivia fascinated me.
And
trivia fascinates us as a culture. All our best selling books are Sudoku puzzles and cook
books and trivial lists called miscellanies. When you look to TV all our prime-time programmes
are about diets and make-overs and cookery and modelling competitions and
how to emigrate to a desert island.
Or its reality TV where you take wannabe models to desert islands
to go on diets and give each other makeovers. Or you put dieters into modelling competitions having been
made over by top chefs. Or you
make over top chefs who then enter modelling competitions on desert
islands. These programmes are
ridiculous. They are
excruciatingly inane. And every
night I’m glued to the TV! We
love trivia!
Now it’s fine to like trivial books and trivial tv,
and it’s fun to test our trivia knowledge. But wouldn’t it be a
tragedy if you got to the end of your life and the verdict on it was
“Trivial”! That would be a very
great tragedy.
But the scary thing is – all it takes to live a trivial life is for you to try very hard
and be very productive and very successful at irrelevant things. That’s all it takes to waste your life
– simply to ‘major on the minors’ as the Americans say. If you work hard
at the side issues in life, your life is trivial. If you miss the main thing in life,
you could be very industrious, very determined, very successful even but
you would have utterly wasted the life God’s given you. I don’t want it said of anyone here on
the Day coming that really matters – ‘your life was trivial. You missed the main thing.’
I want
us to think about four words from the Bible this evening. They come from a letter in the New
Testament written by the Apostle Paul. He writes to Christians and he says to them:
CHRIST IS YOUR LIFE. Christ is your life. (Colossians 3:4)
In 1998 my mother gave me a T-Shirt she’d bought at a London market. The T-Shirt had a cricket bat and a
cricket ball on it, and it just said ‘Cricket is Life: The rest is mere
details.’
This is because, at the time, cricket consumed my
life. I was never happier than
when chasing a small red ball around a park. Cricket was the driving passion of my life and every other
priority in life had to give way.
Friends, family, girlfriends, study – they all very much took a
back seat, because cricket was my LIFE – the rest was mere details…
Now you are thinking – what a trivial pursuit –
cricket! Is there anything more
boring?
Groucho
Marx
once went to a cricket match at Lord’s and halfway through the match he
turned to his host and said “And when will the actual game begin.” Cricket is dull. Cricket is trivial. But it was my life.
Do you know what I have to show for my years devoted
to cricket? Any cricket fans here
may know of Wisden which is
the cricketer’s almanac recording the more serious games of cricket that
take place in the world. There
have been 144 editions of the Wisden cricketing almanac and they each
hold over a thousand pages. I am
on one of those pages. Halfway
down p886 of the 136th edition of the Wisden cricketing
almanac my name appears in 6-point font.
And it’s mis-spelt. That’s
what I have to show for years and years of obsessive devotion to cricket. You know what that means for those years
– they were trivial.
And you know how I felt when I hit a level of cricket
that was just too good for me and I got dropped from the team? I wanted to die. Cricket
was life and when I failed at cricket I didn’t just fail at a sport I
failed as a person. That’s
how it felt. Because cricket was
my life.
Whatever
you devote yourself to has the power of life or death over you. So what about you? What’s your trivial
obsession. I’ve told you mine,
now it’s your turn, let’s get up one by one… What’s your life?
What’s on your T-shirt?
What do you day-dream about, when you’re doing the washing up or
standing in the supermarket queue or the last thought at night. What is it that you think ‘If only I
had that then everything would
be ok.’ Or put it another way:
What is it in your life that you think, ‘If I lost that, I wouldn’t want
to live.’ That’s your life. And that thing – whatever it is – has
the power of God over you. If it
comes through for you it feels like life, if it fails you, it feels like
death. What’s on your
t-shirt? What is your life?
It might be something much more noble than
cricket. I’m sure it is! Perhaps it’s your job, perhaps it’s
your friends, perhaps it’s your spouse or your family. But whatever it is – your life orbits around that
thing. But let me assure you
there is nothing on earth strong enough to take the gravitational forces
you’re putting on it. Family,
friends, loved ones will all fail you – they’ll either let you down or
they’ll get sick and die. But one
way or another, if they are ultimately your LIFE, your world will come
tumbling down.
Our Bible verse says there’s only one thing that ought
to be your life. CHRIST IS YOUR
LIFE.
But wait.
Maybe you don’t think Christ is strong enough to be the centre of
your world. I mean – could Jesus,
this 1st century carpenter, could He really be the centre of
life?
Well the bible insists that Jesus Christ is far more
than a 1st century carpenter.
In the book where our verse is found for this evening,
it says this. “ALL THINGS WERE MADE BY CHRIST AND
FOR CHRIST”
Jesus is not just the founder of Christianity. Jesus is the founder of the
universe. According to the Bible,
Jesus is not just 2000 years old, He was there in the beginning. Everything came FROM Jesus and it is
all FOR Jesus. The Bible insists
that Jesus is our Creator and He is the Goal of all things. “All things were made by Christ and
for Christ.”
You might have all sorts of questions about that. That’s fine, our churches exist as
places where you can ask those questions and get answers. But that’s what the Bible says – “All
things were made by Christ and for Christ”. You were made by Christ and for Christ.
Therefore the BIG question about whether we are living
a trivial life is this: Are you FOR Jesus Christ? Are you FOR Him? Do you know Him, do you know Him as
your goal, the meaning of your life, are you for Him? If you’re not then you might be doing
a thousand good things – but you’re not involved with the main
thing. The main thing is Jesus. Christ is your life… the rest is mere
detail.
Imagine I was invited to Buckingham palace for tea with the Queen (I have no idea what
for, she may have found my entry in Wisden, I doubt it). But imagine I come back from tea with
the Queen, you’d be asking me: What she was like? What did she say to you? Was she nice? Was she bored? Was Philip there? Who did he offend?? Imagine if I answered you “I couldn’t
be bothered with the Queen or any of them. But, my gosh, let me tell you about the tea, there was Chai
tea, Lapsang Suchon…”
No-one should care about the tea. You’re invited to
the palace to meet the Queen. And
we exist on planet earth to meet Christ.
Christ is your life – if you’re missing Him you’re in grave danger
of living a trivial life.
But as I close – here’s the thing. None of us consistently live with
Jesus Christ at the centre. I
long to do that but I fail every day – trivial things are always getting
in the way. But here’s the best
news of all: Jesus has made US His life.
We should make Jesus our life, but we fail. But He has made US His life. In a sense He has put on the T-shirt
with our names written on it. We should
obsess over Him. We don’t. But He obsesses over us.
He came into our world and took our lives upon Himself. He has loved us enough to meet us in
the midst of all our trivial and often treacherous lives. I’ve got copies of John’s Gospel here
– a biography of Jesus’ life that’s in the Bible. It begins by reminding us that Jesus
is the Creator of all, but that He came into our world and took our
humanity to Himself. The phrase
it uses is that He ‘became flesh.’
In a sense He put on the T-shirt with our name on it. Christ has made us His life. Isn’t that astonishing?
But when you see how much He has loved us, How He has
carried our burdens, How He has lived the life we ought to have lived and
then on the cross, died the death we ought to have died, we see someone
we want to put at the centre.
A Christian is someone who has seen Jesus wearing our
T-shirt, and in response we say, I want Christ to be my life.
On your tables are some reponse cards. Why not fill one out and tick the box
that says ‘I’d like to come to a follow-up course’ where you can
investigate Jesus a little more.
And why not take one of these John’s Gospels from me – you can
read for yourself about Jesus the Creator who became flesh. Get Jesus Christ right and then
everything else falls into place – friends, family, work, play. Your life will find it’s true order
when you see Jesus at the centre.
Well those are just a few
thoughts from me. I hope you’re
enjoying your evening and that you enjoy your trivia. Trivia’s fun, but I
hope our lives revolve around someOne far more worthy.
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