R1099 Well For Christ, PT.1

God has an encouraging word for you today through the Bible-based teaching of Dr. Don Wilton and his message called, Well for Christ. The Encouraging Word. This is The Encouraging Word, and Dr. Don Wilton, well-known author, pastor, evangelist, seminary professor, is taking us to Romans chapter 12 today as we begin a two-part series called, Well for Christ. As we open God's Word together, know that we're open to pray with you and for you anytime, day or night at 866-899-WORD.

That number again is 866-899-9673. We'd also love to connect with you on our website at www.tewonline.org. Right now, Prayers That Avail Much, a wonderful book for grandparents especially. It's on our website. I hope you'll take a look at it.

That's online at www.tewonline.org. We'll tell you more about that later, but now let's open God's Word with Dr. Don Wilton. The Encouraging Word. Now my friends, I am about to say and share something with you that is very deep in my heart. I'm not even quite sure where to begin.

I really mean that I'm not quite sure where to begin. You see, many years ago, I gave my heart and life to the Lord Jesus Christ. I had spent a long time looking for meaning in life. I'd gone through a lot of adventures. I grew up in a kind of an adventurous place, I guess. I don't know a lot of people that grew up in the kind of circumstances that I did.

I'm sure they are. But I grew up in Africa and experienced a lot of different things like many of you have. But I spent years trying to find fulfillment. I don't know if I'm coming across right, but I had an adventurous life. I went to boarding school and I was in Africa and I ended up in the military and in faraway places. And you know, I went through loneliness and isolation and even suffered my fair share of good old beatings. I was nearly abused as a little boy and never was, but nearly was and a lot of them around me were. I sought, nearly became a victim of it.

God spared me. You know, as a teenager, I got into a lot of bad company. I became bad company.

And I was looking in all the wrong places. I met a girl who changed my life, really. I'm still married to her, by the way.

She's my duckling. And she just absolutely the most beautiful person I've ever been around. And when you combine my parents' love for me and the prayers for me and people who cared about me, I suppose in many ways, as my mother used to say, I was a rough diamond. You know, somewhere hidden in all that roughness, there was something good and God wanted me. And I gave my life to Christ and I surrendered my heart to him and he became my Lord and my Savior and he changed me. And I've spent many years now trying to serve the Lord. And the Lord has given me a lot of grace and I guess I've come a long way since those days and I experience a lot of joy. I've got a beautiful family, but I haven't always succeeded in my pursuit of God, in trying to please God. You've been down so many times, haven't you?

I mean just so many times. And one of the hardest things for me to really come to grips with is that God doesn't just want my ability to speak in public. He doesn't just want that. He wants that, but not just that.

He doesn't just want my mind. You know, I've got a reasonable mind, you know. I've always loved reading and studying and so unlike I'm sure some of my friends around here, it's not a chore to me. So yeah, some people even thought I was an academic. Now I'm not, but I love to study and sharpen my mind. I do, I think, I think.

Yep, I think. I think a lot actually and I study hard and I try to live a life for the Lord. And then I've got this horse that I live in, this body of mine. I wish I could tell you how magnificent I am. My whole life I've battled with my, my wellness. I'm not a sick person. I've never been sick. I'm not a sickly person. I don't mean that.

I've battled with, with just being totally well physically, my best. There are a lot of reasons for it. I absolutely love food, all of it, excepting boiled okra, everything. And someone told me if I ate boiled okra, I probably wouldn't have struggled with my weight because it just goes straight through you, you know. I mean you don't even have to chew that stuff. That's why I don't eat boiled okra.

If you're a good Christian, you don't eat boiled okra. You know, why have I always battled with my horse, my body? I guess just the way I'm made, you know. So over the years, there's been, you know, I've put on too much weight and then I lose it. At least 7,000 pounds a year and, you know, I haven't always been the best physically.

It's kind of up and down. I'm not going overboard because I'm not badly this way or badly that way. I'm not talking about that. And mostly here in my mind, when I get real tired and I'm busy, which I am all the time, my mind gets cluttered, cobwebs. So, you know, when you look at a person, when I look at myself as I try to serve the Lord, my biggest difficulty is serving the Lord with my whole package. Are you with me? You know, I'm great sometimes on the spiritual side and then I'm great with the mind and the ability to think and to work and to share and to speak and then I'm real lousy on the body side. Or I'm just, you know, I look like Arnold Schwartz's water from California on the body side and, you know, I'm about to seize the world and kick dirt in someone's face because I'm just the model physique, you know. And my mind is sharp, but I'm not living for the Lord on the spiritual side. Or I'm living for the Lord on the spiritual side. My horse is doing okay as it carries my soul, but my mind, I'm just letting my mind go to seed.

I'm just watching too much junk on TV or I'm doing mindless stuff or I'm just signing out and I'm not exercising my mind. There's a balance. I want to share with you a word that God has put on my heart today and I want to ask you if you would like to join with me in presenting everything that we have to the Lord, the whole package. We're going to start out by going to Romans chapter 12, one of the greatest verses that was ever written, Romans chapter 12. And I'm going to speak to you today on the subject from God's word entitled, Well for Christ. This is what Paul said in Romans chapter 12. Therefore, I urge you, I urge you, and by the way, I just want to tell you that that word there is very strong in the Greek text.

In other words, that word there is not, doesn't come across as a suggestion. You might even want to put in the word there, I demand of you, and he's going to tell us why. I urge you in view of God's mercy. Now let's just stop there for a second because I want you to get a hold of something here. Paul says, I demand of you, I urge you, I beg of you with everything at my disposal in light of God's mercy.

Let's kind of put this back to front, okay? Because God is God, I beg you. Because Jesus Christ has forgiven you for your sin, Paul says, I beg you.

Because God has done something for you that not your money, not your position, not your physique, not your power. Nothing can do for you what God has done for you because of God's mercy. Now what is God's mercy?

God's mercy is God's grace. So the question is this, my friends, what would you and I do if God had not given to us the Lord Jesus Christ? What would we do? We would be lost. We would be dead in our trespasses and sins. We would have no hope. We would have no joy and we certainly would have no eternal life. We'd have nowhere to go when we die, excepting into the pit of hell. Now just look at that opening salvo there. Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, those of you who have received the grace of God in Christ Jesus, I urge you to do what?

Look at it. To offer your body as living sacrifices. The operative word there is living. Now what is a sacrifice? A sacrifice in God's economy is a willingness to offer something living to death in behalf of the one to whom you offer it.

Jesus Christ is our best example. God loved the world so much that he gave Jesus to die on a cross. The living Christ offered himself to death in behalf of those that he loved. So now here's Paul is saying, I beg of you, in fact I demand of you, I'm going to tell you something that if you have received God's grace, I beg of you to offer your body a living sacrifice.

So here I am and many years ago I gave my heart and life to Jesus and the Lord Jesus came into my heart and I said, Lord, here I am. So what does God want from me? What does he want from me? So what does God want from you? What do you suppose God wants from you? Your money?

Your ability to sing? Your willingness to go somewhere? What does God want from you? Everything. Because if you're willing to sacrifice yourself as a living sacrifice, it means you're willing to give up your life. Everything. Now watch this. He says, I urge you in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, because this is your spiritual act of worship.

That's a very stinging phrase there. Your spiritual act of worship. What Paul is saying here is because this is what God expects of all those who have been changed and transformed by the power of the spirit of the living God. It is expected of you as your act of worship that you be willing to offer yourself, your living being to God everything.

Now, folks, watch me here today. I want to say this with all the love in my heart. Your and my big problem is we are not giving God everything. You and I are holding back on God, and He will not accept that.

Please forgive the interruption. We'll be back in just a moment with the rest of today's message from Dr. Don Wilton on Well for Christ. But as I mentioned earlier, we have a number of great resources on our website right now. That's TEWonline.org, in particular, Prayers that Availeth Much and Standing in the Gap. It's a remarkable opportunity to see how God calls us to do something that we sometimes think is the last resort. When in doubt, it is the first resort, and that's the power of prayer.

Here's Liz with all the details about how you can have this resource in your hands in just a few days. Satan is seeking to devour your grandchildren. Evil runs rampant in the streets.

It's pouring out of social media and online streaming, seducing young people with false promises of worldly satisfaction. But the Word of God is stronger than anything that comes from the world. With your gift of support to the encouraging Word this month, you will receive Dr. Wilton's message, Standing in the Gap, along with the bonus book, Prayers that Avail Much for Grandparents. Use these Bible-based resources to guide younger generations to Jesus Christ, the only one who can save and satisfy. Now that's just one of the many great resources on our website, TEWonline.org. While you're there, you can listen to and watch many of these great messages from Dr. Wilton. You can also sign up for the daily encouraging Word email. Just click on the Devotion tab, and you can sign up either to have a physical copy sent to you for free, a quarterly version of every day's devotions, or you can sign up online and sign up to receive the email every single morning from Dr. Don Wilton.

It's all on our website at TEWonline.org. Now back to today's great teaching from Dr. Wilton. Try it out with your wife sometime.

I've tried it out once or twice, which is why I have seven false teeth. I met with a couple this past week who are going to be married, a beautiful couple about to be married in April, and can you imagine if I turned to them in my counseling with them and I said to them, the two of you love each other, right? Just getting married in April, oh yes. In fact, they're hardly listening to me.

I'm just asking the questions. And then I say to them, let me tell you how to make a marriage work. You turn to your bride-to-be, and you tell her that you are going to love her 99%. But with 1%, she can forget it. In fact, I'm going to submit to you folks one of the problems we have in marriage is we're not totally devoted to one another, right? I'm not talking about Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in Greece either. They should have put me in that pot.

I would have done pretty good. One of the biggest problems in marriages, folks, let's just be honest with each other as we got husbands and wives and the total devotion is lacking. Total love. The goal of every Christian person must be to prove God's pleasing and perfect will. That's what he tells us. When we get down to the end of verse 2, he tells us when you are totally given, when you are well for Christ, you are able to prove what is good and pleasing and perfect according to God's standards. So let's consider just our church for a minute. May we? We want as a people in a church at First Baptist Church in Spartanburg, and I know you will want to do this in your church. We want to be a church where all of us are trying to help one another to be complete, to be fulfilled, to be whole, to be everything God wants us to be, right?

That's what we do for one another. So we have a strategy here at First Baptist Church and our strategy is designed to help all of us achieve this goal. I'm not going to camp on this, so what is our strategy here? What do we believe we need to do as believers? What do all believers need to do? Number one, all of us must worship together in the fellowship of God's presence. We believe all of us must worship together. We've covered that.

We will keep talking about that. I congratulate you because you have gathered together to worship. Can you worship God out there and out there and in this place? Of course you can, but the Bible says we must come together, forsake not the assembling of yourself. Number two, strategy number two, all of us must prepare ourselves to meet the challenges of life. That's why we have life groups. I want every person within the sound of my voice to be part of a life group here at First Baptist. Sunday morning Sunday school life groups, Bible study groups, Tuesday morning Bible, ladies Bible study, discipleship groups, merge life groups.

You must be in that small group because that strategy is designed to help you to meet the challenges of life. That's where you're going to study. That's where you're going to have the greatest cause for evangelism.

That's where you're going to cultivate 2 a.m. friends, people that you can call on at two o'clock in the morning and they'll be there for you just like that. That's what it means to prepare. Number three, all of us must serve our fellow man, all of us. All of us, we believe that folks. Everybody, we must all serve our fellow man and here in our church we have got hundreds of opportunity for every person who has received the grace of God to serve fellow man. Sunday school teachers and discipleship leaders and singing in the choir, ushers and part of the welcoming committees and in so many capacities from driving buses to participating, to standing in doorways, to being part of security teams, to you name it, there are scores and scores and scores and our goal really folks is that as a church that we are facilitating well for Christ. Now all of us must worship together in the fellowship of God's presence and all of us must prepare ourselves to meet the challenges of life and all of us must serve our fellow man and number four, all of us must engage the gospel in the world in which we live. All of us, worship, prepare, serve and engage. Last week I asked our people if you would be willing to tell at least one person a month about Jesus or if that is problematic and or would you be willing to invite at least one person to come to church with you where we will tell them and folks do you know there were a lot of people who didn't even have those cards, a lot of people who didn't even have an opportunity to sign, a lot of people don't have blackberries and iPhones, you couldn't text 77577 and say I will but evidently a lot of people did, over 700 people did.

That's amazing. In Gideon's day God only used 300 to conquer an insurmountable enemy to declare that God is king. Over 700 people in this fellowship said I can do it. Folks there are lots of other ways that people engage. There are Bible studies at all hours of the day. There are people walking and serving in our helping ministries center. There are people who are part of feeding the homeless and clothing the cold and the needy. There are people doing things every day. There are people engaging. It's not just limited to doing one or two things.

There is an engagement taking place everywhere. If you want to be well for Christ, you must worship at least once a week. You must prepare and be in a life group, at least one.

You must serve in at least one capacity where all you're doing is giving to somebody else. And you must engage in at least one zone of your life outside of the church and in and through the church. So what is Paul saying in this passage about will for Christ? Well he's urging two things. He's urging us to consider God's mercy. He's urging us to consider God's mercy and he's urging us to yield our bodies. And how must we yield our bodies? He tells us how to yield our bodies. We yield our bodies, number one, as living sacrifices. We yield our bodies, number two, as holy vessels. We yield our bodies, number three, as pleasing to God. And this is our reasonable demanded act of worship.

Now here's the question. You ready for it? If we have to yield our bodies as living sacrifices, what are our bodies? And as Dr. Wilton talks to us about what it is to yield our bodies as living sacrifices, we'll discover more as we continue in this Bible study over the next few days. At this moment, though, we think about that decision to yield. Sometimes we think that yielding is weakness, but yielding to Jesus Christ is the greatest strength.

Plugging us into the greatest power we could ever know. You've been listening to Dr. Don Wilton as he's been teaching and preaching from the pulpit. Now as he steps into the studio, open your heart to what he wants to share next. Are you ready to give your heart and life to the Lord Jesus Christ? Why don't you pray this prayer with me right now? Dear God, I know that I'm a sinner and I know that Jesus died for me on the cross. Today I repent of my sin and by faith I receive you into my heart. In Jesus' name. My friend, I welcome you today into the family of God.

This is exciting news. Perhaps moments ago you were praying along with Dr. Don Wilton to give your life to Christ or rededicate your life. Just know that in this moment we believe God is doing something supernatural and we would love to not only pray and celebrate with you, pray for you as a matter of fact, but put some free resources in your hands. Dr. Wilton has prepared if you've given your life to Christ or rededicated your life to Jesus today, he wants you to have these resources if you'll call us at 866-899-WORD. Jot the number down, store it in your cell. It is 866-899-9673. We'd love to connect you with those resources that will help you grow in your faith. And perhaps today's not the day for your first step, but you realize there needs to be a change, a course correction, an adjustment. One of the best things we believe is spending more time in God's Word.