A Life Well Lived

Welcome to this edition of PowerPoint with Jack Graham. A little later in the program we'll tell you how you can get a copy of Dr. Graham's book, Man of God. But first, here's the message, A Life Well Lived. I want you to turn in your Bibles to the 78th Psalm. And when you get to Psalm 78, I want you to hold your place there and then find Acts in the New Testament, the book of Acts chapter 13. And there are two sentences regarding David and his leadership that truly define his life. One is in the passage in the Psalms is a description, a definition really, of his life.

And the other is really an epitaph at the close of his life, how he lived his life and the legacy that he lived. And so we're going to look at both of these passages and apply them to us. Look at verse 70 of Psalm 78. And I'm reading from the New Living translation and then I'm going to quote it from the King James in just a moment. But verse 70 says, He chose his servant David, calling him from the sheep pens.

Remember that? He didn't look the part, but he had the heart. He was a man after God's own heart. And God had set aside Saul and chose David to lead the nation. He took David from tending the ewes and lambs and made him the shepherd of Jacob's descendants. He cared for them.

Now watch this in verse 72. He shepherded them or he cared for them with a true heart. Your Bible probably uses the word integrity. He shepherded them. He cared for them with the integrity of his heart. So he had integrity. And this speaks of his character. Every leader, whether you're leading your family or leading in the church or leading in the community, leading in your office, every leader must ultimately be a man of integrity.

Character is the issue. And credibility, more important than competence, though competence is certainly important, more important than education, more important than preparation, all of these things are good. But without the energy, without the integrity to put it all together at the core, then leadership fails. It is character that brings a man to his moment and to the opportunity of a lifetime. So he cared for them with a true heart, the heart of integrity, and he led them with skillful hands, with the integrity of his heart and the skillfulness of his hands. That would be a wonderful theme for your life.

It would be a powerful theme for your business. That what we do, we do with character and we do with competence. Character is the integrity of heart.

Competence is the skillfulness of our hands. Now, hold your place there and let's look at the book of Acts chapter 13. Maybe you've been wondering, why is David called a man after God's own heart? He was a man who made mistakes.

We saw that last time, didn't we? He certainly wasn't a perfect man, but he was God's man. He was a man who had a heart for him, a heart for the Lord. And the sentence we just read in Psalm 78 and the sentence that we're about to read in Acts chapter 13 really shows us why God called him a man after my own heart. For verse 36 says, now this is not a reference to David, for David had served his generation.

Note that word, served. Had served his generation according to the will of God and he died and was buried and his body decayed. The King James puts it this way, David served his generation according to the purpose of God and he fell asleep. And sleep is often used in the scripture to describe the death of the follower of Christ, the believer. It is like going to sleep and waking up in the presence of God.

There's nothing to fear about death when you walk with Christ. And David was a man who served his generation according to the purposes of God and when it came time to exit, he checked out and went on to his reward. And this is forever stamped in the life of this great man. David dedicated his life to serving God all of his days as a young boy, as a teenager, a champion with Goliath, through his days as a fugitive running and fleeing from Saul and when he was exalted to the kingdom.

All of his days he expressed his love for God by serving people and doing God's will. This is the legacy that lives. A lot of talk today about legacy. I think that's a good thing because more and more we are realizing that the life we live is not within the span of 70 years plus or minus. That the life that we live influences generations to come. But you know, I really can't change, you can't change past generations.

Nor can you really change what happens in the future though you can influence the future. But what you can do is what David did and that is to serve God in your generation. This generation. This 21st century world in which we live. What a great time to be alive. What a great time to serve God. What a wonderful time to be alive in Christ and to make a difference in this world in spite of the challenges, in spite of the crisis in our world. This, there's never been a better time to live for Jesus than right now.

There's never been a better time to serve our generation in following Christ than today. You know, there are three important days in every man's life. The first important day is the day you were born.

And God knew that day and planned that day and put you in this world for his purpose. The second great day in your life is when you are born again. When you are born again, Amen? I mean when you come to know faith in Jesus Christ in a personal way. When your life is transformed by the grace of God. When Jesus comes to live in you. When it becomes more than a religious experience but rather a relational experience and you know God. Jesus is not someone we simply know about.

He is someone we know. He has changed us and is changing us by his love and by the power of his spirit. And the second day, the most important day in your life is the day you are born again. But the third most important day in your life is the day you began understanding why you were born and why you were born again.

Why you were here. Why didn't God just save you and take you straight to heaven? Why didn't God save you and why doesn't he just go ahead and rapture his church? God has a purpose and God has a plan.

It's called his will. And just as David served the will, the purposes of God in his life, what God wants you to do is to discover and then do the will of God for your life. This will develop a great heart. The heart of a champion. That you can do the eternal. Serve God in this generation in a practical way. That you can make a difference which is in time and which is timeless. And that the impact of your life can truly affect eternity.

These two sentences define a life well lived. Now you know you can live your life with a small heart. And you know when you live your life with a small heart, if you close off your heart, it minimizes struggles and sorrows in your life. But you would never know if you have a small heart the joy and the greatness of doing something significant with your life and with your heart. So you can live your entire life with a small heart, a shriveling heart, or you can live your life like David with a servant's heart. And it is the servant's heart that is a great heart for God. You can be vulnerable and available and usable to God.

You can cultivate and nurture your heart. And that is what we would call a champion. Men, find your heart for God. David did. And he laid it all out. He was unwilling to play it safe in the shepherd's field. He came out of the shepherd's field, called by God, and became a great champion and king. And you could call him many things. You could describe David in many ways. He was a shepherd, he was a singer, a psalmist, he was a soldier, he was a statesman. But ultimately when it came time to define his life, he was a servant of God.

He served God and his generation according to the purposes of God and he fell asleep. Small-hearted people play it safe, but God-hearted people become champions. Be a God-hearted, be a giant-hearted man for him. You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and today's message, A Life Well Lit. Our world desperately needs men of God, strong men who model gentleness, lead with humility, and speak the truth in love. We want to help you identify the traits of a real man of God by sending you Dr. Jack Graham's insightful book, Man of God. Our thanks for your gift today.

In it, Dr. Graham gives you biblical insights to what a true man of God looks like to his spouse, his family, and the world. This is the last week of this offer, so call today. Call 1-800-795-4627. That's 1-800-795-4627.

You can also text PowerPoint to 59789. And don't forget to visit JackGraham.org where you can shop our e-store, give a gift online, or sign up for Dr. Graham's free daily email devotional. Our website, again, is JackGraham.org. A life well lived. How did David become such a great-hearted man? He served according to the will and the purposes of God. You, we, me, you, we were put on earth to invest in eternity.

Now don't miss that statement. You were placed here to invest in eternity, to live and give your life for God's purposes, for a higher purpose, for a holy purpose. The way to get the most out of life is to give and to put the most into life. There are two kinds of people in the world. There are the givers and the takers. And if you spend your life being a taker, breathing God's air and taking up God's space and not fulfilling God's purpose, you have missed the meaning of life.

If you're just taking and taking and taking, you know, that's a sign of immaturity. You know, my dad was a very common man. He was born in 1914. And he came through, of course, the great generation. He came through the Depression years. When he was a young man, he went to work for the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was such a great man, my father.

My dad never made, I'm sure he never made more than $400 or $500 a month in his life. During the war, during the Second World War, he was a little too old to go to battle, so he volunteered and he worked for the fire department in Little Rock for the Air Force base there. He was a fireman. He gave so much to my brother and I. He was a Christian man who loved the Lord, and he taught us that life was about serving. It wasn't about yourself.

It's about serving God and serving others. And, you know, when you're a little kid, you want everything. My dad, I remember, he would sing these crazy songs, and he made up a song, and he wrote it on a yellow pad one day called Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. He dedicated it to me. And it was funny, and he would laugh, and every time I'd, you know, be tugging on his coat in the Western Auto Store in Conway, Arkansas, he'd say, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. And he was a neat man. When we'd go to, he figured out how to beat me down on this thing. When we would go once a week to Wyatt's Cafeteria in Fort Worth after we moved over there, he actually came up with a game. He knew I was competitive, so he figured out a game, and he said, what we're going to do today when we go through the cafeteria line is we're going to see who can have the lowest check.

I'd fight to have the lowest check. But too many people live their lives with that attitude, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. They got their hand held out and say, give me, serve me, touch me, love me. That's a small-hearted, selfish-hearted person. God didn't put us here to take. God put us here to give.

A person with David's heart, a person with a heart for God, a person with a great heart, a champion's heart, has learned to give something back, to put more into life than you take out. You were saved to serve. You were saved to serve God. And why do we serve? Out of compulsion?

No. Out of gratitude for what Christ has done for us. We have been gloriously delivered from sinful death and certain death and eternal death. That's why Paul said in Romans 12, verses 1 and 2, he said, after describing our great salvation and all those great chapters early on in Romans, he says, therefore, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And don't be transformed by the world, but be transformed. Don't be conformed, rather, to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind in Jesus Christ. He said, do all this.

Why? He said, I beseech you, I beg you, brothers, because of the mercies of God, because of God's mercy on your life, because of what God has given you, because of the cross, because of His blood, because of the price that is paid. Out of deep gratitude, we serve Him.

A saved heart wants to serve the one who made life possible and eternal life possible. Now, I think many guys misunderstand service and ministry. We talk about being called into the ministry. You know, that passage said that David was called out of the shepherd's field. He was called out of the shepherd's field to shepherd Israel. Well, you know, David, he wasn't a preacher. He wasn't a prophet. He was a shepherd. He smelled like sheep.

He was an agricultural guy. But he had a great heart and God used him. So what I want to say is that you are called, even as David was called, every Christian has a ministry for Jesus Christ. You are called to the ministry. And whatever your career is, whatever you do to earn a living, what you do to earn a living is simply in support of what God has called you to do, and that is to serve Him. To serve by the will of God means that God has a will for every life.

He wants you to know it and find it and fulfill it. And regardless of your chosen path in life, your chosen call in life is to serve God. God has a mission for you.

Say, well, I can't do much. I'm not really prepared to be a servant of God. Don't insult God by saying He can't use you. The Bible tells us that we are all members of the body of Christ and every member of the body has a function. Some are seen, some are unseen.

Some are public, some are personal and private. But every man has a ministry in Christ. Every member of the body has a function in the church.

There are no small jobs in the service of the king. If the king asks you to do it, I guarantee you it's important and it's a big job. And what we ought to be doing, instead of worrying about, well, I don't have a big job, what we need to do is little jobs in a big way for God. And to do it with all our hearts.

Why? Because members of the body, members of the church, we are not spectators. We are servants of God. Too many sit around in churches saying, minister to me, serve me, bless me, touch me, love me, visit me, help me. Too often churches are audiences rather than armies for God. David served God in his own generation.

The heart of a Christian, the heart of a champion is to share and show the love of God. And don't say you don't have time. God has given you as much time as He's given the President of the United States.

His watch works just like yours. And we can all serve. And so David died. He did the will of God.

He died and he left a legacy behind of a living faith. And at the end of our lives, every one of us are going to stand before God and our lives are going to be evaluated. They're going to be evaluated on the basis of what did you do with the life I gave you?

What did you do with the salvation that I graced to you? And you, we, will be rewarded on the basis of what? Our service. Our ministry. And that's clear in the scripture. And when we are evaluated, this is not our evaluation as to whether we are saved or not.

But it is the evaluation of our service. What you have done for Christ, why you have done it, and how you have done it. And what you did and what you may not have done. You know, David had it in his heart to do something. He wanted to build the temple. He really wanted to build this great and glorious temple to the glory of God.

They'd lived in this tabernacle and worshiped in the tabernacle for these centuries. David wanted to build this great temple. He had, he desired to do it.

It dominated his thinking. But God came to David and said, David, because you've been a man of war, you know, you're not going to build the temple. And what God was saying to David was, that's not been your assignment. You've been a warrior king. And you don't have enough time now to build the temple.

But your son is going to do it. And you know that's what happened. Solomon ended up building the temple. And that became the legacy of David's life.

Solomon's temple, as it was known, was really in the heart of David first. But there is a passage which says, but because it was in your heart to do it, you're going to be blessed. Did you know that God even will reward us for the things that are in our hearts to do that maybe for whatever reason we didn't get done?

Isn't that a blessing? I mean, there's some things in your heart right now, if you're a man of God, that you want to do for the glory of God. It might not happen. Somebody else may get to do it. It may be after you're gone.

It may be your children or your children's children. But if it's in your heart, if you have a heart for God to do something great and glorious for God, you're going to get credit when you stand before the eternal king. You're going to be rewarded. So what's in your heart, man? Is it full of selfishness or is it overflowing with service and compassion? I mean, the way to be fully alive, the way to live an abundant life is to get your focus off yourself. And to get your eyes on Jesus and to get your eyes on the people that Jesus loves and start serving with compassion. This is so important that five times in the Gospels, Jesus said, if you want to save your life, what do you do? You lose it.

You give it away. The fastest way to failure is to try to hang on to your heart and hold on to your life. The fastest way to the championship of life is to give your life away.

You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and today's message, A Life Well Lit. Today's culture has so distorted the concept of masculinity that some even reject it as toxic. But our world doesn't need less manly men. We need more men of God. Men who love Jesus, make loving husbands and fathers and lead as servants. We'd like to help you uncover what God says about true masculinity by sending you Dr. Graham's book, Man of God.

You'll gain biblical insight into how you or the men in your life can live with purpose and passion, putting Christ first and living radically for him. Man of God is our thanks for your gift to help proclaim God's word through PowerPoint. This is the last week of this offer, so call today. Call 1-800-795-4627. That's 1-800-795-4627.

You can also text PowerPoint to 59789. And don't forget to visit JackGraham.org where you can shop our e-store, give a gift online, or sign up for Dr. Graham's free daily email devotional. Our website again is JackGraham.org. Pastor, what is your PowerPoint for today? You will be leaving a legacy, for good or for bad, whether you like it or not. So it falls to us to decide what kind of legacy will we live.

Do we want our legacy to be one of harmony or of discord, of service or selfishness, leadership or laziness, love or indifference? The theme in David's life was servant leadership. He managed to see beyond his own challenges, and he's always sought the good of his people. He by no means was a perfect man, and we're all too familiar with the story of his failure, but he was a man after God's own heart. And when the Bible plays back his story, we find that David is primarily known for his repentance, not his sin.

He's remembered for his leadership, not his failures. What about you? After you've passed away and when everyone is standing around your grave, what's the conversation going to be like? Will they be talking about your acts of service, your ministry, your love for the church, how you sacrifice, how you were a great friend, a great parent, a great son or daughter? Will you be known for your love and your passion for the things of God? Well, these are important questions, but if you want to have a heart of a champion, if you want to live and then leave a legacy of servanthood for generations to come, it's important to begin laying the groundwork right now. Jesus said if you want to be great in God's kingdom, learn to be the servant of all. Let me challenge you to live your life with a heart for God and a heart for people, and always live with the end in mind, with eternity in mind.

Small-hearted, little-hearted people always play it safe, but great-hearted, God-hearted people are champions. And that is today's PowerPoint. Remember, when you give a gift to PowerPoint, we'll send you Dr. Graham's book, Man of God, as our thanks. Call 1-800-795-4627.

That's 1-800-795-4627. You can also text the word PowerPoint to 59789. On the next PowerPoint, Dr. Graham brings a message about how Jesus will meet you at the end of your broken road. That's next time on PowerPoint with Jack Graham. PowerPoint with Jack Graham is sponsored by PowerPoint Ministries.