Paul’s Tombstone

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. What is Jesus called you to do? You're not responsible to save the world. You're responsible to fulfill the assignment or the assignments that God has given to you. Success in life is determining what Jesus has called you to do, being faithful in it, so that when you die, you hear from him those words, well done, good and faithful servant. Welcome to a new week of teaching here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Okay, this might seem like a rather morbid way to start the week, but have you ever considered what you would like to have written on your tombstone when you die? Well, death is not something that we like to think about very often or in fact ever. But today, Pastor J.D. teaches from the book of Acts, chapter 20, and he asks us to reflect on the summation of our lives. What will people say about us when we're gone?

What will our legacy be? This message is part of the teaching series called Sent. And if you've missed any of the previous messages in this study, you can catch up online at jdgreer.com. Pastor J.D. titled this message Paul's Tombstone.

I used to lead a thing here at our church called Men's Fraternity, which is basically a life Bible study for guys. But one of the things that I would have the men do when I let it is I would have them at one point draw a tombstone and write out an epitaph that they would want to go on their tombstone. I would always give them some examples of actual last words and epitaphs written on tombstones, some of which are profound and some that are ridiculous. For example, Leonardo da Vinci's last words on his deathbed were, quote, I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality that it should have.

I mean, talk about a perfectionist, right? How would you ladies like to be married to that guy? Elvis Presley's last words were at a press conference were, well, I hope I haven't bored you, which kind of summarizes his life. The epitaph on Merv Griffin's tombstone.

I know we have a younger audience, but Merv Griffin, you know who that guy is? The epitaph on his tombstone reads, I will not be right back after this message. From the tombstone of a dentist, a dentist, Walter Brown lies here filling his last cavity. So that's for you, Dennis.

That's for you. From an unnamed tombstone. These are actual, by the way.

I've seen the pictures and these are not made up. From an unnamed tombstone found right here in Western North Carolina. How many people we have here that are from Western North Carolina?

Raise your hand. A special breed of people out that direction. I can say that because I grew up that direction.

But here's one in Western North Carolina. Quote, here lies Paul. Paul liked women.

Ma caught Paul in with two swimming. Here lies Paul. So the idea is that what's on your tombstone is supposed to, the idea behind the exercise was that what is written on your tombstone should summarize your life. And sometimes it's good to think about your life from that in perspective now and start to live your life now in what you want your tombstone to say then. Think of it like reverse engineering your life.

You figure out what the end product is supposed to look like and then back up and say, what do I live like now? So that when I get there, it says then what I want it to say now. Psalm 90 verse 12, Moses, the man of God said it this way. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to learn wisdom. I love that verse. It's one of my life verses. Martin Luther translated that verse in German basically to say, Lord, teach us to think about death, our death, so that we might figure out how to live. It is as we think about our lives from the perspective of death, Moses says, that you're going to figure out what you ought to be doing now.

So that's my question for you this weekend. What do you want the summation of your life to be? If we were going to write an epitaph on your tombstone, what would be the most important things that would end up going on there? Today, I'm going to give you the five things that I believe the apostle Paul would have wanted written on his tombstone. Now, of course, Paul never had a tombstone because we don't even know what happened to his body. Paul was beheaded in Rome by Nero and scholars say his body was discarded and most likely eaten by dogs. So he didn't have a tombstone, but had Paul had a tombstone, these are what I believe he would have wanted on that tombstone because Paul gives them in a farewell speech that he makes to a group of Ephesian elders in Acts 20 that he thinks he's never going to see again.

He's going to go to Jerusalem and then from there on to Rome and he's pretty convinced he's going to die in one of those places. So he summarizes his entire life for them in this one farewell speech saying, this is what my life's about. By the way, this is the only extended speech in the book of Acts that is directed toward Christians. Every other speech we see is directed as a sermon to unbelievers. So it's significant because I think Luke takes this extended speech as his one picture of how you, a believer, ought to think about your life.

These are the five things that I once said about my life too. This is the outline, if you're taking notes, for my funeral sermon. So if you get called on to preach my funeral sermon, this is what I once said in it. Acts chapter 20, we're going to begin in verse seven.

Verse seven, on the first day of the week when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them intending to depart on the next day. And he prolonged his speech until midnight. There were many lamps in the upper room where we were all gathered and a young man named Eutychus sitting at the window sank into a deep sleep as Paul talked still longer.

And being overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was taken up dead. This has nothing to do with my message today, but I read it because it is awesome. This is why you should not sleep in church. By the way, you think I preach too long sometimes? Paul started his sermon in the afternoon and preached past midnight and a guy fell out of his seat and died. Somebody's like, oh, you went five minutes over today in the 11 o'clock service. I'm like, did anybody fall out of a window and die? Shut your mouth.

All right, stop complaining. Verse 10. But Paul went down and bent over him and taking him in his arms. He said, don't be alarmed for his life is still in him. By the way, this is similar to when Jesus, the little girl died and Jesus said, she's not dead, she sleeps.

This kid is dead. The way the Greek is written, he's dead. Paul raises him from the dead.

And then the best part, verse 11. And when Paul had gone back up, he conversed with them a little while longer. Paul wipes the dead off this kid and keeps preaching until daybreak and so departed. Now from Miletus, he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him. And when they came to him, Ephesus, if you remember from when I preached through Acts 19 a few weeks ago, is where Paul had spent the last three years. Here's what Paul said to them. Here's the speech.

I'm going to read it in its entirety. Verse 18. You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews. How I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to the Jews and to the Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now behold, I'm going to Jerusalem constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me that in every city imprisonment and afflictions await me.

But I do not account my life of any value nor is precious to myself. If only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now behold, I know that none of you among whom I've gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face ever again. Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of you all. For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Pay careful attention to yourselves and all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God that he purchased with his own blood. I know that after my departure, fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and give you the inheritance among those who are sanctified.

I coveted no one silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by working hard, we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said it is more blessed to give than to receive. And when he said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And there was much weeping on the part of all. They embraced Paul there and they kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word that he had spoken that they would never see his face again.

And they accompanied him to the ship where he got on and sailed off and sure enough, never to see them face to face again. Five statements from Paul's farewell speech. Number one, I have been faithful to do what Jesus told me to do. That's the first thing Paul wanted on his tombstone.

Probably the most important thing. Verse 24, my single focus has been and is to do what God has told me to do. That's why none of these threats or dangers that I know are ahead of me, they don't move me because my one great ambition in life is to hear from him, well done, good and faithful servant. You see, at the end of the day, that's all any of us are really responsible for. So my very simple question is, what is Jesus called you to do? You're not responsible to save the world. You're responsible to fulfill the assignment or the assignments that God has given to you.

You see, there are two ways that I see people really go wrong with this. On the one side, you've got some people who feel like they're responsible to save the world. They're the ones who've got to fix their friends. They're the ones that got to make sure their kids turn out right. They're the ones who are responsible to take care of the poor and feed all the orphans. And so they carry around the weight of these things on their shoulders, and no matter what they do, it's never enough.

They're always worried about these things, because what if I do something wrong and my kids don't turn out right when one of my friends mess their lives up? That's one side. On the other side are people who never even stop to think that they have been given responsibilities by God. Paul would say it this way, 1 Corinthians 4-2, Moreover, what is required of stewards is that they be found faithful. Paul saw himself as a steward. A steward is just a servant. A servant's not in charge of the house. The master's in charge of the house. The steward is simply responsible to do what the master tells him to do. The master is the one who bears the responsibility for taking care of the house.

You think of it like a money manager. When I give my broker, when I give him money to invest in a certain company, if that company tanks and goes bankrupt, that's not his fault. He did what I told him to do. If that company blows up and makes millions of dollars and I benefit, he doesn't get the credit for that. It's my money. I give it to him. He does with it what I instruct him to do.

That's how Paul saw his life. I'm not in charge of this. I'm not responsible to save the world. I'm responsible to do as a steward with what God has given me, what God has instructed me.

Now write this down. Success and failure are master words. Faithfulness is the concern of stewards.

Some of you are obsessed about the success or the failure of your life. That just shows that you have assumed the position of master. You're not the master. You're simply a steward and your word is not success or failure. Your word is faithfulness. To those of you who tend to carry around the weight of too much responsibility, what God requires of stewards, all that he requires is that we be faithful with what he assigned to us because, listen, God doesn't need you. He doesn't need you. He's not sitting in heaven going, man, he's got to use his talents the way that I, or my kingdom's going to, no.

He doesn't need you. God can do more with one act of faithfulness than you could accomplish in 10,000 lifetimes on your own. You see a really good example of that in the book of Acts?

We got it several weeks ago. Acts chapter 8. Philip. Philip is in Samaria. Philip's preaching. God's using him. Hundreds, thousands of people are getting saved in Samaria.

And then the most unexpected thing happens. The Spirit of God says to Philip, I want you to leave Samaria where hundreds of people are getting saved, and I want you to go stand by yourself on the side of a little dusty road leading down to Africa. And Philip was like, why?

I mean, I'm having a big impact here, but you want me to go stand on a dusty road where there's no traffic? Samaria says, yep. And Philip stands there. But sure enough, soon comes this single chariot, and in it is a guy that we now refer to as the Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip leads him to Christ. And this guy goes on, scholars say, to found the church in Africa.

And what you see is that God does more through one act of faithfulness than Philip could accomplish in 10,000 lifetimes on their own. So the better question for you is, what has God told you to do? I have a friend right now who's making a very difficult decision about whether he should transition in ministry somewhere, and he told me, he said, you know, for most of my life, I've always asked myself the question, where can I have the biggest impact?

Where's the best investment of my talents? He said, after studying the book of Acts, I realized the only question I need to ask is, where does God want me? Because God doesn't need me. He doesn't need me to have an impact. He doesn't need my talents. He just wants me to be faithful, because he can do more with one act of faithfulness than I could accomplish in 10,000 lifetimes. It's not your ability that God needs.

It is your availability, because the point is not what you can do for him, but what he can do through you. When you get to heaven, I think you're going to be blown away. At how God used small acts of faithfulness to do the greatest things. Every once in a while, God will give you a glimpse of it now, especially if you're weak in faith like me, and you need constant reminders, he gives you little glimpses. For example, I think I've told you before that after I graduated high school, a few years later, I got a letter from a girl that had been in my high school group who told me in this letter, she says, we've never had a conversation. Not one time, she said, but I just recently gave my life to Christ. And my friend asked me, what were the biggest catalytic things that pushed me to faith in Christ? She said, in making the list, she said, a conversation that you had with somebody else, and didn't even know that I was listening, was one of the biggest catalysts for me coming to faith. She said, because I watched your life. She said, you were a curiosity to me. She said, I thought you were strange for multiple reasons. She said, but I thought you were strange. She said, but in that conversation, I heard you give testimony to Jesus Christ.

She said, in that conversation, you didn't even know I was listening to, is what God used to turn me around. I think when you get to heaven, you're going to be blown away at how much that kind of stuff happens when God takes the smallest act of faithfulness. College student, you feel like you lost the argument in that classroom. You feel like you got humiliated. You feel like your commitment to purity is not making any difference.

When you get to heaven, then you realize that God used your courageous stand as the catalyst for somebody else to actually come to faith. I remember what it's like to be in college. Sometimes you feel like, you know, you got this, like, you ever watch a football game and there's like a sea of people all wearing one color, cheering for their team. And then you've always got the one or two guys, like right in the middle that are wearing the color of the other team. And they're just cheering their heads off. And you almost are like, why are you doing that?

Nobody can hear you. You're just making everybody mad. You're not making any difference at all in the game, right? That's what it means to be a follower of Jesus in many of these environments. You feel like I'm cheering for the other team.

Nobody's paying attention. I'm just irritating everybody, but God uses that kind of faithfulness for his spirit to do things through you that will blow you away. Mothers and fathers, I can tell you that what God uses in your kid's life is consistent faithfulness, not some big dramatic conversation. As a guy who was deeply impacted by his mom and dad, I can tell you the biggest impact didn't go back to a conversation they had with me so much as it is the ordinary faithfulness I observed in their lives over a lifetime.

Write this down. Success in life is identifying what God has called you to and being completely faithful in it. For a servant, success in life is just identifying what God has called you to and being completely faithful in it. In a particularly stressful time in my life, when I was really worried about whether or not I was succeeding the first three years that I was a pastor here or the years that I'm referring to, when I was afraid everybody would figure out that I really didn't know what I was doing.

I kept up this illusion, but behind the scenes I was like, what do I do? I wrote down on a card, a little index card, I wrote down 10 things that I knew Jesus had called me to. Every night for three years, the last thing I would do before I went to sleep is I'd pull out that card and I'd read through those 10 things and I'd say, Jesus, did I do this today? Did I do this today?

Did I do this well? Because I knew that if I'd done those 10 things well that Jesus had called me to, I was a success regardless of how big this church got or regardless of how you thought about me. Success in life is determining what Jesus has called you to do, being faithful in it, so that when you die, you hear from him those words, well done, good and faithful servant. One of our pastors, Chris Gaynor, his mother, passed away. Dear Saint of God, Jackie Gaynor, she's been here.

They live in Georgia, but been here at her church many times. Chris told me after his mother passed away, he said, you know, he says, when the world looks at my mother, they wouldn't really find that much that they would consider to be remarkable. She didn't have any real talents that were world renowned. She wasn't necessarily a great speaker.

She was just a very ordinary person. She said, but in her mid-40s, she figured out that God had called her to disciple other women. And so, for the last 25 years, she has faithfully discipled women.

She didn't write a curriculum. She didn't speak to large groups of women. He said, she just took a curriculum somebody else had written, did something very ordinary, and that is disciple other women. He said, over the 25 years that she's done this, she's discipled literally hundreds of women. My question for you is, what do you think Jackie Gaynor heard when she stepped foot into heaven, though she may not have had as big an impact on the world as for you to hear about it? What do you think she heard when she stepped foot into heaven and the Lord Jesus looks at her and says, well done, good and faithful servant, because you did exactly what I told you to do? Isn't that what you want to hear?

What's it like to look into the face of Jesus when the world recedes behind you and all the applause there is done and the opinions of a bunch of no account earthlings are fading in the distance to have the creator of the universe who loved you, who spoke the end from the beginning, who cared for you and died for you, who is your inheritance, who is the alpha and the omega, look you in the eyes and say, well done, good and faithful servant. You were the mother I told you to be. You were the father I told you to be. You did for me what I told you to do. That is success in Paul's life. Is that what you want? Is that what you want to hear?

And you start living that way now. Number two, I told the truth. Paul said, I told the truth. Verse 20, I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable. He says it again, verse 27, I didn't shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.

Paul saw himself, 1 Timothy 2 7, as a herald of truth. A herald in those days was not responsible for composing the message. They weren't responsible for the content of the message. They weren't responsible for whether people liked the message or how they responded to it.

The only responsibility of the herald was that they delivered the message. Theologian J.I. Packer says about Paul, Paul in his own estimation was not a philosopher. He was not a moralist.

He was not the world's wisest man or even a great teacher. Paul saw himself simply as Christ's herald. Paul's royal master had given him a message to proclaim. Paul's whole business therefore was to deliver that message with exact and studious faithfulness. Paul added nothing, altered nothing, omitted nothing.

Let me tell you how seriously Paul took this. You see in verse 26 where he says, I'm innocent of the blood of you all. That is a quote from a verse in Ezekiel chapter 33, where God is speaking to the prophet Ezekiel and he calls Ezekiel a watchman. A watchman in those days was the guy who stood on the wall and watched for the enemy.

So if an enemy was coming to attack, the watchman would warn the people that the enemy was coming. And God says to Ezekiel, Ezekiel 33 eight, when I say to the wicked man, oh wicked man, you will surely die. And you, the watchman, do not warn him to turn from his iniquity. Surely the man will die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hands.

And what he meant by that is this. When the watchman sees the enemy coming and the watchman warns the army, if the army does not get prepared, it's not the watchman's fault because the watchman told them that he was, that the army was coming. But if the watchman is derelict in his duty and doesn't warn the army, then when the city is sacked and everybody dies, then it's the watchman's fault. Paul saw himself as the watchman. Listen for the group of people that God had assigned him to. What is Jesus telling you to do? Like Pastor JD said, success in life is identifying what God has called you to and then being faithful and accomplishing it. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of JD Greer.

If you tuned in a little late today, no worries. You can catch the rest of the message online at jdgreer.com. You'll also have the option of downloading the complete unedited sermon transcripts to help you follow along.

These transcripts are a hit for those looking for further study, so check them out and share them with a friend. It's our pleasure to give you access to these and other Bible study resources. And today we'd like to get a very important resource into your hands.

It's volume two of a personal study guide called Scent, the Book of Acts. The interactive questions and insightful commentaries will help you think through how you can be an active part of God's mission to reach the lost. And our prayer is that through this teaching series on the air and this workbook that we've created to accompany it, that you'll be encouraged to leverage the opportunities and gifts you've been given to reach your community with the gospel. We'll be glad to send you volume two of the acts study guide now to express our gratitude for your financial support.

And just so you know, volume one is also still available if you missed it earlier this spring. Remember, when you give to Summit Life, you make it possible for us to deliver these daily Bible programs and all of the other free resources on our website. So give today and join our mission to put the gospel front and center. Donate by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or it might be easier to give online at jdgrier.com. While you're on the website, you can learn about becoming a gospel partner. Gospel partners are special members of our team here at J.D. Greer Ministries, and they're an integral part of boldly proclaiming the gospel through this radio ministry, our new TV ministry, our website, and print resources. As a growing ministry, we desire more gospel partners to join us in helping others dive deeper into the love of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ. When you sign up for a regular, ongoing, monthly gift of $25 or more, you become part of our gospel partner family, and we'd love to have you join us today. I'm Molly Vitovich. Join us tomorrow when Pastor JD explains that there's only one person who's responsible for saving the world, and thankfully it's not us.

Hear what we should focus our attention on instead. That's Tuesday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.