Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

August 5, 2007

Use Me

1 Corinthians 1: 26-31

Children are very keen observers of adults and they often want to do what they see adults do. This is why children like to dress up in adult clothes and in all manner of things. If children watch you, observe you regularly, doing something in particular, you can be assured they will want to do it, too.

Take reading. How many of you have seen a child, maybe four years old, take a book, sit down, and turn pages in it with a pace and determination that makes it look like they are reading that book, even though it is Popular Science, “How to Build Your Own Aircraft,” or something like that, but they are reading it like they know exactly what it says.

If you have more than one child in your home, chances are you can remember a time when there was one who was too young to read but had a younger sibling—maybe a four-year-old with a two-year-old—and they are sitting with a fat book, turning pages, and it is as if they are reading a story that they have not yet been able to read, but they are reading it. They have seen you do it, and they want to do it, too.

It’s the same way with prayer. If you have children in your home and you say a prayer before a meal or if you pray with your children at a particular time of the day, chances are before bedtime, the child is not very old before the child will put their hand over your mouth and say, “I want to do it,” and the child with great wisdom and innocent fervor, offers a prayer far better probably than any other family member could. If they see you pray, they want to pray.

When small children see parents work, they want to help. You cannot stop a child from wanting to help. I have tried to remember the stories that some of you have told me about children helping, and I have heard about children who washed cars with mud because I guess they had seen mud on the car before and they thought that was what you put on the car, and they wanted to help wash cars so they washed the car with mud.

Or children who burned food in an effort to surprise some family member with a meal. Or a load of whites that had been turned a very nice shade of pink by a child who had decided to help put clothes in the washer and didn’t know you had to separate out a red shirt.

Children want to help and sometimes they don’t always know the things they are supposed to do, so we will say something like, “Here, let me do that” or “You’re not old enough to do that yet,” or “It’s going to take too long. Let me do it.” We never realize that when we do that sort of thing that we often stifle down that spirit, that thing that I think God has put in the heart of every human being that says, “I want to serve. I want to help. I want to be part of this.”

I would imagine that most males, most boys, can probably remember the first time they were allowed to cut the grass with a lawnmower. It had always looked like something that only fathers and gods got to do or whatever. Then the first time you wanted to do that and they let you get behind that lawnmower and you did it, it was amazing. We all wanted to help. Most people do want to help.

Much of my theology as pastor of this church is based on the conviction that Christians want to serve. Christians, somewhere in their heart, want to serve Jesus Christ. We talk a lot about being the hands of Christ, and it is based upon this theological conviction that God has wired us in such a way as we must serve. We must help. We want to do something for Christ. That childhood desire to help is transformed into something as an adult Christian where we think, “I’d like to do something for God.” But it is clear that not everybody does so why not?

One of the obvious answers and a quick answer that people will go to is that people are selfish. “I’m busy. I don’t want to infringe on my time. I don’t want to commit to that.” We live in an age where no one wants to commit, and that is a reason why sometimes people don’t serve. But I find that for every person who doesn’t serve because they are selfish with time or energy or whatever, that there is at least one other person who doesn’t serve because they either think that they are unworthy or unable. “How could God use me? How could God take someone like me, the person I know myself to be in my own heart, and how could God use me? How could God use me? I can’t sing. I can’t carry a tune. The only thing I can play is the radio. I can’t do anything that would be seen as a talent or something that God could use?”

The passage that we read earlier is a summary of a theme that runs throughout the Bible. What is it he says, “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many influential, not many of noble birth,” and he starts talking about how God chooses the foolish things, the small things, and the insignificant things. If you read from the beginning until the end of scripture, God is always using the person that no one would ever suspect.

David is so small that when he puts on the king’s armor, he looks like he is playing dress-up as a soldier and they finally say, “Take that stuff off of him so he can go out there and fight that giant.” He is the least likely person on the battlefield to look like he can slay Goliath.

Gideon is the youngest member of the smallest tribe in the weakest clan or something like that in Israel, and he is hiding in a wine press to thresh his wheat. He is in there all hunkered down and they thresh by throwing it up in the air. It’s almost a comedy looking thing. He is in there bent over where he can’t stand up straight, trying to thresh his wheat so that the Midianites won’t come take it away from him, and God says, “Hail, mighty man of valor.” You can just see Gideon think, “Who else is in here? I don’t know,” and God uses Gideon. This is always the way God works. People who are overlooked, people who don’t seem to have a lot of whatever it may be in the world’s standards can be used in the kingdom of God by God’s power.

We used the meditation text a couple of weeks ago in which it described Jesus as walking through Galilee and seeing fishermen saying, “You’ll do. Tax collector, you’ll do.” Who were these people? Least likely to be sure in their graduating classes to be people who would change the world, but as instruments and willing tools in the hands of God, they became the very instruments that spread the good news of Jesus Christ around the world.

The theme of this section of First Corinthians is that it is not anybody’s skill lest they boast, it is not anybody’s talent, less they brag about what they did for God. It is simply the willingness to serve. Simply the humble willingness to serve.

As we have been going through the summer, we have been talking about prayers that God answers, promises that God keeps. Well, here is one: pray the prayer, “God, use me,” not for the sake of praise from somebody else, not so that you can obtain a certain position where people will respect you, but if each of us, any of us offer the prayer, “God, use me,” simply because of that thing that resides in the heart that wants to serve Jesus Christ, that is a prayer that God answers. “Oh, God, use me, not to put myself on a pedestal, not to receive the praise, not to fulfill my ego, but because I love you and this is all my heart’s desire. Pray that prayer. See if God does not answer.

(Note: This sermon was followed by deacon ordination service.)

Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

Use Me

1 Corinthians 1: 26-31

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