2 Corinthians 5:1–10Scripture
Night one, your kids learned this that my life on earth is temporary.
Our lives on this earth, the Bible tells us, are not our eternal dwelling.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 0:06
And that in comparison to eternity, it really is fairly quick, right? Night two, we learned I asked this question, where will I spend eternity? And that night we went through the gospel and we had a few kids actually have some real in-depth conversation on what it meant to surrender their lives to Jesus to secure where they would spend their eternity.
The third night we learned this. The Bible is my guide to live for Christ. We talked about in Timothy where Paul tells Timothy that God's word is breathed out by God and it's profitable for man. It's profitable for us for our teaching, for our reproof, correction, and for our training up in righteousness. And then the fourth night on Thursday night, I sorry, I preached and we covered this point that only the gospel can lead someone to Jesus.
There's a lot of times that we can get timid or we can get nervous about sharing the gospel and often times we pass up opportunities where we could have shared the gospel.
And what God's word tells us is that it's only the sharing of the gospel that can save someone.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 1:25
And I've shared this a couple times over the last few weeks, but it was several weeks ago now earlier in the summer when we took our elementary age kids to summer camp up at God's Mountain North of Kansas City.
And I heard the director of their camp while he was doing a little meeting with their staff. I heard this director say this, and this has just stuck with me all summer.
He said, "Every one of us came to know Jesus because somebody told us about him.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 1:55
Introduction
So go talk about Jesus." And that just stuck in my mind that nobody can come to know Jesus without somebody sharing the gospel.
So this morning with all of our families here, I'm going to take a little bit of a deeper look, like I said, back at our theme verse. So 2 Corinthians, if you have it in your Bibles, it's not going to be on the screen because like I said, I failed to put my media on the computer this morning as I was getting ready.
But 2 Corinthians 5:es 1-10 says this, "For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.
Meanwhile, we groan longing to be clothed. Instead with our heavenly dwelling. Because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened because we do not wish to be unclothed, but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.
Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God who has given us the spirit as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come.
Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.
This morning, I've entitled my message, What Are You Groaning For? What are you groaning for? Show of hands. And please be honest. How many of you have ever heard me grunt or groan while doing something? Jackson was the first hand. How many have ever heard me groan? Many of you, if you've known me for any length of time, you've heard me grunt or groan.
Whether I'm trying to get up off the floor, whether I'm going up and down the stairs, whether I'm bending over to get creamer out of the refrigerator in the conference room downstairs, I'm a noisy human being.
It just is the way that it is. I've always been a noise. I used to get in trouble sitting at the dining table eating dinner when I was a kid because I would be groaning or grunting while I was eating, like even just chewing my food.
And my stepmom used to get so frustrated. She'd be like, "Can you please chew any quieter?" So my wife actually finds it comical whenever I say something to her or to our kids about chewing quieter. She's like, "Really?" But I'm a noisy human being and I grunt and I groan a lot. But we're not just talking about that type of groaning because we all groan and we grunt for many different reasons.
We groan because we're tired or we groan because we're sore, but we also groan because we're excited or anxious about something, too.
But what Paul's talking about in this Scripture when he's saying that we grown, he's talking about a longing type of groan. So let me ask you this. Have you ever had to wait a long time for something that you were really excited about and it kind of felt like that day would never come?
Anybody? Just a few of us. Like maybe Christmas. We all get excited for Christmas as the as it draws nearer maybe your birthday. This week we celebrated Jackson's birthday yesterday and it was like a countdown for this the whole week leading up. Adults, maybe a vacation that we're looking forward to and you can feel that longing. And if you sit, you can think about it sometimes and maybe you're waiting on that vacation and it's the last day of work and it just feels like that your pile of responsibilities is just piling up and you might feel that because I just want to be done.
I just want to clock out. I just want to get in my car. I'm tired of all of the packing. This is how I felt when we went to family camp a couple weeks ago as I was trying to shove the last bit of things into the back of my van. I just thought, I just want to be on the road already.
There's a longing type of groaning. But what Paul is looking forward to isn't vacation. Well, it's an eternal vacation. What Paul's not looking forward to his birthday coming up or celebrating Christmas with his family. What Paul's looking forward to is eternity in heaven in a new glorified body that he talks about throughout all of his writings. As I was studying, I came across this quote and I want to read this quote to you.
It's from some commentary that I was reading. Says this, Paul was not afraid of suffering and trials or even of dangers. This is not to suggest that he tempted the Lord by taking unnecessary risks, but it does mean that he was willing to lose his life for the sake of Christ and the ministry of the gospel.
He walked by faith and not by sight. He looked at the eternal unseen, not the temporal scene.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 7:48
I love this. This is the best part.
Heaven was not simply a destination for Paul. It was a motivation.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 7:57
Let me ask you this morning as we're looking at this Scripture and Paul's talking about this groaning, this longing to no longer be in our earthly bodies, to no longer be he uses the terminology found naked.
That just means to be still in our earthly bodies, not in our glorified heavenly bodies, yet fully clothed in glory.
But as we're looking at Paul's longing this morning, I think it begs the question of us. What are you groaning for? What is your heart longing for?
Point 1Your body groans for what your heart desires
And my key point, kids, this morning is this. Your body groans for what your heart desires.
Your body groans and longs for what your heart truly desires.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 8:50
And this point reminds me of part of Jesus's sermon on the mount. A couple Scriptures out of Matthew chapter 6. 1 verse 21 says, "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
Verse 33 says, "But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." And I'm not going to really dig into those Scriptures because we're going through Matthew 6 as a church right now. So, we'll cover that Scripture in depth in a few months. But I believe that Jesus is presenting the same type of question.
What are you seeking? What are you longing for? What are you worrying about? What
Are you groaning for? Are you groaning for heavenly eternal things? Or are you groaning for earthly temporal things?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 9:38
And I thought about this and this Scripture this or this whole message this morning. I'm just going to be fully transparent. James. No, I'm gonna I don't I think it's chapter two, but I'm foggy right now.
But in the book of James says, "Be careful of you. Be careful those of you who desire to teach because you'll be judged more strictly is what James tells us somewhere in those five chapters."
And that Scripture is weighing heavy on my heart this morning because this message has been punching me in the gut all week. What are you groaning for? And I had this thought and I didn't want to write it down because when you write something down and you're going to get ready to preach it, you have to be ready to walk through it.
You have to be ready to flesh it out. But I wrote this down.
If you had to take inventory of everything you gave your time and attention to this last week and then make a pie chart to determine whether each item was earthly focused or heavenly focused, what would your chart look like?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 10:40
Now, I could probably make myself a pretty good-look chart this week because this was VBS week, but what about next week? What if I had to make a chart for the whole last month? What is your body groaning for? Your body groans for what your heart desires. It's a humbling question. The chart would show what you groan for.
It would show the motivation and the longings of your heart. And this is the dilemma. This question isn't about separating good things from bad things. It's not about organizing by work or family time. It's not an issue of effective time management and it's not about whether or not something is a good financial investment.
It's an issue of whether our hearts are motivated by heavenly things or by earthly things.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 11:43
This is tough. Paul speaks about a confidence. He says twice in this short Scripture that we're confident. He speaks about a confidence because he knows of his own heavenly motivation. I think Paul's chart would look pretty all right is what I'm trying to say because he's confident in this. He's been tested. He's been tried. And he's been found worthy to be an apostle of God.
But what are we groaning for? Are we groaning for eternal things or temporary things? And I thought and I thought and I thought and this rest of my message was the hardest for me to really put into words.
And I have found this week that I can have some really good processing time, some really good thinking time, some really good brainstorming time while I'm sitting in my hot tub.
It's fantastic. Got this inflatable hot tub that my wife bought me for Father's Day. And I asked this question, "What are you groaning for?" And I came up with three ways. Three ways that we all grow. And like I said, this was difficult for me to putt to words because I had all kinds of thoughts and things running through my head.
But to try to render things down and simplify things to where I'm only sharing what needs to be shared is sometimes difficult for me because I like to talk.
But I came up with three things. They all happen to have the letter F. So there's three Fs here.
Point 2How are you groaning for your faith?
The first is this. How are you groaning for your faith? How are you groaning for your faith? Are you motivated and focused on earthly or heavenly rewards? There's a danger in the world that we live in. And I feel like more times than not when I get an opportunity to preach specifically to our adult congregation because I preach regularly to our children, but I feel like somewhere in most of my sermons, the what we refer to as the prosperity Gospel comes up in a message.
But there's such a danger in the world that we live in what we call the prosperity gospel in this theological mindset that if you surrender your life to Jesus that God just wants to bless you, that he just wants to prosper you, that he just wants to better your life. And that's not necessarily true. I actually just had a really awesome conversation a couple weeks ago with a guy that I would still call a friend.
He's definitely a brother. We used to do ministry together and we've parted ways and we didn't really talk for a while and then I ended up running into him and we got to connect a little bit and we ended up talking and he used to be very much into this health, wealth and prosperity gospel. And I brought it up in the conversation very in a very sly way just to make sure that I wasn't like being offensive but I kind of wanted to see because a few years have gone by where he sat with it.
And as he was asking me about how my family was doing because he knows that my wife has a chronic illness where she deals with headaches all the time.
He knows that one of my kids is type 1 diabetic. He knows that Melody was born with some heart issues. He's never even met Josie. And so he was just asking me, "Hey, how's your family doing?" And so we were just talking about it. And I said, "You know, I got to a place a few years ago where I had to just resolve in my heart that
Instead of praying for God to take the bad situations away that my family was fighting with, that I began to pray that he would just give us the strength and the endurance to thrive in those situations."
Pastor J.R. Brown · 15:49
And I said, ' Because I'd prayed long enough, I finally just got to a point, this is where I slid it in there. I finally just got to a point that if it was ultimately God's will to always heal, then he would have healed my wife already. And he said, "Those 12 disciples died pretty treacherous deaths, didn't they?" And I turned around and I was like, "Yes."
Often we put so much emphasis in trying to seek earthly rewards that we completely miss out on an eternal reward, on a heavenly reward.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 16:34
I wrote this down. Are you praying to be prospered? Are you praying to be sanctified? Because I don't believe that you can necessarily have both. Don't write that down. There's no Scripture that says that verbatim. But I don't believe that you can pursue both.
Are you praying to be prospered or to be sanctified?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 17:07
Man, I went yesterday and I visited with an old gal who used to be regularly here at our church.
Many of you know Mrs. Bonnie and she is a sweet, tender-hearted lady. And her body is just slowly shutting down right now. And I went to see her. She's at a point now, I've been visiting with her every couple weeks, and she's at a point now where she can't even get out of bed anymore. And as her and I were talking and I asked her how I could pray for her,
She said, "Pray that I have the strength to continue to share Jesus with everybody that walks through that door."
Pastor J.R. Brown · 17:37
And I was like, I will absolutely pray that for you.
And she said, you know, my time might be closer. You know, I might hop back up out of this bed. We don't know. But pray that I have the strength to share Jesus. She said, "I'm working on one of my neighbors. She hasn't accepted Christ yet, but I'm but I'm praying she will before I die." Are you praying to be prospered in your faith?
Are you praying for earthly rewards in your faith? Or are you groaning for heavenly rewards?
Point 3How are you groaning for your finances?
The second is this. Are you how are you groaning for your finances? Faith, finances. What is your motivation? Are your goals financially, are they temporal or are they eternal? Again, I'm going to reference Matthew 6 because Matthew 6 says that where your treasure is, that's where your heart is.
And our bodies grown for what our hearts long for.
So where are you seeking and storing up treasures?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 18:56
Now I'm going to say this and I by no means I mean if this comes out wrong, Jeff Compton's going to tackle me after the service is over with. I'm by no means saying that you should be irresponsible with your money.
Okay? But I do believe and I've known many and I've had this mindset myself at times. I've had this mindset even recently. I do believe that our mindset and that our groaning with our finances can be so temporal and earthly focused that we avoid making heavenly and eternal investments with our finances.
And that can be how you obediently and cheerfully give to the church. That can be how you give and are generous with people in your community. That can even be how you invest and spend your money and budget your money with your family. And I was on Facebook and I was just mindlessly strolling on Facebook and I came across this video and I thought, well, that's interesting.
So, I watched it and it was a song that this guy had just written. It wasn't even really a parody. It was just an original song that he wrote about this fishing boat that he had just bought and how yeah, he probably overextended himself a little bit and yeah, he probably Dave Ramsey would have told him not to go into debt, not to take on that boat payment. But then he started in this song singing about the memories that he was making with his kids and how he was sharing his father's love for fishing with his kids.
And the hook of this song was I'd rather have all these memories than Dave Ramsey's money.
Again, I'm not saying don't be a good steward with your money. I'm not saying put yourself in a financial predicament that you can't afford. But I am saying I think sometimes
We get so focused on accumulating wealth or the number in our savings account that we walk around with our eyes closed to eternal investments that the Lord may want to lead us in.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 21:02
And how is that groaning for heavenly things?
Because when you die, you don't get to take it with you.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 21:24
So how are you groaning for your finances?
Point 4How are you groaning for your family?
Your faith, your finances. My last one this morning is your family. How are you groaning with your family, man? The I'm just sharing stuff with you, like I said, that has been punching me in the gut for the last few weeks as I've been chewing on this Scripture.
How are you groaning for your family? This verse keeps running through my mind. Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he's old, he will not depart from it. How many of you heard it? It's a well-known proverb. It's a well-known nugget of wisdom that King Solomon gave to us. Train him up in the way he should go, and when he's old, he will not depart from it.
Now, I'm not going to I'm not going to challenge King Solomon's writing. All right? It's not what I'm trying to do here.
I'm just going to say from my vantage point, you are training up your child whether you're intending to or not.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 22:21
And he's going to follow in your footsteps. She's going to follow in your footsteps. So rather you're training them in the way they should go or you're training them up to groan for earthly temporal things, they're going to follow you.
They're watching you and they're learning from you. They're mimicking you.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 22:47
Boys learn how to treat their future girlfriends and their future wives by how their dads treat their moms.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 22:53
It's a proven statistic. So rather you're intentionally training up your child or rather that's not even on your radar right now because you're so focused on temporal things. You're training them whether you're intending to or not.
How are you groaning for your family? What kind of investments are you making with your family? How are you prioritizing the word of God with your family? And this is again, this is not easy for me because the Brown family devotion time has really in my house just become Melody and mom devotion time because I've allowed it to become less of a priority for me.
That's something I'm going to be fixing.
How are you prioritizing the word of God with your children? Husbands, how are you prioritizing the word of God with your wives?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 23:58
And I'm telling you, there's a growing it's it's getting worse and worse. I thought it was bad 10 years ago when I was just trying to fight this issue with teenagers and it's a hundred times worse now that I'm doing ministry with children.
It's a hundred times worse when I see over and over again parents prioritizing sports or any kind of extracurricular activity over involvement with their church family.
I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to work this out, how I'm going to have this conversation because, you know, you got to check the plank in your own eye before you go mention the speck in your brother's eye.
But I got a good friend. I see him every couple weeks and we were just chatting. He goes to a different church and he's been telling me for a while now about how he hasn't been in church, how it's been months, how it's been over a year since his family was at church.
And just a couple weeks ago when I saw him because we hang out every couple weeks, he said, "Hey, you'd be proud of me. We're back in church. I said, "That's awesome, man. That's great." He's like, "Yeah, but it'll be shortlived because in two weeks soccer season starts again and my kids have this and it's all on Sunday mornings." And I'm just like, but this is it's it's an issue.
And I have a friend that he likes to challenge and he was a college friend of mine. He likes to challenge a lot of my faith or Scripture focused Facebook posts. And this guy posted something on Facebook a couple days ago that in all of the New Testament, church services aren't ever mentioned.
So why are we why are we so persistent about telling Christians that they have to be at church on Sundays? Because church services aren't mentioned. And I'm just like, brother. And this dude's a believer. Like he's he's served in pastoral ministry and I'm just like what are you doing right now? I sent him a message. I'm like what are you doing?
Like I understand your point that you're trying to make, but all you're all you're really doing is diminishing the value and the level of emphasis that as Christians we should have for when we join together.
Because if you want to do stuff the way that they did it in the New Testament, then go sell your house. Go sell all your earthly possessions. Give everything that you have to your local church congregation. Start living as a commune. Everybody will think that you're some kind of weird cult, but start living as a commune and literally breaking bread together daily because that's what they did in the New Testament.
But we live in a world where it's pulling teeth to even motivate a local church family to prioritize one morning a week.
We're living in a world where it's pulling teeth to get families to prioritize one Wednesday night a week to prioritize that night to make that night sacred for their teenage kids.
Well, they have this sport or they have this sport or they have this activity or they have this
Are you groaning for heavenly things for your kids or are you groaning for earthly temporary things?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 27:30
You can't grown for both. You can't prioritize both. And I'm telling you, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard a parent make an excuse about how busy their kid is and why their kid can't make it to church, I'd have me some money.
I could probably afford that 3/4tonon diesel that I'd really like to buy. I'd really like to stop borrowing Kirk's truck. Maybe, Pastor Sean, maybe I'll just start charging people. Every time you give me an excuse for why you or your kid can't show up to something, I'm just going to charge you a dollar. I could probably make that truck payment.
Will I pay cash for it, Jeff? No, but I bet you I can make that payment. I can make some good memories with my kids. Oh, the stuff I could do with that 3/4tonon diesel truck. Are you groaning for heavenly things or for earthly things? I'm going to close with this morning. We're look at verse nine again. Sorry, I know it's not on the screen.
Verse 9 says this. So, we make it our goal to please him. Whether we are at home in the body or away from it, we make it our goal. Oh, look, it is up there. Thanks, Curtis. We make it our goal to please him. I'm clearly not reading from the ESV. I think I had my Bible app on the wrong translation.
What's that to say? Therefore, whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to be pleasing to him. Is your groaning pleasing to God? Is your groaning pleasing to God?
Your body groans. Listen to me this morning, church. Your body groans for what your heart desires. Is your groaning pleasing to God?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 29:40
I think we just need to sit in that.
We just need to sit in that. As your body groans, what it longs for, as your body groans because it's tired, is the energy that you're expensing on a regular basis, is that pleasing to God or is it wasted?
Is it heavenly focused or is it earthly focused? Is it eternal or is it temporal?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 30:16
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