Sermon: "Being God's Glove"
How many pairs of gloves do you have around your home? Here is what I found when I did a personal inventory.
I have my winter gloves … which I use for shoveling snow, running my snow blower and taking my winter evening walks.
I have my wood cutting gloves … which I use when I run my chain saw, split wood or haul wood.
I have my mechanic gloves … which I use when I change blades on my lawn mower (that’s about the extent of my mechanical accomplishments).
I have my little brown gloves … I usually have two or three pairs of these at the house or in the car. I view them as emergency gloves.
I have my leather work gloves … which I use when I help people to move. They are especially nice for moving appliances.
I have rubber gloves … which I use when I am painting or planting flowers for Connie.
I have a golf glove … which I try to use as often as I can.
Gloves are very useful because they fit over each individual finger, thus allowing complete use of your hand, even as your hand is being protected. Gloves are great but in themselves they can’t do anything. They need a hand to make them productive.
Think how hard it would be to work if the thumb and fingers of your gloves would be sewed shut. Your fingers would be folded up into a fist. They would stay nice and warm, but you couldn’t function very well. It would be hard to use a pencil or your cell phone. It would be hard to hold a chain saw or snow shovel.
You want to be able to extend your fingers into your gloves because you have work to do …. so does God, and he wants to use us to do it.
He wants us, our bodies and our minds, to be his glove. He will fill the glove with his Spirit, his power, if we offer ourselves to him.
What our hands are to our gloves, the Holy Spirit is to the Christian.
Our gloves help us to do a lot of things, but gloves without hands accomplish nothing.
Our bodies and minds can help God do a lot of things, but without his Holy Spirit we can accomplish nothing.
This morning you are going to be invited to be a glove for God.
The Apostle Paul knew what it was to be a glove for God and he wrote …
GALATIANS 2:20 – I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Paul said he was crucified, yet we know he was living when he wrote those words. It was his old nature that was crucified. It no longer controlled him.
Paul went on to say, “The life I live in the body I live by faith.”
From outward appearances Paul appears to live as all people live. He eats, drinks, breathes and sleeps as others do. Yet he says, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
Paul became a glove for God and God was able to use that glove to accomplish a lot of his work.
God can use you to do his work if you will become a glove for him to use.
Before we look at what is involved in being a glove for God, let’s review what we looked at last week concerning, “You and the Holy Spirit.” Our lesson was called, “Stop Pushing Your Car.”
We saw that many Christians depend upon their own power in trying to live a joyful and useful Christian life, but fail miserably. We also saw that to be successful as a Christian you need to live by God’s power. That means you need to live in Jesus, which involves coming to him each day with a thirst for the things he has for you; things such as inner peace, joy, and a purpose for living.
We also saw that to be successful as a Christian you must “depend on his Spirit.”
That’s where our lesson begins today. If you are going to be God’s glove you will be a useless glove unless you allow yourself to be filled, to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.
The first thing required of you if you truly want to become God’s glove is to learn to …
I. WAIT FOR THE POWER
This can be very frustrating. Who has time to wait? Yet learning to wait on God is a theme that runs throughout the scriptures.
When we are wronged, Proverbs tells us to “wait” for the Lord to act instead of trying to get even ourselves.
PROVERBS 20:22 – Do not say, “I’ll pay you back for this wrong!” Wait for the Lord, and he will deliver you.
When things are going bad for us and even those close to us have turned against us, the Psalmist tells us to stay strong and “wait” for the Lord.
PSALM 27:14 – Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.
Of course, most of you remember what Jesus told his followers just before he ascended into heaven. Remember he rose from the grave and spent 40 days with many of those who believed in him. The Bible says …
ACTS 1:3-5, 9 – 3After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
9After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
He ascended into heaven 40 days after his resurrection. We call this Ascension Thursday but the day they received the promised power, the Holy Spirit, did not come until ten days later. On the day we call Pentecost. Can you imagine how difficult it must have been for them to wait? They didn’t know how long a few days would be and they didn’t know what it meant to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, but they waited.
We don’t have to wait for God’s Spirit to come upon us because he does that when we believe in Jesus, but we do have to wait until he directs and empowers us. When we try to do things in our time and in our strength we often mess up.
So if you truly want to be a glove for God you must wait until he is ready to use you. Since waiting can be very frustrating here are some things to do as you wait.
A. WATCH WHILE YOU WAIT
If you are standing somewhere waiting for someone or waiting for a bus to pick you up, you keep looking up the street or road.
If you are waiting for God to use you, you must keep looking for him. You must have a hunger for him. I can remember as a teenager walking outside at night and looking up to the heavens and crying out to God, “Why am I here on earth. What is my purpose in life?” Later in my late thirties and early forties as I spent many hours driving to work or to visit customers, I would cry out to God, “Father, there has to be more to life than just selling doors.” I was waiting and watching for God’s direction.
As you wait for God to move in your life you must be watching for him, hungering and thirsting for him. You must want to be his glove, his servant, more than anything else in life.
If you do, he probably won’t make you a pastor, but he will use you for the purpose for which you were designed. Remember all gloves aren’t used for the same things. You also need to …
B. BE OBEDIENT AS YOU WAIT
After you offer yourself to God as a living sacrifice, go and do the things he wants you to do …
- Be the husband or wife he desires you to be.
- Speak words that build up and encourage others.
- Work hard so you have something to share with the poor.
- Teach others about God and his Son, Jesus.
- Be kind, considerate and gentle with people.
As you demonstrate your faithfulness by your obedience, God often chooses to use you in greater and greater ways.
It is sad to say that as some people are waiting for God to use them in some big way, they aren’t faithful or obedient in the normal day-to-day activities in life. They are like a glove with holes in the fingers. Those kinds of gloves aren’t very useful.
Finally, you can and should …
C. PRAY AS YOU WAIT
A good time to develop your relationship with God is while you are waiting for his power to come upon you … and prayer is a great way to develop that relationship. The Bible says …
I THESSALONIANS 5:17 – Pray continually.
Prayer is more than just spending time on our knees or with our heads bowed. Learn to see prayer as not just an activity for God, but also as an awareness of God. Strive to live in an uninterrupted awareness of God’s presence with you. Acknowledge his presence everywhere you go.
Okay, we have seen that if we want to be God’s glove we need to wait for the power, but we have also seen that this time spent waiting can be very valuable.
The next thing we want to look at concerning being a glove for God, being used by God, being empowered by God, is that you must …
II. KNOW THAT GOD WANTS TO WORK IN YOU
Sometimes as we wait for God’s power to send us into action, we can start doubting if God really does want to use us. If my “mechanics gloves” had feelings they would probably feel like that since they only get used two or three times per year when I change my lawn mower blades. I may not use them often but I really appreciate them since all of my wrenches must be especially made to slip off of bolts and nuts and bang my knuckles.
Here are some verses that help me when I begin to question if God’s power is going to flow through me.
ROMANS 12:1 – Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.
This clearly tells us that God wants us to offer our bodies to him as a living sacrifice. We don’t have to die as a sacrifice to God. It is pleasing to God when we say “my body is yours, use it as you desire.”
God does want to work in and through you. Here is another one …
II CORINTHIANS 5:20a –We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
Jesus wants you to be an ambassador for him. I think that shows, without a doubt, that God wants to work in your life.
Let’s really be honest with one another. One of the reasons we have trouble believing God wants to work through us is because we have trouble receiving what we can’t see and we can’t see the Holy Spirit.
We can accept the fact that Jesus died on a cross for us; Jesus taking our place and paying for our sins. It is astounding, yet it is a concept we can embrace.
However, receiving the Holy Spirit is both supernatural and unseen and we tend to fear or shy away from what we can’t see or explain.
If you don’t acknowledge the truth that God’s Spirit lives within you, you will have trouble believing that God wants to work in you.
So far we have seen that we need to wait for God’s power to work in us, and we must know that God wants to work in us, which brings us to the purpose for which we are here on this earth.
III. BEING GOD’S GLOVE
If you are going to be God’s glove you must …
A. ACCEPT HIS POWER
We have already looked at why it is difficult for us to accept into our lives what we can’t see, but you cannot be his glove if you don’t accept and depend upon his Holy Spirit. Let’s look at a few verses in Romans to try and help us truly accept God’s presence and power being present in our lives through the Holy Spirit. As I read these verses pay special attention to the highlighted words.
ROMANS 8:9-11 – 9You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. 10But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. 11And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.
The highlighted words come from a word in the Greek which means … to occupy a house, to reside, remain on, inhabit. By implication it means to cohabit.
The Holy Spirit lives in a believer in the same way a homeowner lives in a house. That means we have two spirits living in our bodies … our own Spirit and the Holy Spirit.
The sad thing is that many Christians do not allow the Holy Spirit to control them. They do not accept his power. You will not be a very useful glove for God if you do not accept the power God’s Spirit can bring into your life.
You don’t need to fear him. Just trust him. Listen to what he wants to teach you. Allow him to live through your body.
To be God’s glove you must accept his power, the Indwelling Holy Spirit and you must …
B. SURRENDER TO HIS PLAN
This can be really difficult at times. If I were one of my gloves I would choose to be a woodcutting glove. A woodcutting glove gets to be outdoors and hold a chain saw. A woodcutting glove helps to turn a big log into firewood to keep someone warm.
I wouldn’t want to be a winter glove and only be used in the cold and snow. I wouldn’t want to be a mechanic’s glove and get covered with grease … and I certainly wouldn’t want to be a rubber glove that gets covered with paint and then gets tossed in the trash.
However, gloves don’t get to choose how they will be used and neither do we. God is, indeed, the potter and we are the clay. The Bible says …
ROMANS 12:4-6a – 4Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. 6aWe have different gifts, according to the grace given us.
God sometimes, and in my own life quite often, desires to use us in ways we would not choose. To have his power flow through us we must allow him to use us as he chooses. Maybe he will want us to be a rubber glove. Again my experience has been that if I allow him to use me as he desires even being a rubber glove becomes a joy. The key is surrendering to his plan. Finally, you must …
C. KEEP AT IT
You must keep at seeking God’s power to flow through you. You must keep at hungering and thirsting for God. You must keep at waiting, praying, obeying, accepting and surrendering. You must keep at offering yourself as a living sacrifice.
CONCLUSION
Are you willing to be a glove for God?
You must …
- Wait for his power
- Know that he wants to use you
- Accept his power
- Surrender to his plan
and
- Keep at it.
The question is not – how can I have more of the Holy Spirit? But rather, how can the Holy Spirit have more of me?