You have almost certainly by now heard the story that goes something like this. A man had built a home near a river. It began to rain, so that the waters in the river were beginning to rise. When it became evident that things were going to flood terribly, the authorities sent out word that everyone should vacate their homes and move to higher ground. This one man was stubborn and refused to move. The local sheriff came by and told him it was time to leave. The old man said, "No, I’ve lived here all my life, and I’m not leaving. Besides, I’m a praying man, and I trust God for everything that I need. God will take care of me."

The sheriff left. The waters began to rise and the old man had to leave his house and get up on the roof. A man in a boat happened by and shouted to the man on the roof, "You’d better go with me. The flooding is getting bad and the dam may break. This whole place could be completely washed out. Please come with me." The old man said, "No, I’ve lived here all my life, and I’m not leaving. Besides, I’m a praying man, and I trust God for everything that I need. God will take care of me."

Sure enough, the dam broke and, as the house began to be washed off of its foundation and rushed down the river, a rescue helicopter hovered overhead. From the helicopter a rescuer yelled down from a bullhorn to the old man. "We’ll toss a rope down. You can climb up the rope and be saved." The old man yelled up to the helicopter, as though they could hear him, "No, I’ve lived here all my life, and I’m not leaving. Besides, I’m a praying man, and I trust God for everything that I need. God will take care of me."

Shortly, the house was washed away and the man was drowned in the river. When he went to heaven, he made his way to God’s throne and he said, "Dear God, what happened? I told all of these people who came by that I was a praying man and I trusted you for all that I needed. How come you let me drown?" The Lord said, "Well, I don’t understand, because I sent a sheriff’s car, a boat and a helicopter. Why did you refuse the help I sent?"

We are never more miserable than when we keep waiting for someone to rescue us from life’s dilemmas, especially our own self-made miseries. The happiest people in the world, on the other hand, are people who have learned to accept responsibility for their own lives. They trust God for what God alone can and will do. Yet, they never look for someone to blame when things go wrong.

We’ve come this morning to the last sermon in a four-part series called "The Four Rs of Meaningful Living." Just like the three Rs of "readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic," kind of a play on the words, I have suggested the four Rs of meaningful living. Now, these are not the only principles of meaningful living. Eating your vegetables, doing your homework, doing whatever your wife tells you to do, those kinds of things are also principles of meaningful living. But, these four principles I have found to be essential principles to meaningful Christian living. Non-negotiables, in a sense.

The first of those, three Sundays ago, was the word "redemption." We cannot rewind our lives like a VCR tape. We cannot go back and start all over and retape life. There is no such thing as rewind, but there is redemption. As well, redemption is not something that God does to us or for us as much as it is a participatory event in which God invites us to work with him in seeking his purposes for our lives to come to maturity. A good test for us knowing whether or not we are redemption-minded people is to listen to the way we talk. People who are redemption-minded people spend most of their time in present and future tense language, speaking of grace, mercy, and hope, and very little time talking about what might have been.

"Rehearsing," the second of the four Rs. We get to choose what we rehearse. We can rehearse the wounds and pains that others have caused us in life, or we can spend our time rehearsing the goodness of others and the goodness of God despite what others might or might not do to or for us. A good test for knowing whether or not we are rehearsing God’s grace more than the failures of others or ourselves is to listen to ourselves talk. It’s not so much about what we say at church, where we sing, perhaps, "Amazing Grace," but when we’re talking in the course of the week. Talking to others, talking to our family, talking to ourselves, about other people and especially how we talk about those who have wounded us. Do we spend our time rehearsing over and over and over again the stories about what people have done to diminish our lives, perhaps even reaching back years to tell those stories? Or, do we spend our time rehearsing the grace, the mercy and the forgiveness of God?

"Redemption," "rehearsing," and, thirdly, "restarting." Life is about learning to constantly restart, to begin again. We can spend our days regretting lost opportunities or poorly made choices, or we can accept God’s mercy for even our worst choices and use the gift of life we have today, starting over wherever we may be. A good test for knowing whether or not we are focused on restarting instead of regretting what once was is to listen to ourselves talk. Do we spend more time saying things such as, "I wish," or, "if only," or do we spend our time saying of the lessons we learned the painful way, "Next time"?

"Redemption," "rehearsing," and "restarting." Today, the fourth of the four Rs, the word "responsibility." Now, this is not a text of scripture that you might think we would look at when we use the word "responsibility," the Great Commission, as we call it, Matthew 28:16-20. But, let’s look a little closer. This is certainly one of the most, if not the most significant transitional moments in the lives of the disciples. Jesus had been crucified and yet had risen again and come back to spend some time with them. It must have been something of an emotional roller-coaster for them. Now, Jesus is about to leave them once more. As he prepares to leave, he gives the disciples, and, through them, us, the New Testament Church, two invaluable gifts. Two things on a very, very short list of things we can absolutely count on, no matter what.

One, he offers them and us the possibility of living a life of eternal purpose. The other, he promises, no matter what, his presence with us in all of life. Nowhere in this text of scripture or, for that matter, in all of scripture, does Jesus or God through Jesus guarantee them or us safety from all forms of harm, deliverance from boredom or the mundane task of daily living, or answers to all of life’s impossible mysteries. Jesus does offer the opportunity of making his purpose ours and the promise that he will never ever be absent from us in any moment of our lives.

That’s really all we’re promised. That’s it. Purpose for living and the presence of God with us in it. Eternal purpose. "Go and make disciples," Jesus said, for God’s eternal kingdom. No matter what we do for a living, our common Christian vocation is that of making disciples. Helping people discover what God is up to in this world and how they can participate in his redeeming work.

Now, when I hear the word "disciple," or am asked to think of "disciple-making," one of the first images that pops into my mind is something that will be familiar to many of us. It’s called Training Union. You remember that? There was children’s choir at 4:30, bologna and cheese sandwiches at 5:30, along with some really stale potato chips served out of huge tin tubs that probably gave them metal poisoning and some very watered-down Kool-Aid. Then, at 6:00, training union was served up nationwide. Pretty much anywhere in the Bible Belt, if at 6:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, you stepped into a Baptist church, you would step into Training Union. It was such a part of our lives that a whole generation of people grew up speaking of one of the greatest examples of their parents’ teaching them grace being that one night a year they got to stay home from Training Union and watch The Wizard of Oz on Sunday night television.

In Training Union, we used to "read parts." Parts that others wrote and we read. We did learn some great doctrine. I’m certain that some of the most foundational information I got about Christian doctrine came to me through reading those parts. And, there was something to be said for that. We have come to learn, hopefully, that for faith to be genuine, at some point, we have to accept responsibility for writing the script we’re reading and that others are hearing. We cannot any longer read the parts of faith and hope someone else wrote for us.

What is your faith story? What is your script? Our genuine faith is expressed in our words of regret or of rehearsing grace, of rehearsing past sins and sadnesses or rehearsing God’s present and future mercy and hope. By the way we speak, by the script we’re reading, we are in the process of constantly discipling people around us to believe that there is no hope or there is eternal hope. We are teaching people constantly by the way we talk. Not so much just by what we sing on Sunday morning, but in the day-to-day conversations of everyday life. Jesus commands us, in those day-to-day conversations of life, to embrace the responsibility for his eternal purpose by making disciples.

It’s not a purpose given to a group of people who live in another city, who go and do missions for us. It is a commission given to the church, to the local church, to individual believers, regardless of age or race or sex or nationality or family origin or intelligence or wealth or whatever. Anyone who wants an eternal purpose for their lives has been given that incredible gift and opportunity by Jesus himself! "Go make disciples."

Why should we be a follower of Jesus, anyway? Just to escape eternal hell? No. We ought to also be disciples of Jesus because there is no other way to discover the joy of being alive and at the same time connected in this moment to something more divine and eternal, something that will outlive just this temporary moment of our lives.

You had to hear about Warren Buffett’s incredible charitable gift this week. $37 billion something? Unbelievable! He is giving the bulk of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed itself to a number of things, including research to cure diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria, especially on the continent of Africa. Buffett originally intended to give this huge gift at his death, through his estate. For reasons that were his own, he decided to speed the gift up. One of the things he said about going ahead and giving the gift now was that it was not right for him to accumulate opulent wealth when six billion people in the world were doing without the basic essentials of everyday life. So, he’s giving it away!

Now, a cynic might say, "Yeah, but you do the math. He’s worth $44 billion. He gives away $37 billion and he’s still a billionaire." I only know this much. It is not mine to judge what anyone else does with their wealth. It is only mine to decide what I will do with mine.

I respect a person who can do that like Warren Buffett. But I also respect what I was handed this morning. Do you know what this is (holding up an envelope stuffed with money)? This is one of the most heart-warming stories I’ve heard in a long time. A little ten-year-old girl in our church heard about our mission trip to Latvia and wanted to do something to help. She harangued her mother into letting her make some hand-made crafts, including painted tongue depressors and painted rocks, one of which I secured for myself at $20 and which will sit on my desk for a long time, adorned with a beautiful little yellow flower. She took these crafts and, with her mother standing with her, stood bravely outside the Brookshire’s in Red Oak for two and a half hours in the heat thispast Wednesday evening and sold them that and brought me $141 in proceeds as a gift toward the Latvia Orphan Mission Trip.

There’s Warren Buffett. He did what he did with his wealth. Then, there’s a little ten-year-old girl who didn’t have any money but had the skills to paint rocks and tongue depressors. Orphans in Latvia will be the beneficiaries of her charity.

Jesus has given all of us, in one way or another, the opportunity and the responsibility of participating in his eternal purpose for our lives. To not sit around, blaming other people for our misery and heartaches and sadness, but to get busy and to paint tongue depressors if we have to, to be involved in touching the lives of others in eternal ways. In large part, our life story will be written and shaped by whether or not we have accepted the responsibility for living out God’s purpose for us. We don’t have to. Then again, we’ll have no one to blame for our misery but ourselves. Because not even God has offered, much less promised, to rescue us from a miserable existence if we choose to reject the offer he has given us of participating in his eternal purpose in this world.

A dear friend of mine, my age, ruined his life years ago. Over the years, regretfully, I’ve lost track of him. We graduated from college the same year. His father was a very wealthy businessman. He gave his son half of his business and built him a house when he graduated from college. He had a wife and two beautiful children. He was a deacon at church and taught in the youth Sunday school department. But, somewhere in there he started making some poor choices and ended up being arrested by federal agents for cocaine trafficking. I went to his sentencing, and I drove to his house the day his father was going to drive him to the federal penitentiary in Oklahoma.

Before all of that happened, I went to see him in jail one day. I asked, "Mike, how did this happen?" He said, "My dad always bailed me out every time I got in trouble, until I finally did something he could not bail me out of." There was a son in this story who played on the edge until he fell off. There was also a father who taught his son more about being rescued than about accepting responsibility. And, the rest is tragic history.

All of us who are parents have made mistakes by rescuing our children at times we should have let them take little falls so they wouldn’t have to take a big fall someday. But, our Heavenly Father does not. He will not let us off the hook. He has given us the possibility of living a life of purpose and lets us choose whether or not to be involved in disciple making. Then, he promised us his presence.

When I was standing over Florence Tanner’s casket at the cemetery a few weeks ago, reading the 23rd Psalm, it occurred to me that this is really about the only for-sure promise we have. Listen to these words as I read them. You’ve heard these so many times, but listen to them as though you’ve never heard them before. You’ve heard them many times at funerals; listen to them this morning at a service of celebration. David, who made his own share of poor choices, wrote, "The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever."

Do you know what the promise of that psalm is? The presence of God. In life and death and in the journey in between. And then life beyond. We are promised the purpose of God and his presence in all of life.

So, why are we going to Latvia? Why should we not also go to the Rio Grande River? Why should we not send teams out from this church to multiple points on the globe every year? Why are we going to Latvia? It’s not much because there’s a need. There are black holes of unmet need all over this globe, starting at our front door. We are not going to Latvia just because there are orphans in need, though there are. We are going primarily because Jesus said to go. And, in the going, we’re not so much fulfilling his purpose as we are discovering his purpose.

We are not going to Latvia to take Jesus to the Latvians; we are going to see what Jesus is already up to there with the orphans and to see how we can get in on it. We are going to be the presence of Christ but also to discover his presence already there in the lives of some of the most incredible followers of Jesus some of us have ever met. We are not going to rescue the Latvians; we are going there to discover with them the God who asks us all, regardless of where we live, to accept the responsibility of participating with him in bringing the kingdom of God to be on all of the earth as it is in all of heaven, by, at a minimum, demonstrating that God’s grace knows no boundaries, political, religious, or geographic. We are going because we believe that if we want to see the face of Jesus, on some level, we are going to have to get close to people who are deprived of life’s most essential needs.

If you are not a follower of Christ today, I would invite you to follow Jesus wherever he leads you. And if your life is not what you wish it were, what are you waiting on today? Who are you waiting on to make it any different? God has offered you his purpose and presence. What more do you want?