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This is day five, our last day of looking at 2nd Corinthians chapter four. I'm
almost sad to come to the end of this chapter. We've been talking, yesterday we
began a talk looking at the kind of servant who endures, who lasts.

And we reminded ourselves yesterday that it's the Spirit-powered servant, not
the personally powered or self-powered servant, it's the Spirit-powered servant
who lasts. Let me read for you again all those verses 16 to 18 and then break
down two other very strong things that Paul says in these verses about enduring
and serving. Serving for a lifetime.

"Therefore," he says in verse 16, "we do not lose heart, though outwardly we are
wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and
momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them
all. " So we fix our eyes, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, for what
is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

You want to last a lifetime in serving Him, first let the Spirit power your
life, not the self. The second thing Paul says here is you realize that
servanthood is not accompanied by ease, it is accompanied by hope. If you think
that somehow if I serve God it's going to be a life of ease, it's going to make
my life easier, you've missed the point entirely.

Servant of Christ, not a servant of Christ, this is the world, the fallen world
that we're living in. You're going to have troubles no matter what in this
world. Jesus said you're going to have troubles in this world, but Paul says it
in this way in verse 17.

"For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that
far outweighs them all. " Let me paint for you the contrast between what I'd
call the servant of ease and the servant of hope. The servant of ease, the goal
of their servanthood is comfort.

The sense is if I serve God, God's going to serve me. I'll take care of God and
God will take care of me. Or maybe I'll take care of God's business, I'll take
care of God's people and God will take care of me.

And the way He's going to take care of me is make everything fine. No problems,
no struggles, no sicknesses in my life. Now it's not so strange that we should
think this way.

That's just the way human beings tend to think. We want to make life easier. And
the truth is we're looking forward to heaven where things are going to be
perfect.

So it is natural for us to think it shouldn't be this way. The problem is it's
going to be this way as long as we're on this earth. We think this way even in
the fact that we live in what I would call a retirement conscious society.

For many people the goal of their life is a comfortable retirement. Now I
believe in retirement. I think all of us should look forward to a change of pace
and some new opportunities as we grow older.

But I hate the retirement mentality, the idea that we reach a point in life
where we are no longer responsible. We've got to let others do the serving now
while we just sort of sit back and do the watching. I've earned this comfort.

Retirement may mean we change some of the ways we serve and places that we
serve. But the rest of your life you're going to serve God with all your heart,
mind, soul and strength, maybe in different ways than earlier in life, but He's
made you to serve Him the rest of your life. The idea is not a life of ease and
comfort, of kicking back.

The idea is a life of kicking in to what it means to live out God's glory in
your life. And so Paul says in verse 17, "Our light and momentary troubles are
achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. " This is the
servant of hope.

He's not living in some false fantasy life where he's pretending there's no
troubles in this world. Even if you can escape some of them yourself, believe
me, there are plenty troubles in this world, plenty of them. And other people
are experiencing them right now.

They need your love. They need you to serve them. Paul looks at his own life.

We just talked earlier this week about the persecutions he'd faced, about the
afflictions that he'd faced, the pressures that he'd faced, and here he says,
"Our light and momentary troubles. " Now momentary, you might accept that one
because you know we're just on this earth for a moment, but when he says light
troubles, you look at that and it feels like it's like calling the San Francisco
earthquake a little tremor, the Chicago fire a small blaze, the eruption of
Mount St. Helens, just a little steam on top of a mountain.

How could he call this light? It's a matter of perspective. Paul's not
minimizing the troubles that he's facing or the troubles you're facing.

He's maximizing the glory of God. If he took the Chicago fire and he put it in
the sun, he wouldn't even know it was there. And Paul is saying, "When I look at
my troubles compared to the glory of God, and in fact, the fact that God is
using those troubles even to lead in greater ways to the glory of God in my
life, then I'm able to call them light.

" Paul compared his trials to God's glory, and that's what gave him hope. When
you look at how people live life and the struggles we all have, why do some
people go from bad to worse and others from glory to glory? It's a matter of
perspective.

Are you focused on your troubles or are you focused on the glory of God? No
matter what troubles you're facing right now, whether you brought them on
yourself, someone else brought them on in your life, whether the most horrendous
thing you've ever faced or a small irritation that you just can't seem to shake,
no matter what troubles you're facing right now, the truth is those troubles are
achieving for you an eternal glory. What's the glory?

The glory is when you look to Christ in the midst of those troubles and you let
Jesus become more of who he is in your life, and that outweighs anything in this
world. That's the servant of hope. So if I want to last in ministry, I've got to
realize that this servanthood is not leading to a life of ease.

That's not why I'm serving God. It's lived in a life of hope. And then Paul
talks about a third thing that's in the life of every servant who lasts,
everyone who serves for a lifetime.

Servanthood is not evaluated by temporary results. It's evaluated by eternal
impact. In verse 18, "We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is
unseen, for what is seen is temporary.

What is unseen is eternal. " There's a contrast also here. There's a contrast
between those who serve for temporary results and those who serve for eternal
impact.

Those who serve for temporary results, if you're just serving for the temporary
result, your major focus tends to become popular opinion, what other people
think of you. Or your major temptation is to believe that some visible result
validates the fact you should be serving him. And if there's no visible result,
you should just stop because it's not working for you.

How can you tell if you're this kind of person, the person that's serving just
for temporary results? You do an attitude check. If no one notices when you
serve, do you get angry?

If you don't see instant results out of your service, do you get depressed?
That's a sign that you're serving for visible results. And the truth is, I've
had those signs in my life.

No one noticed and I'm irritated at that. Or I didn't see the instant results
that I wanted and I feel a depression over that. That's a sign in my life that
I'm serving in a way that's not going to last.

I'm not going to endure if I'm serving for the visible results. Paul says
instead, be the kind of servant who serves for eternal impact. God wants to
create true impact in your life.

In his book, A Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football, Paul Zimmerman quotes a
physicist who made this incredible discovery about the impact that happens in a
football game. As a physicist, he proved with physics that when a 240-pound
lineman who could run 100 yards in 11 seconds collides with a 240-pound running
back who could cover the same distance in 10 seconds, the kinetic energy would
be enough to move 33 tons one inch. It would be, in another way to say that in
certain collisions, 1,000 Gs, 1,000 gravities.

That's a tremendous impact of two people hitting each other. When we think about
impact and eternal impact, there's an even greater impact in serving God because
there's an impact that lasts all the way into eternity. The impact happens.

When does it happen? In a football game, you know when it happens. You see the
two players hit.

When does eternal impact happen in our lives? The impact happens. Paul says it
here.

When you fix your eyes on what's unseen, that's the moment of eternal impact.
That's the moment that creates a servant that can last through all this life.
That's the moment, here's the key, that enables you to yield your will to God's
will.

If I'm fixing my eyes only on what is seen, I'm going to do what I see to do.
Even if I have a sense that God is saying to do something else, it's like, "God,
here it is right in front of me. I've got to do this.

" But if instead I'm looking at Him, I'm looking beyond the moment to eternity,
I'm looking beyond the circumstance to the person, I'm looking beyond my
feelings to the love of God, if instead I'm fixing my eyes on what is unseen, I
have the freedom to yield my will to His will. How do you do that? How can you
look at things that are invisible?

That sounds sort of impossible, doesn't it? In Hebrews chapter 11-7, Moses is
said to have endured because he saw Him who is invisible. How does he do that?

There's an example of it, but how do you do that? Invisible things are spiritual
things. They are matters of trust rather than matters of proof.

Eternal impact comes when I look at the truth of God's Word, when I look at the
truth of God's character, when I look at the truth of God's plan, and I allow
that to affect my decision. His will being done, not my will being done. Now,
some people ask, isn't eternal impact like visible in this world sometimes?

Well, yes and no. God obviously has a visible impact on this world, and yet
we're not always aware of it. When we talk about this, does this mean we should
never evaluate the effectiveness of something?

No, you should evaluate it. It simply means that you look through a different
window in your evaluation. You start measuring with an eye on eternity.

Hey, it was great. We had more people at church this weekend than last weekend,
but what difference is it making as we look forward to eternity? If it doesn't
make any difference in eternity, it doesn't matter if you have 20, 50, 80, a
thousand times the number of people.

It's just more people. What about more impact on eternity? So you start
measuring with an eye on eternity.

You start putting God's will in a place of priority in your measurements.
Instead of you measuring for how you can do it better, there's a lot of
scientific ways to do that. Instead, you spiritually begin to measure for what
God wants to be doing.

That's what eternal impact is all about in our lives. Now these verses, these
last couple of days have talked to us about how to last. I want to pray for you
right now that you will last.

Lord, I pray for each of us. You know our hearts. You see our hearts.

We want to last the rest of our lives in serving you. We know we may not be
doing the same things the rest of our lives, but we will be serving you the rest
of our lives. And whatever it is you have us doing, I pray that you'd help us to
serve empowered by your spirit, not by ourselves.

We want to last. Help us to serve, Lord, based on the hope that we have, not
some false idea of gaining ease from you as if this world could be heaven. Help
us to hang on to hope.

And help us to serve looking forward to not some temporary result that builds us
up, but to the eternal impact that speaks to your glory forever. That's what we
ask for. In the name of Jesus, amen.

Don't miss next week. We're going to look at 2 Corinthians 5. 2 Corinthians 5 is
the chapter that has the truths we live by faith and not by sight.

To be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord. We must all appear
before the judgment seat of Christ. And if anyone is in Christ, he is a new
creation filled with many of the strongest truths in the Christian life.

So see you next week for 2 Corinthians 5.