What Is Life?

"What Is Life?"
Philippians 1:18-26

How many have played the board game, Life?

Right at the start you have to decide between two different pathways.  Either you start out going the career path or the college path.  Taking the career path gets you on the main road of life faster.  Even though the college path will slow you down and get you behind, it offers you the possibility of making more money.

After that you are confronted with all kinds of decisions and circumstances:  Get married or remain single?  Fill up you little plastic car with little plastic children pegs (pink for girls, blue for boys), or not; pay expenses (some huge), and get paydays along the way.  It is just like life, right?

At the end, you cash everything in (including your children!) and see who has the most cash.

That is what life is all about.  At least in American society.  It is a very Western culture styled game.  I'm sure the squares would be very different if the game was styled for people who live in the Sudan, North Korea, or Afghanistan.  You wouldn't start out with choosing college or career in those countries.  You would start out with one track that would read, "I eat today," and the other which would read, "I do not eat today."  That is what life is like in many countries around the world.  It is very simple.  Eating or not eating.  That is about it.  Move on to the next day, that has the same identical choice as the day before.

If you grew up as a kid in the USA, playing the game, Life, you were getting indoctrinated about the answer to an age-old philosophical question:  "What is life?"  The game was teaching you life is about acquiring things and having as much as you can at the end.

If that is true, then why do so many people get to the end of life and are so terribly dissatisfied?  Why do so many get to the end of life angry because they believed the game, and found out it was a lie?  Sadly, you can not go back and play the game over.  You can play the Milton Bradley game over and over and have different outcomes each time.  But not in real life.  You only get to play/live once.

That's the question, is it not?  The most important word in that question is "one."

The game, Life, is one answer to that question.  For many people, what they do with their one, precious life is the pursuit of accumulation.  The one with the most stuff at the end wins.  But do you know what is strange about that?  I have never heard read at a funeral a list of what all the person accumulated.  No obituary I have read had such a list of all the person accumulated.  So, why is that?

J.M. Barrie is the author of the book, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up.  In one of his short stories he wrote,
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story but writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."

I think that is why the life of accumulation, and the list of what is accumulated, never makes it into the obituary.  Because people, at the end, suddenly realize they wrote their story totally different than what they really hoped it would be.  And it is too late to write the life story of what you had, at one time, "vowed to make it."

Another answer to the question, What is Life? has simply to do with biology.

Even though this is a list of what needs to happen biologically for there to be life, I like some of these categories as metaphors.  For example, "growth" is on the list.  It is easy to see how growth fits in with what life is biologically.  But it is also true for a business or organization, like a church.  It is one of the main driving forces behind our Vivid Vision at church.  Those who put the Vivid Vision together, and you all who voted on adopting it, recognized that if you are not growing, you are dying.  There is no in-between, no middle ground.

The same is true in your life of faith.  If your faith is not growing, your faith is dying.

There are so many other qualities on this list that are fun to think about, such as "adaptation" and "organization" that have to do with how you are alive.  I would encourage you to think about them, as you think about your own viability and life, not just biologically, but spiritually.

Here is another way to look at what life is:

"Living well," according to this pithy saying has to do with making the right choices.  There are some things you do not have a choice about:  Your family; where you grew up as a child; your genetics.  Those kinds of things are fate, or a given you just have to accept.  But accepting them is a choice, too, is it not?

How you react to your family and the role you take on in your family is a choice.  How you decide to deal with certain geography you find yourself in (which could involve a country, a state, a neighborhood) is a choice.  And once you become an adult, all your choices are your own.  Sorry, no one else to blame.  That's part of adulting.

So a good case could be made that the answer to our question, "What is life?" is choices.  Life is the choices we make that will lead to future choices, and on and on.

Here is another answer to, "What is life?"

I like this slide.  To me, this slide says life is about risk.  Life is not about comfort.  Even though that is what most people are trying hard to make it.  Life is not about plateaus.  Life is not about resting on your laurels.

I was talking with Alan the other night at dinner.  One of Alan's big questions has been, "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?"  But of course, failure is part of life—it has to do with how we learn and grow.  But even then, a case could be made that there are no failures—just opportunities to learn.  When a reporter asked Thomas Edison about inventing the lightbulb, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." So, in a way there is no failure—just steps toward finally succeeding.

I reframed the question:  "If you knew that God was with you and in you and behind you, what would you do?"

Each of our questions have to do with risk and trust.  Just how far and how much are you willing to risk to really be alive?  And with my question, how much are you willing to risk trusting God in all things as you live your life?

There are so many images life has been compared to.

These are all great analogies and images.  But at some point, each of us has to personalize what we think life is.  What is life FOR YOU?  You, me, each of us has to personally answer the question, "What is life?"

Paul shared with us his personal answer to this part of his Philippian letter:

Remember the other slide that said, "Life is between B and D" when I was talking about choice?  Well, here's another version of that slide:

"What is life?  To me, it is Christ."  Notice, Paul uses the title, "Christ," not the name of Jesus.  Christ is a title.  It literally means, "anointed," or, "Savior."

A person who was anointed (with oil) in biblical times was a king.  Being anointed with olive oil was the way a person was inaugurated as the king.  The anointing was usually done by a prophet or a priest for God.  Thus, for Paul, life is following the anointed one—Jesus—who was anointed by God.  For Paul, life is submitting to King Jesus, and letting him rule over his life; that Jesus has sole authority over his living.

The other part of the Christ title is being the Savior.  If you are going to have a Savior, you have to recognize you need saving.  You have to humbly submit to an understanding of self that there is something very basically wrong with your self that you can not fix.  You have to submit to the truth that life is a struggle/battle, but one you can not win on your own.  You need someone to have your back, to stand beside you, to stand over you and protect you when you have fallen, to keep you from receiving a mortal wound from the enemy.  In a word, you need a Savior.

In other words, to live is not to live alone.  It is to live in companionship and comradeship with the Savior, the Christ.

One day, the great artist Michelangelo came into the studio of the equally great Raphael.  Michelangelo looked at one of Raphael's drawings.  Then Michelangelo took a piece of chalk and wrote across the drawing the word "amplius."  It means, "greater" or "larger."  He felt Raphael's drawing was too cramped, too narrow.

Basically, that is what Paul meant in his answer to, "What is life?"  He wanted to live large.  He wanted to be a part of something bigger than himself.  He wanted to have a greater purpose than that which he could only come up with on his own.

There are a lot of good answers to the question, "What is life?"  But Paul wanted not a good answer, he wanted a great answer that would throw his life into a larger and more expansive mode of being.  There were no other answers to that question for Paul that got at what he most desired.  Only the answer of "Christ" put him where he wanted to be in life.