January 3, 1993
Times of transition can transform our perspective. On the occasion of Parkside Church’s final meeting in its temporary location of six-and-a-half years, Alistair Begg invites the congregation to look back and to look forward. The church, he explains, ought to be thankful, useful, and faithful, since in saving us God has brought us into the fulfilling of His purposes. While doing the will of God, our movements should demonstrate His faithfulness.
Sermon Transcript: Print
Once again, I invite you to take your Bibles and turn with me to the 121st Psalm. Psalm 121. And it reads as follows:
I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you—
the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;
the Lord will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.
We’ve gathered this morning on what must certainly be regarded as an historic Sunday in the history of our church. And today, without question, surely marks the end of an era. Few if any of us who were present on that first Sunday here in September of ’86 ever imagined that over six years later, we would still be here. Those who were then juniors in high school have already graduated from college. Those who were about to expect their first baby or who were expecting with their first baby now have school-aged children. Those who used to look around and say, “Well, I’ll be retired in four years,” have now been retired for two and a half years. And those who wondered what it would be like to have become parents are already parents; and those who said, “Yes, we’ll have grandchildren soon,” already have them; and those who wondered what it would be like to look in the mirror and see a great-grandmother have already discovered so. It’s small wonder that the psalmist says, “Teach us to number our days aright, [so] that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”[1]
And on a morning like this, the sense is almost tangible of people’s own personal reflections and recollections as to what the experience worshipping in this school has produced in each of our lives. For many of us, these hallways, which we had frequented either as schoolchildren ourselves or as attending the productions of our children as parents in the system, have become for us hallowed hallways, because, unexpectedly, we encountered God here. Unexpectedly, the name of Jesus became precious to us. Jesus, up until these past few years, had simply been a religious leader, a man from history, a shepherd. And yet, in the intervening time, he has become for us our Savior and our Shepherd and our Lord and our Guide.
It has been within this kind of unorthodox context that the Bible has become a living book for many people. People came here and never carried a Bible—perhaps had one; it was gathering dust—and all of a sudden, it’s become a precious book to them. They have it with them all the time. They read it every day. They carry it to worship. It is because the Word of God has become alive within your life, and you worship him for that today.
For not a few people, the swimming pool in Solon High School can never just be the swimming pool in Solon High School anymore. Because it was there on a Sunday evening that you declared your allegiance to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Master. And turning the swimming pool from the arena of recreation and exercise into a baptismal pool, it became a place of great significance in your life.
And so it is with recognition this morning that people have been building altars, as it were. Seats in this auditorium are sacrosanct—places in which conversations have taken place, where marriages have been mended, where teenage children have been prayed for, where moms and dads have met in the context of fellowship and encouragement; in Sunday school classes, where on rocking chairs and taking babies and nursing them on your laps, you’ve discovered more of God and of his faithfulness. And so if the walls could speak, what a tale they would recount! And yet they can’t. But etched indelibly in our hearts are all these kinds of recollection.
It therefore would be incredibly presumptuous of me to think that somehow, I could gather up the collective consciousness of our congregation in the few moments that remain to me this morning—that I could somehow or another compress into a phrase or two all that is represented amongst us here. And so I don’t want to endeavor to do that. But I do want to suggest, nevertheless, that these three statements that I’m about to make provide an apt summary of what is and what ought to be true of us on this final Sunday morning. Here are the three statements, and I will go through them. Number one: Thankful is what we ought to be. Number two: Useful is what we want to be. Number three: Faithful is what we plan to be.
Number one, then: Thankful is what we ought to be.
The whole Bible is a book of thankfulness, and nowhere is it more expressed than in the book of Psalms. David was frequently praising God with thankful heart. Psalm 7: “I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness and [I] will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High.”[2] You can virtually open the Psalms to any page and find thankfulness. Psalm 30:12: “… that my heart may sing to you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever [and forever].” The Hundredth Psalm: the psalmist says, “Let us enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Let us give thanks to him and bless his name. For the Lord is good, and his mercy is everlasting, and his truth endures to all generations.”[3]
Certainly, this morning, thankful is what we ought to be—thankful at least for these two things.
Number one: thankful for his provision—for his provision on a material level, of a suitable place for worship in this time of wanderings; for his provision, as we’ve said, of a school board and administration willing to make it available and continually possible; for his provision of a custodial staff that has worked not against us but with us and for us; for his provision of vast numbers of people who have been willing, over these years, to sacrifice their time and their energies and their money to help us remain here and to prepare for the future.
Thankful for his provision of elders who have been adventuresome enough to dream, cautious enough to keep us from foolhardiness, and prayerful enough to wait upon the leading of the Lord.
Thankful for his provision of a pastoral team that has been able to function effectively minus what others would regard as absolute prerequisites for suitable ministry—and to a man, this remains the case for everyone who has served: for Mike as he has overseen, in these most recent years, three years or more, the whole nursery operation; for Ron as he has gone always beyond the call of duty in doing things on an ad hoc basis that many people never even attempt when they have everything the way they want it and where they want it; for Dave as he has exercised youth ministry, again within a context that is different and novel; for Bob as he worked faithfully amongst us, meeting in smaller groups in all kinds of places, in rented accommodation all over the place; and for Andy as he has come and joined us and picked right up along with the rest. We’re thankful this morning for that kind of commitment.
And we’re thankful for the provision of a patient, forbearing congregation. Well might we recognize that Jeremiah was right when he said the Lord’s “compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”[4]
But, recognizing God’s provision for us on all these material and practical levels, we at the same time do not want to miss the fact, nor miss stating the fact, that all of these material, transient benefits are secondary to the great provision that God has made for us in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ—the provision which Paul so aptly and succinctly addresses in Romans chapter 5, where he speaks in this way:
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.[5]
And certainly we would want to make no apology for the fact that over these last six-plus years within this building, we have constantly said these things at every level of our working together: that since Jesus Christ died for sinners, men and women must realize themselves to be sinful before ever they would seek to embrace Christ as Savior. And many, many people are thankful this morning not simply for the transient, temporal provisions as outlined but are thankful this morning in a unique and special way for the provision of the Lord Jesus, because in Christ they have found a person to follow, and with Christ they have found a purpose to fulfill, and through Christ they have found a prospect to face. And that is what our ministry has been, and is, and remains all about.
Thankful is what we ought to be for his provision—and, secondly, for his protection. Throughout these years, God has protected us—from ourselves, from foolishness, from many of the things that are often characteristic of local churches. I can’t expand them, but let me give you them.
He has protected us from division, from factions, and from schism, and from splits in a remarkable way.
He has protected us from discouragement—not that we haven’t been downhearted in the disappointment of our first building project, not that we don’t have things that we might like to rewrite, but he has protected us from discouragement. No one has quit. No one has given up. And that’s as a result of the shared, combined commitment of this church family.
He has protected us also from delusions—from delusions of grandeur especially; from thinking that we’re really very good and very special and know how to do everything. Certainly, we can no longer live with that delusion as it comes to the notion of building and securing plans and developing land. Six and a half years said we really weren’t too smart at that. And so it makes us realize this morning that everything that we have to be thankful for, we’re thankful because of what he has done.
And also, he has protected us from disaster—from financial disaster. Hasn’t even come close—we do not say proudly but thankfully.
On this first Sunday of 1993, on this last Sunday morning here in this tremendous facility, thankful is what we ought to be for his provision and for his protection.
Now, you know I always spend longer on the first point, so relax.
Secondly: Useful is what we want to be. Useful is what we want to be. Indeed, we might say, in the past tense, useful is what we’ve tried to be—tried to be useful.
Where does our understanding of this emerge from? Well, the answer is in our understanding of salvation: that as we’ve discovered what it means to come to personal faith in Jesus Christ and to understand what it means for God to work within our lives, we’ve come to the increased awareness of the fact that we have not been saved in order to sit around and think great thoughts, but we’ve been saved in order that we might become useful. And we learn that, for example, in Ephesians 2:8–10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” And then here’s the key verse: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
Paul picks up that same notion when he writes to Timothy as a young man and uses the illustration of a house, where you have china that you might use for formal occasions, and then you have other pottery that you might use for more menial occasions. And he says, “In the same way, God, within the household of faith, has those instruments that are made for noble purposes, and he has those that are made for ignoble purposes.”[6] And then he says, “If a man cleanses himself from [ignoble purposes], he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.”[7]
“Useful to the Master” is what we want to be—to him. He is our Master. We serve him. Whatever we do we do as unto the Lord and not unto men.[8] We do not ultimately do it for a church, nor for the leadership of a church, nor for the congregation of a church, but we want to be “useful to the Master” in our place. In our place—not in someone else’s place. Your nose is where it is supposed to be—at least in the majority of cases—because God designed it so. And in the same way, our eyes are in place just as God designed them. And picking on that picture of the body, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:18, “But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be,” and he has put you in the exact place so that you might be useful.
What an illustration of body life is represented in these last years, through all the classrooms and all the corridors, what they have witnessed—witnessed the transformation in many lives from the experience of church being a spectator sport, becoming a participatory activity; men and women who have come and who have found that Christ is Lord and Master and then have discovered that not only is thankful what we ought to be, but useful is what we want to be—in his place and for his purpose.
People talk a lot these days about job descriptions: What are you supposed to do? Is it clearly defined? Do you know what you’re supposed to do on a week-by-week basis? Do you know what you do on a daily basis? And it’s right to ask those questions. But none of us need to be in any doubt as to the job description which Jesus gave to those who are his followers. And when we talk in terms of usefulness, supremely, above and beyond any other consideration, here is and remains the mandate of the church of Jesus Christ and therefore of this church and congregation. Listen to it in the words of Jesus:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I [will be] with you always, to the very end of the age.[9]
Our objective is reproduction: to convey this message of good news to all and sundry, without barrier of race, of education, of nationalistic boundaries, so that men and women who as yet have not heard may hear and understand, and in understanding may come to believe, and in believing may begin to follow, and in following be baptized, and in declaring their allegiance to Christ go out to serve him again. That’s the kind of usefulness that we want.
Thankful, then, is what we ought to be for his provision and for his protection. Useful is what we want to be in his place and for his purpose.
And finally: Faithful is what we plan to be. Faithful is what we plan to be.
One of the greatest tyrannies that represents church living in our day is the success trap. And I want you to put up your antennae and notice how often people will applaud us for our apparent success: “I want to congratulate you on your success.” Well… And I wouldn’t want to stand against that, because I think I know what people are saying. But I certainly would want to guard against beginning to believe in my own heart that the key to usefulness is successfulness and that the effectiveness of our church is in success, when in actual fact, what God looks for is not successfulness but faithfulness.
And so I say this morning that faithful is what we plan to be, because of the pattern that we follow (the pattern of Jesus himself) and because of the prospect that we face—the prospect that we face when one day, we stand and give an account before the bar of heaven for our lives; the kind of reckoning which Jesus describes in Matthew 25 in the parable of the talents. And the man, you will recall, who had received five talents came back and said, “You gave me five, and I’ve gained five more.”[10] And the master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You[’ve] been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.”[11] For some of us, we think that our part here has been so obscure, so apparently irrelevant, that being faithful in these little, inconsequential matters may somehow yield for us a little and inconsequential reward. But Jesus says, “No.” He says, “It is ‘faithful’ in the apparently inconsequential and small which yields the privilege of greater usefulness and which stores up in heaven rewards on the day that we see him.”
Sixty-nine years ago, Mallory and Irvine died in attempting to scale Mount Everest. The last sighting of Mallory and Irvine carried with it this descriptive phrase: “They were seen going steadily for the top.” “They were seen going steadily for the top.”
We leave footprints behind us in this place. Actually, there’s not enough dust on the corridors for them to be identifiable. You’d have to be a great scout to find them. But at least in metaphorical terms. And I would suggest to you that our feet have been toughened along the path of the last six and a half years. I want to suggest to you that we leave behind “TUF” footprints—T because thankful is what we ought to be, U because useful is what we want to be, and F because faithful is what we plan to be. May all who come behind us find us faithful.
Let us pray together.
Just as we sit in this dying moment of our morning worship, let us each speak to God from the silence of our hearts, telling him that we really want to be thankful for his provision and for his protection; that we do want to be useful in the place he puts us, fulfilling the purpose he’s given us; and that we do at the same time want to be faithful, recognizing the pattern we follow and the prospect that we face.
Hear our prayers, O God, and let our cry come unto you.[12] For Jesus’ sake. Amen.
[1] Psalm 90:12 (NIV 1984).
[2] Psalm 7:17 (NIV 1984).
[3] Psalm 100:4–5 (paraphrased).
[4] Lamentation 3:22–23 (NIV 1984).
[5] Romans 5:6–8 (NIV 1984).
[6] 2 Timothy 2:20 (paraphrased).
[7] 2 Timothy 2:21 (NIV 1984).
[8] See Colossians 3:23.
[9] Matthew 28:18–20 (NIV 1984).
[10] Matthew 25:20 (paraphrased).
[11] Matthew 25:21 (NIV 1984).
[12] See Psalm 102:1.
Copyright © 2025, Alistair Begg. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations for sermons preached on or after November 6, 2011 are taken from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
For sermons preached before November 6, 2011, unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973 1978 1984 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.