The Gift of Importance – LaVon Koerner

Transcript: Many years ago, I selected a life verse. It was Psalm 37:4. “Delight yourself in the law of the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Now, back then, I thought that God was going to give me my desires of my heart. As you grow older, you get a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of wisdom, and it became clear to me He wasn’t talking about my desires. He was talking about His desires that He put into my heart.

Over time I began to understand those desires, and I have identified seven of them. There could be more, but there are at least seven desires.

One of them is what I want to talk to you about right now, and that is the desire to be important. You and I want to be important. Now, God put them in our hearts to draw us to Him. It’s a connecting factor. He’s always wooing us into Him.

Because of that particular notion in your heart, your desire to be important, I want to ask you some questions. You’re a businessperson. Have you connected your sense of self-importance to your business?

Well, let me find out. Let me ask you this question. If your business is going great, do you feel more important? Let me ask you this: if your business is not going so hot right now, is your self-importance at risk?

If you can define a sense of importance and connect it to your business, we’ve got a problem. Because now your business has become the means for you to sustain, build, create, and propagate your sense of importance.

This is going to sound harsh, but your business has just become an idol, because it’s replaced God. God is the one that wants to make you important.

Let me ask you some questions. If you’re going over the line, if you’re using your business to create your importance and you find yourself feeling important when things are going well and unimportant when things are not going so well, you have just created some vulnerability.

Let me tell you why that’s not a good thing. God doesn’t want you to be there – not because you’re moving Him off the throne and putting your business on the throne. He doesn’t want you to be there because it’s bad for you.

So you become vulnerable. You’re going to live a rollercoaster life of emotion. Business is up, importance is up. Business is down, your self-importance is down. You’re hiding in the shadows. You become desperate. You begin to realize that your self-image is too tied to your business and its success.

You will start using the business to make you important and you’ll use the customers of your business to make you important. You’ll use the employees of your business to make you important. Do you see what’s happening here? You’re using people to build your importance – importance you should already have from God.

I want to talk to you about that, but I want you to understand how sick this is, if you’ve allowed Satan to replace God with your business. You will always be guarding, always protecting your brand, always be building your brand. And by the way, that’s what marketing teaches today – that you have an individual brand, and build that, build that, build that, always build that.

But then something else is going to creep in. Let’s say your business flourishes, and I pray that it will, and I hope that God blesses your business. But if it flourishes, that has a tendency, if your importance is tied to your business, that now you’ll become more prideful. Oh, that’s a big vulnerability.

Not only that, if your business is being successful and somebody else’s isn’t, you may have disdain for those whose businesses are not being as successful as yours. You could look down on them.

I hope you see. I could talk all day about this, the precariousness of allowing your business to be the answer to that desire that God has planted in your heart to be important.

Well, what’s the alternative? The alternative is that God wants to make you important. He wants you to know that you are important to Him. He put that desire in your heart to do one thing: to bring you closer to Him. Every day, He wants to give you the gift of importance.

May I ask you – have you accepted that? Have you said, this morning, “Thank you, God, for making me important”? Do you understand if there was nobody else in the world, Jesus would have still come, still died, for you?

Do you understand that when Jesus was carrying that cross up to Golgotha and was nailed to the cross and He was put on the cross, that your name, your picture of your face, came to His mind? He did it for you. You’re important to Him.

It’s not by accident that you’re alive right now. It’s not by accident that you’re on planet Earth in this particular year. You could’ve been born thousands of years ago, but you were born now. Why? Because God has a plan for you. Why? Because God has a purpose for you. Why? Because you’re important to Him.

You’re absolutely important. He’s counting on you, He’s invested in you. He’s invested His own Son in you. It doesn’t get any better than that. So you are important to Him.

It’s going to happen. The Bible says in Hebrews 9 it’s appointed for a man once to die, and after that is the judgment. So it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time for you. You’re going to die, and there are going to be thousands and millions of people.

Your name is called and you step up to the throne, and God looks at you. You give your name. “Hello, I’m LaVon Koerner.” He looks over at this book. It’s called the Book of Life. The Book of Life has every name of every important person in all of history.

He looks for your name, because the meeting that’s about to happen is by invitation only. He looks in that book, and if your name is there, if your name is in the Book of Life, you be important. Only important people have accepted the gift that God wanted to give them, the gift of importance – if they’ve accepted that by grace, not because your business was good. And you didn’t get out of the Book of Life because your business was not good.

It is based upon God, and if you have said “yes” to His offer to you, to make you important, your name is in that book. The Book of Life is the ultimate source of important people. If your name is in there, you be important.