©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

06-04-06

Feeding The Hunger, Healing The Soul Pt.1

6/4/06 Feeding the Hunger, Healing the Soul Pt. 1

We are going to take a two week break from our study of John

because I have some thoughts bumping around in my mind

and I want to try to share them with you.

I want to talk a little bit this morning

about something that is so big in all that God is doing in our lives

that we frequently don’t see it at all.

This may sound strange to some of you when I say it,

but it has been my observation

that sometimes the things that should be the most obvious to us

in God’s dealings with us

are the things that we can most easily miss.

Some examples may help me explain what I’m saying.

This is certainly true when it comes to our relationship with the Bible itself.

There are some big messages

that are carefully built into the structure of the Bible,

messages that are designed to help us hear correctly

what’s our God is saying to us.

But all too often

we either don’t see them at all,

or else we have become so familiar with them

that we cease to hear them.

That word “Gospel” is a great example.

I’ve mentioned several times in the past

what that word means.

It means “Good News”.

The titles of the first 4 books of the New Testament are “The Good News” according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

And if what we read there

doesn’t sound like “Good News”,

then one thing we know for certain - we’ve misunderstood what’s being said.

Another big message that’s blasted all over the New Testament

is the one that comes through the constant use of that word “saint”.

Sixty-seven times God calls us His saints.

But here again, because we don’t know what the word means,

the power of what He’s doing is lost on us.

The literal translation of the word is “holy ones”.

And with that title

God is not telling us what we should be,

He’s telling us what we are,

what we have become through Christ.

We are not simply forgiven,

we are literally recreated at the spirit level,

given a new, holy, pure heart by God Himself.

That certainly doesn’t mean we no longer battle against sin in our lives,

because our physical bodies are still filled with all sorts of lies - wrong thought patterns,

emotional impulses,

destructive need-meeting techniques we’ve built into our lives that generate intense battles within us a times,

but once we bow before our God

and chose to place our lives into His hands,

He responds to that cry within us

by literally uniting His Spirit with our spirits,

forming us into His holy ones at the deepest level of our existence.

And He calls us His “holy ones”

because that’s exactly what we are.

At the core of our being

there is within us an eternal spirit-longing

to live a life that honors our God.

We may not know how to do that,

we may not even believe it’s possible sometimes,

but within every true Christian

there is a pure, righteous, holy heart that, if it could, would praise and honor our Lord Jesus Christ

in every action,

every word,

every thought.

We are His holy ones.

Another huge message we often miss

is the one that’s imbedded in the titles of the two major sections of the Bible itself.

We all know, of course,

that the Bible is divided up into two major sections -

the Old Testament

and the New Testament.

Why?

It isn’t just because some of the books are older than others.

Those two titles were chosen

because, before we ever open the cover,

or begin reading one word of the text

our God wants us to know what we’re reading.

Without those two titles,

our approach to reading the Bible

would be a lot like being handed a road map

with no labels or words written on it.

Picture yourself being handed one of those gas station road maps they use to give out years ago,

but the one you’ve been given

says nothing on the front,

and when you open it up

you can see all the roads and rivers and railroad tracks,

but no words of any kind,

no cities labeled,

no towns labeled,

no indication even of what state your looking at.

Any thinking person would look at the thing

and then toss it aside saying to himself,

“This thing is no good to me.

There’s no way I can tell where I’m at or where I’m going.”

And yet if we miss these most basic divisions of the Bible

we can find ourselves doing the same thing in our relationship to Scripture.

We’ll drop into some passage

without any idea what God is describing for us

or how He wants us to relate to it.

And if we’re not careful,

rather than leading our minds and hearts into Him and His truth,

it will actually result in our becoming hopelessly lost and confused.

The Old and the New Testaments

are describing for us

two radically different agreements

that God has made between Himself and us,

agreements that were made for radically different purposes.

The first was made to drive us to Christ,

the second to give us new life in Christ.

The word “Testament” means “covenant” or “agreement”,

and when we read the accounts in the “Old Testament”

we know that we are reading a description of that first agreement between God and man,

seeing what it was and how it worked.

It wasn’t complicated.

It’s recorded for us in careful detail

a number of places throughout the Bible.

If you’d like to read it on your own,

one of those places is in Deuteronomy 11:26-29,

but the basic message is carried throughout the entire Old Testament.

The components of the Old Covenant were simple.

God revealed to the Nation of Israel, and through them, to the entire human race

the basic moral absolutes that He required from them.

They were given initially to Moses in the Ten Commandments,

and then expanded and explained by Moses in the first five books of the Old Testament.

Then God told Israel that, if they kept His commandments

He would bless them abundantly,

and if the refused to keep them

He would curse them and make their life extremely difficult.

Then the Old Testament records for us

the disaster that resulted,

a disaster carefully designed by God

to bring the human race to the understanding

that any arrangement between us and Him

that is based upon our efforts to earn His blessing through our performance

will never work.

In fact, in a remarkable statement of revelation,

Paul tells us in Romans 5:20 that  “... the Law came in that the transgression might increase...”.

God did not give us His moral law in order to make us moral,

He gave it in order to make us sin more

because He knew that our real problem was not our actions,

it was our spirit rebellion against Him.

But we would never face the spirit problem

until His moral law brought that rebellion out into the light.

And nothing brings spirit rebellion out into the open

like the voice of God declaring THOU SHALT NOT!!!!!!!

That’s the Old Covenant,

and when we read the Old Covenant, the Old Testament,

what we read will only make sense

when we understand what God is doing and why.

That entire law-based relationship between us and our God

was established by Him

to create within us both a recognition of and a desperate hunger for some other answer,

some other way through which we could find peace with our Creator.

And then...

and then, when the time was right,

God offered us His alternative.

HEB 8:8-13 For finding fault with them, He says, "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, When I will effect a new covenant With the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers On the day when I took them by the hand To lead them out of the land of Egypt; For they did not continue in My covenant, And I did not care for them, says the Lord. "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel After those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws into their minds, And I will write them upon their hearts. And I will be their God, And they shall be My people. "And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen, And everyone his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' For all shall know Me, From the least to the greatest of them. "For I will be merciful to their iniquities, And I will remember their sins no more." When He said, "A new covenant," He has made the first obsolete.

I will put My laws into their minds, And I will write them upon their hearts....For I will be merciful to their iniquities, And I will remember their sins no more.

I love the way Paul paraphrases Isaiah in Romans 11:27 when, quoting God, he says,

ROM 11:27 "And this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins."

Of course, when the Prophets who lived under the Old Covenant made these prophesies

they had no clear idea

how such an arrangement could ever come to exist between God and man,

an arrangement in which God simply took away our sins,

poured out mercy on us,

remembered our sins no more,

and placed a new heart within us.

And it wasn’t until the appearance of Christ on this earth,

it wasn’t until He shared that last meal with His men,

just hours before His crucifixion,

and said to them,

LUK 22:20"This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood...,

picturing for them His death in our place for our sins,

it wasn’t until then

that we began to gain some insight into what He was doing.

And now, whenever we read anything in this “New Testament”,

this New Covenant section of the Bible,

the only way we can ever understand it correctly

is within the context of this New Testament established between us and God through Christ.

Which means...

which means that, if we ever read anything in the New Testament

and come away from that reading

feeling as if what God is offering us

is a relationship with Himself that is based upon our ability to perform for Him,

or if we feel as though

He is accepting us when we perform well,

and rejecting us or pulling away from us when we don’t,

then one thing we know for certain - we have misunderstood what’s being said.

I do not believe there are any three words

that Satan tries harder to blind us to

than the first three words of this second section of the Bible - THE NEW TESTAMENT.

If we miss those first three words,

or if we fail understand what they mean,

nothing that follows them will make sense to us.

Now, I got into all of that

simply because I wanted to offer some examples of why I said that

sometimes the things that should be the most obvious to us

in God’s dealings with us

are the things that we can most easily miss.

But the thing that brought all of this to mind to me

was actually a completely different major theme

that is imbedded in all that God is saying to us through Christ.

It has to do with love -

our desperate need for love,

our fear of being hurt and the reasons why we so seldom find the love we long for,

and the kind of healing that our Lord seeks to bring into our lives.

We’ve gone back to the first few chapters of Genesis repeatedly in recent weeks,

seeing there some of the most basic truths of our lives.

And I want to take us back there one more time this morning

just to remind us of the first great consequence of sin in our lives.

GEN 3:8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

The first great consequence of sin in our lives

is that it drives us into hiding.

With Adam and Eve it was physical hiding in the bushes,

but that physical hiding

was simply an external expression

of what was really going on inside them.

Their sin created within them a sense of shame,

and their shame drove them into the fear of discovery,

the fear of being known,

and their fear drove them into an intense emotional isolation.

And that’s where we’ve all been ever since.

What we need most in life,

what we long for more than all else is to be truly, deeply loved.

But we know too much about the junk inside us,

and we are certain that, if others knew about some of the junk inside us

there’s no way they would ever...could ever love us.

And so we find some way

either of hiding from those around us,

or of finding some sort of love substitute,

some sort of pretend love that helps sooth the pain inside.

The approach we take personally

depends on a number of things -

the kind of pain we’re packing around,

the kinds of wounds that have been inflicted on us in the past,

our basic temperament and personality,

what techniques and hiding places are available to us.

I’ll mention just a few of them

so that you can better understand what I’m talking about.

And I’ll start with two of the most common.

The first is to attempt to create an external social image

that tells those around us

that we’re really fine folks

with no problems,

no failures,

no real struggles of any kind.

There are lots of variations of this love-seeking approach, of course.

Many people will take some special talent or ability

and shove it out to the front so that it becomes the one thing

that everyone knows about them,

the one thing everyone sees.

It could be anything - sports ability,

artistic or musical ability,

our physical appearance,

an exceptional IQ,

natural leadership ability,

a great sense of humor or ability to make others laugh, and on and on.

I learned this early in my own life

when I discovered that in certain situations I could get up in front of people and speak.

From seventh grade on

I lunged at every opportunity that came my way to get up on stage.

At first it was drama,

and then public speaking,

and when I’d hear that applause at the end of a play or a speech

I would tell myself that all those people really did love me.

The problem with this external image approach to seeking love, of course,

is that we know the truth.

We know that what people are responding to

is not the real us,

but rather our carefully crafted facade,

and if they knew the truth,

if they knew us honestly and fully

they’d probably turn away in disgust.

Those of you who were at the baptism last Sunday met Joey Mesa.

From what he shared prior to his being baptized

you know that, before his submission to Christ last December,

he got himself into a some really stupid stuff.

During the past few years

he did his best to keep the junk in his life hidden from me.

In other words,

he did what so many of us do -

he built and external image for me,

one designed to convince me that everything in his life was just fine.

But then I began to find out about all of the struggles going on in his life,

and together he and I started wading through the problems,

one step at a time.

A few weeks ago he and I started talking about the past few months

and all that we’d gone through,

and I asked him why he hid from me for so long.

He said, “Because I thought if you knew what was going on in my life

it would destroy our friendship.”

Then I said, “But what really happened when it all came out?”

He said, “It made our friendship far stronger.”

Then I said, “And here’s the amazing thing! It works exactly the same way in our relationship with God.”

But I do understand why he hid from me for so long.

He did it because it is our first response to the junk we find inside ourselves.

We build an external image

in terror of what would happen

if anyone found out what was really going one inside us.

A second common love substitute technique

is to group ourselves with other people

who are into the same forms of corruption we’re into.

Two drunks cling to the bar or to one another

and in the process

offer one another an illusion of unconditional acceptance and approval

that feels like love.

Just a few years ago

a man and a teenage boy

terrorized the east coast through their random sniper assassinations

and in the process created a powerful bond of mutual acceptance between themselves.

This love substitute technique has been around forever,

but within the past decade the internet has given it a whole new level of power and popularity.

If a person is looking for it,

he or she can find web sites and chat rooms on virtually every kind of the most base, foul human behavior in existence.

And once they enter that world

they can discover a kind status and acceptance based on their shared perversion

that gives them the illusion of being truly loved.

And of course this kind of love substitute

is certainly not limited exclusively to shared immoral behavior.

People have been grouping themselves on the basis of special interests forever,

hoping that because we all drive Harleys,

or because we all make quilts,

or because we’re all Irish,

or because we all collect Hummells

we will find a deeper level of acceptance and love.

But here again,

acceptance on the basis of any shared interest

can never quiet the hunger for love within us

because we know that the “acceptance” we receive

is not based on true knowledge of who we are

but rather on the shared interest that brought us together.

And there are lots of other techniques we use

in our attempts to cope with the longing for love within us.

Some people fall into the trap of hiding their own inner corruption

by always being on the offensive,

looking for and pointing out the flaws and failures and weaknesses of others.

It’s a very effective way of keeping people from seeing our flaws,

but it has the down side of making it impossible for us ever to receive love from others

because our attacks make it impossible for anyone to risk trying to get close to us.

Then there are others

who deal with the hunger for love

by simply shutting down emotionally,

feeling nothing.

“I am a rock, I am an island,

And a rock feels no pain,

And an island never cries.”

And then there are so many

who cling to some emotional substitute

for the true intimacy of the soul

that comes with real love relationships.

The most common, of course, is sex,

creating a brief, intense emotional illusion

of the true intimacy of the soul we long for.

All of which is to say

that we all enter this world with two huge opposing forces within us.

First, we bring with us a deep hunger for true love and the soul intimacy it brings,

a love that is based on our being known honestly

and accepted fully on the basis of that knowledge.

And second,

we bring with us a deeply corrupted spirit

that drives us into actions and attitudes

that bring about a deep sense of shame within us

and a longing to hide and protect ourselves

from the very ones from whom we hope to receive love.

Which brings me to that huge, central theme of God’s message to us

that I believe we so often failed to see.

Because I believe that one of the central works God seeks to accomplish in our lives

is to resolve these two huge opposing forces in our lives,

to bring a level of healing within us

in which we can find freedom from the shame

and a true intimacy of the soul through which we can both give and receive love.

And I say that because of this:

JOH 13:34 "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

And now, having taken so much time in the diagnosis,

I’m going to extend this study one more week

so that I don’t have to rush through my explanation

of how I see our Lord actually accomplishing this healing process in our lives.