©2006 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

07-02-06

Feeding The Hunger, Healing The Soul Pt. 5

7/2/06 Feeding The Hunger Pt. 5

There is a major theme in God’s work in our lives,

a theme that forms the central focus

of so much of what He is trying to accomplish for us,

but it is a theme

that we frequently don’t even see

because of the religious clutter that sometimes surrounds our lives.

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.

Simply put,

we long for love from those around us,

but at the same time we have a desperate desire to want to hide ourselves

from the very ones we hope will love us

because we are convinced that if they knew us honestly

they would want nothing to do with us.

And here again this is a bit of a side-track,

but I’ve always found it fascinating

the different ways in which we go about hiding.

It has been my observation

that most of us tend to gravitate toward one or the other

of two distinctly different approaches to hiding ourselves from those around us.

Some people hide behind a wall of words,

while others hide behind a wall of silence.

And both walls are equally effective

in keeping people from seeing what we don’t want them to see.

About eight years ago

we spent two Sundays looking at these two distinctly different groups,

and since I think it may help in our understanding

of the barriers we face in our search for the intimacy of the soul,

I want to quickly review the main characteristics of those two groups.

For lack of better labels

I called the two groups “talkers” and “nontalkers”.

The talkers use speech as their primary tool

for emotional contact with their world,

but it is also their primary tool for hiding from the world.

They can and do articulate their feelings

and their thoughts quickly and easily,

but what they articulate is carefully selected

to protect themselves from allowing others to see anything they don’t want them to see.

Talkers need words for emotional survival.

They fuel their emotional tanks

through verbal communication.

The greatest terror of the talker

is silence.

Three minutes of absolute silence

is a terrifying experience for them.

If a talker is with another person

and a silence of more than a few seconds occurs

the talker will find something to say -

anything!

They’ll talk about the pattern of the carpet,

or the height of the tree in the front yard,

or the population of Anchorage,

and they urgently want

response back

from the people around them.

And here is the important thing to remember about the talkers -

when they talk

they are not really talking

about whatever they’re talking about.

When the talkers talk

they are using a flood of verbal communication

to continually validate themselves through noise,

and to protect themselves through careful control of what is said and what is not,

while at the same time creating a superb hiding place

behind an impenetrable wall of words.

Then there is the other half of the world -

the nontalkers.

Whereas the talkers are protected through their wall of words,

the nontalkers are protected through their wall of silence.

For the nontalker,

not only is silence not an enemy,

it is a wonderful friend.

Silence is like a warm, cozy, soft blanket

into which a person can snuggle.

Silence is safe.

Silence is friendly.

Silence is protection.

The nontalkers find casual social contact to be both threatening and draining,

and they must have blocks of isolation

built into their lives on a regular basis

or they quickly become emotionally exhausted.

Nontalkers stand in awe of the talker’s ability to think of so many things to say.

And, when nontalkers are with talkers,

they tend to view themselves

as rather dull,

uninteresting people by contrast,

sort of like God forgot

to equip them with a personality gene.

I personally think

it is almost impossible

for the talker and nontalker groups

to truly understand and appreciate one another.

Talkers will always believe

that nontalkers really could plunge into the exciting world of verbal communication

if only they would try a little harder.

They look at it as a growth issue,

a will issue,

a try-a-little-harder-and-you-can-do-this-too issue.

And apart from the work of God in their lives, nontalkers are no better.

They will have just as much difficulty

accepting the talkers in their world.

They will have a strong tendency to look at the talkers around them

as compulsive noise machines

running in terror from the great Silence Dragon pursuing them,

and from the fear

that someone might break through their wall of words

and see all those things inside

that they are trying so hard to hide.

And the nontalkers peak out from behind their wall of silence at the world around them,

forever clinging to a secret hope

that the talkers in their lives will eventually run out of words,

or find just a few seconds of inner harmony with themselves

so that the endless flood of noise will cease

and the world can finally know

just a few moments of peace and quiet.

Now those are exaggerations, of course,

and they also present a picture of those two groups

without the intervention and healing of the Spirit of God in their lives,

but there is enough truth there

to help me illustrate how we all hide ourselves

from the very relationships in which we so long to be known and truly loved.

Part of our desire to hide

comes from our awareness of our own inner moral corruption,

and part of it also comes

from some of the messages given to us by our parents

or other significant adults or peers during our childhood,

messages that tell us we are unworthy of being loved.

We talked a little bit about some of those messages last week.

And one of the central works God seeks to accomplish in our lives

is to resolve these two huge opposing forces within us,

to bring a level of healing within us

in which we can find freedom from both the fear and the shame we feel,

and through that freedom

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

When our Lord said, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another...,

He was telling us

that one of the major themes of His work in our lives

is that of teaching us what it really means

to love and to be loved,

to close that gap

between what we fear the most

and what we need the most in our lives.

And then, three weeks ago,

we spent quite a bit of our time

looking at the way in which God has created each of us in His image,

and because of that God-imprint within us

we are at our core primarily relationship creatures.

But it’s more than just that.

Not only are we relationship creatures,

but we alone are relationship creatures designed in the image of God,

which means that with every human relationship,

the more we pattern our approach to others

after the pattern we see in God’s dealings with us,

the healthier those relationships will be.

God has populated our world

with an incredible variety of life forms,

and all of them have their own unique rules for relating to other members of their own species.

Some of them follow certain patterns that parallel healthy human relationships,

and some of them follow patterns that are radically different from what works for us.

Is it the praying mantis that devours it’s own mate after breeding?

Not a good pattern for us to model our relationships after...

I have frequently heard people point to certain behaviors in the animal kingdom

and then suggest that what we see in this animal or that animal

would make an excellent pattern for us as well.

But the truth is that

when we make comments like that

we are looking the wrong direction.

When God created us

He did not create us in the image of the lower creation,

He created us in the image of Himself,

and if we want to understand what works in human relationships

we need to look at the relationship pattern

that we see being modeled for us by God Himself.

Which means that if we want to understand what it means to love

then we begin that understanding process

by looking at how God loves us

and how He expresses that love to us.

In fact, when it comes to the most critical relationships in our lives,

God clearly, powerfully says just exactly that.

Last week in one of my side-tracks,

though we didn’t take time to look at the passage,

we talked a little bit about the way in which God sets Himself up

as the perfect pattern for the husband/wife relationship.

EPH 5:23, 25, 28-30 For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her;... So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself;... for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body.

Do you see what he’s saying?

This is what we were looking at last week -

that process through which God reveals to husbands

the kingdom assigned to us by our God.

And He explains to us in practical terms

how we fulfill that role.

He’s saying,

“Hey, husbands, are you having a little trouble

figuring out this husband thing?

Well, try this!

Try relating to your wife

the same way Christ relates to the church.”

But knowing how slow we husbands are to catch on sometimes,

he then makes it really clear for us.

You see, He knows that we’re going to like the sound of that first phrase,

For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church...

But he also knows that we don’t have a clue

as to what that really means.

So then He goes on to tell us.

It doesn’t mean we are their master,

it means we’re their savior,

and only when we discover how to fulfill that role in our partner’s life

in a way that truly brings about healing and redemption within them

will we discover the level of fulfillment in life

that comes with true kingdom rule.

I know, of course,

how absurd what I’ve just said

sounds to many men.

But I have long since ceased being defensive

about the life principles given to us by our Creator.

And when I meet a man who strongly objects

to the idea of elevating his relationship with his wife

above his career,

above his hobbies,

literally above all else,

the one question I want to ask him

is, “Have you found the kind of deep, truly satisfying fulfillment in life you hoped for?”

I find it fascinating that,

when a man fails in his relationship with his wife,

no amount of success in any other part of life

can compensate or fill the void that that failed relationship creates.

And on the other hand,

when, 5, or 10, or 20 years after his wedding day,

a man can hear his wife say to him, “The wisest thing I ever did in my life was to marry you.”,

then no amount of defeat,

or set-backs,

of turmoil,

or disappointments in his career or any other part of his life

can ever rob him of the sense of life fulfillment he gains from his success in that one relationship.

But here again, if we want to understand what works in human relationships

all we need to do

is to look at the basic pattern given to us

in Christ’s relationship with us.

And of course the husband/wife relationship

is just one aspect of all of this.

I know I’ve wandered all over the place in this rather strange series,

but let me see if I can pull together what I’ve really wanted to say

in a way that makes sense.

What we are looking for, hoping for in our life relationships

is a true intimacy of the soul.

And by that I mean simply

that we are looking for at least a few relationships

in which we can risk allowing another person to see us honestly,

and then we find ourselves being accepted and loved

in the face of what we have allowed them to see.

We want what we lost in the Garden of Eden -

we want to be able to come out of our hiding places long enough

for someone else to know us honestly

and then to accept us on the basis of that knowledge.

And this kind of real soul intimacy

is certainly not limited to marriage.

In fact, it is what we long for at some level

in every human contact we have.

Several weeks ago I shared with you

a comment a young friend of mine made to me

after he risked inviting me into helping him work through

the consequences of some really stupid choices he’d made.

When I asked him how his honesty had affected our friendship

he said simply, “It made it far stronger.”

So how to we go about building those relationships?

Well, in a single sentence

we build them by looking at the pattern modeled for us by our Lord in His relationship with us

and then by reproducing that pattern

in our relationships with those around us.

And for the rest of this series

I’m going to take us to a passage in the 4^th and 5^th chapters of Ephesians

because what Paul does in this passage is truly remarkable.

We are going to look at two verses from that passage

in our last few minutes together this morning,

and then we’ll come back to it in two weeks

and look more closely at the verses that precede and follow this passage that we’ll look at this morning.

But I need to prepare you for what’s going on in these verses

or the power of it will be lost to us.

You see, this is one of those passages

in which God makes some statements to us that,

if we do not hear them correctly

will cause us to automatically switch into our platitude mentality.

We will assume that what we are being offered

is a high and lofty goal

that we really should try to shoot for

but certainly have no reasonable expectation of achieving.

And we’ll do that because of the opening phrase in Ephesians 5:1.

In that phrase Paul says simply,

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children...

And as soon as we hear that,

unless we see that statement in context,

it’s easy to see why we switch into our platitude mentality

because, I mean really!!, what else would we think?

Be imitators of God?

Right!

I’m just going to imitate God.

I’ll be omniscient,

and omnipotent.

I’m going to have a little trouble with that being everywhere at the same time thing,

but maybe I can make up for it with being really really wise.

You see, unless we understand the context in which Paul makes that statement,

it’s no wonder we switch into our Bible platitude mode.

So what is the context?

This statement appears in the middle of a passage that begins with Ephesians 4:17 and runs through 6:9.

And right in the middle of that passage

Paul offers us this statement

that tells us exactly what he’s doing.

He says,

EPH 5:1-2 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.

And in that sentence

Paul does the same thing I’ve been trying to do throughout this study -

he links being imitators of God

with our learning how to love.

In other words,

he is telling us that, if we want to know how to build love relationships with one another

then all we have to do is to look at the way God relates to us.

And then he explains to us what that looks like in practical terms.

So, where have we ended up so far?

We enter this world with two huge opposing forces within us.

On one side we have within us a deep hunger to enter into true love relationships with those around us,

relationships in which we are known deeply and honestly

and then accepted and loved on the basis of that knowledge.

On the other side

we have a terror of allowing anyone to see us honestly

because of the moral corruption we have within us.

If people really knew what we were like...

Then our Lord enters our lives

and establishes for us

a whole new agenda for us -

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.”

He tells us that, if we allow Him to accomplish His work within us,

He will close the gap between those two forces within us.

He will teach us how to love.

And then He goes on to tell us

that the way we learn to love

is through looking at the pattern He has modeled for us

in His relationship with us.

And next time we’ll look at a powerful counterfeit love God warns us about,

and then the follow week we’ll finish this up

by looking more closely at this passage

to see just exactly how we go about modeling ourselves after God Himself.