©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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02-13-05 |
Real Life, Real Love |
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2/13/05 Real Life, Real Love
This has been a week
that has been filled with far more “real life” than I care for.
Monday was a good day.
(By “good” I mean, of course, that it followed the pattern I’d anticipated.)
I got some things done at my desk in the morning,
stopped by Alaska Trading and Loan and had a great conversation with Norm,
spent the afternoon doing rather reckless things with two Junior High boys and their snow boards,
and then had dinner with some good friends.
It was a nice day,
a predictable day,
a day that followed the plan I’d laid out for it.
But then Tuesday afternoon
“real life” began to intrude.
Sandee and I received a call from my brother-in-law
telling us that my dad had just had a stroke.
My parents live in eastern Washington state.
They are well into their 80's now,
and up to this point
they have both enjoyed excellent health their entire lives,
so much so that my brother and sister and I have just taken it for granted.
Sandee describes my mom as “the Energizer Bunny”.
She just keeps going and going and going.
It wasn’t until Wednesday morning that we had a clear picture of what was happening,
and given the situation it was better than it could have been.
On a scale of 1-10 the doctor said the stroke was a 5.
There was some paralysis on the right side,
and some speech difficulty,
but his spirits were good
and the doctor now believes that
with a month of rehabilitation
there is every expectation that dad will be able to return home.
But it was that same morning, Wednesday,
that the phone calls about my nephew Jeremy and his wife Michelle started.
The first one informed us that they were several hours overdue
in their flight from Anchorage to Port Alsworth.
And then,
within the day we heard of the crash,
and of the death of their three daughters, Samantha, Jessie, and Kadee Jo.
During his Jr. High years
Jer began a deep friendship with our family,
a friendship that we now share with Michelle as well,
one that has only grown deeper over the years.
Though we only saw the girls a few times a year,
the loss that family has suffered
has created our own private Tsunami within our extended family and much of the community.
On Thursday morning I had a phone call from John Averill.
He called just to see how I was doing,
and in the course of our conversation
he said to me
so many of the things that I should have been saying to myself, but couldn’t.
He talked about the great lie of Satan,
the lie that causes us to question and blame God for the death of these three children.
And then he made a statement
that helped me to once again remember the truth.
He said, “God is not the author of death.”
When he said that
chunks of my thinking
that had been dislodged by our Tsunami
once again fell back into place.
From the very beginning
death was never God’s idea.
We are eternal creations of His,
designed by Him with spirits that will indeed live for all eternity.
He is not the author of death,
we are.
We are the ones who chose to break our union with the source of all life
and through our rebellion
bring physical death into human experience.
And even then,
our God continued His battle for life on our behalf.
For, the truth is that, not only is God not the author of death,
but He is in fact
the author of all true life,
the author of redemption,
the author of healing,
the author of deliverance.
He is the One who,
when we chose a life of independence from Him,
and the physical death that came with it,
responded by offering us
a new life with Him, through Him,
one that begins here and now,
but then extends beyond the death of our bodies,
beyond the grave,
one that replaces this mortal physical body
with a new one,
a perfect, pain-free, flawless one that will never die.
There is nowhere in all of life’s experiences
where the true nature of our God becomes more evident
than in His response to this physical death we have brought on ourselves.
For it is at this point most of all
that we see Him saying those things to us
that the human spirit most longs to hear.
Death in Christ is never an end.
It is simply our departure from the shadowlands
into the true life in the presence of His love,
a life that has no end.
This is not the week I would have chosen
for myself or for any of us,
but it is a week in which,
I have been forced to once again remember
the most basic truths of our lives,
and there is great value in that.
Well, what I had originally planned for us this morning
involved our return to our study of Ephesians,
and I think we will go ahead with a little of that.
As we have moved through our study of the first three chapters of this letter
we have seen Paul revealing to us
just a tiny glimpse
into the magnitude of the recreative work
that Christ has accomplished within the life of the Christian.
We have heard him talk with us
about the way in which,
even when we were fighting against our Creator,
running from Him,
hiding from Him,
pretending we didn’t need Him,
telling ourselves that He was the enemy to be avoided at all costs,
as Paul put it,
even when...(EPH 2:1)... you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
God reached out to us,
calling us to Himself,
and when we finally stopped our running, and hiding, and games and had the courage to listen,
and then to respond to His offer of forgiveness through Christ,
... because of His great love with which He loved us,
He made us alive together with Christ ... and raised us up with Him, and
seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages
to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us
in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:4-7)
And Paul’s account of the recreative work God has accomplished in our lives
doesn’t stop there.
He goes on to describe
how God then formed us into His people,
His Church - the physical body of Jesus Christ on this earth,
and then tells us that He has done this
(EPH 3:10) so
that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to
the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.
We are the window
through which all of creation now sees the truth about God Himself.
Let me put it this way.
There is a question that most of you have probably never consciously asked yourselves,
and yet you have already come up with a highly refined answer to it.
And the answer you have come up with
has become the most powerful single force in your life,
the force that has literally determined the course of your life up to this point.
That question is,
“Who is God and what is He really like?”
Every other major decision in our lives
will flow from whatever answer we have given ourselves to that question.
Whatever moral value system we are living by right now
is the direct result of who we think God is and how we think He relates to us.
All of our life goals,
our basic priorities each day,
where we invest our time, our money, our resources,
how we approach our relationships with those around us,
all of these things flow out of our perceptions of God -
who He is,
what He’s like,
what we believe He’s said to us and why He’s said it,
what we think we can expect from Him,
and what we think He expects from us.
If I meet a person
whose life is consumed with a desire
to achieve success and fulfillment here and now,
a person who approaches other people
as tools to be used for his own gain,
I know I am with a person
who is angry at his God,
a person who doesn’t trust his God,
and doesn’t want anything to do with God’s intervention into his life.
They may laugh at religion,
or ridicule it,
or they may be deeply and openly religious,
using their religious system
as the ultimate tool with which to keep their God at a distance.
But underlying all of the facade
their basic belief about God
determines the course of their entire life.
And this process of our figuring out what God is like
is complicated by the fact
that we all enter this world
with spirits in rebellion against Him.
We start out suspicious of Him,
mistrustful of Him,
convinced that our submission to Him
would destroy any hope of achieving true happiness and fulfillment in life.
When Adam and Eve first set the human race
on this course of alienation from God
they did so
because they were convinced that God was trying to cheat them,
to deceive them,
to keep them from something
that would truly enrich their lives.
And everyone of us
have entered this world
with the same initial response to our Creator.
And, when Paul wrote his letter to the Ephesians,
he went into great detail
carefully explaining
the true nature of God’s relationship with His people, His church,
and then He says in effect,
“Now, if you really want to know what God is like, LOOK AT HIS CHURCH!”.
And please, keep in mind
that Paul is not talking about these human organizations
that we call churches.
He’s talking about the real thing -
about the way in which God responds to all those
who reach out to Him.
And what we see there
is a God who has designed a perfect plan of redemption
for extremely imperfect people,
a plan of redemption
that in no way obliterates our free will,
but rather a plan that rests upon it
as He does not call us to DO anything,
but rather to choose to believe
that He is indeed telling us the truth -
about our sin, about Christ, about His death in our place, and about His offer of new life in Him.
And when we want to understand
what our God is really like
all we have to do is to look at what He has done and is doing
in, and for, and through His people.
This is not the world He chose for us.
This is certainly not the world in which we will live out eternity with Him.
But it is the world
that provides us with the perfect stage
upon which we can make honest decisions about our God
on the basis of how we see Him relating to His people, His church.
And everything we see there
proclaims His love,
His heart of compassion and kindness,
His commitment to take whatever evil we have created through our rebellion,
and then recreate it into good in our lives,
both here and for all of eternity.
And the manifold wisdom of God is now made known through
the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.
That is almost, but not quite where Paul ends the first half of this letter.
You see,
there is one additional piece he needed to mention,
one additional piece around which all the others fit.
And he gives it to us
in the form of that remarkable prayer we have recorded for us at the end of chapter 3.
And you know what he prays, don’t you?
He prays ... that Christ may dwell in your hearts through
faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to
comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and
depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may
be filled up to all the fullness of God.
That’s Paul’s way of saying
that the only way this whole God/man thing is ever going to work
is if we can see into the heart of our God
and see there the breadth, and length, and height, and depth of the love of our God for us.
Does that sound strange to you
in the face of what some of us have gone through this past week?
Does that sound strange to you
knowing that, in just a few hours
this room will be filled with people
who will meet together for the memorial service
for the three precious little girls
of two very strong Christian parents?
Do you wonder how Paul can proclaim the love of God
in the face of such events?
I was not able to talk with Jeremy and Michelle personally
until Friday afternoon.
When I was finally able to get through to them
I figured I was suppose to have some sort of words to offer
that might give them some encouragement.
But as soon as I heard there voices
I knew that everything they needed to hear
was already being spoken directly to them by the Spirit of God.
I chatted with Jer for a few minutes,
listening to him share the utterly amazing account of their survival.
He described the crash,
and the plane’s quick descent underwater, and the complete blackness,
his mouth filled with gasoline,
of his frantic but futile attempts to free his unconscious Samantha from her belt,
and then he told of the way he felt his body shoot toward the surface,
directly up into the one hole in the ice through which he could have made his escape
following his cutting through his own harness with his knife.
He told me about the four mile survival hike that followed,
a hike in which, three times he broke through the ice and sank up to his neck.
And he told me about the way in which,
when he broke through yet again, this time up to his knees,
the only way he could get out
was to hang onto Michelle’s frozen clothing with his teeth
until she could drag him out.
But then he went on to tell me
about the way in which they have seen the Spirit of God
giving them strength, and hope, and encouragement during the past few days
in the midst of incredible pain.
Jer and Michelle run a guide service for hunters from their home in Port Alsworth,
and Jer said that he’d had a number of calls from concerned clients
who wondered if they could do something to help.
Many of these men are not Christians,
and do you know what he told them?
He said he told them that,
if they really wanted to do something for him,
they could read the first four books of the New Testament,
and then draw their own conclusions
about what kind of God this really is.
When I got off the phone
I remembered Paul’s words at the end of Romans chapter 8.
ROM 8:31, 35-39
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against
us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as
it is written, "For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We
were considered as sheep to be slaughtered." But in all these things we
overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created
thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord.
When we turn to Christ
He does not supernaturally create for His people
an alternate world in which there is no pain,
no suffering,
no death.
That world will one day be ours,
but not on this side of the grave.
But what He does do
is to assure us that,
no matter what we face here and now,
none of it will ever have the power to separate us from reality of His love,
and through that love
we will find both the strength we need for the present,
and the hope we need for the future.
You see,
what our God offers us
is a love that is adequate
for the real world in which we live,
and it is our daily rediscovery of that love
that forms the only adequate foundation
for our effective fulfillment of the calling given to us here on this earth,
the calling of being the window through which all of creation
can see the manifold wisdom of God.
It was my original intention
to take us at last into the 4th chapter of Ephesians this morning,
but obviously my mind has been elsewhere this week
so we’ll wait until next week
to see if I can actually make it past my overview of the first 3 chapters.