5/13/07 The Isaacs In Our Lives

We are almost but not quite finished

with what I want to share with you

about that opening comment made by Christ

to the man at the Pool of Bethesda in John chapter 5.

If you were here two weeks ago,

or if you were involved in this study when we were in it before Easter,

you remember the question.

When we began the passage

and heard Jesus’ opening words

to this man who had been 38 years in his sickness,

at first the question seemed strange to say the least.

JOH 5:6 When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, "Do you wish to get well?"

But as we’ve looked at that question for several weeks now

we have seen at least a little

of why the Lord asked it,

and even more of what it means to us.

And two weeks ago we saw that,

in a very real way,

this pool at Bethesda is a snapshot of the entire human race,

all of us sick in our souls,

all of us trying frantically to cope with our internal wounds,

our tender areas,

our broken places.

Because we cannot heal ourselves,

prior to our union with our Lord

we invest our efforts into finding ways

of protecting and guarding ourselves

in the face of our sicknesses of the soul.

And just as Adam and Eve tried to hide from God in shadows,

so we try our best to hide from one another

behind whatever we can find

that will mask our brokeness from those around us.

From our earliest days

we find whatever social skills we possess,

whatever creative talents we have been given,

whatever intellectual and personal attributes we have,

and then we use them as best we can

to build for ourselves a safe, protected place in our world.

And please understand that I certainly don’t fault us for this.

It’s all we can do on our own.

We cannot heal ourselves,

so we use whatever resources we have

to cope with our sickness.

That’s life on this planet

in this awkward time between the fall and the return of Christ.

But that isn’t the whole story.

Not even close.

For, just as Jesus sought out this man at the Pool of Bethesda,

and then asked him if he wished to get well,

so He seeks out each one of us

and asks us the same question at the spirit level.

And we also saw two weeks ago

that the question carries with it...well... implications,

the greatest of which is Jesus Himself.

Is it any wonder that our world has become so skilled

at creating alternative healing approaches,

ones that avoid the sticky issue of trust and submission to Jesus Christ.

There’s lots of people talking about inner healing,

lots of techniques and approaches and systems and sound psychological tools offered.

And many of them do help us better cope with the pain.

But that’s not what our God offers us.

What He offers us, quite simply, is Himself,

the Great Physician of the human soul.

He alone knows what’s broken.

He alone knows how to heal.

And there are some aspects of soul healing

that He seeks to bring into our lives from the very beginning of our union with Him.

At the top of the list

is His urgent desire to bring us out of the shadows

and into the security of His love.

Which is why there is only one doorway into Him -

a doorway divinely positioned at the foot of the cross.

Our Lord said it better, of course.

JOH 14:6 ... "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”

What is it that drove you into hiding from your God?

What is it that made you certain

that you were forever disqualified from this whole GOD thing?

What made you shove Him to the back of your mind,

pretending that He wasn’t there,

or that He didn’t matter,

or that surly He must grade on the curve and surely you’d at least get a “C”?

Well, whatever it is,

that’s why it always starts at the cross,

with Him reaching out to you,

and taking whatever it is you were so certain disqualified you from His love,

and then His writing across it in His own blood, “Debt paid in full forever.”

And then, just so that we never forget,

He concludes the transaction

by nailing our list of offenses to the cross where it remains forever.

You think I’m making this up?

COL 2:13-14 When you were dead in your transgressions ... He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

And that’s where it starts - the healing work of the Great Physician in our lives.

But as we saw two weeks ago,

His healing work is not just a point,

it is a process we share with Him as long as we remain in these bodies on this earth.

And before we leave this altogether

there are some thoughts I shared with you two weeks ago

that I want to return to for a few more minutes this morning.

I hadn’t intended to get into this two weeks ago,

but having done so

I don’t want to leave it until I’ve forced myself to work through it in an organized way.

And to help get us back into this

I want to begin by taking us back to an incident

that took place in the life of Abraham.

If you are acquainted with the life of Abraham

you will remember that God chose Abraham and his wife, Sarah,

as the parents of the Nation of Israel.

It was a promise given to Abraham by God relatively early in his life.

But Abraham and Sarah had no children.

Through their 20's, and 30's, and 40's, and 50's,

they had no children.

Through their 60's and 70's they still had no children.

And Sarah went through menopause,

and from a natural point of view

all hope of offspring was gone forever.

Yet still God’s promise to Abraham remained firm,

and remarkably Abraham’s faith in that promise remained firm too.

And then, finally, when Abraham was 100 years old,

Sarah conceived and gave birth to Isaac.

He was God’s great and remarkable gift,

the fulfillment of the promise,

this old man’s hope for the future.

But then, when Isaac was just a lad,

something happened between Abraham and God

that tested Abraham to the extreme.

Let me read the account of what happened from Genesis 22:1-14.

Now it came about after these things, that God tested Abraham, and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you." So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son; and he split wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance. Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you." Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, "My father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said, "Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together.

Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me." Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son. Abraham called the name of that place The Lord Will Provide, as it is said to this day, "In the mount of the Lord it will be provided."

Now I can’t even begin to imagine

the range of emotions both Abraham and Isaac felt throughout this ordeal,

or the questions he wrestled with.

Certainly Abraham must have wondered

how God could love him and yet ask him to do this.

And Isaac must have wondered

how his father could love him

and yet bind him and place him on the alter.

But in some respects

what God asked of Abraham

in this event that took place so many years ago

He also asks of us.

And when I got away from my notes two weeks ago

I tried to share with you

what I have come to believe is an essential part of God’s healing and freeing process in our lives.

Now, the parallel between what happened with Abraham and Isaac

and what God does in our lives is not exact,

but it’s close enough so that I think it will help us relate to what I want us to see here.

You see, Isaac was quite simply huge in Abraham’s life.

He was first of all the son that he and Sarah had never had.

But he was much more than that.

He was Abraham’s answer to many of the deepest needs in his life.

He was Abraham’s hope for the future,

his close companion in his old age,

his one great opportunity to reproduce himself as he had never done so before,

not just to reproduce himself physically,

but to reproduce himself as a man,

to pass on all that he understood about life,

to pass on all that he understood about God.

There are some things in human experience

that can only be shared within the context of a father/son relationship.

There is a sense of fulfillment and completion

that can never be expressed more intensely

than when a father says, “That’s my son!”

Isaac was the one thing in Abraham’s life

that could never be replaced or duplicated if lost.

Isaac was simply Abraham’s answer to many of the deepest needs the man had ever known.

And each of us have within our own lives

things that we view in the same way -

things upon which we have built our lives,

things that we believe we simply must have if our needs are ever to be met,

things that give us a reason for getting out of bed in the morning,

things that are our best answers to our deepest needs.

Sometimes with us, as with Abraham,

it’s another person.

But not always.

Sometimes with us, as with Abraham,

it may even be something

that we can look back and know with certainty

that it came to us directly from the hand of God.

Sometimes it’s something

that we know all too well did not come from the hand of God,

something that, in fact, has served as our preferred God alternative,

the place we run to for comfort, or purpose, or escape, or assurance, or help

at those times when we choose not to run to our Lord.

But one thing is certain -

whatever it is,

we view it as an essential answer so some great need in our life.

And the greater the need,

the greater its value to us.

At the top of that list

are things like our need for love,

or our need for affirmation,

or our need for security,

or our need for a sense of purpose and value.

Or maybe the thing we cling to so tightly

is whatever it is that helps us cope with the pain

when those needs in our lives are not being met.

But the fact is that we all have an Isaac in our lives,

something that we see as our solution, our answer to some very big need.

And here’s where the parallel between us and Abraham comes in,

and here, too, is what I was trying to share with you

when I got off my notes two weeks ago.

You see, there are times in God’s healing process in our lives,

when He knows that, even though the need we may be trying to meet with our Isaac is a legitimate need,

the way we have attempted to meet it is not.

In the end, rather than leading to greater freedom,

it will only lead to greater bondage

as we cling more and more tightly

to what we believe we must have

in order for our needs to be met.

There are times in each of our lives

when we are not unlike a drowning man,

thrashing around over our head,

frantically looking for something, anything to hold us up.

And when we see our rescuer coming to us

we will latch onto them and cling to them so tightly

that in the end we will destroy both him and ourselves.

And there will be times in the lives of every growing Christian

when God will ask of us

what he asked of Abraham.

“Will you sacrifice your Isaac?”

If you have to choose between your God and your Isaac,

will you choose your God?

And I want you to understand

that I am not talking here

about those times when God, in His sovereignty,

chooses to remove something from our lives.

Those times, too, serve His purposes in our lives,

and if we respond to them as He wants,

they will be used by Him to accomplish great good in our lives.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

What I’m talking about here is not a sovereign intervention

in which God removes something from our lives,

what I’m talking about here

is His asking us to choose to remove some aspect of our lives

most of all because we know that our refusing to do so

would mess up everything we value most in our friendship with our God.

And right here is where the parallel between Abraham and his Isaac

and us and our Isaac breaks down.

Because, you see, at the end of that day Abraham walked home

with his Isaac by his side,

and most of the time we do not.

Most of the time

what He asks from us

we really do have to sever from our lives.

And it is never without pain.

And it is never without a genuine sense of loss.

And if we allow the process to progress as God intends,

there will come a time when we will say to our Lord,

“If I can only have You, and know You without this in my life,

then I choose You and I know I can and I will find You adequate.”

But here’s the thing I want you to know.

That is not the end of the story,

not by any means.

You see, there are things we discover about ourselves,

and about our God -

about His love for us,

and His being truly adequate for us in any situation,

things that simply cannot be learned any other way

than through the real, total death of Isaac in our lives.

But it has been both my experience

and my observation in the lives of others

that there will come a time

when God gives our Isaac back to us.

Only this time, rather than our clinging to him with an iron grip,

frantically trying to build our lives upon him,

believing we must have him at all costs,

now we receive him back

with our spirits overflowing with gratitude to our God for His great kindness to us,

and with an amazement that He would choose to trust us once again

with the very thing that we handled so poorly in the past.

And if I could offer any suggestions

that would make this whole process easier in our lives,

I would offer these three.

And the first I borrow from Corrie ten Boom

because no one has said it better

than she did in her book, “The Hiding Place”.

Choose to hold all things loosely.

There is nothing permanent in this life,

nothing indestructible,

nothing that will never fail us apart from our God and His love for us.

And there is nothing we can ever possess

that has the ability to meet our needs at the deepest level

apart from those things He chooses to give us

within the context of our friendship with Him.

After nearly 60 years of life

one of the things I have learned with certainty

is that I am a very poor judge of what I really need in order to be happy.

I was as deeply affected last week

by the words of the students who went to Mexico

as were some of you,

listening to their descriptions of the intense joy they saw

in the lives of people who, by our standards, possessed nothing at all.

And I know from experience

that most of the time

when I am absolutely certain that I really must have something in my life in order to be happy

I’ve gotten it wrong.

And now, as best I can,

I have found it best

to hold all things loosely,

knowing that I have no rights to anything,

and that everything that comes into my life

is simply on loan to me for a very brief period of time.

Which leads me to my second suggestion -

cultivate a daily heart of gratitude to God

for whatever He has chosen to give you for that day.

Whatever He has chosen to place in your life this day

is an expression of His grace and His kindness to you.

Do you want to hear the heart of God?

Psalm 84 says it nicely.

PSA 84:11-12 For the Lord God is a sun and shield; The Lord gives grace and glory; No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, How blessed is the man who trusts in You!

The sun for warmth,

the shield for protection,

pouring out grace and glory on those who reach out to Him.

Don’t ever be afraid to love intensely,

to care deeply,

but do so from a heart filled with gratitude to God

for His kindness in choosing to give you this day

those whom He has given you to love.

And then, finally,

I would urge you to trust absolutely

the authorities that God has placed in your life.

That may sound rather strange,

but the truth is that those authorities that He has placed in your life

are the best tools you will ever have

in knowing the difference between what God has given you

and what you are simply clinging to

in your own flesh-based self-deception.

In the most remarkable way

God has promised us

that He will communicate His will to us

through the authorities He has placed in our lives.

And the really remarkable thing

is that He both can and will do that

even when those authorities are operating out of corrupt motives in their own lives.

And with that I’ll leave this little side-track

and we will return next week

to the rest of John’s account of the 5^th chapter of his Gospel.