©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

05/16/04

Being Loved By God Pt. 4

Being Loved By God Pt. 4

“So, if God is really God,

and if He really does love me as much as Larry says He does,

why doesn’t He just FIX me?

Why doesn’t He just fix my life?”

Ever wondered that?

Ever wondered why change sometimes seems to come so slowly,

and why it takes so much effort,

and learning,

and rethinking,

and then forgetting and relearning,

and struggle sometimes?

If what we do this morning is going to be of any value to us

it is essential that we begin by reminding ourselves of the basics of the God/Man relationship.

And number one on that list of basics

is understanding what is on the top of God’s priority list for us.

No, even that is incorrect.

Number one is understanding

that there is only one thing on God’s priority list.

What do think God wants from you?

What is He after?

What is He trying to accomplish in your life?

If you’ve been listening to that voice of religion within you,

you probably think He’s been trying to fix you.

He’s been trying to find some way

to prod you into better behavior

and more faithful and fervent religious duty.

You probably think

that changing you so that you are good and do good

is right at the top of His priorities list for you.

Well, if that’s what you’ve been thinking,

you’re wrong.

What He wants,

all He wants

is your growing discovery

at the deepest level of your being

of the true nature of His love for you.

Now, it is certainly true

that our discovery of His love

will bring about profound changes in our lives,

but all such changes

are by-products of that discovery.

If you have found yourself frustrated,

wondering why God doesn’t fix your life,

it may well be

because you have allowed yourself to believe

that fixing your life is the goal,

that it is HIS goal for you.

God has not called you to Himself,

He has not begun this work within your spirit

of waking you up to Him

and giving you the eyes to see things you’ve never seen before,

and giving you ears to hear what you’ve never heard before,

so that He can change you.

He has done it so that He can communicate His love to you,

so that He can create between you and Himself

the perfect Father/child union your spirit has been hungering for

since that day you entered this world.

Discovering what it means to be loved by God

and allowing our spirits to respond in love to that discovery

by loving Him in return

is the central issue of life for each of us.

To the degree that we make progress in that discovery,

to that degree we will find all of the other issues in life

fitting into their proper place.

We will find within us

the inner motivation to face those broken areas in our lives.

We will find the courage to stop hiding from ourselves

and the freedom to look honestly at those places where growth is needed

without feeling as though we need to clothe ourselves

in some sort of religious facade.

We, just like Adam and Eve after their sin,

begin our relationship with our God

filled with fear

and with shame,

trying to hide from Him in the bushes,

placing our hope in our little pile of good deeds

that we have stitched together with bits of twigs

and then wrapped around ourselves

in a frantic attempt to hide our nakedness before our God

and make ourselves acceptable to Him.

But only when we trust His love for us enough

so that we will come to Him just as we are,

with nothing to offer Him

except our belief that He is indeed good

and will be good to us if we reach out to Him,

only then will we discover what it is

for Him to clothe us in the warmth of His righteousness,

forever removing our shame

and replacing it with honor and dignity before Him.

Our God says it to us in so many ways

in so many places,

from Genesis through Revelation,

but I especially like the way He said it to the church at Laodicea.

 REV 3:17-21 ‘Because you say, "I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire, that you may become rich, and white garments, that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me. He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.

So, the first basic of this thing we call Christianity that I would mention

is the understanding that what God seeks is not to change us,

what He seeks is just simply US,

a relationship with us

that enables us to discover the true nature of His love for us.

Only that discovery

has the ability to bring about

the kind of recreative work

our God seeks to accomplish in our lives.

Then, I want to mention one more basic concept of true Christian living

before I move on to share with you

those barriers to discovering the love of God in our lives.

And in this whole area of my greatest surprises about being loved by God,

this one has helped me as much

as anything else I’ve ever discovered.

And let me try to state it in a single sentence,

and then I’ll explain what I mean.

God views every issue in my life,

every circumstance I face,

every conflict I confront

not as something I must fix for Him

but rather as projects I am to share with Him

so that through the process I can then grow in my understanding

of the true nature of His love for me.

Even in our human relationships,

how do we go about building love relationships with one another?

Three weeks ago

when I first started talking about my surprise

at what it really means to be loved by God

I used my friendship with one of my grandnephews

to illustrate what I was trying to say.

I shared with you my efforts to communicate my love to him.

One afternoon I picked him up from school

and we went up to our house

and built little wooden paddle boats

and sailed them in the bath tub.

Another afternoon

we made rubber band guns

and then hunted jungle animals in the basement on our hands and knees.

Now, why did we do that?

Why didn’t I just go down to Fred Meyer

and find some nice little bathtub boat

with a wind-up motor

that would have worked far better than the one we made

and just give it to him?

Why did I take all of the time and effort

to work with him for more than an hour,

showing him how to trace the outline of his boat onto a piece of wood,

and then placing my hands on top of his

as, together, we guided the wood through the band saw?

Why did I listen to his ideas about including a sail on the boat,

and let him decide where and how big the sail should be?

Because from the very beginning

it was never about making a boat.

It was always, only about my finding a way

of communicating to him how much I love him.

But for that to happen

we needed a project to share together,

something that would allow me to say things to him

with my actions toward him,

and the tone of my voice,

and the way I responded when he failed to cut exactly where the line was drawn,

or when the spray paint accidently sprayed all over my tools

rather than on the boat.

Do you know what life with Jesus Christ is?

It’s an endless stream of toy boat projects

that we share with our Creator.

There is no other way we can hear His love

except by our sharing with Him the projects of life.

I’m not suggesting that the projects themselves have no value.

The last time I was over at my grandnephew’s house

I noticed that he kept his little wood boat right next to his bed,

along with a neat, long line of lions, and tigers, and zebras, and giraffes he’d killed on our safari.

He mentioned to me that the paddle on the boat was broken

and he thought maybe he really should come back up to my house

so that we could make another one together.

And those projects our Lord selects for us

mean a great deal to us, as well.

When He works with us,

and walks with us through some area of healing we’ve needed in our life,

and we discover the resulting freedom

that only practical righteousness can bring,

we find our spirits overflowing with gratitude

to our God who cares enough

and loves enough

to create for us a way of escape.

And when He chooses us

to be the means by which He touches another person’s life,

and we know that what He said through us,

or what He did through us

truly has eased another person’s pain,

or renewed their faith in their God,

or given them hope when they desperately needed it,

we come away from those situations feeling honored

that God would have allowed us to be the means by which

He revealed Himself to another person.

I’m going to get just a little side-tracked here for just a few minutes,

but a few weeks ago

I received one of the most encouraging e-mails I’ve ever received.

I’d like to read part of it for you

because it may help illustrate what I’m trying to say here.

Dear Mr. Huntsperger,

I want to let you know what your book, The Fisherman, has meant to our family. My husband's 39 year old sister, Laura, died on April 20th of Cystic Fibrosis.

Laura was reared in a Christian home and trusted Christ as her Savior at a young age. She progressed and grew in her faith over the years. However, she experienced the pain of divorce and spent some years much like Peter...with the flesh and spirit doing battle. This past Christmas, her 16 year old son went to the Christian bookstore and bought a copy of The Fisherman for her as a gift. He is an avid fisherman and was captivated by the cover. After reading your book, Laura's life completely changed. She began to search the Scriptures with a hunger that I have never seen in anyone. She would literally write verses on the palm of her hand to help her "hide it in her heart". She took her laptop to the hospital and had my husband purchase a new ink cartridge for her so she could print out little cards to put around her room with verses on them. She prayed with fervor, spoke constantly about Christ, and during her final few months on this earth, led three others in her hospital to trust Christ. One of those three was a nurse. That nurse then led a dying Cystic Fibrosis man to Christ just hours before he died. That man was one of Laura's good friends. He died three days before she did. Laura firmly believed in God for her healing. She is healed.

In the aftermath of the funeral, the grief, and the logistics and concern for her husband and two children, the most important thing is that we are all stronger in our faith for the example Laura gave us. Your book was mentioned at the funeral. ...I wanted you to know that God worked through you to bless and change my life before I'd ever read your book. He did this through a young woman named Laura.

When I read that

I thought about Peter’s comment to that crowd that formed

following the healing of that lame man in Acts chapter 3.

ACT 3:12-13, 16 But when Peter saw (the crowd gathering), he replied to the people, "Men of Israel, why do you marvel at this, or why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus,... And on the basis of faith in His name, it is the name of Jesus which has strengthened this man whom you see and know; and the faith which comes through Him has given him this perfect health in the presence of you all.”

It’s just our little toy boats,

the projects He’s carefully selected to share with us.

He shows us where to draw the lines,

and places His hands over ours as we cut it out.

He doesn’t yell at us

or slap us around when we don’t get it just right,

because the project is not the goal,

the project is just the tool He has selected

through which we can discover who our God is.

There are times when He will choose to use our little toy boats

for some useful purpose in the lives of those around us.

And those who are helped

will frequently give us the credit

for what the Spirit of God did in their lives.

And there’s no problem with that at all.

In fact, our Lord seems to enjoy

sharing His glory with His children,

so long as we never loose sight of the truth.

Paul put it this way.

1CO 3:6-7 I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.

So, all of that is to remind us of the two basics.

First, what God has been seeking in His relationship with us from the very beginning

is our discovery of the true nature of His love for us.

And, second,

most of those discoveries take place within us

as He shares with us carefully selected life projects,

projects of changes He seeks to make within us,

and projects of things He seeks to accomplish through us.

The projects themselves do have tremendous value

both to ourselves

and to others,

but the real goal is always the same -

not the fulfillment of the project,

but rather what we discover about the mind and heart of our God in the process.

We discover the love of God for us

through building toy boats with Him in the garage.

Through our eyes

the boats matter very much,

and have great value to us,

and we frequently get very upset

when the project doesn’t go exactly as we want it to.

But through His eyes

if we are discovering more about His love in the process,

everything is turning out just exactly as He intended.

And then I promised you last week

that I would share with you

the four greatest barriers I am aware of

to our being able to correctly hear and understand the love of God in our lives.

We won’t make it too far in this

in the few minutes we have remaining this morning,

but we’ll at least make a start.

And the first one I would mention

is our strong natural human resistence

against seeing ourselves honestly apart from the redemptive work of God in our lives.

God’s first great act of love in our lives

is His Spirit giving us eyes to see our own inner corruption.

And before I go any farther with this

I need to make a crucial distinction between our conduct and our value in the eyes of God.

And I’ll tell you right now

that this is hard stuff for our minds to grasp

because it is at this point,

perhaps more than any other

that we see the utter separation between the mind of God

and the mind of man.

All of human society,

and certainly all of human experience

is built upon determining a person’s worth,

their value

on the basis of their behavior and their performance.

We like people or dislike people,

as a general rule we accept people or reject people

on the basis of what they do and how they act toward us or toward others.

But when it comes to our relationship with our Creator,

all the rules change.

And when it comes to our central purpose for being here,

that of discovering the true nature of His love for us,

the rules really change.

For, you see, the very first step we will ever take

into the discovery of the love of our God for us

is the step that forever separates our performance from God’s love for us.

There is a single statement in the New Testament

that says what I want to say here

better than I could ever even begin to.

It’s found in Romans 5:8 and it says,

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Paul says it even more powerfully

and with a kind of brutal honesty that most of us find very unsettling

in the first few verses of Ephesians chapter 2.

EPH 2:1-6 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

The truth is,

no matter how nicely we may have been able to dress ourselves up before world,

when we stand before our God prior to our union with Christ

we stand before Him drenched in immorality and corruption.

And as long as we continue to cling to anything

that we think we can bring Him

that will somehow improve our acceptability to Him

we will never understand ourselves correctly,

or Him correctly,

and we will certainly not be able to understand the true nature of His love for us.

When our little dog, Pepper was still alive,

one Easter weekend

he found the family’s Easter Baskets hidden under our bed.

He knew he was not suppose to be in there.

He knew he was not suppose to have anything to do with those baskets.

But Saturday night,

while we were all watching TV

he crept into our bedroom,

crawled under our bed,

and gorged himself on chocolate.

Chocolate in large quantities is toxic for dogs,

and I first became aware of what he had done

when I heard the strangest clicking sound coming from the bathroom.

I went in and found him staggering around in there

with little bits of foil from half eaten chocolate eggs stuck to his paws.

I called the Vet who told me how to induce vomiting

so that our little dog wouldn’t die from his doggie sins.

That little dog learned more about the nature of my love for him that night

than he ever learned curled up next to me on the couch.

And we begin to discover the true nature of the love of our God for us

when His Spirit can finally break through all of our facade,

and all of our denial,

and all of our I’m OK - you’re OK religious posturing

to the point where we see our own immorality honestly before our God

and with Paul cry out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?”

And in my experience

God usually seems to accomplish this work within us best

by taking just one specific issue of moral corruption within us

and giving us eyes to see it honestly.

But, if you have never felt loved by God,

really, truly, personally loved by Him,

it may be because up to this point

you have refused to allow His Spirit

to show you yourself honestly before Him.

And if so,

I would close this morning

by offering you a prayer you might consider praying.

“God, I’m tired of hiding from You.

I’m tired of hiding from myself.

I’m tired of trying so hard to convince myself I’m really doing just fine.

Please, Lord, give me eyes to see myself honestly before You,

and then give me the kind of understanding of Your love that I so desperately long for.” Amen.