©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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06-26-05 |
Hearing His Love |
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6/26/05 Hearing His Love
We are returning this week
to some things we left unfinished last week.
If you were here
you’ll remember that we spent our time
continuing our study of those wounds Satan brings into our lives,
wounds designed by him to make it far more difficult
for us to hear the love of our God for us.
During the past few weeks
we’ve taken several steps in our thinking in this whole area.
We’ve talked about the wounds - about when and how they are inflicted.
We’ve talked about God’s heart desire to bring us healing from those wounds
and listened to His words to us through the Prophet Isaiah
describing the redemptive work He seeks to accomplish in us.
And then last week
we spent the morning
looking at how our God accomplishes this healing process within us.
We saw that it comes into our lives
through our hearing His love at the point of our woundedness.
In an attempt to illustrate what I was trying to say
I shared with you
three examples of pivotal points in my own life
when the Spirit of God was able to accomplish that process within me.
Now, I’ll tell you honestly
that my ability to forget the truth
far exceeds my ability to hear it,
and most of my life seems to be a process
in which I am forever relearning what I once knew and have since forgotten.
This is especially true
about the reality of the love of my God for me.
That’s why I carry that golf tee in my pocket
that I told you about last week.
That’s why, on the table right next to the chair in which I do most of my writing,
I keep a picture of that little boy
who considered that red and white piece of plastic
to be such a treasure.
You see, the battle over our growing discovery
of the true nature of God’s love for us personally
is the central battle in every one of our lives
from the day of our birth until the day we die,
and so often a new discovery of that love
brings with it
a new attack against that truth.
And the more we fortify ourselves
with reminders of the forward progress we’ve made,
the easier it is for us to face the new attacks.
But this morning
I want to back us up a step in our thinking
because, even as I was teaching last week,
I was aware that some of you simply could not hear what I was saying.
Oh, you could hear the words OK,
but there was simply no place in your own life
where you could identify with what I was saying.
If you and I were to line up our doctrinal statements,
we would both boldly proclaim that God does love us,
and that it was that love on His part
that motivated Him to do for us what He did through Christ.
Intellectually you have no problem accepting
that God does, indeed, love us - His creation.
But the truth is
you have rarely, if ever been aware of that love on a personal basis.
When Paul talked about the way in which, “... the love of
God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given
to us...”,
though you could hear the words,
there was no point in your own life
at which you could identify with what was being said.
And this inability to hear His love
is in no way limited
to those of you who have not yet placed your life into His hands.
In truth,
it is not uncommon for a person to have been a Christian for years,
perhaps for decades
and yet to have never had their spirits immersed in the reality of Christ’s love for them.
Oh, they will be among the first to proclaim His love as a doctrinal truth,
but when you get near them,
and especially when you get near their mental perception of God,
you discover that they really don’t like Him very much.
Their God is someone to be obeyed,
and worshiped,
but He is certainly no one they want to go for a walk with...or golfing with,
no one their spirit runs to whenever they have a few free minutes during the day,
no one from whom they draw hope, and purpose, and security,
and certainly not the one
their mind runs to once again each morning
as they begin each new day.
And I’m not talking about “morning devotions”
or anything like that, you know.
I’m talking about
the way our spirits respond to our God,
that God in whom, as Paul put it in Acts,
“we live, and move, and have our very existence.”
His presence with us is the only certain constant of life.
But what I’m talking about here
is how our spirits respond to that reality.
The longer I teach,
the more I realize
that nearly everything we need to understand most
about ourselves and about our God
we have modeled for us in those events recorded for us
in the first few chapters of the book of Genesis.
We may look at Adam and Eve following their sin
and see them crouching down in the bushes,
trying to hide from their Creator in their shame,
and think to ourselves, “That’s ridiculous! As if God wouldn’t notice they were missing! As if He wouldn’t know where they were!”
And yet our own sense of shame,
or fear,
or resentment,
or distrust causes us to do exactly the same thing.
Only we don’t hide behind the bushes,
we crouch down behind that project that just has to get done today,
or this duty, or that worry, or this good cause we’re involved in.
And what was it that brought their Creator to the Garden in the first place?
Was He there to demand an accounting of what they’d done that day?
Was He there to collect their time cards for the week
or to pass judgement on their productivity levels?
He was there for just one thing - because He loved them,
and, wonder of wonders, He loved sharing life with them.
But once they disobeyed Him,
and the shame of their own actions filled their minds,
and the fear that accompanied that shame,
all they wanted to do was to hide from Him.
Which brings me
to the first major truth I want to share with you this morning,
the first major cause
for a person being unable to hear the love of God for them.
If you were here last week,
you may remember that, toward the end of our time together,
I mentioned that even though the way in which we each hear the love of God
is a deeply personal matter,
still there are some universal principles in this whole process,
some non-negotiables in this communication process between us and our Creator.
And the first one I want to share with you
is what I think I’ll call the only gate into the Magic Kingdom.
You see, it’s a little tiny bit like Disneyland.
Once you’re inside Disneyland
there are hundreds of different places to go
and things to do.
But there is only one gate in,
one narrow path through which you can gain access to all that lies beyond.
Last week I shared with you
three events in my own recent history,
events through which I have been able to discover new depths
of the love of my God for me,
places where He has been able
to touch some of the wounded areas in my own life with His love
and bring healing.
In the context of my rather dumb Disneyland analogy here,
those were some of the major attractions inside the Magic Kingdom.
But my doorway into this world with my Lord
came into my life many years ago,
and it was the same doorway through which everyone else throughout history
who has discovered the love of God
has had to enter.
So, with that as background,
let me show you the gate.
It is addressed literally hundreds of times,
by every Biblical writer,
in every book from Genesis through Revelation.
And when I share it with you
many of you will respond by saying,
“Well, of course, that’s obvious.”
But the problem we all run into here
is not our acceptance of this truth on a doctrinal level,
it’s our willingness to face it honestly on a personal one.
And before we go any farther
I need to let you know
that my comments will, of necessity, get a little dark here
before we once again come back into the Light.
Though I could go to any one of hundreds of different passages,
since we’ve been studying the book of Ephesians recently,
let me just take one of Paul’s statements of this doorway from that letter.
EPH 2:1-3 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.
And as soon as I read that passage,
I think many of you will begin to appreciate
why it is far easier for us to accept what Paul says here as a doctrinal truth
than it is for us to accept it as a personal reality.
And yet, until we do,
until the Spirit of God is able to bring us personally to the place
where we can read those words
and know with absolute certainty
that they are not just describing “the human race”,
but that they are, in fact, describing US,
we will never be able to know the living reality of the love of our God for us.
Paul says it so well in Romans 5:8.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
That word “demonstrates” means that He proves or confirms the reality of His love
through showing us that love
at that point in our lives
when we are overwhelmed with our own sin-filledness.
But it is that very awareness
that we run from at all costs.
It is our fear of that truth
that causes many to drape themselves in a religious facade,
even preaching salvation through Jesus Christ
while frantically hiding from the root causes within their own lives
for their own need for that same salvation.
And here we are again,
back in the Garden of Eden, sewing our fig leaves together,
only we substitute pages from our Bible for leaves,
with the hope that it will hide our nakedness from God
and from those around us.
And the problem, of course,
is that none of us are exempt.
It isn’t that a few of us are dead in our trespasses and sins,
having indulged in the desires of the flesh and the mind,
and were by nature children of wrath,
and then the rest of us are simply in danger of that level of corruption
unless we make some major changes.
The truth is
that is who we all are when we come to Christ.
And even though our inner shame and fear
cause us to want to hide from the truth,
until the Spirit of God can bring us to the point
where we will drop the facade
and stand naked before our God
we cannot begin to know His love and the healing it will bring.
Now, it has been my observation in life
that with most of us,
even though we have involved ourselves in all sorts of different types of moral corruption along the way,
yet there is with each of us
just one or maybe two specific points in our lives
that, in our own minds, define our corruption before God,
points at which all of our other moral offenses
seem pale and appear unimportant by comparison.
And quite frequently,
these are moral offenses
that trace back many years.
But if we have not handled them correctly before God,
if we have not stepped out from the bushes
and stood before Him in all of our shame,
and then followed His leadership in addressing those sins,
they never go away,
and in fact they become some of the most critical defining issues of our entire life.
And I can share with you some of the symptoms
that will be present within our lives
if we have not yet addressed them as our God wants us to.
First of all,
we will find ourselves living with our own silent internal self-loathing,
a self-loathing that never allows us to truly be at peace with ourselves.
Even though we will do everything we can
to build a great external public image,
inside, because we know the truth,
because we know the level at which we sold ourselves out to moral corruption,
we honestly do not like who we are.
Depending upon the nature of the evil we’ve given ourselves over to,
we may become a fierce defender of our “rights”,
boldly waving our little banner declaring our “freedom” to live any way we choose to.
Or we may find some just cause to defend,
or some helpless underdog to protect,
or some socially worthy project to take on.
Our own sense of inner shame
can become among the most powerful motivational forces in our lives.
But what we really long for and have long since lost
is the ability to look at ourselves honestly
with a true sense of self respect.
And everything else is just smoke and mirrors.
The second consequence I’d mention
is actually the one that got us into this whole thing -
until we can hear the love of our God
at the point of our deepest moral corruption
we cannot hear His love anywhere else.
This is the only gateway into the Magic Kingdom.
And I am certain that there are many within the church world
who have never been able to hear the love of God personally
because they are refusing to allow Him to show them His love
at the point of their greatest moral failure.
A third frequent symptom
is an inability to trust the life and leadership of God in their lives on a daily basis.
The truth is,
the whole concept of the leadership of the Spirit within them
becomes simply a meaningless religious fog
because, having refused to follow the Spirit into an honest confrontation with their own evil,
there is no place else for the Spirit to lead.
God’s leadership in our lives is always an expression of His love,
but it is never negotiable.
If we do not care for the direction He’s pointing,
if He offers us an alternate route
He does so only because He knows it will ultimately bring us right back
to the place we refused to go the first time.
But once we draw a line before our God
and declare that we will not cross it,
until we reconsider that decision
we lose our ability to know that daily intimate Spirit-leading in our lives.
A fourth common symptom
of a person’s refusal to allow the Spirit to face them honestly with their immorality
is the development within them
of a judgmental spirit.
This happens
because the flaws and failures of others
become superb hiding places
from their own inner corruption.
They become highly skilled
at finding the faults and flaws in the people around them,
or in the things those people do or say.
They might even use their insights
to then offer some unsolicited words
about how the other person can correct the flaw, or the failure, or the problem they have pointed out.
The inner motivation, of course, is obvious.
As long as they can keep attention focused
on what’s wrong somewhere else
they don’t have to look inside themselves,
and hopefully no one else will either.
Well, there are numerous other consequences
to this moral hide-and-seek game we play with our God,
things like the loss of our personal allegiance to Biblical morality in many other areas of our lives as well.
For example,
our concept of honesty
is lost in a cloud of deception
as we do or say whatever has to be done or said
to keep our minds and the minds of others away from our own inner corruption.
And one of the fascinating things here
is that, when it comes to our moral conduct,
time is irrelevant.
It doesn’t matter whether the conduct was last week,
or last year,
or 50 years ago.
Until a person faces it
and take ownership of it
it will continue to exert tremendous power over their life.
OK, so much for the dark side.
Now, how does God go about delivering us from our corruption?
It’s not complicated,
it’s just simply terrifying to the human spirit.
We come out from behind the bushes
and take ownership of our sin.
1JO 1:8-9 If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving
ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful
and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.
The process usually involves two steps.
First, we begin with our God,
agreeing with Him about what we have done.
LUK 15:21 "And the son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'
And second, we go to those we have sinned against
and confess our sin to them as well.
If they are aware of our sin against them,
then we name the sin.
If they are not,
then we confess to them
that we have not given them the love we owed them.
And then I’d add a third step here too.
If we can make restitution for our actions,
if we can restore or in any way help to undo the consequences of our sin,
then we do it.
And if we refuse to go to the one we’ve sinned against
we will not find the freedom and healing we long for
through simply confessing the sin to God.
MAT 5:23-24 "If therefore you are presenting your
offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something
against you, leave your offering there before the altar, and go your way; first
be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering.
And the results in our own lives
are truly glorious.
Our Lord will begin a process within us
in which He reverses all of those consequences
that our sin brought into our lives.
We will be able the hear to love of our God for us as we’ve never heard it before.
We will discover the most remarkable peace with ourselves
because we have found peace with our God.
We will loose that judgmental spirit over others,
always looking at their faults and flaws
because we no longer have to hide from our own sins.
We will discover within us
a growing ability to truly love those around us as never before.
And the Spirit of God
will recreate within us a moral conscience,
an ability to honestly face the moral issues in our own lives,
and in the process
we will find a whole new basis for true self-respect within us.
And one other result I’ll mention -
we will find that for the first time
our God will be seen as truly nice.
He will become our greatest reason for getting up each morning,
and our greatest hope
as we face the day ahead.
OK, that is not the only cause for our not being able to hear the love of God in our lives,
but it is the one that’s at the top of the list.
Next week we may move ahead with this whole thing another step.