The Heart of the Matter (Psalm 23:6 / Gospel) By Win Green

Transcription

1 The Heart of the Matter (Psalm 23:6 / Gospel) By Win Green The story of the Bible is described by some as the greatest story ever told. It is composed in some 1,500 pages, but let me summarize it in three short sentences: 1. God creates humanity. 2. Humanity rejects God. 3. God won t give up until He wins humanity back. These three simple sentences form the basis for the entire Christian Faith... the A,B,C s of the Christian Faith if you will. They bear repeating. (1.) God creates humanity. We are not biological accidents of nature, but the highest expression of God s creative love. (2.) Humanity rejects God. We might not reject God face to face or shake our fist at heaven. More likely we simply turn away from God to go our own way. (3.) But God won t give up until He wins humanity back. He comes to us wherever we may be with an open and gracious heart. Let s look at each of these points more closely... I. God Creates Humanity Several weeks ago Pope John Paul II stirred controversy all over the world by saying that the theory of evolution was not incompatible with the Bible. Conservative literalists, who believe that God created the world in six days just the way Genesis says, were outraged, calling the Pope a heretic, and accusing him of caving in to the secular world. The conservatives steadfastly maintain that human beings were not created from apes. But whether you agree with the Pope or the more conservative Christians, this much is clear. We are not accidents of nature. It is God who forms us in our mother s womb. No where is this better expressed than Psalm 139: For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother s womb. my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, Thy eyes beheld my unformed Manuscript By Win Green 1

2 substance; in thy book were written, every one of them. the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. Psalm 139:13-16 We are not accidents of nature. God has made each and every one of us. He has the hair on our heads numbered, and the number of our days counted. He has made us for a specific purpose, and for that reason has equipped us with certain gifts, talents, strengths, and weaknesses that contribute to His desire for our lives. Now if we accept that God created us, then we cannot rightly say that we are our own, for if God made us then we are His. Now this is a point that rankles the modern mind. After all, we spent the first 3,800 years of human history escaping slavery, so the last thing that many of us want to do is to be owned by anybody else. We don t want to be told what to do by anyone. We want to be free of all constraints. After all, we reason, it s our body and we should be able to do with it what we want. It s our life, and we should be able to decide our own fate. But, if it s true that God made us, then it is not true that we are our own. Now most of us are repelled by this idea. We don t want to be owned by anyone. After all, this is America. But there s no getting around it. If God made us as the Bible says He did, then we are in fact His. Our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our emotions, our sexuality, our talents... they are all his, for he made them. He made them for His own purposes, not for selfish ones. Here is where rebellion occurs for most of us. We want to believe that we are in control of our lives. We don t like the idea of us sitting in the back seat of life while God drives. We want our own hands on the steering wheel of our lives. This creates a lot of internal friction. We have two distinctly different and opposing beliefs inside us. We believe that God made us, but we also believe that we own our lives and are in control of them. These opposing beliefs do not live well inside the same soul, and the result is that many of us feel a great deal of ambivalence toward God. We are both attracted and repelled by Him. To deal with these mixed feelings toward God some of us do one of two things. First, we just try to juggle our feelings toward God. We avoid Him where possible, and call upon Him only when our circumstances are critical. (Some people say that we should have prayer in the schools, but there already is. As long as there are algebra tests in school there will be students talking to God.) But people are forever waiting until their circumstances are desperate to talk to God. Manuscript By Win Green 2

3 But you know what is amazing? God is always willing to listen, even if we have mixed feelings toward Him. Many of us, however, can t stand our mixed feelings about God, so we resolve the issue by choosing to believe that God does not exist. After all, if God doesn t exist then we can dismiss any conflict inside ourselves that they might have about Him. (But the big problem is that if God doesn t exist then life is rendered meaningless, for if God doesn t exist then there is no difference between good and bad. When life is over there is nothing, no consequences for our actions. Jean Paul Sartre correctly observed that without God anything is possible, for without God there is no moral law that governs our universe. But God does exist, and He made us, and for this reason everything we do has consequences. At the end of our lives we will stand before our Maker to be judged. This is one point Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all agree upon. There is a God who made each of us, and that at the end of our lives we will be judged. At the judgment it makes no sense to think that we could say, I did what I did because it was my life, my body, my soul. & I did what I wanted with them. Because we did not make them, and they cannot rightly be called our own. The heart of the matter is this, God created us and we are His. II. Humanity Rejects God This brings me to my second point. Even if God made us, we still reject God in favor of going our own way. We take our lives into our own hands, believing that we know what is best for ourselves. The Bible says that we are all like sheep who have gone astray (Isaiah 53:6). Do you know how sheep go astray and get lost? It s nothing that they consciously decide to do. They simply nibble themselves away from the flock. They eat a little grass here, and a little there, and before long they are lost from the rest of the flock. The same is true for people. People don t consciously decide to stray away from God. They simply nibble away from Him. They get involved in this and that, believing that they know what is best for their lives, and before long they have gone astray from God. There are all sorts of distractions in life that call us away from God: families, careers, health concerns, getting the children to little league soccer, our social life, contributing to the community, and sleeping in. None of these are bad. In fact they are all good. We never reject the goodness of God in favor of something bad. No one ever wakes up on a Sunday morning and says, I think I ll reject God this morning. No, the way we reject God is by choosing good over the best. Manuscript By Win Green 3

4 Most of us do believe that our lives are our own, ad that we know what is best for them. Here in lies the great challenge of our spiritual lives. To grow spiritually we must sometimes make choices, not between the good and the bad (that s easy), but between our good and God s best. Again, like sheep, we all go astray, not by seeking after the bad things of life, but by nibbling the many good things that come our way and distract us from what is best. If you were to ask people if God loved them 93% of the respondents would say yes, of course. But if you were to ask the same people if God owned them I dare say that the same 93% would say no, nobody owns me. My life is my own. It is for this reason that most people reject God s presence in their day to day lives. They don t a God would control them, but a God whom they can control. They want a God to whom they can pray and get what they want. They want a God who will look the other way when they break the laws of the universe. They want a God who reflects their own ideals instead of a God who shapes them into his own image. Most of us have twisted the meaning of scripture. We interpret This is the day the Lord has made. to mean This is the Lord the day has made. We want a God that we own, not a God who owns us. This is why the Bible calls us all sinners. Sin is much more serious than the petty little wrongs that we do. Sin is rebellion against the whole idea that we are God s possession, and this disease of sin runs deep into the core of who we are. I had a dog once who not only thought that he was human, but who also thought that he was his own master. He did what ever he wanted. He sat on my best sofa. He relieved himself when and where he pleased. He chewed anything we wanted. In short he was a disaster because he did not recognize his master. We are all disasters when we reject our master. This is the master disaster... sin... believing that we know what is best for us and that we are in charge of our own lives. The prophet Isaiah describes people just this way, The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master s crib; but my people do know know, neither do they understand. Isaiah 1:3 Now as much as I loved that dog I was tempted to get rid of him. Instead, I punished and disciplined him, not because I didn t love him, but because I wanted to be able to keep him without ruining my home. I never gave up on him, and the Good News for us is that God never gives up on us either. III. God Wins Us Back Manuscript By Win Green 4

5 Even if we reject God, still God won t ever give up until He wins us all back. This is the very heart of the Gospel. It is God who pursues us with a heart full of love, it is not we who must chase after an indifferent God. Perhaps the most famous piece of scripture of all is the 23rd Psalm. We hear it read at many different public occasions, especially at funerals. Many of us have it memorized. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want... I remember a funeral I did when I first entered the ministry. It was the second or third funeral I had ever done, so I was very nervous. It was a bitter cold winter day as we all gathered around the casket at the grave site. I said a few words and a prayer, and then I led the forty or so gathered in the 23rd psalm. But right in the middle of the Psalm my mind went completely blank, and I couldn t think of the rest of the Psalm. I was hoping that those who knew it would keep it going, but no when I stopped they all stopped. There was a very uncomfortable silence which lasted what seemed to me to be an eternity, when finally the voice of a little old lady standing in the back of the crowd whispered loud enough for all to hear, Who is this guy, he doesn t even know the 23rd Psalm?! At the end of the 23rd Psalm, in its last verse, there is a wonderful Gospel promise that many of us tend to over look. The promise is this, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. The Jerusalem Bible translates the verse, how goodness and kindness pursue me... Eugene Peterson translates the verse, your beauty and love chase after me. This pretty much sums up the heart of God toward us. His goodness and mercy is following us, pursuing us, chasing after us in order to bless us. This is a good word if I have ever heard one. It literally means that each day when we wake up we are being pursued by goodness and mercy. Some people of course have an essentially negative attitude. They wake up in the morning believing that life is out to get them, but the Biblical promise is that God is doing everything He can to chase us down with His love. Here in lies the big difference between the Jewish/Christian Faith and all the other religions of the world. Religion is about mankind pursuing God, but Christianity is about God pursuing mankind. In the other religions of the world men and women are vainly attempting to be good enough so that they can climb their way to heaven. But the Christian faith preaches that God climbs down from heaven so that He can lift his faithful up. This is what the word Grace is all about. God pursuing mankind to bless them. Several years ago, Jeanette George wrote about a flight she had taken from Tucson, AZ to Phoenix. It s not a long flight at all. Seated next to her was a young woman with a baby girl, who was in a word beautiful. She wore a white dress and her hair was fixed with a little pink bow. She was smiling and during the first part of the flight she kept saying dada, dada. The mother told Jeanette that she and her baby were going home, and that her husband, the girl s father, was Manuscript By Win Green 5

6 going to meet them at the airport. Everyone on board the plane was just captivated by the adorable little girl. During the flight the mother kept feeding the girl just and fruit to distract her, but as the plane rose in altitude the baby s ears felt the pressure, and she started to cry. The more the little girl cried the more the mother fed her. The flight then got turbulent, and suddenly the girl threw up over everything herself, the mother, everyone seated around her. The puke just ejaculated out of her. It was a mess. The babyls face was blotted with red from crying. Her hair, her white dress, everything was covered in vomit. People were assuring the young mother that it was OK, handing her tissues while running for cover. When the plane landed, the little girl was fine; she soon started saying dada again. But nobody else was fine. Jeannette George wrote that when they got off the plane the little girl spotted her daddy immediately. He was standing in white pants, a white shirt, and holding white flowers. As he walked to embrace his wife, she just handed him the child and made a beeline for the bathroom to clean up. Jeannette wrote, I thought that when he looked at how nasty that little girl was he would say she s not my baby. I don t know whose baby this is. But that s not what happened. That daddy took that little girl in his arms and he started kissing her, stoking her hair, and saying over and over again, daddy s baby came home. Let me now read two sentences from what Jeanette George wrote, I watched him all the way to the baggage area. He never stopped kissing that baby and I thought, where did I ever get the idea that Father God is less loving that a young dady in white pants and shirt who doesn t care what his little girl looks like, or what she smells like, He s just glad she s home. If you ve messed up, and assumed God would never want me after this. You re wrong. Whatever you ve done, God wants you to come home to Him. Manuscript By Win Green 6