Everyone is a searcher. Not everyone knows it. Humans eat, sleep, mate, work – and they search. In fact, they search while they are eating, sleeping, mating, and working.
Those who know they are searching say things like, “I’m searching for peace.” Or “I am looking for excitement” (or friendship, or love, or purpose, or glory). Yet whenever people find what they are looking for – find friendship or love or glory – they go right on searching; they don’t stop.
That’s because their quest is part of a more comprehensive search on which humans have embarked: the search for God. People may deny that they are searching for God, either because they do not believe God exists, or because they do not care. They may also deny that they are searching for God because they may believe they have already found him.
One finds the latter kind of people in churches. They’ve stopped searching for God because they have found him. They have had a spiritual encounter or have responded to an invitation to receive Christ into their life. But it does not follow that their search has been completed.
350 years ago, a shipload of pilgrims landed on America’s northeast coast. In their first year there they built houses and streets and established a town. In the second year they elected a town government. In the third year the town government voted to build a road five miles westward into the wilderness.
In the fourth year, angered by the waste of public funds, the townspeople tried to impeach their government. Why build a road into the wilderness? They were already in the new land – why would anyone want to go further?
For someone to say that they have found God because they had a conversion or other spiritual experience is like those pilgrims saying they had found America because they had seen a few miles of the east coast. Yes, they had found America, but there was so much more for them to discover – Niagara Falls, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite and on and on. And there is so much more of God to be discovered – cataracts of grace, mountains of joy, and rivers of peace.
Our spiritual journey is like the voyage those pilgrims took as they sailed the vast waters between England and America. Welcoming Christ into one’s life is like bringing the captain aboard ship: someone who knows what to do is now in command. But that does not mean that we have arrived at our destination. The search continues.
Some people deny that they have ever searched for God. For answers, yes – and for meaning, for excitement, and for love – but not for God. Or so they think.
C. S. Lewis, the brilliant atheist who became a Christian, once wrote: “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven” – or we might substitute God – “at all, but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.” The desires for beauty, pleasure, and even power all derive from the primeval desire, shared by all humans, for God.
God is the human heart’s deepest longing. The desire for him is bred in our bones. It is him, whether we know it or not, that we’ve been seeking all our lives, from birth to death, day in and day out, year after year. We thought we found what we were looking for in our hobbies, in the smell of a pine wood or in the slap of water on a rocky shore. But these things were not it. We thought we had found it in the music we loved or in our truest romance.
St. Paul told the intellectual crowd in Athens that God made the world the way he did so that people “would search for God and perhaps grope around for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” The universe is a put-up job. The cosmos was intentionally designed to turn us into God-seekers.
U.S.A. Today published a multi-year poll in 2008 regarding people’s perception of time and their own busyness. It found that in each consecutive year since 1987, people reported that they are busier than the year before, with 69% responding that they were either “busy,” or “very busy,” with only 8% responding that they were “not very busy.”
How can Christians be in the world but not of it? What does it mean to be unequally yoked? Does this only happen in marriage, or can we be unequally yoked in other relationships? We explore the questions as we look at 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1 in this timely message for the church.
Rolling Stone published a list of the top 100 guitarists of all time that has Carlos Santana at number 20. Carlos has won ten Grammy Awards and sold 100 million records. He is a rock legend. He is also a deeply spiritual person.
In his 2014 autobiography, Carlos revealed his practice of sitting in front of the fireplace with a card on the floor next to him. On the card, painted in intricate picture letters, is the word “Metatron.” Metatron is an angel with whom Carlos had been in regular contact since 1994. He keeps a yellow legal pad at his side, to record what Metatron says to him.
Carlos says: “There’s an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o’clock in the morning, everything’s really quiet and you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: ‘Write this down.’ It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert…”
Carlos is a great guitarist but he’s not a careful enough theologian. The idea that “the voice” of God or of a benevolent spirit “will never take you to the desert” is simply mistaken. God certainly does send people to the desert. He sent Jesus there. He sent Moses there and St. Paul there too. God’s people aren’t delicate little flowers. They not only survive the desert, they bloom there. God sends them where they’ll do the most good and experience the greatest growth and, if that is the desert, to the desert they will go.
The idea that spirituality is good in and of itself is erroneous. Spirituality is like fire: it can save, or it can destroy. It can be good or bad. It all depends on where it comes from and where it is going. I’m not judging Carlos – I think he’s great – but I worry about where his spirituality is coming from and where it is going. There are worse places than the desert.
Spirituality must be grounded in truth, built on the bedrock of a spiritual universe; that is, on the God who is spirit and truth. Otherwise, it will go wrong. The Bible offers an example of spirituality gone wrong in the Corinthian church.
Some of the Corinthian church members were, like Carlos, fascinated with the spiritual. They referred to themselves as the “pneumatics” – the Spiritual Ones. We are the spiritual ones. We understand. We have insight.
The Corinthians were not, like Carlos, fascinated with angels (that was the Colossians), but they were fascinated with Spirit-inspired speech, like glossolalia and prophecies. They considered these to be a sign that a person was a pneumatic – was special.
When St. Paul wrote the Corinthians that he did not want them to be ignorant about the gifts of the Spirit, it must have felt to them like a slap in the face. They were the spiritual ones. But they were getting it wrong, and Paul knew it. True spirituality never makes people think themselves superior to others. That kind of spirituality is built on the wrong foundation.
That’s why Paul reminds them that, before their conversion to Christ, spirituality had messed them up. They had experienced inspired speech way back then – but it wasn’t inspired by God. Paul insists that the important thing is not whether they are inspired but where that inspiration comes from and where it is going. If it does not lead to a life that confesses “Jesus is Lord,” it is the wrong kind of spirituality.
Any spirituality that causes a person to look down on others doesn’t originate with God. A spirituality that engenders rivalry and one-upmanship is dangerous and devilish. Healthy spirituality, the kind that derives from the Spirit of God and leads to the Lordship of Jesus, is experienced individually but is never individualistic. It is experienced and expressed in community. It thrives in the context of the church.
The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself the chief cornerstone (see Eph. 2:20), Who are the people who formed the foundation of God’s eternal church? Why were they chosen? What does this mean for us?
Approximate viewing time: 24 minutes
Then they returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city. When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
These men whose names I just read are the foundation “of apostles and prophets” on which the church of God is built, in which Christ Jesus himself is the chief cornerstone (Eph. 2:19-20). When we look at these men and the people with them, we are seeing the proto church. We cannot call them the church yet, since they have not yet been bound to each other by the one Spirit, but they are the foundation of the church. And notice what work is being done at the foundational level: they are praying (v. 14). “…constantly in prayer” could be translated, “constantly attending to prayer…”
The word has the idea of being on call. It is used, for example, of a high ranking officer’s chief of staff, who was always at his beck and call. Here, the idea is not that prayer is always there for the apostles and others to use, but that the apostles and others are always there and ready to be used for prayer. I wonder if that describes us.
This is the proto-church, and there are some things to notice. They are still hurting from the defection of one of their closest friends, their fellow apostle, Judas. They can still hardly believe it. Judas was not simply these men’s co-worker; he was their brother. They were family. The Gospels make it clear that none of them had any inkling that Judas would betray them. His defection left them stunned, angry, and hurt.
Another thing to notice is the interesting association of Peter with John. Both these men have biological brothers among the Apostles. It was Peter’s brother Andrew who first introduced him to Jesus. And John’s older brother James was one of the first of the Twelve and was the first to die a martyr’s death. Yet it is Peter’s and John’s names that are linked here and then twelve more times in the first eight chapters of Acts. In every other catalog of the apostles, Peter and Andrew always head the list, followed by James and John, but here we have (literally) Peter and John, James and Andrew. The blood of Christ makes new family connections between people that are as just real, and can be even more permanent, than the connections made by the blood that flows through our veins.
Notice too that the apostles are “joined together” with the women, with Mary, and with Jesus’s brothers. “Joined together” expressed a Greek word that has often been translated, “of one accord” or “of one mind.” The idea behind this word is that something outside a group of people has united them. It could be used today to to describe Muslims, Jews, and Christians all pulling together to rescue earthquake survivors in Turkey. Something outside them has united them. Or it could be used of the 85 instrumentalists in an orchestra that are playing under the baton of one conductor. It is not that they have a natural affinity for each other (they may or may not); it’s that the conductor has united them around the one score.
During his time on earth, Jesus Christ promised to build his church and the men listed in verse 13 are the building materials he chose to use in the foundation. If you know anything of their history, you might think that Jesus had left himself open to the charge of using inferior grade building materials. If these guys are up to code, it would seem like the code needs to be revised.
It was not the natural quality of these men that suited them for their place in the church’s foundation; it was the bonding agent that hardened their resolve, cemented them together, and made them “strong, firm, and steadfast.” It was the addition of God’s Spirit into their lives that made all the difference. He is the Spirit of life, the Spirit of holiness, the Spirit of sonship, the Spirit of unity, the Spirit of power, the Spirit of revelation, the Spirit of grace. It was the introduction of the Spirit into these men and the immersion of these men in the Spirit that transformed them.
Christ did not choose them for their foundational role in the church because of their obvious superiority. After three years of discipleship, three years of living together day and night in the company of the committed, Jesus told these same men that they would all fall away. They insisted he was wrong. He told Peter that he was going to disown him. Peter adamantly denied it. Nevertheless, they all fell away, and Peter disowned his master. These men did not seem like the kind of quality building material needed for the church of the eternal God. They were not strong, firm, and steadfast.
Yet the Bonding Agent, the Holy Spirit made them strong. Each of them would remain true to Christ for the rest of their lives, serving sacrificially, and dying heroically. Tradition, not Scripture – these stories are not inspired – have Peter dying by crucifixion in Rome in 67 AD. John was exiled to the Island of Patmos for his testimony about Jesus. James was the first of the apostles to die, beheaded by Herod Agrippa. Andrew was crucified on an x-shaped cross in Greece after seven soldiers beat him mercilessly. Philip was executed on the orders of a Roman proconsul whose wife he had led to faith in Christ.
According to tradition, four soldiers in India ran Thomas through with spears. Batholomew was martyred in Arabia. Matthew was stabbed in Ethiopia. James son of Alpheus was clubbed to death, then beheaded. Simon was killed in Persia. Judas son of James, also known as Thaddeus was shot to death with arrows.
If tradition is true, all these men remained faithful to Christ through serious suffering. They lived heroically and died martyrs’ deaths. Their lives proved that Jesus was right to choose them for the foundation of his church. But who would have guessed that before God reinforced them, transformed them, and bonded them together by his Spirit? I can imagine the angels in heaven looking at these guys and saying to the ascended Jesus: “Lord, we were just wondering if … if you have a backup plan in place.”
Why? Because these men all blundered at one time or another. They were constantly misunderstanding what Jesus told them – right up to his ascension. They quarreled. They said and did the wrong thing, not once but time and time again.
Take Peter, who is always mentioned first in every list of the apostles. Was he a spiritual superstar or a spiritual blunderer? The Gospels present him as impetuous – the kind of guy who speaks before he thinks. When he was on what he later referred to as “the holy mountain” (the mount of transfiguration), he blurted out something ridiculous, and Luke comments that “he did not know what he was saying” (Luke 9:33). Peter could be counted on to talk when he didn’t know what he was saying.
Peter was the guy who jumped out of the boat and tried to walk on the water. You have to admire his zeal, but he sank and would have drowned had Jesus not saved him. Peter was the guy who took a knife to a gunfight (or something like that) and tried to use it; Jesus rebuked him.
And speaking of rebuking, Peter was the only apostle who was insolent enough to rebuke Jesus. We read the story in Matthew 16:21-22: “Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” What kind of guy rebukes Jesus? Peter. Speak first, think later Peter.
Peter had his high points too. In fact, it is an interesting study to see how his high points seem to coexist with and even precipitate his low points. Peter was quick to obey, but he was slow to listen. He was the first to act, but it was frequently the wrong action. He was self-confident, but it was a misplaced confidence that let him and others down.
The greatest example of this misplaced confidence happened on the night Jesus was betrayed. Peter guaranteed his loyalty to Jesus (while casting doubt on the loyalty of his fellow disciples’). He vowed that he would die before he would desert Jesus. After Jesus’s arrest, Peter bravely followed him right into the enemy’s compound. But then he denied Jesus not once but three times in a matter of an hour or two. And, I think, once again he hardly knew what he was saying. Speak first, think later Peter.
And what did Jesus do? He made this man Chief Apostle and placed him in the foundation of his glorious church. Some of us have messed up as badly as Peter. Does that mean we have ruined our chances of ever getting close to Christ and serving him? Do our failures disqualify us? No. Our sins will only stop us if we refuse to leave them.
Peter was not the only stone in the church’s foundation that was chipped and uneven. In fact, with the exception of Jesus himself, who is the chief cornerstone, all the rest are flawed and lopsided. It contributes greatly to God’s glory that he builds his beautiful church out of such people – people like us.
Take Philip for example. If I have a favorite apostle, it is Philip. After his calling, every time he appears in the Gospels, he seems confused. Philip is the disciple who just didn’t get it. On one occasion, while they were out in the wilderness, Jesus asked him where they might buy food to feed a crowd of thousands. Jesus was obviously testing Philip but he didn’t realize it, and blurted out, “Two hundred denarii” – a huge amount of money – “wouldn’t buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!” (John 6:7).
In what might be the silliest thing any of Jesus’s disciples ever said, Philip urged Jesus to “Just show us the Father” – bring the eternal, infinite, sovereign God into this room; put him on display – “and that will be enough for us” (John 14:8). If Peter was impulsive, Philip was befuddled.
And yet, of all the disciples, Philip is the only one we know of that Jesus went out personally to find and commission. Jesus wanted Philip the Befuddled. Philip didn’t have to “get it”; Jesus got him.
Next in the list is Thomas. If Philip was befuddled, Thomas was gloomy. He was a dark cloud on a sunny day, the Eeyore of the apostolic band. Here is how he encouraged the other disciples: “Let’s go with Jesus so that we might die with him” (John 11:16). Jesus once gave his apostles the beautiful promise that he would come back for them and take them to be with him. He then added, “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas interrupted with characteristic bluntness: “We don’t know where you’re going, so how can we know the way?”
Thomas is best known for his stubborn refusal to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it” (John 20:25).
What did Jesus do with that storm cloud of a man? He made a believer of him: “Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27). According to tradition, old storm cloud Thomas brought showers of blessing to India and many people there were converted to Christ under his ministry.
We could go on. Matthew was a traitor who sold out his nation for financial gain. He became the author of the Gospel that bears his name. Simon the Zealot was a guy who advocated the execution of people like Matthew without trial or jury. Jesus put them in the same squad.
And don’t forget that this group included early joiners besides the Apostles– the women and Jesus’s brothers. His brothers did not have any confidence in Jesus until after the resurrection. In fact, they disparaged him: “Why don’t you go to the big city and do your shtick there? No one who wants to be a celebrity hangs out in a Podunk place like this” (my very loose paraphrase of John 7:3-4). Yet brother James would go on to become the leader of the church in Jerusalem and brother Jude would write one of our New Testament letters.
What can we learn from this? Jesus Christ started the church with very imperfect people. People who didn’t get it. People who failed spectacularly. People who had a history. He is building his church with the same kind of people today. Remember what Paul said to the Corinthians: “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were” (1 Cor. 6:9c-11a). And it’s what some of us were too.
Jesus isn’t building his church out of people who have it all together but people who are placing all their hope in him. They get to be part of something bigger than themselves. They are connected. They are doing something that makes a difference. They are part of a story that will be told forever. They get off the sidelines and fulfill the role God has prepared for them.
Now remember that in the foundation-laying days of the church, these first believers were joining constantly in prayer. Jesus had told them to wait in Jerusalem for the promise of the Father, the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4) but, interestingly, Jesus had not told them to pray. Yet, they joined constantly in prayer, were on call for prayer. Why?
I think it was because Jesus had modeled prayer for them. Luke tells us that before his baptism, Jesus prayed and it was while he was praying, that the Spirit descended on him from heaven (Luke 3:21). He taught them that the Father would give the Spirit to those who asked him (Luke 11:13) and told them to keep praying and not give up (Luke 18:1). And so, they prayed while they waited, and it was while they were praying that the Spirit, the bonding agent, was poured out on them. The Spirit transformed them into the firm, sure, and steadfast foundation of which Christ is the chief cornerstone.
It was not just in the foundation-laying stage of the project that prayer is important, but at every phase of the construction of Christ’s church. And notice that these men and women didn’t just pray privately in their homes; they prayed together. If you want to see Christ’s church – including our church – be all God can make it, you should be praying together with other people.
There is a Friday morning, 9:00 prayer meeting for the church that has been happening for years in room 303, right by the church office. If you cannot come together with others to pray then, start something yourself. Invite a few people to join you in prayer on a regular basis.
April will be a month of prayer at Lockwood, bookended by two days when we will pray together. We will be seeking God’s will for us in this year of transition. Decide right now that you will be a part of that.
Something else we see here: our unity as a church family does not come from within us but from without. As we move closer to Christ, we get closer to each other. We are not bonded together by race or class or education but by the bonding agent, the Spirit of God. Do you want to fit in, find friends, be part of a vibrant community? The best thing you can do is move closer to Christ.
Finally, I’ve notice that many people veto themselves, keep themselves at a distance. Don’t do that. I’ve known people who have been at Lockwood for years who, when they’re talking to me, say, “Your church really is this or that” instead of “Our church is this or that.” Could it be that they think they have no share in the church because of what their life has been?
But look at who God chose to be the foundation of Christ’s church—people like us! People who have a history. People who have a personality. People who fail. Don’t veto yourself. Present yourself to God, submit to Jesus, and see what he can do with you.
In the movie, “Titanic,” a mother and her teenage daughter Rose, played by Kate Winslet, are crossing the Atlantic with Rose’s fiancé. He is from the same social class as she, but he is rich while her family has squandered its wealth and is poised on the edge of poverty. She must marry the rich boor to save her family from shame.
Rose detests the idea of being hitched to this pompous snob and resolves to throw herself into the ocean and end it all. She is saved from this fate by a scallywag kid named Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is only on the ship because he won tickets for a third-class cabin in a poker game. As one would expect, the two young people fall in love.
I have never watched, and do not intend to watch Titanic, even though Roger Ebert hailed it as a “flawlessly crafted … spellbinding” film. I know how it ends—and that it takes over three hours to get there. However, I recently read a book that used the plot of this movie to illustrate differences between traditional and modern societies, and I was intrigued.
In “When the Church Was a Family,” Joseph Hellerman claims that if first century viewers watched “Titanic,” they would react differently to Rose’s plight than present-day Western viewers. Hellerman writes: “People in the ancient world automatically assumed that the groups to which they belonged took priority over their lives as individuals.”
Viewers from the first century would not have rooted for Rose and Jack. They would, in fact, have despised her for her selfishness. But in our time, storytellers like James Cameron know that their audience wants to believe that romantic love trumps other commitments.
This is so much the case that Hollywood keeps churning out movies in which bored men and women abandon their families for a sexual fling or for sexual experimentation and viewers sympathize with the adulterers. This idea was present in other times – consider the Pre-Raphaelite poet William Morris’s line, “Love is enough” – but it is orthodoxy now. In our day, people can repeat the trite slogan, “Love is love,” and actually believe they have said something profoundly important.
A first century viewer would think it a shame that Rose must marry such an arrogant snob, but would expect her to do so nonetheless. She is part of a family. Her first duty is to them, not to herself and certainly not to “love.” To allow her family to be brought into shame, when she has the power to prevent it, would be disgraceful. What kind of a daughter would do such a thing?
This group-first mindset is a characteristic trait of traditional societies but is largely absent from the American way of thinking. We expect our children to leave the family when they reach young adulthood and go out to make their fortune. We demand a raise, even when the company can’t afford it—and if we don’t get it, we’ll go elsewhere. We are individualists to the core.
This difference between first and twenty-first century ways of thinking comes into play when we interpret ancient texts like the Bible, which was written in a group-first, traditional society. If we read these texts without an awareness of the group-first mindset, we are bound to miss things in the text.
Examples of this can be found in biblical passages dealing with salvation. We tend to read them through a mono-focal, individualist lens, which limits their scope to what happens to an individual’s soul. Were we to read them through a first century lens, we would find that God is saving for himself a people and not just persons. We would see that salvation changes one’s corporate identity and not just his personal destination.
We would see, as Hellerman has memorably put it, that we are not only justified in salvation but “familyfied.” We are not only united to Christ, but to his people. This awareness is largely missing among contemporary Bible readers, with the result that many people are quite satisfied to be “unchurched” Christians. The biblical authors would have been flabbergasted.
This session launches a class on what the Bible has to say to American culture. This is not about conservatism verses liberalism, but about biblical Christianity’s challenge to American cultural assumptions. This week, we look at the American ideal of freedom through the lens of New Testament teaching.
This past week reports of a revival on the campus of Asbury University in Wilmore, KY, made the Washington Times, Washington Examiner, FOX News, NBC news, Christianity Today, CBN, and a host of other news outlets. People are excited. People are curious. They are waiting to see what will happen next.
Not long after I became a Christian, a revival started in that same college chapel. It was 1970. The prayer, worship, singing, confession, and reconciliation went on for 170 straight hours. Classes were cancelled. Lives were changed. Students who experienced that revival went around the country telling people what God had done at Asbury. Three of them came to our church in the Greater Cleveland area to tell their story.
What is a revival? It is easier to describe than to define. The word is used in Ps. 85:6, when the psalmist pleads with God: “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” The prophet Habakuk asks God to revive his works of old during the present time (Habakuk 3:2). A revival happens when God’s people – not one here and there, but in a group – are reenergized, awakened to God’s presence, and filled with his love.
I have heard countless preachers wax on about revival over the years. I have heard it so often that I have tuned it out. I have rarely prayed for revival. That is not something I like to admit because in some circles, longing for revival is the mark of genuine faith.
There are reasons for my lack of enthusiasm. For one thing, many of the people I have heard speak most passionately about revival don’t speak passionately about God. They long for revival, but not for God! That is backwards.
Another reason I have shied away from revival talk is that some people seem to think of revival as a substitute for a daily, interactive relationship with God. It’s like someone who won’t eat healthily or exercise but who regularly runs off to health conferences, buys fitness gear, and joins the latest fads.
A third reason for my reluctance is I have heard people say, time and time again, that the only hope for our nation is a revival. They may be right. They probably are right. But by regularly framing it that way, they make it sound like revival (and perhaps the God who gives it) is in service to the nation. But God will not be anyone’s tool, not even to make our beloved nation a better place. To be more concerned about national reform than about the church’s love and holiness is to have our priorities wrong.
A fourth reason for my lack of excitement about revivals is revivalism. There are religious people who have made a trade out of peddling revivals – overhyped, overemotional events that lack spiritual depth. They blow into town and blow back out again but the change they bring only lasts until the emotion fades. I have an aversion to emotional manipulation, which leaves people worse off than they were before.
That is not, as far as I can tell, what has been happening at Asbury. People who have been there use words like “low-key” to describe it. There has been no hype. The revival wasn’t planned. It is not being driven by group psychology methods. It is not taking place at a Pentecostal worship center but at a college with Methodist roots that is named after a Methodist bishop. From what I can tell, God simply came near, and his manifested presence began changing people.
Think of that last sentence: God simply came near. What could that mean? Isn’t the God who inhabits all space and time, filling the vastness of galaxies and riding the roller coaster of quantum uncertainties already near? Do we not “live and move and have our being” in him (Acts 17:28)? If he is already here, how can he come near?
There are different kinds of nearness. I may be sitting near my wife on the sofa, yet we may be miles apart. On Valentine’s Day, I took my wife to a restaurant and afterwards I took her out … to by her a Valentine’s Day card. You see, I hadn’t remembered it was Valentines Day and had forgotten to buy one. (She was, thankfully, not angry with me. After more than forty years, Karen understands that I rarely know the date, sometimes don’t know the day, and occasionally don’t remember what month it is.) She was gracious, but some spouses would really have felt distant because of a failure like that.
So, a man may be right next to his wife and yet be far away from her. Some wrongdoing, selfish attitude, or old resentment may have come between them. And just so with God. We may be separated from him by our sins, our selfishness, or our pride. The prophet says, “Your sinful acts have alienated you from your God” (Isaiah 59:2).
When we are distant from God, certain things – bad things – routinely happen. We can see how this works in Isaiah 63 and 64. We’ll read Isaiah 63:15-17, and then 64:1-3, 5b-7.
Look down from heaven and see, from your lofty throne, holy and glorious. Where are your zeal and your might? Your tenderness and compassion are withheld from us. But you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name. Why, Lord, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you? Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes that are your inheritance.
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you! For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.
But when we continued to sin against [your ways], you were angry. How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins.
A general observation before we dig into this passage. This is a prayer made by people who are desperate. Three times in this prayer, the prophet says to God, “But you are our Father.” “You, Lord, are our Father.” “Yet you, Lord, are our Father.” The prophet seems to be asking, “God, how can this happen when you are our Father?”
When God is far from us, bad things happen to us, and bad things happen within us. Israel exemplifies this. Look at the bad things that happened to them. In 63:18, they have lost possession of Jerusalem. In 64:10, their cities have been deserted and Jerusalem is desolate. In 64:11, the temple, the heart of Judaism, the glory of Jews worldwide, lies in ruins, burnt to the ground.
You can imagine how people talked about these things – the terrible state of their nation and the ruin that had come on them. Bad people – people who did not know God – were imposing laws on them. They were forcing their morality – Jews would call it their lack of morality – on their children. And no one could stop it.
If there had been some version of social media in those days and their posts had been saved for posterity, I suppose they would have read very like our posts today: the government and its education systems are shoving their morality down our throats. They are dismantling our way of life. The faithful will soon be no more.
When God is far from his people, things like that happen—and worse. What could be worse than evil generated from the outside that we are powerless to stop? Evil generated from the inside in which we are complicit. That also happens when God is far from his people.
In 63:17, the prophet cries to God: “Why, Lord, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you?” When God is far away, a spiritual hardness develops in people. They walk in their own ways and not God’s, and so their paths don’t cross with his. When our hearts are hard, we can know what is the right thing to do, but can’t make ourselves do it. The path we’re on doesn’t lead in that direction. Hardness of heart is a terrible thing.
The prophet asks the LORD why he makes the people wander from his way, why he hardens their hearts. It sounds like he is blaming the LORD for what hard-hearted people do. His reasoning goes like this: the people would not wander if God were not distant. He can’t understand why God doesn’t come near, for when God is far from his people, they are bound to do wrong.
But it gets worse. In 64:5, God gladly comes to the aid of those who do right, but people cannot do right when God is far from them; they can only continue to sin. It is a Catch-22 situation: God won’t come to our aid because we are sinning, but we can’t stop sinning because God won’t come to our aid. The situation is self-perpetuating.
Sin makes people (this is verse 6) unclean, which is to say unfit to be in God’s presence. But outside God’s presence, people wither on the inside. “…we all shrivel up like a leaf,” is how verse 6 puts it. To shrivel up on the inside is worse than anything people to do us from the outside.
The result is that we cannot want what we need. That is why (verse 7) “No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you.” The thing we need is the thing we will not and cannot do: we are starving people who cannot eat the only food the universe grows (Lewis).
This is the state of things when God is away from his people. Then why does he not come near? But he will come near. He has promised. We call that coming near the judgment. When he comes near what is inside us will show itself for what it really is. The prophet Amos asked people, “Why do you long for the day of the Lord? That day will be darkness, not light.It will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear…” (Amos 5:18-19a).
Look at the language Isaiah uses to describe what happens when God comes near: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down …” (Isaiah 64:1-2a). Do we really want the one who causes mountains to tremble to come near? Remember how, when he came near to Israel at Horeb, the mountain “was covered with smoke, because the LORD descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently” (Exodus 19:18). Do you remember what the people said to Moses then? “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Exodus 20:19).
Here is the incredible tension under which we live—and not just us, but God too. Because God is far away, people are hardened in heart. But if he comes close while we are intwined in our sins, our sins will burn up and we will be hurt. If he does not come close, we will become harder in heart and even more intwined in our sins. If he comes close, he might destroy us. If he does not come close, we will destroy ourselves.
This is the disaster that Adam’s sin perpetrated on, and has been perpetuated through, all his children. If God comes close, we are ruined. If he stays away, we are ruined. The Bible is the story of how God solved this most intractable problem. It tells how he made a way to come near people without destroying them.
How did he do that? “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” God eternal entered time. The infinite was confined in space. Thousands of years of preparation were necessary. An entire people group was groomed for millennia. The right woman was selected through whom the Word could become flesh. Finally, God sent “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, for sin…” (Romans 8:3). It is the hinge on which human history turns. Only in Christ could God come among us without killing us.
And what happened? We killed him. God knew through all those thousands of years that this would happen and incorporated it into his plan. It was the way – perhaps the only way – the intractable sin problem could be solved. And God knew through all those thousands of years that he would raise Christ from the dead, which was how the problem of our mortality would be solved.
But then Christ ascended to heaven, and doesn’t that mean that we are back where we were? Is God not once again far from us? Do we only get God for the 33 years that he lived among us in human form? No, God sent his Spirit, which was also the plan for thousands of years. By his Spirit, he can be with us to restore and not destroy.
Long ago, the prophet asked: “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?” (Malachi 3:2). The answer is the person who has received God’s Spirit. It is the presence of the Spirit in humans that enables them to endure his coming. And he places his Spirit in the person who believes in his Son.
Here is the thing. God has not changed. He is still the same God who, when he came near, made Moses cry out, “I am trembling with fear” (Hebrews 12:21). God is not a toy for religious people to play with. Coming near him can unmake a person—or remake him. Because of what Christ did, and the ensuing gift of the Holy Spirit, God can be close to us and remake us.
Now, I am going to say something you might not like, but that I have come to believe is true from personal experience and from pastoral observation: people are as close to God as they choose to be. You may object, “No, I want to be closer to God, but I have three kids.” You are as close to God as you choose to be.
“No, I want to be closer to God, but my schedule is frenetic.” You are as close to God as you choose to be. If your schedule really is your problem and you want to be closer to God, you will change your schedule.
But I am trying to get closer to God. That’s great, because if you are really trying to get close to God, he will get close to you (James 4:8). And when he gets close to you, good things happen. When God comes close in Isaiah 35 and Malachi 4, people experience healing. This, I think, includes both physical healing and the healing of the soul. We make a great mistake when we want God’s healing, but expect it to experience it remotely. God doesn’t usually send healing; he personally delivers it.
When God is with people, they have peace. They receive guidance (1 Samuel 14:36ff). They have hope (Hebrews 7:29). They experience mercy (Isiah 55:6). They gain understanding (Ps. 119:169). They have rest (Matthew 11:28). We wither when God is far away; we flourish when he is near.
But what will it take for God to come near, as he seems to have done at Asbury? We need to become more concerned about what God thinks of us than about what people think of us (John 5:44). If we get that backwards, we will never be able to believe God.
We need to pray. People who have studied revivals claim that they are always preceded by prayer. Not casual and nonchalant prayer, but impassioned and fervent prayer. This was true at Asbury; people have been praying for God to come near.
But God will not come near to people who are choosing their sins over him, for to come near them would be to hurt them. We cannot have God and our sins. Maybe you think, “I’ve tried to get rid of my sins, but I can’t. I’ve talked to people. I’ve joined a group. Nothing works. I am stuck with them.”
Try this: focus more on getting close to God than on getting away from your sins. If you get close to God, your sins will get away from you! Right now, you are a magnet for them, but God’s presence will reverse the polarity.
Take the first step, however small, in his direction. Incline your ear toward him. Move, even feebly, toward him, and he will come to you. Hobble in his direction, and he will cross light years to be with you.
Picture eight or so sixth-grade boys, playing football on a narrow strip of grass between two houses. A laundry pole marks one end zone and the sidewalk marks the other. The football has gone into the busy street repeatedly, worrying drivers and kids alike.
At half-time, some of the kids run across the street to the neighborhood store, while others continue to toss the football around. When the boys return from the store, one boldly displays candy that he stole, and he dares the others to do the same.
Several of the boys take the dare and cross the street. While they are gone, the first boy taunts those who remain. He accuses them of being scared, then clucks like a chicken. The others return moments later with their plunder. “It was easy!” they say, and they goad the remaining boys to “do it.” Two more cross the street.
The football game is now forgotten. When the last of the shoplifters returns, they go off together, as thick as thieves. One of the boys who didn’t steal candy picks up the football and walks alone into the house. I was that boy.
I wanted to belong to that group of boys so badly that I thought about stealing from my lifelong neighbors, the store owners Vince and Helen Lindway. I may have done it too, had it not been for the thought that I might get caught and brought before my dad—a fate too terrible to imagine.
The quality of life most commonly identified with satisfaction and well-being is the sense of belonging. A God-given way to experience this is through the family, but families are often fractured and even those that are intact are frequently not close. Psalm 142:4 states what millions of people feel: “Look to my right and see; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life.”
People may be sorted into one of four possible categories in regard to their relationships. They may be rejected: known but not accepted. They may be ignored and rejected: neither known nor accepted. They may fit in – they are accepted but not known. They may belong – both known and accepted. Fitting in is not enough to satisfy anyone. People need to be accepted and known.
But this raises the question of why people feel alone in the first place. The answers, for there are more than one and they are layered, are psychological, sociological, and theological. The crack in humanity’s relationship with God is foundational, but it has expanded into all our relationships.
Early in the Bible, we read the story of humanity’s break with God; the rest of the Bible relates what God is doing to repair the breach. Alienation from our creator and life-giver has left humanity vulnerable, confused, and anxious. Instead of satisfaction and well-being, humans routinely experience discontentment and fear.
The break with God immediately spread to other relationships. We see the crack radiate out as Adam blames his epic failure on his wife. We know it has spread even further when we hear what the future holds: the woman’s desire will be for her husband, but he will “rule” over her.
The crack continued to grow, first splitting brothers – Cain and Abel – and then alienating people from each other. Societal violence increased until “every inclination of the human heart was only evil all the time.” Though the rupture began in humanity’s relationship with God, it went on to divide people from each other.
But it did not stop there, for the crack even divides individuals from themselves, leading to a condition St. James described as “double-souled.” People are alienated from themselves, their identities ruptured. They undergo a slow internal disintegration, something St. Paul describes as the “corruption” of the self.
We ought to gratefully acknowledge mental health professionals’ efforts to heal our internal ruptures. We should cheer community activists’ work to end social alienation. But unless the initial rift is mended between people and God, these efforts will be like patching drywall in a house that is settling. The cracks are certain to reappear and grow even bigger. The original rupture must be repaired.
The Way Home 