My
full and unedited message is posted on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX_NXYx-F6A
At the outset of my message today I want to
make a very important point. If you take nothing else away from what I say
today, I hope every child of God, every son and daughter of God who were born
again through obedient faith in Jesus the Messiah, I hope you will hear this
point:
You are not alone. God is with you at this
very moment. Wherever you are – at home, or away from home. Sick in bed or up
and around healthy. Struggling after losing someone you deeply loved or
comforted in their arms at night.
Listen, child of God, He is with you. For
some of us that phrase is so familiar, we’ve heard it so many times, it has for
us become almost trite. Like a throw-away phrase people say when they don’t
know what else to say.
But this is not a trite throw-away phrase.
It is Almighty God who says it to you through His holy and inerrant and
infallible Scriptures.
Which leads me to my text for today:
O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and
when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and
my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before
there is a word on my tongue, behold, O Lord, You know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before, and
laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high,
I cannot attain to it. Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee
from Your presence? (Psalm 139:1-7, NASB)
God knows all about us. Not only has He
accurate count of the hairs on our head, but He knows everything we think,
everything we do, and every motive behind it all. So, at the beginning of what
I want to say to you today: Child of God, born again into His kingdom by your
faith in Jesus Christ, do not fear. Do not worry. Do not doubt this. He is
there with you. At this moment. Embracing you. Even if you cannot see Him, feel
Him, touch Him – we walk by faith and not by sight – or by feeling.
So that’s point number one: God is with you.
Always. He never leaves you. Whether you sense Him or not is NOT the issue. We
live by faith in His unfailing promises made to us through His inerrant word,
we call the Bible.
Let’s now return a moment to the psalm and
to the second point of this message: O Lord, You have searched me and known
me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up.”
As I
said a moment ago, God the Holy Spirit searches us, our hearts, our souls, our
very being itself. Nothing is hidden from Him, not even the smallest
wisp of a word in our mind. He knows the length and breadth and depth and
height of our anger, and pride, and lusts, and envy – and yes, also, our
loneliness, our sadness, our doubts, our fears, our confusions.
Think for a moment, in the quietness of your
own thoughts, how absolutely naked and vulnerable your soul always stands
before your Creator – and then think further of this incredible truth:
Despite who you are in the depths of your
heart, despite what you have done and continue to do, and what you haven’t done
and still refuse to do – God LOVES you. Please hear this. You must believe that
if you can ever hope to know the peace of God in your life.
God the Holy Spirit tells us through the
apostle Paul’s pen: “God demonstrates His love toward us in that while we
were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
Listen, if He didn’t love you, He would not
have sent His beloved Son to die in your place, to take the punishment your
sins and my sins so justly deserve from a Holy, Holy God.
God sent Jesus to be our substitutionary
sacrifice so that you and I – and anyone else who wants His forgiveness – we
can enter into eternal communion with Almighty God. In a sense, Jesus still
hangs on that cross – looking at you with tear-filled eyes, waiting for you to
repent of your sins and fall in confession and subsequent obedience at His
feet.
When David realized the Lord knows him inside
and out, from the number of hairs on his head to the sickness of his soul, he wrote
what anyone might expect him to write: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I
cannot attain to it.” In other words, how can the finite hope to grasp the
infinite? It would be less logical than an amoeba trying to fathom the mind of
an Albert Einstein.
So,
given this utter impossibility to understand God and His love, His holiness,
His mercy, His grace, and His judgment and justice, we are faced with
only two choices: We can either accept what He says about Himself and about us
as entirely true – and strive to live according to His commandments. Or, we can
bring God down to our level. We can recreate Him in our own concept of what we
want God to be like.
That, of course, would be an eternally
deadly choice.
Let’s
go back again to the psalm and to my third and final point of today’s message: O
Lord, You have searched me and known me.”
Although this psalm doesn’t say it
specifically, we know from the length and breadth of Scripture that God not
only searches us, but that He also actively searches FOR us.
Why is He searching for us? Because He knows
we are lost – lost in the sin of Adam and lost in our own sins we so easily
commit.
And because sin is so much a part of the
warp and woof of our nature, most of us don’t even know we’re lost. That’s why
God searches for us – and He has been doing that from the moment of our
conception.
You may remember the parables Jesus told of
the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. One sheep out of his hundred
sheep wandered away from the fold. Lost. Cold. Frightened. And what did the
shepherd do? He left the 99 safely in the corral and went out in search for the
one lost lamb.
Then He told of the lost coin. Of course,
the coin didn’t know it was lost, but the woman who lost is was frantic to find
it. She turned her house upside down and swept it from front to back until she
recovered it.
Then Jesus told the story of lost young man.
He was tired of living down on the farm. He was probably frustrated with his father’s
seemingly endless rules and chores. I imagine he was angry that he was unable
to come and go as he pleased. So, at the end of his patience, he asked his
father for his share of his inheritance and took off on his own. The lure of
city lights, and the proverbial wine, women, and song enticed him. And for a
time, he drifted from one wave of excitement to another.
Then disaster struck. A famine. Economic
collapse. With his money gone, he was suddenly homeless and hungry. That might
be similar to the story of some of you watching this message. But Jesus then
tells us, “when the young man came to his senses” he decided to return to his
father.
What was the father doing at the time? Here
is how the Lord tells it in verses 20-24: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him
and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And . . . the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out
the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his
feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and
let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine
was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ (Luke 15:20-24)
Let
me say it again for emphasis: Not only does God search us, but God also searches
for us as a loving shepherd. You probably know what David wrote in his
23rd psalm: “The Lord is my
shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me
beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.
Listen. It is the shepherd’s JOY to search for and find His
lost sheep. And Jesus, of course, tells us HE is the good shepherd:
“I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me,
even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for
the sheep. (John 10)
Some of you might be tempted to think the Good Shepherd is no longer
interested in searching for you. You might think your sins are so grievous and
you have lived so long in your sin that He has given you up for lost.
Please don’t believe everything you think! Instead, choose to
believe what GOD says about you – that He loves you so much He left His very throne
in glory to search high and low, broad and wide just to find you and carry you
on His shoulders safely back to the fold. Remember that text I quoted earlier
from Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome: “God demonstrates His own love
toward us in that while we were yet sinner, Christ died for us.”
Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, and no matter how often you’ve done it – the Good Shepherd is searching for you. And if you’ve listened this far, it’s because something inside of you is stirring you to believe that.
The stirring you feel is the Holy Spirit’s gentle voice. And you
can believe Him when He says to you: “I’ve found you. Let’s go home.”
Please. Be confident today – and all your tomorrows – be confident in that unalterable, unchangeable promise of God. God never leaves you. God is actively searching you – and God is actively searching FOR you.
The
psalmist next writes: “Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?”
Of course, he asks here a
rhetorical question – one to which he already knows the answer. There is no
place on earth, under the earth, or anywhere in the universe where we can flee
from God. That’s what Jonah thought he could do, and we know how that turned
out.
But though David knows the
answer to what he just asked, it does raise a question we can ask of ourselves,
because people many of us know seem to always be trying to flee from God’s
presence. Why would anyone do that?
We look at that question next
week.
No comments:
Post a Comment