I love
the ironic moments that happen in life.
I was in a bookstore recently and had the opportunity to witness one of
those wonderfully ironic moments.
A woman who was obviously agitated walked up to an employee of the store
and said, quite loudly, I’ve been looking
all over this store! Where is the
self-help section? I found
that comment so funny and I really wanted to interject myself into the
conversation and say if she tells you how
to find the self-help section, wouldn’t that defeat the point?
But I have
some sympathy for her – wouldn’t we like for some things to be easier? Wouldn’t we like a bit more help every
now and then?
I’ll
tell you where I’ve often wanted some help over the years – trying to figure out
the manner in which God works. I
often want to ask Lord, could I get a
little help here? I don’t
understand how you work, I don’t understand your timing, I don’t understand a
lot of things about you and sometimes I get impatient trying to get answers! Could I get a little help?
This
message went through about four titles, five versions, and a bunch of different
directions from where I began. I
had a different topic in mind but each day it seemed to be going in a different
direction until it landed on the title of Waiting
On God and I didn’t really want to use that title because it sounds too
presumptuous, as though God needs to answer to us about how he works. But then I realized, maybe a lot of
people have some of those same questions and would like some help dealing with
them.
I told
you last week that for a time in my life I was reading some of the psalms every
day. Every week or so I would pick
different psalms and read them for about a week and then pick some others. I’ve read the psalms all my life, but
until I adopted that pattern I didn’t realize just how much raw emotion some of
them contained. Listen to some of
these passages, one of which is our text for this morning, but I want to add a
couple of others –
7 Hear my voice when I call, Lord; be merciful to me
and answer me.
8 My heart says of you, “Seek his face!” Your face, Lord, I will seek.
9 Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your
servant away in anger; you have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, God my Savior.
—Psalm 27:7-9
1 Out of the depths I have cried to You, O
Lord.
2 Lord, hear my voice! Let Your ears be
attentive to the voice of my supplications.
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait, and
in His word do I hope.
6 My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning; indeed, more than the watchmen for
the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the
Lord there is lovingkindness, and with Him is abundant redemption.
8 And He will redeem Israel from all his
iniquities.
—Psalm 130:1-2, 5-8
And
the psalm that contains perhaps the most raw emotion, and the one that Jesus
quoted on the cross, is one that is hard to read, and is our primary text for
today –
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so
far from my cries of anguish?
2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not
answer, by night, but I find no rest.
3 Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the
one Israel praises.
4 In you our ancestors put their trust; they
trusted and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried out and were saved; in you
they trusted and were not put to shame.
Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to
help.
—Psalm 22:1-5, 11
That’s
hard to read, isn’t it? That’s
hard to hear, isn’t it? But isn’t
that where we find ourselves sometimes?
We wonder how God is working and we are patiently waiting, but after a
while we start to feel that patience eroding away.
How does
God work? How do we understand
God’s timing? How do we come to
understand God’s will? Those are
tough questions, and questions that often gnaw away at our souls.
If you
have asked those questions – if you are in the midst of some of those questions
right now – allow me to offer a few words of advice this morning –
1. Don’t be afraid of the desert.
My first time spent around the desert was back in the mid 80’s when
I went to Las Vegas for the Southern Baptist Convention. You really haven't lived until you've
spent a week in Vegas with thousands of Baptists. That was really quite a moment.
I was walking along the edge of town one afternoon and it was so hot
– I think it was about 115 degrees that day. But it was a dry heat.
Have you ever said that – but it’s
a dry heat. Yeah, that didn’t
bring me much comfort. It’s a dry
heat in my oven but I’m not going to stick my head in there. When the temperature gets above 110
degrees it’s just really hot, dry heat or not. On that afternoon the wind was blowing and sand was getting
in my eyes and it was a painful experience. I wanted to be somewhere cool and calm and restful, but at
the same time I found that moment to be strangely exhilarating. It was a moment to fight back against
the elements and prove that you can withstand that moment!
Everyone has their desert moments, where life is tough and gritty
and you feel dry spiritually. If
you’ve not been in the desert spiritually, I have great admiration for you,
because I’ve been there. Or if you
haven’t, maybe you’re just not willing to admit it to yourself.
Being in the desert doesn’t mean you are weak spiritually. Being in the desert, actually, often
becomes a time of great growth.
When the Hebrew people fled captivity in Egypt they wandered in the wilderness
for forty years. When I hear the
word wilderness, being from West Virginia, I think of forests, with a tree
canopy that shields one from the elements, and cool running streams, but the
wilderness facing the Hebrew people was much more of a desert. It was barren and inhospitable. It was a place with little shelter and
very little water. It was a very
inhospitable place. But it was
also the place where they became a people. It was the place where God forged them into a nation, a
place where their faith was tested and tried and through every trial became strong.
As we wander through our times in the wilderness, our time in the
desert, that is where we become a person of greater faith, it is where we
understand that God – is his timing and in his way – is shaping each of us into
the person he created us to be.
2. The older I get,
the less certain I am about how God works, but the more convinced I become that
he does.
I was
never one of those kids that took everything apart to try and figure out how it
works. I guess that’s why I’m not
an engineer. I never cared about
how things worked; I just wanted them to work. So it’s kind of odd that I spent a lot of years trying to
figure out the manner in which God works.
I spent a lot of time wondering about God’s timing and what he was doing
in the world and what he was doing in my life and those questions used to
really keep my mind reeling and caused me a lot of worry and anxiety.
But not
any more, because I don’t worry about it very often. I am even less certain now about the way in which God works
but I am more certain than ever that he does. I’ve come to the realization that I don’t need to know how
God works, I just need to know and trust that he does. That’s a wonderfully freeing point at
which to arrive.
Living
in such a scientific and technological age puts within us the idea that we must
have an answer to every question and that we must understand the inner workings
of everything, from the largest to the smallest questions of the universe and
life.
But must
we really understand everything?
Can we not live with some element of mystery? Of course we can!
Anyone married learns very quickly the reality of living with
mystery. Tanya and I will
celebrate our 31st anniversary in May and I can guarantee you that
she is still a mystery to me in some ways – and I am to her as well.
To not
understand God and to not know the manner in which he works does not in any way
lessen the reality of God or of his way.
Last week I read a portion of Isaiah chapter 55, and in verse 8 we read “For my thoughts are not your
thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. That doesn’t mean we have to stop
asking questions or wondering about God’s ways, but it does remind us there are
some mysteries that will never become clear to us until we enter eternity. And I’ve learned to be okay with that.
3. Let your head and your
heart work together.
It’s never a good idea to let either your head or your heart run
your life. We live between two
extremes in life – there’s the very logical, scientific dimension and there’s
the romanticized follow your heart attitude. Sometimes we need to be a bit more
logical and thoughtful about a decision or an action, so we need to use our
head more than our heart. But
there are times we need to allow our hearts to overrule our head so we don’t
become an emotionless zombie who doesn’t feel anything.
Please know this – God’s presence is not tied to our emotional
feelings, nor is it tied to what we can see and understand. The skeptics of the world, who want us
to weigh everything on a scale of what can be seen versus what cannot be seen,
everything that can be measured in a lab versus what can be measured by the
heart, miss so much of this truth – that we cannot see or comprehend a lot of
spiritual truths with our minds.
Sometimes, thankfully, the heart will take control and will sense
something that the mind cannot comprehend.
The human heart, Robert
Valett says, feels things the eyes cannot
see, and know what the mind cannot understand.
You might not recognize the name of St. John of
the Cross, who was a Spanish Catholic mystic who lived in the 16th
century, but you probably know the title of one of his works, a poem, and then
later the title of a lengthy treatise he wrote on that poem – The Dark Night of the Soul. The poem and book were written when he
was imprisoned because of his desire to bring reform to the monastic order of
which he was a part. Three times a
week he was allowed out of his windowless cell where he was imprisoned in order
to receive a meal of bread and water, and afterwards he was whipped because of
his refusal to recant his beliefs.
He wrote that in those dark confines
he was able to have a certain realization
and foretaste of God.
Once
in the dark of night,
Inflamed
with love and wanting, I arose
(O
coming of delight!)
And
went, as no one knows,
When
all my house lay long in deep repose
All
in the dark went right,
Down
secret steps, disguised in other clothes,
(O
coming of delight!)
In
dark when no one knows,
When
all my house lay long in deep repose.
And
in the luck of night
In
secret places where no other spied
I
went without my sight
Without
a light to guide
Except
the heart that lit me from inside.
It
guided me and shone
Surer
than noonday sunlight over me,
And
lead me to the one
Whom
only I could see
Deep
in a place where only we could be.
O
guiding dark of night!
O
dark of night more darling than the dawn!
O
night that can unite
A
lover and loved one,
Lover
and loved one moved in unison.
And
on my flowering breast
Which
I had kept for him and him alone
He
slept as I caressed
And
loved him for my own,
Breathing
an air from redolent cedars blown.
And
from the castle wall
The
wind came down to winnow through his hair
Bidding
his fingers fall,
Searing
my throat with air
And
all my senses were suspended there.
I
stayed there to forget.
There
on my lover, face to face, I lay.
All
ended, and I let
My
cares all fall away
Forgotten
in the lilies on that day.
Remember that even when you feel as though you are waiting on God,
when you feel like shouting I could use a
little help here Lord, that he is with you, and he is never going to leave
you.
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