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Discovering God

Jer 31: 31 – 35

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 15 Aug, 20044

WE ARE beginning a series on discovering God. I want to begin by suggesting that we never discover God unless he chooses to reveal himself. This is a matter in which he is in charge..

  One great mistake most of us make is to think of God as somehow lying around like a gold nugget, perhaps to be found, perhaps to be missed by many generations of people.
  Sometimes I think that there are people who like that idea, because then they can say, “I looked, but I didn’t find him. He probably doesn’t exist.”
  If so many people who weren’t looking for him have come to know him, maybe he is extremely findable!

  I’d like to tell you some of my story.

  I grew up in a basically secular family. my grandfather had been an active Methodist, but he hadn't been a regular attender since his hearing started going. So I didn’t see much church–going in that area.
  My mother was sympathetic to Christianity, but she didn’t attend church; my father was moderately antagonistic. He’d been forced to go to Sunday School, and didn’t like it.
  A lot of Australians have had a bad experience of the church.
  Some have been forced to attend services when their friends, and, sometimes, even their family, doesn't attend.

  Many Australians just don’t trust pastors and priests.
  For many Australians, anyone who speaks well or has some education just seems suss. And most ministers are well–spoken, most are well–educated. As a group, we sound like the villains on afternoon TV shows.

  I’m no Lowell Thomas when it comes to public speaking, but I was on a train once, and a chap just ahead of me spoke to some people acting like yobbos and stopping people from getting on.
  I thanked him, and he said,
  “You use your voice professionally. You are a public speaker, or a teacher.”
  I laughed and admitted that I do some preaching.
  I had to learn to speak carefully, because people just didn’t understand me when I spoke quickly and unclearly.
  But now I have a give–away voice. People know when they hear me that I am a bit different from your average Ocker.

  It’s the same with that fellow on Neighbours, the chubby Christian chap, Harold. He talks and acts differently from all the others.

  And, of course, many people have been disappointed. They assumed that God would have to answer their prayers if they prayed very hard, and God didn’t deliver what they wanted. There are many people who hate God because someone they loved died.

  I’m sure that there was a lot more than just being sent to Sunday School that kept my father distant from God. He was angry with God about something. He had been disappointed by Christians who talked before they thought. There were many things, but we were all affected.

  So I am certainly not a typical “never left the church where he grew up” kind of minister — if such a thing is all that typical anyway.

  I remember attending the Methodist Church for my brother’s Christening, and for one or two Christmasses; and we went to two Easter services at the Anglican Church, but that was it until I was about 15.

  But God broke into that.
  I always attended School Scripture — it was compulsory — but it didn’t mean much to me until I was 14 and we had a stand–in minister while the regular bloke was on long service leave.
  Rev Dickie Barton told us about Jesus and he told us that people didn’t just meet him and say, “Ho, hum, well I’ve met him.” He told us that people made a response for good or ill to him, and that we needed to make our responses, too.

  And I saw it: it all came clear — Jesus died for me! In that death, God was displaying his love for me, and for people like me!
  There were no words, but God revealed himself to me.

  And he can reveal himself to you, too.

  Mr Barton was in the Army in the First World War, and he told us how he had been reading his Bible and praying as he waited in the trenches one morning. Suddenly he said it was almost like a voice commanding him, “Get down!”
  He dropped to the ground and almost at the same time, a bullet slammed into the trench timbers where he had just been standing.
  He told us, “God can speak to you, and he will if you listen!”

  I can vouch for that. Our God is a God who speaks. Most of the time it is through the Bible. Sometimes it is direct.

  Soon after I came here, the church was in a financial crisis. We were nearly broke, yet two or three people were pushing us to increase our overseas missionary giving.
  The line was, “If you had faith, you’d give more to missions, then God will bless you.”
  I knew it was wrong, but I could see that there was more to it. These people were out to gain control and they had me whether I opposed their plan or agreed to it. One way, I was anti missions, the other way I had let the church go broke.
  I prayed about it. I prayed on many occasions.
  One day, as I was driving through Newtown and saying, “What will I do, Lord?” He answered me, “Acts 1: 8.”
  I knew Acts 1: 8. It says

When the Holy Spirit comes on you, you shall receive power and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and to the farthest ends of the earth.

  But what did that have to do with our financial crisis?
  Oh... I see... Gradually, it dawned on me.
  There are priorities in missions. You start where you are with what you have, and you move outwards as God directs.
  Here was the answer! I was not opposed to missions, but I believe in following a Biblical pattern!

  God can answer you when you ask him!

  I’m going to be honest with you. I’ll tell you straight out that there have been times when my attitudes have probably been no better than those of the people who were trying to get rid of me. And the word from God was a rebuke that I deserved. Sometimes it came through other people, sometimes through reading the Bible, sometimes through a direct word like that.

  Once I was praying for the spiritual well-being of someone I found quite difficult, and God really pulled me up sharply.
  “You only want this person to change so that you won’t have so many problems!” he said. I deserved that.

  God wants to communicate with us. He loves to communicate with us.
  In our passage, we read of a plan  that God put in place right from the beginning. He wants people to know him personally. God is supremely about relationship, because God is Love, and you can’t have love without relationship.

“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
  I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
  31:34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
    or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’
  because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
        declares the LORD.

  There are many other passages with a similar thrust.
  God wants to be known, not just known about.
  Some passages about knowing God don’t even sound all that pleasant to our ears. God doesn’t just send out pretty pictures and sweet words in a slick PowerPoint presentation. He’s real. Here is God speaking in Ezekiel’s prophecy:

EZE 7:23 “Prepare chains, because the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of violence. 24 I will bring the most wicked of the nations to take possession of their houses; I will put an end to the pride of the mighty, and their sanctuaries will be desecrated. 25 When terror comes, they will seek peace, but there will be none. 26 Calamity upon calamity will come, and rumour upon rumour. They will try to get a vision from the prophet; the teaching of the law by the priest will be lost, as will the counsel of the elders. 27 The king will mourn, the prince will be clothed with despair, and the hands of the people of the land will tremble. I will deal with them according to their conduct, and by their own standards I will judge them. Then they will know that I am the LORD.”

  Here we see God promising, “I will deal with the injustice and violence in the land, then they will realise that I really am God. They will know who I am.”
  This is a God who is passionate about us.
  There is a book called, Caring enough to Confront. There is another book called, Nice Guys Wreck Lives. I've read the covers of both books. They were good covers.

  God does care enough to confront; he loves enough to take action. Yet he doesn’t throw thunderbolts onto foolish ways. He wants all people to come to repentance.
  You could buy a machine, a tape recorder, and put a loop in saying nothing but nice things. Some people want a God like that.
  But someone who confronts you and still cares, he’s different. That’s how God is.

  Many years ago, I had a friend, Judith, who was our local regional Town Planner in the State Government. If we needed to get the low down on a Government policy affecting some planned development, we phoned Judith.
  But Judith was also a pastoral carer, regardless of what job title she had. Whenever I was having a really bad week, she had a knack of ringing up and just saying, “I was thinking about you today, and thought I'd ask how you are going?”

  It’s great to have friends like that.

  At one time, things were goiing pretty badly. The chief had made promises to me and broke them. I was left stranded, because I had acted on those promises. I was pretty angry.
  But I wasn’t responding appropriately. I was saying, “You treat me badly, and I just won’t cooperate with you.”
  Judith worked out what was happening, and she confronted me about what I was doing. She wasn’t any the less my friend, but she was very disappointed in my attitude.

  When people treat you like that, you know they care. It helped me through that hard time.

  And that’s what God is saying in this passage in Ezekiel. He wants people to know him, and he is prepared to confront our selfishness and our abuse of power if we refuse to listen.
  God is a God of love, and he confronts.
  But there is another passage I want to leave with you all today. It’s one of my favourites. It says,

God demonstrates his love to us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

  Here is God, being totally realistic about the kind of people we are, but acting to bring us into relationship with himself before we even thought such a relationship is possible.

  So today I want us to reflect on this God.

  If you ask some religions about God, they will tell you that God is so remote that he has no interest in our day–to–day lives. If you ask other religions, they’ll tell you that he is so close that he is equally part of everything, both the good and the bad. They’ll say he has no concern about changing anything at all. And one or two religions even tell you there is no God or if there is a God we can know nothing about him.

  But there is one God who reveals himself; there is one God who speaks to us, who has given us his written word, who has revealed himself in a Son, in Jesus the Lord.
  Over the next few weeks, we will get to know this God far better.

  Next week we start at the beginning.  Bring your brains along, because we don’t have to leave our brains outside to know God as he is!