"The Reach Toward God"Sermon Transcript for January 21, 2001
By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
Thank you very much. That was wonderful. And I pray you feel the sense of the Lord’s presence here this morning. In a way that’s what we’re going to talk about the next few minutes, the presence of the Lord. But, more appropriately, the reach toward God. We are constantly reaching toward God. We’re constantly trying to find God and go where God is. It seems to be a trait that humanity has had since the very beginning. So much so that people are always climbing mountains or trying to fly higher. You know, somehow they are going to get to where God is. When I was a teenager, I was quite a flying enthusiast. I loved airplanes; and I tried to learn to fly airplanes. And well I was fairly successful or I guess I wouldn’t be here. It was really a sense of euphoria to be soaring up there in the clouds and feeling a sense that you could almost touch the face of God. When I was in that point of my life I loved a poem by John Gillespie Magee called "High Flight". I had it memorized. The ending line of the poem seemed to really resonate with me as I was preparing to deliver today’s message. The line that says, "And while with silent lifting mind I trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand and touch the face of God."
It’s a wonderful concept isn’t it? To think that you can go where God is and just reach out and touch God. And it has driven many people to try to do so. You might remember this story of Nimrod in the book of Genesis who built his tower with the intention of going all the way to heaven and touching God. And I think he must have had some other intentions that were not so honorable because God defeated him in that effort. As you remember the story, you’ll probably remember that the tower collapsed and we’ve been babbling ever since. So the Tower of Babel was a total failure. But, still there’s this drive to reach out and touch God.
And the interesting thing is that when we grow in faith we begin to understand that God is with us right now. He’s right here in this place. That to reach out and touch God does not require any more than to simply be where you are because God is there with you. But that is something we learn from faith. For some faith comes from seeing things. You know, I call that Missouri faith - the show me faith. I can believe if I can see it. Thomas had that kind of faith. He must have been from Missouri or Missoura. I’m sorry, I may be saying that wrong. But the writer of Hebrews told us in today’s reading that "faith is the assurance of things that are hoped for and the conviction of things not yet seen". So apparently we have to be willing to trust in things that we’re not so certain of in order for it to be faith. And yet, we must somehow receive that faith in order to believe so that our faith increases. It’s sort of a paradox when you think about it. But the writer of Hebrews tells us again in Verse 6 of today’s reading that, "Whoever would reach toward God must believe in God and believe that God rewards." And that is fairly tough for some people to do. You probably know some people like that.
Some people just can’t believe that God exists or at least they can’t make that leap of faith that causes us to accept that God exists. And for those of you who have already accepted that, it takes a leap of faith to believe that God rewards us. And some of you may be past this point, but for the benefit of those who may be aren’t so sure about these things I want to talk about that just a bit. You see, when we who believe that God exists start trying to rationalize and explain God’s existence to others, it all makes perfect sense to us. But to an unbeliever, it’s purely subjective. The methods that you use to convince someone of God’s existence are really very subjective. Like it or not, the existence of God and the rewarding nature of God is an act of faith. It’s something that you experience and then you just know for sure. And when you try to share that with others it always seems to fall short. Because faith in God defies description to some extent anyway.
And that’s why we refer to that first step as a leap of faith. Now what is a leap of faith? I don’t know if you’ve ever had one. I probably could tell you about some that I’ve had. But I’m thinking right now of a movie that I really enjoyed a few years back about Indiana Jones. This time he’s looking for the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Now, I don’t know if you like those Indiana Jones’ movies, but I think they’re great fun. Indiana Jones is this guy with a leather jacket and a whip and a great looking hat. And he’s just as macho as macho can be. And there’s just no challenge out there that Indiana Jones can’t handle. This guy’s got more faith in himself than anybody I’ve ever met. And this guy is tough. But he came across a challenge that totally whipped him, at least for a minute. When he was just 50 feet or so away from the Holy Grail, the only thing that kept him from getting to it was a 1,000 foot chasm and no way to get across that he could see. And so here was Indiana Jones faced with a dilemma. His whip wasn’t long enough to swing over it. He couldn’t jump that hard no matter how hard he tried. What was he going to do? Well, he had a cryptic kind of clue in his notebook that said you must take a leap of faith. And you know, Indiana Jones wasn’t much of a believer, as near as I could tell. And yet, he finally resolved that the only way he was going to get to the Grail was to make that leap of faith. And so you know what he did. He stepped off into the chasm only to drop about six inches to find himself standing on what seemed to be an invisible bridge. In fact, what it was was an optical illusion. He just couldn’t see it; but it was there all along. He simply had to make that leap of faith to experience the existence of the bridge. And then he was able to get to his objective. He was able to receive his reward. Now that is a pretty good definition of a leap of faith.
But for those of us who have already made that leap, the next big leap then is to learn and trust, to have faith in the nature of God’s character. See the one who reaches toward God is usually not having problems with accepting that God’s existence is real. But then we have to face the reality that God is a person with a human, not human nature, but a God-like nature that humans can respond to. And that God is interested in you. That God loves you and God wants to help you and reward you. And for those who believe that God rewards, what is the ultimate reward? Well, it’s release from the greatest fear that I suspect we all have which is the fear of dying. God’s ultimate reward is that beyond the existence of this body is an eternal existence. And in that eternity that God rewards us with a better existence than the one we have now.
That is a faith leap of another kind and one that I probably would imagine more of us are exploring in our Christian journey. See, the problem for all of us is that faith is an unnatural characteristic for us. It’s not something that we do instinctively in the beginning. It’s not something we are born with and we just use it and get better at using it. It’s something that is given to us. And we know that’s the nature of faith because the Bible tells us so. I Corinthians 12:9 and Galatians 5:22 both refer to faith as a gift from God’s spirit. It’s something that we get from God first and then God grows it in us. Now that’s a hard concept as far as I’m concerned to understand how you get...you have to get the gifts of faith in order to have faith in the one who gives you the gift of faith. That’s kind of complicated. But let me see if I can break this down to a simpler kind of way to understand it. And I’m fortunate because I have children and because I’m pretty much a big kid myself. And I kind of understand how kids look at things sometimes.
And I find that I can understand faith better when I look at it through the eyes of a child. Now, when I was an infant I was an extraordinary intelligent infant. I remember everything I did when I was six months old. I’m lying, I know, but go with me on this. You know, when I was six months old I sat in my high chair and I watched my family gather around the table talking to each other. Which in my extraordinary intelligent infant-state, I recognized as a logical thing to do. They were talking about the day; they were talking about what we were having for supper; they were talking about all sorts of things. But suddenly they would go silent and one of them would talk to somebody who wasn’t there which in my gifted nature as an infant I found to be rather peculiar. They’re talking to somebody who’s not there.
Now, I’m trying to be funny, but the truth is we, if we want to understand how to receive the gift of faith, all we have to do is go back to our own childhood and realize that we didn’t just suddenly know that we could have faith. It was something that was given to us, wasn’t it? I was given faith in God by my parents or through my parents. Simply by that act of faith called prayer, where a whole bunch of people who were talking to each other stopped and talked to someone who doesn’t appear to be there. That was one of the first places I learned faith. Now, I also learned faith in other places and times in my life. But I want to roll the clock forward with another example.
I remember my son, Nathan, when he was two years old. We were pushing him around the hospitals in Louisville in his wheelchair and his stroller because of all the medical needs he had with his spina bifida. And I watched how he received and experienced all of that. And one of the things that really amazed me was how he enjoyed riding elevators. And so I watched his way of experiencing the elevator and it taught me a lot about faith. You see, when we rolled up to that magic box, we pushed the button and the door opens and we go inside and the door closes and a few seconds later the door opens and we’re someplace else. Did you ever think about that? Did you ever imagine an elevator ride through the eyes of a child? It’s a magic box. It’s like Star Trek, you know. You go in, you say, "Beam me up to floor 12". And the next thing you know you’re there. And that’s exactly how that faith in the elevator and the magic of the elevator grew in Nathan. Why shouldn’t he accept it? We all walk into the elevator and calmly wait for the door to close and wait for the hum and the little bit of the lifting sensation and then the door opens and we’re somewhere else. And we just experience that as a very matter of fact normal part of our daily lives. And for Nathan that was dozens of times sometimes a week.
And so I realized that when we try and understand how faith is given to us that there’s the place to begin. When you are given a gift by someone else, then it’s up to you to do whatever you want with it later. Once it’s been given to you, how you use it is your determinate. And so, if you haven’t received the gift of faith from God or if you haven’ made that leap of faith that causes you to be in a relationship with God, then when you do God gives you that gift. And then it’s up to you to ask God to increase that gift as much as needed to get you through the bits of your lives. It’s really kind of neat what faith does to you after you’ve had it. It’s sort of a heroic quality. Now, I don’t know exactly if you understand what I mean by that, but I have witnessed in other people how their faith has made them bold and unafraid in the midst of terrible adversity. But I’ve also witnessed the quiet faith in people whose lives seem to be going just fine and yet their faith has caused them to heroically give over all the credit and glory to God knowing that it is only because of God’s love for them that they are blessed in the way that they are. And everywhere in the middle. It’s really a heroic quality - faith. And it is that heroic quality that begins to show the world God’s existence through our own lives.
The writer of Hebrews told us in verse 13 of today’s reading that all of those people he was talking about "died in faith even though they hadn’t received all of the promises". And the message I hear in that is that faith is heroic because we are willing to bet our very lives on the rewards that we haven’t seen yet, to the gifts we haven’t received yet, the promises not yet fulfilled. And they knew that. Those famous people listed in that litany of faith. And they were rewarded. But we were rewarded by their faith too. Because each one of them can show us through their lives what faith can do and how it can change not only us but the people around us.
We pray for faith because ultimately faith saves. Now for the beginner, for the person who’s just made that leap of faith and has made that jump from uncertainty to some kind of experience of God, that’s already a transforming event that is bound to lead toward salvation. And when you begin to experience God’s existence and you begin to understand the nature of God’s character, it’s just a matter of time before you begin to feel the sense of God’s holiness and majesty. And for the person at that point in their faith journey, it can be awesome. It’s the kind of experience that drives you to your knees when no one appears to be watching. It is a sense of God’s holiness that begins to gnaw at us and make us realize our own unholiness, our own sinful nature.
Because God gave us the gift of justice, we begin to realize that God rightly should punish us for our sinfulness and our unholiness. Now I want to stop there for a second and take a little side trip. Because it’s hard for young believers especially to understand that justice is a gift from God. But again I have to refer to kids because they always seem to cut right to the bone on this stuff. I have a ten year old daughter who understands justice and injustice in an extraordinary way. Now if you’ve ever had young teenage daughters or sons around you understand their sense of justice is very resolute. They feel that they’re not loved it they’re not given justice. And usually what they need isn’t so much, you know, justice in the Biblical sense. And thank goodness for that because far be it for me to administer it. But they teach us, those young people, that justice is an act of love. So keep that in mind when you are tempted, or you know someone who is tempted, to think that God can’t punish us if he loves us so much. Oh, but punishment and justice is a part of God’s love.
And so when you feel convicted by the holiness of God and you feel the weight of your own sin, what are you to do? As you grow in faith, you ask God to help you increase your faith in Christ. You learn about Jesus because you will find that the weaknesses in the Bible and all around you who know God through Jesus, have been freed from their sin when they put their faith in His sacrificial death. You see, Jesus died for us and paid the penalty that we should rightly pay. And we, by faith, can be forgiven through His sacrifice and not our own. And that’s when faith saves us.
But it doesn’t just stop there. Because when Jesus was killed, he rose again from death on the third day. And our faith in His resurrection is where we get the hope of our own resurrection and the hope of our own existence beyond this earthly life. And after Jesus had been with us for a time, Jesus ascended to Heaven where he still sits and reigns today. Where he is with God today. And will come again. And that is the greatest hope of all. That is the hope of things to come. That we can all claim and enjoy and embrace, through faith. And so when we hear these promises we have to pray that God increases our faith so that we can experience that salvation and that hope and promise. And that is why you see so many happy Christians. And if they’re not happy, you need to tell them to pray for more faith because it will make them happier.
Faith is, after all, a hearty state of mind. Now what does hearty mean? I guess the simplest way to explain what I mean by that is to go down here to Marsh or Kroger’s and go to the soup section. And you see regular soup over here and over here you see hearty soup. Over here it’s chicken and stars and you’ve got to stir it up to see the stuff. Over here it’s hearty vegetable soup and it’s just full of stuff. And a person who asks God to increase their faith is bound to become more hearty or filled with more spiritual stuff. And you know the whole selling point of hearty soup versus plain old ordinary soup is that "it’s better for you". So asking God to make you a hearty soul increasing in faith daily is a way to make, for you, better stuff. To equip you to deal with the world in a better way. Faith is that inner boldness that makes us more than we ever dreamed we could be. It causes us to be able to do things we didn’t even know we had the gifts to do. It causes us to react to the world around us in an entirely different way. And sometimes an illogical way from the world’s eyes. But that’s because the world sees our faith as a rare occurrence reserved only for a moment of crises. The world sees our acts of kindness and mercy and justice as a way of buying ourselves a ticket to heaven. But we who have faith increasing daily with the power of the Holy Spirit, we are simply trying to express what’s happening inside us. Our works are not a way of trying to earn our salvation, they are simply works that are a response to the gift we’ve already been given. And faith is one of the ways that we reflect the gift that we’ve been given. That hearty state of mind is contagious. That faith is contagious. I dare say that for the one who has no faith in God and needs to make that leap, it may be in part because they haven’t been around too many people of faith or they might catch the disease. And I pray if they are here today they catch it from you. And that you make them so sick with it that they can’t ever go back. Faith is a hearty state of mind. It’s why Christians are so happy.
So we need to pray for faith every day. Nobody has enough as near as I can tell. I know I prayed for faith seven or eight times this morning. Once before I stood here to bring you this message. I pray for faith every hour because I never feel I have enough of it. And I hope that’s good. I want faith to increase to the point where I just have that same euphoria that the pilot described in the poem I opened with. So I ask for faith daily and I encourage you to do that. And we must all remember that our faith is in Jesus for our salvation. So that we’re not tempted to boast in our own works or anything that we do for our salvation. That our faith is in Jesus and that is why we are so darn happy. Because we couldn’t have paid that price. And our faith reveals that to us. And then I would ask that you pray daily that God causes you to express your faith outwardly in every moment of your life, in everything that you do and say. That your faith is evident not only when you’re faced with a crises, but when things seem to be going just fine. That kind of faith is what caused us to get the hymn we’re going to close with this morning. Dr. Ray Palmer in 1830 was on his own personal faith journey. He was thinking about his own relationship with God when he suddenly was just overcome with a need to write down some thoughts. His own story says that he never intended for the hymn, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee", to be heard by anybody or used for worship by anybody. He simply wrote it down because it was an expression of something that was happening in his life. As he said in his own words, it was at a moment when he had a great and deep apprehension or experience of God’s presence through Christ. So let’s sing that as our closing hymn in response to what God has been saying to us. That’s number 452 in your hymnal. And I invite you to stand now and sing, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee".
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