"A Hunger After God"
Sermon Transcript for August 25, 2002
Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:6 & 13:44-46
By Rev. Mike Beck
I believe I’d been in the ministry three or four years. Long enough to realize a lot of things you needed to know about the ministry, they didn’t teach you in Seminary. And I was spiritually a little dry and physically a little weak; and so I decided I would take three days and I rented a room in the seminary in Kentucky that I attended and went down simply for a personal, spiritual retreat with the Lord. On the morning of the second day I wondered whether Dr. Y.D. Westerfield might be in his office over at the college. I’d been converted as a young boy under Y.D.’s preaching. Y.D. was in his mid-eighties at that time and still working full time. So I took a break and walked across the street and found out where his office was; and he was in it. He was very gracious as Y.D. was to receive me. We were down on our knees in prayer before I left; and I will never forget one of the things he told me that day. He said, "Mike, your primary task in ministry is first of all to keep your own hunger after God fresh and new. But then beyond that," he said, "do everything you can to create within your people a hunger after God. For if they hunger after God, everything else they’re worried about will take care of itself." If they are hungering after the things of God—I’ve never forgotten that.
As I mentioned last week, there are many opportunities and challenges before us here at Grace Church. There are some significant "faith-moments" in the coming nine months that how we respond to them will chart our future for several decades to come. And in light of that I indicated last week the Lord had laid three foundational messages on my heart as we kind of enter that nine-month period. Last week I talked about "The Love of God". Next week I want to talk about "The Joy of the Lord" which will be so needed to sustain us in times when we get weary. Today I want to talk about "A Hunger After God".
And I want to begin by indicating some of the things that a hunger after God is not. Hungering after God is not becoming a religious fanatic. Hungering after God is not spending all of your time at church. The last I checked if you were spending all of your time in church, when in the world were you having time to be salt and light in a dark and broken world. And as Dan mentioned in his welcome this morning, hungering after God does not mean that we do everything perfectly. Boy, Peter and David are good examples of that! They hungered after God but they blew it royally on numerous occasions.
On Wednesday evenings I’m currently leading a study by Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell entitled, "The Road Map to Wholeness". Kirbyjon, who is the pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in America, reminds us that the Greek word for salvation, "sodzo", at its essence means "wholeness". When we hunger after God, friends, we’ll find wholeness. When we hunger after God we’ll find the meaning and purpose of our life. I invite you to join us in that study. You can come on board at any point of time. In the first lesson this last week, Kirbyjon said there are two tremendously significant events in our life. First is when we were born. The second is when we discover "why" we were born. Hungering after God helps us to do that.
When we hunger after God, we begin to exhibit the "fruits of the Spirit"—love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and faithfulness; self-control. When we hunger after God, we’ll find an abundant life now and we’ll discover life eternal. And if you’ve been listening to what I just said, those things sound like awfully desirable things. But why is it as desirable as those things are--wholeness, life abundant, life eternal, the fruit of the spirit—then why is it that so few persons really hunger after God and instead are content to settle for a cheap imitation of faith instead of the real thing? Let me suggest four reasons I thing that happens.
We Listen and Give in to the Lies of the Enemy. The first is this, in our minds we listen and give in to the lies of the enemy. Now, Satan is not out there in a red cloak with a pitchfork and a long tale. But I want to tell you he’s very alive and real. And one of the things he does to you daily is to whisper sweet lies in your ear that cause you not to hunger after the things of God. If you haven’t read it, you ought to read C.S. Lewis’ classic book, The Screwtape Letters, in which Satan tells his emissary here on earth how to get the believer off track. I’m going to re-read it again this week because I know one of Satan’s tactics in the important nine months ahead will be to try and get your Senior pastor off track. So I want to freshen up on the tricks of the enemy.
Our Pride. Our pride keeps us from hungering after God. A feeling – I don’t need that. Now I like Frank Sinatra as a singer, but one of his songs will lead you straight on the road to hell. It’s the song, "I Did It My Way". And there are a lot of people in life not hungering after God because they’re going to do it their way.
Our Busyness. Our busyness keeps us from hungering after God. In fact in this little book, The Screwtape Letters, if I remember right, one of the things Satan said was "If nothing else works, just get them busy so they no longer have time to pray or to be in the Word." Remember Jesus’ parable, the sower? He said some of the seed fell on rocky ground and started to grow. But the cares of the world, the problems of the day, choked out the seed. Our busyness can do that.
Faulty Perception of God. And then, fourthly, a faulty perception of God keeps us from hungering after Him. We fear we won’t really like the things of God or that following Christ leads to a life that is dull and boring. That’s not what Jesus said. He said, "I’ve come that you might have life in all its fullness." So those things prevent us from hungering after God.
Before we go any further, I want to bring us back to our Scripture for today. Those wonderful words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Message Translation are translated this way; "You’re blessed (happy) when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat!" That’s a nice image. When I think about the best meal I ever ate, I think about Ruth Crist Steakhouse. And this translation says look up a good appetite for God is food and drink and the best meal you’ve ever ate. The verse we sang, "Seek First the Kingdom", tells us God is concerned about your burdens today. And I know as the pastor of this church some of you hearing my words today are burdened down in many ways—financially, relationally, loss. God is concerned about those things, but he says don’t get the order backwards! Seek me first so that I can be there with you to help you deal with the things that I also am concerned about. And then in the parables of Matthew 13, the kingdom of God that we see in those parables are so valuable, that those two men went and sold everything they had so they could buy it!
When we talk about hungering after God we’re talking about discovering the essence of life-- the "living water" that Jesus told the lady at the well who had come to gather the water. And He said that water is important, but you’ll thirst again from that water. I want to talk to you about water that will cause you to never thirst again! David said, "My soul yearns for the Lord. My heart and flesh cry out for the living God." Jesus said, "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?" And Augustine, one of the early church fathers, who if you have not read his confessions I urge you to do so. Augustine knew how to party hearty at an early age. But then he found Christ and he said, "My soul cannot rest until it finds its rest in Thee."
What is it that happens when individuals and churches truly hunger after the things of God?
I want to move now to a very practical arena and list very quickly eight things that we can do in our day-to-day lives to stir within us a hunger after God. I want you to listen carefully to the first one. It’s one you may not have thought about.
1. God Really Does Love Me. It actually begins with what I talked about in last week’s message. A hunger after God actually begins with the realization that God loves you! Lloyd Ogilvie and his wonderful book on the parables, Autobiography of God, his title on the chapter related to these two parables is, "The Treasure is You". Listen to this incite, he says, "You cannot say God is everything to me until you can say and believe I am everything to God." He goes on to write, "So often the Gospels preach or taught in the grim ambiance of what we must give up in order to realize God’s grace. That’s backwards," he writes. "What God has done for us is the only adequate motivation for what we are to do and to be in response. We can seek first the kingdom of God only after we know that he has sought us and having found us loves us with an acceptance and a forgiveness that knows no boundary." In fact, here’s the real interesting take on these parables. He said, "Jesus is saying you are the treasure. You are the pearl of great promise. I have found you." It doesn’t happen out of duty, it starts realizing God loves me.
2. Personal Relationship with God. We’re not going to hunger after God until we’ve entered in to a personal relationship with God that goes beyond the "head" and touches the "heart". For friends, we can know all about God and not know God. The twelve inches from your head to your heart makes an eternal difference!
3. Know Christ Not Only As Savior, but Also as the Lord of our Lives. The sad fact is that all too many persons who call themselves believers in actuality only want a quarter’s worth of God, a God of convenience that might bring some degree of comfort to their life. We’ll begin to hunger after God when we want to know Christ not only as Savior but also as Lord. We put those two terms together—Jesus as my Lord and Savior. They are very different things.
4. Spiritual Disciplines. The pathway to hunger after God always follows the way of the spiritual disciplines that God has laid out in His Word--prayer and scripture and meditation and worship and sharing with other believers. I don’t have time to flush this out, but God has said in His Word, "If you’ll use these disciplines, they’ll awaken within you faith, which will lead to a hunger after Me." Spiritual disciplines are a pathway we follow.
5. Slow Down. And then in a related way, number five. The sad fact is that most of those things never happen in our life until we learn to slow down and "be still and know that I am God". We’ve got to slow down to allow that hunger to develop.
6. Have a crisis in your life! We started this week; there is a Worship Planning Team of about seven people that meet on Wednesday afternoon to plan our worship services. And we’re always pressed for time, so I started this week on Monday evening I e-mailed all of the members of the team with the sermon title, the scripture lesson, and some leading thought questions and urged them to e-mail me their replies. Boy, did it make the sermon preparation easier to have seven people working on it. Reverend Dan he mailed me the sixth thing I want to mention that I would never have thought of but it’s oh so true. And I really don’t want you to have to learn to hunger after God this way, but when I asked the question, What are the things that cause us to hunger after God?, here’s number six—have a crisis. Isn’t that true? When a crisis hits us, we’re on our knees and in God’s face because we’ve learned our own resources aren’t sufficient. I can’t just do it my way; I need God. September 11 did that for us last year; I’m just afraid we forgot the lessons we learned.
7. Daily, Conscious Decisions. Make daily conscious decisions that put God first in your life. It’s not just run down to the alter of prayer and say, "Lord, I want to hunger after you." Our life is normally shaped by the small decisions we make every day. Deanna’s comment she e-mailed back to me she said, "In every decision, ask yourself this question, "Does this choice allow me to seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness, or does it create a barrier to that taking place? That’s an awfully good barometer for our decisions.
8. Put our Possessions into Proper Perspective. For us to hunger after God, we’ll have to put our possessions into proper perspective. You’ve heard me use this quote before, but I tell you, the more I think about it the more profoundly I think it’s true. "Whatever gets your attention ultimately gets you."
Cindy Winteregg said, "Discover what happens spiritually in your life when you trust God with your finances and give up some material things.’ There’s a whole lot of truth in the quote that we’ve got to "give up" in order to "go up".
Matthew 6:24 – "We cannot serve two masters". In that teaching Jesus was talking about "our stuff". And friends, when the hearse takes you on your final road, you’re not going to take a bit of that stuff with you! Some of you aren’t experiencing the "joy of the Lord" because your "stuff" is standing in the way. You’re trying spiritually to straddle the barbwire fence of life with one foot on God’s side but one foot holding onto the things of the world. And friends’, straddling the fence is a terribly uncomfortable position!
Are you wiling to be honest this morning as God asks you the question, "Do you hunger after me?" As individuals, when we hunger after God we no longer care what others think. Let’s use the analogy of the two men in the parables. One found the treasure in the field; the other found the pearl. Can you imagine what their friends were saying when they went to the bank and said I want to cash out every asset I have because I found this pearl? That pearl was of such value they didn’t care what other people thought. But are we as a church truly hungering after God or are we more interested in strictly maintaining the status quo, expecting the church to be primarily concerned about taking care of me? Friends, when a church hungers after God the key thing that persons are focusing on have nothing to do with form or tradition. See, our priorities have changed. Instead the most important thing going on is the lives being changed by the transforming power of the risen Lord. That’s what matters.
I think there are some things we need to pray about this morning that have to do with where are hearts are. I want to ask you to bow your head. The altar is open if there are any of you that would like to come and spend some time here at the altar in prayer. It’s a powerful place, but you’ll never get any pressure from this pastor for we can pray and make that pew an altar. And I want you to just take a moment now to look at the power of the Holy Spirit in your heart to see if there is a hunger after God there. If it’s lacking, invite God to put it there. I want you to take a moment now to shift from the individual to our church. For Y.D. up there in heaven, I’ve got to tell you, you’re right. If we hunger after God everything else will take care of it’s own. Would you pray that God will create within the heart of our church a hunger after God and that men and women, boys and girls through the ministry of this church will come to know the love of God we talked about last week. Finally, I want you to just remain in an attitude of prayer. I want you to put this picture in your mind. Pictures are so valuable. Let’s picture a deer wandering through the fields in this dry summer we’ve been in. And he goes to some places he used to find water and they are dried up. He keeps wandering and finally comes to a small hill and looks down and there is a flowing stream. He bounds down the hill and takes that long beautiful neck and bends it to the water and his tongue comes up and he sips the water into his dry neck. And as you keep that image in your mind, remember the words of David, "As the deer pants after streams of water, so my soul longs after you, oh God." Make that our prayer, precious Jesus. Amen.
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn