What Is A Spiritual Journey: Have You Been To Cloud City? The Great Leap Series

"Though his warrior father had carved out a kingdom for the crown prince, it was not big enough. This prince had a voracious appetite that could never be satisfied. That craving for more would send him to the ends of the earth in a never-ending quest that still astounds the world some 2,500 years later.

The crown prince was only twenty years old when his father was assassinated. After rounding up and ruthlessly executing all of his rivals, the boy conqueror began his long march across planet Earth. His army of some thirty thousand warriors blitzkrieged from the Balkans to India in less than thirteen years. They covered some ten thousand miles on sandaled feet.

The statistics of that amazing odyssey seem almost impossible. Its empire stretched from the Aegean to the Himalayas, across three continents. The conqueror’s rule spanned more than two million square miles of earth by the time he was thirty-two years of age.

When he reached the Indus River, his weary army refused to take on the war elephants of India. The troops wanted to go home. The ancient historian Plutarch wrote that Alexander wept like a baby because there were no more world to conquer.

With an unsatisfied hunger that still gnawed at his restless soul, Alexander marched back to Babylon, where he drank himself into a stupor. In June of the year 323 BC, he died at age thirty-two. The cause of his death is still mysterious. Most likely it was typhoid fever, but some suspect that his generals, who carved up his empire after his death, might have poisoned him.

Alexander was a man for whom the world was never big enough. His tutor, Aristotle, often lamented that young Alexander could conquer the world, but he was never able to conquer his own passions.

Pascal was right when he said that there is within us all a God-shaped vacuum as infinite as God himself. We can possess the whole universe and all that it contains and still not fill that vast emptiness within. If you have a soul hunger, you might want to remember this: When too much is never enough, give yourself to the infinite one, who is more than enough." -Quote from The One Year Book of Amazing Facts

And that today is what this message is really about. When it’s just never quite enough. We all face down this reality of wanting more and more, and eventually facing addictions of various kinds. The Bible calls them sins.

The enemy’s goal is to get us hooked on sins. The enemy wants us always searching to fill that empty feeling with stuff in the world. And never wants us to look to God to satisfy us.

So let me ask you this question, which is the title of our message: Have you ever been to cloud city?

Cloud City, the mysterious city, from Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back. The city in the clouds, where Han Solo, Leia, and Chewy are taken captive by Vader and the empire. And Vader sets a trap to bring Luke Skywalker there, to try and destroy him.

Cloud City reminds me of what it’s like to get sucked in by addiction, by sin. It seems fun at first. It seems beautiful. It’s glorious. It’s exciting. The colors, the clouds, the beautiful architecture, the magnificence of it. But soon you realize something isn’t quite right. Something is just a little off.

How does Vader get Luke to come to cloud city?

He captures his friends and tortures them. Luke can actually feel their pain in the force, and leaves to attempt to rescue them.

First point, the enemy will attack our family when we serve God, to try to hurt us. He will attack our family. And he will use circumstances and situations to harm us. I can sense it in my gut, when I’m in a potentially compromising situation. Maybe I’m hanging out with the wrong people. Or I’m in a place that puts me in front of temptation.

Recognize this friends, cloud city is a trap and a prison.

Let me ask you this question: What is your cloud city?

For me it was drug addiction. And that primrose path soon turns into a nightmare. I promise you that.

For you it might be relationship addiction, it might be cigarettes, maybe its gossip, or constant lying, or stealing or sexual addiction, or overeating, selfishness, rage, refusing to forgive, or self destructive behavior. Maybe it’s something you do repeatedly without even realizing it.

Cloud city is the trap we all face.

But cloud city is a mine, did you know that? A Tibanna gas mine. As beautiful as the clouds, the shining sun, the mysterious buildings, the cream colored hallways, it’s a trap.

It’s a mine. Many of us labor in those mines. The addiction is no longer satisfying anymore but we’re trapped in the mines, swinging the pick axe., serving the addiction, and it’s miserable.