When God Makes You Uncomfortable
Faith Basics, part 3
Wildwind Community Church
David K. Flowers
Sept. 9, 2007
Jn. 3:19-21
Human beings have a funny way of thinking about things a lot of the time. We always wonder if our experiences are “normal,” that is to say “like the experiences of other people.” We all wonder sometimes, “Am I crazy?” We freak out at the possibility that our experience might be different from the experiences of others. We want to stay within the norms, firmly inside the mainstream. On the other hand, people often get offended when you suggest to them that they are mainstream and predictable and like everyone else. What is this strange need we have to feel unique, combined with an equally strong need to fit in and be like others? On the one hand we want to control our own lives and be independent and we feel like our style is cramped when a church or a religion tells us what to do. On the other hand, we drive ourselves nuts trying to figure out what to do, and even get critical at times of the churches and religions that don’t have the answers we are looking for, right when we want them. And when it comes to God, people often have one of two images. One is that God is a sweet, harmless cosmic Santa Claus who will just smile and pat you on the head no matter what you do – he just wants you to be happy, because like many of us, he thinks that individual happiness is the most important thing on earth and as long as you’re happy, he’s happy. The other is that God is a vengeful, hateful, angry, cosmic bean-counter, sitting in heaven somewhere making marks on a blackboard every time you screw up and barely able to wait for the moment when he can gleefully send you to hell.
Let me ask you something. Is it possible the truth about these things is somewhere in the middle? Do you think maybe people have a need to both be unique and to fit in? Of course. Is it possible that we want a sense of control over our lives, but we also want/need to know what the limits are sometimes? Absolutely, I believe that’s true. And is it equally possible that God cannot be actually understood either as the cosmic feel-good guy who exists for our pleasure, nor the hateful hell-sender who takes pleasure in our misery? I believe that is not only possible, but likely. Any time we give in to all-or-nothing thinking, we are oversimplifying and likely to miss the nuanced truth.
So last week’s message was not meant to leave the impression that God is a full-time dispenser of warm fuzzies. Last week we looked at a God who gently, calmly, and quietly calls us to himself – a God who does not use things like jealousy, false guilt, and fear to manipulate us into doing what he wants us to do. But this is not to say that being or getting close to God will always make us comfortable. Much to the contrary, in fact.
I am convinced that there is no person in this world more comfortable than the person who has made peace with the idea that there is no God. That person never has to worry excessively about meeting any standard other than the relatively low one most of us hold ourselves to. He never has to really exert himself to achieve disciplined control over his thoughts and his actions. He never even has to struggle with the idea that he hasn’t yet become something he was “meant” to be, for we cannot be meant to become something if there is no one to “mean” it. Now THAT is comfort. That is peace.
Following God will bring peace to your life, but not this kind of peace. To believe in God, and to commit to serving him, is to acknowledge a standard for living life that is far above our own, and even far above our ability to meet. It is a lifestyle of effort to achieve disciplined control over our thoughts and actions. It is to frequently wonder if we are becoming who God meant us to be. That’s part of the deal. There are all kinds of little discomforts we will endure just by virtue of accepting that there is a God who created us intentionally and wants to know us. But this is to be expected. After all, men, you could avoid ever being wrong about anything if you simply avoided women, right? Women, if there were no men, you could surround yourself with other women and just live all your life in a sensitive universe, right? By virtue of being in a relationship with someone, we encounter dozens of little discomforts, and it’s some of the discomforts that come from a relationship with God that I want to talk to you about this morning.
I have come up with four particular times when you will find yourself in significant discomfort because of God. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. It’s the rare sermon where we can say everything about any topic that needs to be said. These are just a few ideas of what I think are the main ones.
Sometimes you will experience discomfort because of God. At the end of every summer I have to take down my pool and put it into storage. Our pool filter sits on a concrete slab. In a few days I’m going to go out and take down that pool, and I’m going to bend down and lift up that cement slab. And when I do, what’s going to happen? There are going to be hundreds of bugs that have lived happily under that slab all summer, and they’re gonna get a rude awakening. See, they have no use for the light. They’re under there right now just doing fine, and when I lift up that slab and light steams into their little world, what are they going to do? They’re going to run for the darkness, wherever they can find it. Into a hole, into the grass – anything to keep from being exposed to the light. See, in the light they can be seen. And being seen does not bring good things into a bug’s world. Light can mean the end of its existence. It probably gets either stepped on or eaten when the light shines. If you have lived your life in the darkness, doing things that the darkness has concealed all your life, it’s not gonna feel good if the light suddenly comes pouring into your life, is it? Oftentimes bugs experience discomfort when light streams in. Let’s look at our text for today. These are the words of Jesus:
John 3:19-21 (MSG)
19 "This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God.
20 Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure.
21 But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is."
Are you seeing it? Men and women going about their lives. All of us just doing our own thing, perfectly content in the darkness – in fact, grateful for it, since it kept the things we were doing from being exposed. Heck, that darkness kept even us from having to see our sin. But suddenly Christ – the light of life – comes into the world. And people panicked. And one day somebody – some sinful person who loved his darkness – thought, “We gotta get this guy hanging from a tree as soon as possible.” Jesus was like the new employee who comes to your workplace and is more talented and works harder than everybody else. His goodness exposes the badness of others, which before that hadn’t really been noticed because there was nothing to point it out. People don’t recognize his talent, thank him for his work, and ask him to show them how to improve. Instead they talk trash about him behind his back, maybe to his face, and look for ways to slow him down or get him fired so they can go back to life as usual. But you know who loves this guy? The manager. The boss, who has devoted her entire life to this company, and wants her store to be the best it can be. She sees his excellence and for the first time realizes things can be better than they are. See, anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes the light so the work can be seen for what it is.
Are you getting it? My friends, the times when God will make you uncomfortable are the times when his light shines into the darkest places in your life. Every time God gets close and you get uncomfortable, you have a choice to make. I want to talk now about four of these times, and as we go we’ll deal with the unique choice presented by each circumstance.
First is when you are far from him and do not know him as the forgiver of your sins and the leader of your life. God will draw you to himself. He’ll expose you to the light. The Bible teaches that God pursues you, that he wants you to know him and he wants to know you.
Matthew 18:12 (AMP)
12 What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray and gets lost, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go in search of the one that is lost?
This is what God does. After you come to know God, God isn’t going to say, “Great, I guess I’m done searching, let’s watch TV.” He’s going to leave you in the fold with the others who’ve been found and go out to get the next one who’s missing. And he will not rest until he has gotten everyone who is willing to be found into the fold. Finding and folding, finding and folding – that’s what Christ is about – that’s the work God does. He seeks you, he draws you to himself, and he puts you safely in the fold and goes back out to find and fold others. Not only that, but he calls you to join him in that work – but that’s another sermon altogether!
God pursues human beings. The Holy Spirit has even been called, “the hound of heaven.” God knows right where you are. You cannot hide from him. He sees everything you do – all the sin you commit. He knows your thoughts of all the sin you’d like to commit but lack the opportunity. He knows everything you tell yourself to rationalize your attitudes and behaviors.
Hebrews 4:13 (NIV)
13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
God has a way of cutting through the rationalizations, exposing the truth about who we are, ringing the life and the validity out of our excuses, and revealing us to ourselves as spiritual frauds and imposters. Sound comfortable to you? Of course not! The person who is being sought by God will experience frequent times of discomfort. Every time God gets closer, they will feel that pinch. Every time they hear a sermon, they will have to do mental backflips to keep from rushing to the front after service to give their lives to God. They’ll tell themselves everything they can think of. They’ll get mad at the preacher. If they’re talking to a Christian friend, they’ll get mad at the friend. They’ll threaten to never again return to their church, and at the time they’ll mean it. But most of the time they’ll go back. Wanna know why? My friends, it’s because somewhere inside they want to be found. And God knows it. God knows it better than any of us – and God will continue to pursue. But not forever. A time will come when the person God is pursuing understands that it is God who pursues and that they have a choice to make. Run toward God, or decide to continue to run away. Run toward the light, or find another rock to hide under. If they continue running from God, God will not pursue forever. God will eventually give every person what they want and will stop pursuing them entirely. The feelings of discomfort will go away. Sermons will cease speaking to them. They will become hard toward spiritual things. At that point, they will become comfortable again – and they will be in the greatest spiritual danger of their lives. So God will often make us uncomfortable when we do not know him. And remember I said there’s a choice we’re presented with in each of these times of discomfort. When we’re uncomfortable because God is drawing us to himself, our choice is to accept God or to reject him. Some of you are facing that choice today. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what I recommend.
Second, God will make us uncomfortable when we do know him and belong to him, but we have sinned. I have taught you over and over that at the moment you commit your life to Christ, you spring to life spiritually. You find yourself feeling remorse for things you may never have felt remorse for in the past. Your conscience (which I believe is simply the voice of God in every person) becomes tender and sensitive to God. God will find all kinds of ways to remind you that your sin has separated you from him. Let’s look at one extraordinary example.
King David is called in scripture a man after God’s own heart. But he did something really bad. He saw a woman taking a bath on her rooftop one day and he wanted her. So he sent her husband to the front lines in battle and arranged for him to be killed. Then David took this woman for his own and got her pregnant. God sends the prophet Nathan to tell the King he has done a wicked thing. Of course I imagine Nathan is less than thrilled with this job, because all David has to say is “Off wth his head” and Nathan’s a goner. But here’s what happens. Nathan goes to the King and tells him a story. Let’s pick up there with that story he tells David.
2 Samuel 12:1-10 (MSG)
1 … Nathan said to him, "There were two men in the same city—one rich, the other poor.
2 The rich man had huge flocks of sheep, herds of cattle.
3 The poor man had nothing but one little female lamb, which he had bought and raised. It grew up with him and his children as a member of the family. It ate off his plate and drank from his cup and slept on his bed. It was like a daughter to him.
4 "One day a traveler dropped in on the rich man. He was too stingy to take an animal from his own herds or flocks to make a meal for his visitor, so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared a meal to set before his guest."
5 David exploded in anger. "As surely as God lives," he said to Nathan, "the man who did this ought to be lynched!
6 He must repay for the lamb four times over for his crime and his stinginess!"
7 "You’re the man!" said Nathan. "And here’s what God, the God of Israel, has to say to you: I made you king over Israel. I freed you from the fist of Saul.
8 I gave you your master’s daughter and other wives to have and to hold. I gave you both Israel and Judah. And if that hadn’t been enough, I’d have gladly thrown in much more.
9 So why have you treated the word of God with brazen contempt, doing this great evil? You murdered Uriah the Hittite, then took his wife as your wife. Worse, you killed him with an Ammonite sword!
10 And now, because you treated God with such contempt and took Uriah the Hittite’s wife as your wife, killing and murder will continually plague your family.
Yikes. You figure David was comfortable with this? I can’t imagine what that confrontation must have felt like for him. He has just committed a big combo – murder and adultery. Nathan has just told a story which parallels what he did, and David has just said that the man in the story deserves to die. Then Nathan brings out the zinger – “That man is you.” Wow. Nathan lifted David’s rock, didn’t he? He lifted up that slab and revealed David scurrying around in the darkness there. By the time he was done, David had basically admitted he deserved to die for what he had done.
Now let’s talk about choices. At that moment David had a choice to make. Repent or justify. That’s the choice we have to make when we sin and are confronted with it. We can repent of our sin and come clean, or we can launch into a string of excuses and justify it. Wanna know what David did?
Psalm 51
For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.
1 Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are proved right when you speak
and justified when you judge.
5 Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
6 Surely you desire truth in the inner parts ;
you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.
7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins
and blot out all my iniquity.
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will turn back to you.
14 Save me from bloodguilt, O God,
the God who saves me,
and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.
15 O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
17 The sacrifices of God are a
broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart,
O God, you will not despise.
This is one beautiful, humble confession, isn’t it? This is one reason why David was called a man after God’s own heart. When confronted by his deepest sins in the most humiliating way, his heart was tender – he responded with repentance, not self-justification. God will often make us uncomfortable when we sin. Our choice is to repent or to justify. If there is currently known sin in your life, what will your response be?
Third, God will often make you uncomfortable when you need to make a significant life change. We talked a lot about fear last week and this is where fear comes in. Change is scary. If we do not know Christ, inviting Christ into our lives is change, and it’s scary. If we have sinned, sin requires repentance which means changing direction, and it’s scary. But at other times you may need to change. Maybe God lays a burden on your heart to start a certain ministry and it’s one that doesn’t fit the direction of your church, and so you sense possibly you need to explore changing churches. That’s scary. Maybe it’s a career move, or starting a business or working fewer hours to be with your family, or getting fit, or going to counseling, or whatever it might be. Those things will bring fear. I’ll leave this one now because I talked about God and fear last week, but your choice here will always be a choice between faith and fear. You can move toward the future, move toward God, move into exploration and prayer about what you might need to do, or you can allow fear to paralyze you.
Fourth, you will frequently get uncomfortable when you are going down a road that is unwise and that will probably hurt you.
Psalms 121:5-8 (NIV)
5 The LORD watches over you-- the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
6 the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
7 The LORD will keep you from all harm-- he will watch over your life;
8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.
Here you have a promise that when you are going a bad way, God will let you know. God’s Spirit in you will watch over you. It may be something you hear in a sermon. It may be caring words from a friend (will you listen to them, or ignore them?). It may be something you read in God’s Word. It may take nothing more than listening to the voice of truth and reason in your own heart. When that happens, it will often be uncomfortable.
I think many people live bitter lives toward God because of things that have gone wrong in their past. And yet I would gently ask, “Were you more open to God’s desires or to your own?” I have frequently said that the majority (not all but most) of our greatest heartaches are things we brought upon ourselves by refusing to listen to wisdom. God has promised to direct our paths, but we must be listening and willing to look to the light, even when it hurts our eyes.
The choice here? In every decision, in everything you do, you have the choice to listen or lunge. You can quiet your heart, pray, speak to trusted and mature friends, consult God’s Word, talk to your small group and ask them to pray, listen attentively to sermons, and genuinely seek God’s desire for you at every turn. Or you can lunge into whatever you want, ignoring common sense, ignoring your own conscience, ignoring God’s Word, the concerns of those who know and love you best, etc. That’s your choice. Listen or lunge.
I preached this message today because we need to learn how to identify God’s voice and God’s activity in our lives, and since discomfort is what sometimes happens when we hear from God, we need to understand discomfort itself as a sign that God may be speaking to us. If we understand this, we can be prepared to choose to accept God or reject him, repent of sin or justify ourselves, to choose faith over fear, to listen carefully or just to lunge forward and do whatever we want to anyway.
So finally, I want to point out that we can use these things in themselves as markers that we are on a wrong road. Right now at this moment, are you rejecting God? That’s a wrong road. The right road is surrender to him. Are you justifying yourself for something? That’s a wrong road. The right road is repentance. Are you choosing the path of fear? That’s a wrong road. The right road is the path of faith. Are you just lunging into something you want to do because it’s what you want? That’s a wrong road. The right road is listening to God. I warn you today to not make it your habit to avoid all discomfort. Some discomfort is from God, because you find yourself standing in his light. I encourage you to learn to live in that light, not to scurry back to the cover of darkness. Can we pray together?
God, will you hear the simple prayer this morning of the one who says, “God I accept you into my life – please forgive my sins and be the leader of my life. Thank you Jesus for what you have done for me.” Will you hear the prayer of the one who says, “I sincerely repent of the sin I have committed.” Hear the one who says, “I commit this day to choose faith over fear – God, what risk do you want me to take?” And hear the one who says, “God, I am listening and I will allow you to protect me.” Help us to care more about your desires for our lives than our own. Amen.
We’re going to play a song ("Psalm 51") to close our message time this morning and it’s just a time for you to reflect on where you are as we move into worship. I encourage you to listen to the words and respond to God in your heart.
