December 14th, 2008
Chasing God
It seems to me that something has been lost. Do you ever feel like something is missing? You come to church sing some songs, hear some words, and you leave but do ever find that unsatisfying? I am not knocking church. Church is great. There is nothing really like the church…but do you ever feel like you want more? Do you ever just get tired of the religious traditions, and the programs of man, and going through the same motions week after week each time feeling a little emptier inside? Have you found your Bible reading something less than life changing? Have you found your prayers short of intimate? You know what I am talking about. We all feel this. We know there has to be something more to this life. And we desperately search for it. We will spend our time, our money, and a great portion of our lives looking for the pieces that we know are missing. You see we are hungry for that which is missing in our lives. We search with everything we have because we are desperate to fill the void inside of us.
Are you hungry? I want to show you something. Here I have fresh steak, just cooked; nice, juicy, ready to eat. Oh man, this steak looks good. Does anyone want this? Would anyone like to eat this steak? Maybe steak is not your thing. So I brought some pasta. This is linguini in a sun-dried tomato and basil sauce. Anyone interested? Yea, looks good right. But I have saved the best for last. This…is a trash bag. Inside I have some things like a rotting banana. Some crumbs of bread. This is just you know some left over’s tossed out. Anyone want eat this? Of course not. This is gross. You wouldn’t want to eat crumbs from the trash, not when there is a perfectly good steak or some fresh made pasta. Let me ask you this: if there was not steak. If there was no pasta, would you eat these left over’s if it meant staying alive? Would you eat this if it would give you a break from the hunger pains you were feeling? If you had gone a few weeks without food you would eat anything you could get your hands on.
When I was little I always used to tell my mom I was starving and I was going to die if she didn’t feed me right away. I was a dramatic kid. So she would offer me something like a tomato or an onion. I would turn my head in disgust and say eww…no I don’t want that. To which she would reply: then you are not starving. If you were starving you would eat this. I used to think that was annoying. Now I know she is right. The hungrier you are the less concern you have for what you are eating. Go a few days without food and you would become much less concerned for the quality of your food. Go a few weeks without food and you would be willing to eat almost anything, even Brussels sprouts. We understand that our body’s hunger for food and when they do we make sure to properly satisfy that hunger by eating. Yet even when we do this we can still feel unsatisfied.
You see something has been lost. We have forgotten about the hunger that exists inside of us all. We have allowed ourselves to fill our lives with senseless garbage so that we forget about the hunger that we have for God. We fill our lives with work, and games, and toys, and projects, and every other sort of thing that serves no greater purpose than to fill our life with more stuff. It’s almost as if we are trying to fill our lives with so much garbage that we forget about our hunger. When we come to church we are not looking for an almighty sovereign lord who gives us commands and rules to follow. We are just looking for enough God to fill in the gaps. We don’t come seeking the fullness of God, just enough to keep us from feeling empty. Week after week we come to church and pray before eating our food so that we can fill the holes. We trade away a genuine relationship with God for inoculations of Spirituality and then we surprised when we find ourselves something less than satisfied.
We are starving. Not for more money even though we like to think that would solve all of our problems. We are starving but not for nicer things. We are starving but not for a better spouse, a happier family, a better job. We are starving but not fame, not for friends, not for popularity or entertainment. We are starving for something more. We are starving for the one thing that is often missing from our lives, and sadly often from our churches. We are starving for God. We were created to fellowship with Him. The void that exists in our lives can only be filled by our creator. We can pour all the things we want into our lives but all they do is fill the hole, they cannot make our hearts complete. In Acts 17 we hear the Apostle Paul in one of his sermons say:
Ac 17:24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. Ac 17:25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. Ac 17:26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. Ac 17:27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
There is something missing from our hearts. The problem is we try to fill that void with the wrong things. Not all of these things are worldly or evil, in fact many of them are good. Sometimes good things keep us from the best things. Consider studying Scripture to learn about God. Normally that would be considered a good thing. But the danger comes when we invest our time studying things about God and forget about the God we are studying. Instead of knowing God we have settled for knowing things about God. That is not relationship. There is no intimacy there. There is a difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone. You can find every fact there is about a celebrity on the internet but that doesn’t mean you know them. That doesn’t make you friends. Do you want your spouse and friends to be able to list off facts about you or would you want them to know you? We get so focused on knowing about God that we forget about knowing God. Something good keeps us from something great.
Another problem comes when we fill our lives with religion rather than with a relationship. When we read God’s word we so often do so out of obligation or duty and not from a sincere desire to know God better. When we pray we pray because that is what we are supposed to do not because we are truly seeking to know God and to build intimacy with Him. We get so focused on doing things for God that we often forget about God. We serve Him, do food pantry’s, benevolence ministries, and all sorts of various services without recognizing why we are doing them or who we are serving. When we fill our hearts with a religion rather than with God we find ourselves unsatisfied. Sadly the honest truth is that most of us have allowed the gifts that God has given us to know Him to become religious obligations that we begrudgingly carry out. I can tell you right now if that is what you are doing. What do you feel when you skip a meal? Hungry? Don’t you mean guilty. Don’t you feel guilty when you skip a meal? How do you feel when you forget to read your Bible or something comes up that keeps you from it? Do you feel guilty? Because you should feel hungry. The Bible contains the bread of life that we need. When you read it because that is what you are told you are supposed to do then if you neglect it you feel guilty because you are looking at your relationship with God as some a duty to follow. If your missing your Bible reading for the day makes you hungry as if you skipped a meal then you are reading it with the proper understanding of its power.
Then the problem comes with the church. Just think of church. What if we didn’t have a building? Oh no, you can’t do that then there is no church. We allow Godly things to get in the way of God. Think about it: what would you do if we decided that there would no longer be music on Sunday mornings? If we said we are just going to do away with worship at church what would you do? Oh no, you can’t do that you can’t have church without songs! Why? What if said we were going to stop having sermons? Oh no, you can’t do that you can’t have church without a sermon! Why? We enslave ourselves to traditions and practices that make us comfortable and forget what those practices are all about in the first place. You don’t have to have a sermon, music or a designated building to worship God. But we fill our lives with traditions rather than with God because traditions are safe and we can control them. Deep down, some part of us is more comfortable doing ‘Godly things’ than entering into God’s presence. If you have a steak, why would you eat garbage?
Another problem comes when we seek God for the wrong reasons. How often do we put Jesus in a box? Do we use Him when it suits us? How often do we turn to God when we find it convenient and then ignore Him when He’s not? How often do we seek God not for who He is but for what He can do for us. We seek God so often for His hands. We want His blessings, we want money, we answers, we want strength, we want hope, we want eternal life. We just don’t seem that interested in Him. It is time that we stopped seeking the hands of God and started seeking the face of God. It is time we stopped looking for what God can do for us and just started looking for God.
We see to have forgotten that none of these things are God. None of things are really all that important. We have divisions and conflicts within the church because people are making ‘Godly things’ more important than God. We put our focus on what we do rather than try to seek His face. I am guilty of it, I have those points where I say: I have to write a sermon for Sunday. Why? Because that is what you do on Sunday. But why? Our gathering here is not to listen to a message or to sing some songs. Our gather here is for one purpose to encounter the presence of God. The reason that church has become so unsatisfying to so many people is that we are not really seeking God we are merely trying to use Spirituality to satisfy our hunger but what we are learning is that it doesn’t work.
We are coming to the church which says that it has the bread of life. Yet there is no bread. All there is are crumbs. Crumbs from the glory days where man walked with God and they communed together. Those of us who have been in the church for awhile don’t even seem to mind anymore. We don’t even seem to notice that the church is not giving out the same bread that we read about in Scripture. We seem satisfied with eating crumbs from the carpet and are confused when people come into the church and are not interested in what we have.
The world is hungry. Just look at them. Billions of dollars every year are invested in psychics, and mediums, and tarot card readers. Men give money time listening to monks and priests sharing with them senseless superstitions and they follow them because they are desperate to find something. The world desperately seeks anything that can give them meaning. You cant tell me that this world isn’t hungry. They are starving. They are starving for something and the problem is there are looking everywhere but the church. People come in and check it out and then leave…why? There is only one conclusion that can be drawn: we are not feeding them.
Starving people will always flock to a place where there is food. If the church was giving them what they needed, if the church was feeding them they would come to us in numbers we could not contain. The reason we have not grown. The reason the church in America is not growing by leaps and bounds is that we are not giving the people what they need. We are not feeding them. In a starving world if the church of God truly was giving out the bread of life people would flock to us faster than we could build a building for, even with multiple services. A starving world would find a place that had food. The reason they don’t go looking to the church is because we have run out of bread. The crumbs of God’s presence keep us here but they don’t grow us, they don’t give us enough. The problem with church grow is not in a lack of advertising. As much I wish it was the problem is not people are too busy or not committed enough. The problem is that the church is not giving them what we promise. We are not feeding them.
We see the glory of the past while missing the glory we could have right now at this moment. In the beginning God walked with Adam in the garden. God walked with Abraham. We look at these men and their connection to God and say wow what would that be like? Why do we settle for wondering when God has made Himself available for that right now? We could experience God like they did in the past but we have become complacent. We have allowed ourselves to be satisfied by crumbs from glory past rather than desiring to experience the fullness of the glory of God.
We must learn to chase after God again. We must learn to seek His presence in our lives. It is time we stopped settling for crumbs and started looking for the feast that has been prepared for us. We must learn to keep God as the focus of our lives. Not Godly things. Not Spiritual things. Not good things. God. Our worship, our service, our prayers, and our reading of His word must be done out of a desire for intimacy with Him not out of obligation. To do these things for the wrong reasons makes them pointless. So the real question is are you ready to trade your knowledge of God for a relationship with God? Are you ready to put your religion away and replace it with an intimate relationship? Are you ready to chase God instead of some illusive idea?
