Spiritual Formation Series: Sermon 1: Desiring God - November 2, 2014
In the next few weeks we’re going to be looking at a subject that we’ve never addressed in depth, to my recollection. We’re going to explore the Scriptures and look at spiritual formation.
The topic today is “Spiritual Formation: Desire”.
Over the next few weeks we’ll explore what it means to follows Jesus as He models self-denial, as He models what it means for us to carry our cross, and the final message, from Bill Ryan, will look at what it means to commit and sustain our commitment to growing in Christ with genuine determination.
Just a few words about spiritual formation. All people everywhere are in the process of being formed spiritually, whether or not we recognize it. We are growing toward God, or we are not growing toward God.
Life, and our responses to all that happens to us and around us, shapes us. As Christians, we are becoming like Jesus, we are ultimately predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ (Rom 8:29).
That means that its God’s intention and purpose and plan that we become like Jesus in holiness, in love, in compassion, in caring for one another.
Spiritual formation is the process of becoming like Jesus. It is the way that God shapes us, recreates us, molds and makes us to be what He intends us to be. It’s a given that, abiding in Jesus, we will continue to grow toward being like Jesus until the day we die, or until Jesus returns.
God wants us to be like Jesus, because that’s how we are the most free, the most joyful and the most effective at doing His will.
God works with us in this process. He doesn’t overwhelm our wills, forcing us to obey Him, forcing us to become like Jesus. We bring certain things to the table and God brings certain things to the table in this process.
God brings His power, His love, His Holy Spirit, His faithfulness, His constancy, His patience and mercy. What God brings is impressive and huge and is what really brings us to the place where we need to be, as we grow to be like Jesus.
What we bring is our hurt, our sin, our brokenness, our histories, our questions, our doubts. That’s not a particularly impressive list. Perhaps the most important thing that we can bring is a desire for God.
A genuine longing to know God, to be found in Him, and to allow God to lead us, to direct us, ultimately to call the shots in our lives as the One who is Lord of our lives. What we can bring is the desire to seek God. But there is a problem.
No One Seeks God
The Apostle Paul, the writer of the Book of Romans, writes this:
Romans 3:10: As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. 12 All have turned away...”
That’s a quote from Psalm 14, written many hundreds of years earlier. Still applied at the time that Paul wrote the Book of Romans. Still applies today.
There isn’t any person who seeks God, from his or her own initiative. There isn’t a one of us that, out of the goodness of our hearts, wants to pursue God.
Since the fall of humankind, everything is broken. This includes our relationship with God, and it includes our wills. Neither you nor I have the will or the inclination to seek after God.
Does that surprise you to hear? Nobody here gets brownie points for being the one person who is the exception to the rule.
We all lack what the Bible calls righteousness and we all lack understanding of God. And none of us seek Him.
I kind of wish that wasn’t true, because it seems a harsh assessment of humanity as a whole and of me personally. Not really a great boost to the ego.
But if that’s the case, and it is, where does that leave us? If I were you I’d be thinkin’: “I’m not sure I like this preacher. Kind of a downer”.
Well, we are left, by this passage and a lot of other passages, with a distinct sense of being pretty helpless when it comes to anything to do with God.
But of course we don’t take our complete understanding from any one verse by itself. We need to know and reflect on the whole counsel, the full counsel of the Word of God.
And what we really need, WHO we really need, is Jesus to give us hope. And Jesus to make a way.
That takes us to a statement by Jesus in John 6:44. He says:“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day”.
No One Seeks God Unless God Draws Them
So, yes, it’s true that no one seeks God of his own accord. No one can come to God by themselves. BUT...the good news is that God draws us to Himself. God takes the first step, He takes the initiative to draw us to Jesus.
Do you sense God drawing you closer to Himself? Are you here today as someone who is wondering about faith, considering the words and the claims to divinity of Jesus?
Are you drawn to Jesus, despite your questions, despite your doubts? Are you wondering what life would be like to live it as a fully committed follower of Jesus Christ?
Well...surprise...God is drawing you in. HE wants YOU. and because of that He has brought you to this place to experience a little of what it might mean to gather with God’s people, to journey together with others who are intent on following Jesus because we’ve been called by Jesus.
Here you can ask your questions in a safe place. And I hope you will ask your questions. It’s only as we seek answers to the things that trouble us that we find that those barriers are nowhere near as big as we thought they were.
Or are you here as someone who has loved and followed Jesus for some time now, but you are thinking, you are sensing, that God is wooing you deeper. He’s calling you to do something different. He’s calling on you to reorder your loves.
We all have the same problem. We drift. We drift from our commitments, we drift from our first loves. Now drifting doesn’t mean violating our commitments. There’s a stronger word than “drifting” for that.
But we wander. We wander and, prone to wander, we need to wander back. We need to hear the call of God’s Spirit, and come back to God, to a place of patient expectation.
In Acts chapter 2 the disciples waited as Jesus told them to do. They waited, and waited, and then like a rushing wind, the Spirit of God moved upon them.
Sometimes we focus on the miraculous things that happened on that day...tongues of fire landing on believers that led to them speaking in tongues. That happened. That kind of thing still happens, I believe.
But, hopefully, we don’t wait for the ecstatic. We don’t wait for the drama. We don’t wait for the thrills and chills. We don’t wait for the fleeting stuff that we know is not the substance of our days or of our faith.
We wait for God. We wait, and that waiting grows into a thirst.
At God’s initiative, God gives us a heart to know Him. He gives us a need to explore and then deepen our relationship with Him. He calls us into a relationship where we are His people and He is our Lord.
This is both for those who have never come to faith in Jesus Christ, BUT it’s also for those of us who have followed Him, and yet over time we have drifted from or maybe even lost our first Love.
We have drifted from Him, perhaps not losing our faith per se, but nevertheless drifting into a mindset where our faith has ceased to really matter to us.
So God then calls us to return to Him. To come back to our first Love. To repent of our sins, to turn from our ways that do not please Him. To turn from our selfish and self-destructive behaviours. To stare our sin in the face and gain the courage to call it just that: sib.
No more excuses. No more justifying ourselves. No more wasting time apart from God when we could be doing just so much better with God.
Psalm 42:1-2 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
So, we’ve seen that if we desire God, it is because God draws us to Himself. So that means that our desire for God starts by God desiring us. Our love for God starts by God loving us. 1 John 4 puts it really plainly: “19 We love because He first loved us”.
When we desire anything good, we will hopefully act upon it. There are, of course, evil desires that it’s very important to NOT act upon.
There are desires that place us outside of God’s will, and Scripture gives quite a lot of attention to these. We are warned to, even as we pursue God, to not let ourselves be tripped up by behaviours that displease God.
If we do that for long enough without repenting, we have no choice but to start justifying our sin. That’s just the way it is. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here.
When we desire a good thing, we don’t let that desire just sit in our head.
We Act Upon It
We act upon it. I recall when I was falling in love with my wife, Barbara. I could have just kept it to myself. I’m kinda glad I didn’t.
So I said to her: “Don’t take this personally, but I think I’m falling in love with you”. Kind of an odd way to put it, I can see in hindsight.
But I was, in my own quirky way, trying to be honest with her about my feelings for her while not presuming that she felt the same way. Turned out, she felt the same way. The rest is history.
When we desire God, we WILL act upon it. We will do what we can, what lies within our power, to draw near to Him. We WILL pray. Not just the kind of prayer when we talk, talk, talk constantly.
We Will Practice Listening Prayer
We will practice listening prayer. We will long to hear His voice. And if we do, and if we wait, and if we learn to listen, He will speak to us. That much I know.
When we desire God we will do what we can.
We Will Gather with Others
We WILL gather with others who also love God in order to worship God. We will do that. We won’t be at home wondering every Sunday, should I go to church? Or shouldn’t I?
Should I, or shouldn’t I? Being with the Body of Christ at church, worshipping God, will become one of the deep and beautiful and rewarding rhythms of our lives.
We Will Grow to Love His Word
When we desire God, we will grow to love His Word. Has God spoken? Has He made His will known to humanity? Has He inspired humans to write His words down on paper?
You bet. Reading His inspired Word will become one of the beautiful and rewarding ryhthms of our lives that we return to again and again.
We Will Reorder Our Loves
When we desire God, really DESIRE God, we will not only reorder our loves and affections so that it’s pretty obvious to at least us, if not others, that God is massively important in our lives.
We will reorder our loves, by sheer exposure to God in prayer and in worship and through His word, so that we start to care about the things that God cares about.
I use to appreciate but not really care that much about the fall. Barbara, my wife, LOVES the autumn colours. She goes for drives just to see the autumn, the fall colours in Ontario. She goes, so I go. She loves those things, now I love those things.
We Will Care about What God Cares About
God cares about things like justice, we discover as we read His Word. Justice, then, becomes important to us. God cares about the afflicted, the poor, the needy. God’s heart is huge. It’s a heart big enough to love each person on this planet, more than 7 billion of us, at the same time.
As we grow to love God, we discover that desiring God means that our hearts become more sensitive to the things that break God’s heart. It’s no longer about just knowing what’s going on in the world, the things that violate God’s justice.
Our time with God in prayer is a time when our hearts are moved with compassion for those who suffer. We tune into God’s great love for those who suffer. And when our hearts are moved, our feet keep in step with our hearts, and so we become agents of change, be it ever so humbly. Useful clay in God’s hands.
So, may we each grow in our desire for the living God. May we, understanding that He is drawing us to Him, respond to His call.
If you’re here today and you have not received Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life, as your Saviour and Redeemer, I encourage you to respond to God’s call and accept Jesus into your life. If you do that, your life will never be the same.
If you, like me, are sensing God calling you deeper in your walk with Him, may we enter into that place of rest, that place of waiting in faith. May we draw to Him in the giving of our time in prayer, in the reordering of our loves, and in earnest pursuit of God.
Can we stand together and read Psalm 63 as our prayer today.
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. 2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. 3 Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. 4 So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands. 5 My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, 6 when I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; 7 for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy. 8 My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.
