| September 26, 1999 | On Being Found | Isaiah 55:6-9
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Especially: "Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon."
I went on the Internet looking for an example of a group searching and finding. I found the
Inner Discovery Network which describes itself as a "group of persons who felt alienated from and rejected by conventional religious institutions - yet still craved spirituality in their lives." One of their goals from their Web site is: "Finding Self-Acceptance." This group thinks they have found the truth when they look inside themselves and here is what they found. "Freedom comes from our discovery that our whole selves have been designed to fulfill our destiny, and that within that framework we may do anything we wish, so long as we strive to do no harm to others." They are more lost than they realize. We are thankful, however, that we have God's Word to guide us.
In just a few short verses of our text, we have a compact statement of a basic truth of our Christian faith. We are told here how things work with God. We are taught by the Word of God that we ought to seek God and repent from our rebellion against Him and He will freely forgive us. This basic truth is very different from the thoughts of sinful man and the ways of the world, for God thinks on a higher level than we do; a much higher level.
The text starts with a simple call to seek the Lord. Look to Him, even, resort to Him. He is the one with that which we need. He has the good things to give. So we are called to seek Him.
Something important is attached to this call. We are to seek the Lord while He can be found. We are to call upon Him while He is near. This makes a lot of sense. If the Lord is far from us, we will not find Him when we seek. He will not hear if He is far away when we call.
When a special opportunity presents itself we are more likely to take it. When a product is advertised as being on sale, "while quantities last," the hope is to draw shoppers to a bargain they don't want to miss. In the same way, God wants us to call upon Him while He is near.
What causes God to be near or far from us? The answer might not be what you think. God always wants to be near us. This is the way He designed things. He set up the world so we would seek Him. NIV Acts 17:26-27 says, "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. 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."
So, God wants to be near us. How, then, is He ever far from us? The only thing that causes Him to be far from us is when we push Him away. God desires to be near but there are those times when you or I push Him away. We push God far away. Then it becomes hard for us to seek Him.
It is a mistaken idea that God comes near at some times and then at other times He leaves and is more distant from us. God doesn't do the moving, we do the moving.
I knew a woman who had wanted to have her own child, but God did not give her a child. She struggled with understanding why God did not give her what she wanted. After she sought counseling she was taught by the counselor that God had turned away from her and hid Himself from her. God was the one doing the leaving according to this counselor. That was a sad conclusion for it stated that God's closeness or distance from us is simply a matter of His whims. It also stated that a person can only say that God is near when he gets what he wants and in the case of the woman mentioned, that would be a child.
Instead of this notion, we can know that God always desires to be near us. He always wants to bless us with good things. We keep in mind, however, that God will give us what is truly good for us, which might be different from our selfish desires.
So, we know that if God is distant from us, it is the result of our pushing Him away. How do we push God away? We do it when we put something in that place that God wants to fill in our lives. It is the place that He deserves to fill and should fill, but we often bring in substitutes for God.
You are perhaps reminded of the First Commandment: "You shall have no other gods." When we push God away and put something in His place, then that thing we put in God's place is something we are treating as a god. This is called idolatry. When you think of idolatry, you might think of the idols in Old Testament times which were often statues and images which were worshiped in place of the one true God.
Today's idols can be many different things. Money, goods, family, job, status, medicine, health, recreation, sports, and beauty are among the more popular idols. These things are put in place of God and God is pushed away so He is not near. The most popular idol today, however, is not on that list. If you want to see what the most popular idol is, simply look in the mirror. Yes, the idol with which we often push God away is our own self. We do this by pursuing our own self-centered behavior. We look out for number one. We give in to our own desires rather than follow God's wishes. We think of our thoughts and reasoning as being superior to God's. We push ourselves in a position of authority over what we think and do, rather than giving God that authority.
Some would say that selfishness is really at the root of all sin. When we sin we look to do what we think is to our own advantage. Our own interests will be given higher value than God as we violate the first table of the Ten Commandments. Then, as our interests are given higher value than those of our neighbor we violate the second table of the Ten Commandments.
The substituted god of self is very popular today. We are taught from so many sources in our world that we ought to look to our self as the highest authority. Today the most popular alternative to Christianity is something called New Age Religion. New Age thinking infects many other religions with its main teaching that you can find the true god inside of yourself. If you just look inside of yourself you can reach your potential, teaches the New Age. So you see that the false god of self is substituted in place of the real God and thereby the true God is pushed away.
Our text calls each of us to turn from this sin. "Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts." This calls for those who are hostile towards God, who are guilty of sin, to leave and forsake the path they are traveling. Turn away from that sin. It also speaks of the man who is guilty in his thoughts. Jesus has taught us that to even think of a sin is to be guilty of a sin. To lust in our hearts is the same as committing adultery outwardly. We are guilty of sin and we are called to forsake our ways. We know that this sin demands punishment.
To turn from this sin, we must have the Lord's help which He freely offers. If we don't seek the Lord as our way out of sin, then we are forsaking Him. We are turning Him down. If we forsake Him, we will be lost, without hope. So says: NIV 2 Chronicles 15:2 "...The LORD is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you." So, if we reject God, then He rejects us.
If we do not seek the Lord's help with our sinful lives, we will face disaster. If we push Him away, then eternal punishment comes because God is not with us. In Deuteronomy 31:16-17 the Lord tells Moses how the people of Israel will fall deeply into sin after they enter the promised land, and then they will forsake the Lord. Deuteronomy says: "And the LORD said to Moses: 'You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them. On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed. Many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, 'Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?''"
When you look at the problem of our sins, who else are you going to call for help? Certainly many people try to call on--themselves. Either they deny that they have a problem with sin or they try to save themselves by working their way to heaven. There is no other source of salvation, however, than the Lord. NIV Isaiah 45:22 says "Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other." We know the Lord stands ready to save us. He wants to save us. He says "For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!" in NIV Ezekiel 18:32.
Looking back at our text, it tells us to "Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near." The position where the Lord may be found is when we come to Him looking for salvation, already knowing that we have a problem with sin. So the text urges us to recognize our sins by saying, "Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon." There is that wonderful promise of God's help. The mercy and pardon promised is for we who desperately need it.
What about the person who does not see their sin? To deny the sin in our lives or to engage in sin willfully or plan for it is to fail to see the problem of sin. This pushes God out of our lives so He is not near us. He cannot be found when we see no true reason to seek Him.
If we instead acknowledge the sin in us, then we will seek the Lord to help with it. If we confess our sin we are forsaking our wrongdoing and turning instead to the Lord. We turn to the Lord because of the torment our sins cause us. We are seeking Him from a position of distress: NIV 2 Chronicles 15:4 promises us: "But in their distress they turned to the LORD, the God of Israel, and sought him, and he was found by them."
In fact, God cares so much for us that He comes to us, even while we are still sinners. He comes to us, even when we don't seek Him. NIV Isaiah 65:1 "I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name, I said, 'Here am I, here am I.'"
The Lord has answered us through Jesus Christ. In Him our sins are forgiven through His sacrifice upon the cross. Our sins are remembered no more. We are saved from the punishment we are due, that is eternal death. So the Lord can say in Amos 5:4: "...Seek me and live." We indeed will live through Christ, for we are spared the never-ending torture in Hell and are instead given life in heaven.
We know from Deuteronomy 30:14 that "...the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it." Jesus Christ is that Word. He is very near us today. He comes to us in His very body and blood offered for our sins. He comes near today to you. He has found you today.
Can we really understand the wonders of God coming near us though we are sinners? Can we really understand how He finds us through His Word calling us to seek Him? Though we cannot understand this, we can know it is true, for God's ways and thoughts are higher and better than ours. We should expect special things from our Lord. We expect even more blessings from the one who comes near to us,
Jesus Christ. Amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.