A Holy Passion

A Holy Passion: The Searcher Ezekiel 34:11-31 Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI November 16, 2003 In the classic western, The Searchers, John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a bitter, disillusioned soldier returning to the embrace of his family on the frontier after service in the Civil War. He is a hard man with little humor and a decidedly bigoted worldview. Native Americans are little more than Neanderthals: sub-human savages unworthy of humane considerations. A renegade tribe of Commanches attacks the settlement shortly after he arrives and kidnaps his two nieces. Only the youngest of the two girls, Debbie, survives the ordeal. Ethan sets out after the band – at first to try and rescue the girl. But as the search lingers from weeks into years, Ethan’s goal appears to change. He no longer seems intent on bringing her home, rather he wants to end her misery. He says he intends to kill her rather than let her suffer what seems to him an incomparable evil – being made into the servant and play thing of a Commanche warrior. Ethan’s nephew, Martin Pawley – a half-breed, and so despised by Ethan – goes with him on his quest to find the girl so he can protect her, when the time comes, from Ethan. Side by side, these antagonistic allies set out on a journey of years – Ethan, seemly too angry and stubborn to give in to despair, his nephew too afraid of what will happen if Ethan should succeed in finding Debbie alone. Even as he gets to know Ethan through years of being uneasy companions on the trail of his half-sister’s abductors, he never learns to trust Ethan’s heart. He never sees the real root of Ethan’s persistence. It

is not until the girl is found – now grown and integrated into the life of the Commanche – that he sees what’s really in Ethan’s heart. In the climax, Ethan, astride his horse appears to be intent on running down his hapless niece. Martin, Ethan’s hostile sidekick, tries to get between the girl and Ethan, but he is easily brushed aside. As Ethan closes on Debbie, he swings out of the saddle and grabs hold of the girl, lifting her off the ground. In a panic, Debbie freezes, staring wide-eyed into the grim face of her uncle. There is a breathless moment of uncertainty – the girl is in Ethan’s power, what will he do? With the dramatic flair that can only happen in Hollywood, Ethan sweeps Debbie into arms, cradling her as if she were the five-year old girl taken years before. Gently, Ethan rumbles, “Let’s go home.” In that one poignant scene, Ethan’s motive becomes clear; it was love all along. Although The Searchers has a myriad of subplots about how the lives of the others are affected by the search, the over-arching narrative – the controlling narrative or image – is the relentlessness of Ethan in the search. And in the final analysis, when Ethan returns home with the girl, we see that the story is about the relentlessness of love. Over the past two weeks we have talked about a holy passion – the inborn desire God has given us for intimate relationship with him. All of us are born with a deepseated longing for a meaningful, vibrant relationship with the Creator – a love of epic proportions. We sense we are meant for something great and we spend our lives looking for it. We are on a search – in some senses a desperate search – to find the love we were created to enjoy.

But all love stories have two sides. This week we are going to shift our focus a bit – from the search, to the Searcher. This week we want to look at the holy passion from the perspective of the one who placed it in us. We know that we are born to search for a deep, intimate relationship with God, but what about him – does he long for us in the same way that we long for him? And that’s really the question, isn’t it? We are on this quest from day one of our life and the one thing we are looking for we’re not sure we want to find because we wonder if he wants us to. Just the fact that we voice the question – that even as Christians we wrestle to come up with an adequate answer – betrays something of our struggle in the search. It betrays that we question the heart of God concerning his creation. What sort of Creator is he? Is he really good? There are times when we really question this, isn’t there? Times when we hesitate to trust ourselves fully to God. Evil strikes and we wonder where is God when it hurts. Good fortune comes and we can only see how our efforts, our strength contributed to its arrival. Slowly but surely, our blindness to his presence leads us to live as if in the end analysis life is up to us – like practical agnostics. How can we learn to trust the heart of God toward us – to trust our lives to him? Rachel and I are in the process of looking for a good used minivan or SUV that we to transport our growing family. We hope to have about a dozen kids, their cheaper that way – at least according to the movie. Just kidding. Anyway, Rach and I are beginning to look around for our next vehicle. We’re months away from committing to buy – unless something goes horribly with the truck we

plan to wait until next summer. So why begin now? We want to read up on our choices – we want to narrow the field of options by balancing our desire for amenities with safety and reliability. We want to know more about our next vehicle than its color and mileage. We want to know its track record. In reality, we want to know if we can trust the vehicle before we buy it. The only way to do that is to look into the vehicle’s history. That’s how we learn to trust – we consider what’s happened in the past to tell us what we can trust in the future. The heart of God is no different. To trust him, we must know him. To know him, we must look at his track record and see if it reveals a good heart. Let’s begin by looking at a slice of pre-fall history. Look with me at the first vv. of John chapter 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. There is one thing that I want us to see in this text – although it can be exegeted into a sermon all its own. In this passage we have evidence of the unity – of the great love – that existed in the fellowship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit prior to creation – all creation. Before there was an earth, before there was a man, even before there was an angel, God existed and knew perfect love in his Triune nature. He was not lonely, he did not need a companion. He did not create out of some felt need he had – not even the need for an object to pour out the storehouses of his love. He was whole and complete in himself, he needed no other.

So why did he create? It was his heart – the goodness of his heart. He created for the sheer pleasure of sharing with another the complete love and intimacy he felt within himself. Ephesians 1 says that it was his pleasure to create us to share in the love and intimacy he knew through Christ. In Christ, we are lifted up into the eternal fellowship and love of the Godhead – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In other words God created so that he could share the joy, the fulfillment he knew in himself. It was his pleasure to create us to enjoy him. Even in creation, God is acting so that he can give himself away to us. That, dear friends, is a deep, deep love – a love born of a good heart. But something happened prior to our creation that would have turned even the best heart among us sour. If you or I were to endure such a trial, our hearts would become iron, impenetrable.

We would lock our hearts away, engaging in only the most

rudimentary intimacy out of fear of being hurt so deeply again.

What happened?

Betrayal. The angel, Lucifer, was not content to be the most glorious, the most beautiful of creatures. He wanted to be the Creator. So he led a rebellion against God – he betrayed the heart that in goodness created him and in love bared itself to him. And in doing so he became the great enemy – Satan – the source of the question concerning God’s heart. What I find most amazing about the story of Satan’s rebellion is that it in no way deterred God’s good and gracious intention to create. We have a saying, once burned, twice shy. Yet, God is not a man and his ways are infinitely greater and wiser than ours – his heart is infinitely greater.

So God does not stop with the angels, despite the rebellion. He creates the physical universe, including the crown of his creation, those made in his image – mankind. Even more stunning, he creates man with the capacity to choose or reject him. God makes man a lover – like himself – able to give himself freely to another in the deep bonds of intimate relationship. Again, God exposes his heart to betrayal, to rejection. Amazing, isn’t it? Even more so when you realize that God created in spite of the fact he knew we would betray him – remember, he foreknew us before the foundation of the world. He knew we would learn to hate him. The Scriptures are filled with betrayals of the heart of God. From Adam and Eve to the present, story after reveals the depths of our rebellion. The Scriptures are the narrative of that rebellion and how God responded. And what we find again and again is that God never fails to come for us – despite how far away we move from him. We rebel, he restores – that is the basic story line. Why? Because of his greatness of heart, because his heart is good. But how can we be sure? In the midst of our consistent betrayal, and God’s grace and patience there is no small amount of destruction, of judgment that goes on. How can we be certain his heart is good? Because for the same reasons God chose to create, he also chooses to redeem. In redemption, God once again shows the goodness of his heart by giving himself to us. Look with me at 1 John 4:9-11 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

How do we know God’s heart is good? Look at the cross. Paul, in Romans 5:6-8 says that this is the mark of God’s love – that he dies for us while we are yet sinners. Some, Paul says, will on rare occasions give their lives for a righteous or a good man. But God, in an overwhelming display of the goodness of his heart dies for us when we were ungodly and powerless against sin. In other words, God doesn’t wait until we can love him before he shows his love to us – he takes all the risk on himself, he takes the initiative. He bares his heart on the cross, he gives himself away to us first. Whether in creation or redemption, God’s response is the same – he gives himself away. That is the mark of genuine love – of a good heart. The evidence from the past is clear – God’s heart is good. He can be trusted and he is relentless in the search. Every time we have gone astray, he has gone looking for us. So great is his love, he refuses to abandon the search until he finds the one sheep that strayed from the fold. As we noted in a sermon a couple weeks ago, God searches for us with extravagant concern. But as they say in the investment world, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results or does it? Just because God has sought us diligently in the past does not guarantee that he will continue to do so, does it? The Scriptures say that our God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow – there is no changing or shifting shadow in him. We can trust that our changeless God does indeed long for us in the same way we long for him. Simon Tugwell, in his work titled Prayer says,

So long as we imagine that it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about; he is looking for us. And so we can afford to recognize that very often we are not looking for God; far from it, we are in full flight from him, in high rebellion against him. And he knows that and has taken it into account…. Our hope is in his determination to save us, and he will not give in. In the passage from Ezekiel we read earlier, we hear the words of Simon Tugwell echoed from the vantage of eternity. Let’s be honest this morning, like Israel before us we have despaired on the journey. We sometimes wonder if God knows what he’s gotten us into. But let’s take a moment to look at the journey. God redeems us from the bondage of sin and offers us a new life in him, but we secretly pine for the familiar borders of our sinfulness. He feeds and gives us water in the midst of our spiritual desert and we complain that the fare he offers is not as stimulating and varied as what we enjoyed in the city of sin. We often choose our own shepherds based on appeal – the more popular the better – instead of faithfulness. And then we are surprised when the shepherds of our choosing turn out to be wolves – as driven by their hungers and lusts as we are, only better at hiding them. We feel the urge to search for meaning, for intimate relationship but we settle for the cheap substitutes of power and sex, distraction and inebriation. If left completely to ourselves on this journey for the relationship we were created for we would utterly fail, living lives filled with shoddy substitutes and pretend purpose. But the good news is that God longs for us to be united to him and so he leaves nothing to chance. He says in Ezekiel that he won’t leave the finding of his sheep solely up to his underlings, the shepherds he has appointed. No, he himself will go in search of

the sheep. He will gather his flock, despite their wanderings, despite the faithlessness of his appointed shepherds – he will gather his people and he will be their God. This morning we celebrate one of those moments when we realize God is searching for us as well. In the reaffirmation of Julieanne DeVries we recognize the faithfulness, the relentless love of the Great Shepherd in gathering his flock on to himself. For here is a sheep whose capacity to search for the intimacy she was created for is limited by profound disabilities. Yet, simple as her testimony may be – “I love Jesus” – it evidences that she has indeed been found. God did not leave it up to Pastor Bob or me or any other under-shepherd to go out and find her. If he had, we may have hesitated, wondering if she could ever really be found. He went in search of her himself, and in doing so revealed the goodness of his heart. People of God, the real beauty of sharing in the larger story of redemption is that we know its end is sure. God has promised he will find us. To put it another way, he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion. In other words, he is good and we can trust him with our heart. When the news from the doctor isn’t so good we can still rest in God knowing that he will find us, no matter how deep and dark the valley. When we forget God in the haze of our own glory, we can be certain he hasn’t forgotten us. And in both the good and evil that filters through our life we have this confidence – that it is all being used for our good, to draw us nearer to the heart of God. It is being used to help us see that we are finally found and heading home.