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Song: David Crowder Band – How He Loves
I really want to do 2 things in my sermon today, while looking at our need to continue growing in our maturity with Christ.
The first is more of a reminder. I’d like to remind us to hold to what is true: To hold to the truth of our salvation and have confidence in it when we confess that Jesus is Lord, and encourage us in the fact that God loves us and he loves us forever!
I think all of us can relate to feeling distant from God, or like we may not have that relationship anymore and I want to confront this, I want to deny this. Not belittle or flippantly cast these feelings aside, just refute it and encourage us on.
The second thing is a challenge as well as a reminder: That we need to continually surrender to His will. Continually give our lives up to him if we are to mature in our faith.
Tozer asks in his book that inspires this series, ‘Why do we not capture the divine illumination of Jesus Christ in our souls?’ And he answers himself,
‘Because there is a cloud of concealment between us and the smiling face of God!’
Its beautiful language isn’t it? I wish I could write like that, I wish I could talk like that! Why can’t we capture an ongoing real, confident, intimate relationship with Jesus Christ in our souls? Because there are things that blind us, causing us to doubt our own faith and confidence in Christ.
If you remember last terms youth service, we looked at the passage read this morning and I finished my sermon by encouraging us all to reach for maturity in Christ, that we should strive for an ever-growing faith. And we also reflected on this quote by Tozer, ‘God isn’t honored by our arrested development. The New Testament teaches that we should go on to full maturity, that mediocrity is not the highest that Jesus offers.’
You see what I want to look into today almost directly flows from last terms youth service. Last term we were called into Lion Country, that dangerous place we enter when we want to know Jesus better. We enter that place where an enemy prowls like a roaring lion. And we looked at different attacks
that Satan uses to stop us.
And today I want to look at another way Satan likes to attack Christians while we strive for our maturity in Christ. In particular I want to look at how Satan desires to conceal the truth of our relationship with God. How he tries to get in between us and God and deceive us into thinking our place with Him isn’t assured, isn’t guaranteed. When we’re in Lion Country, Satan recognizes that the confidence that we have in our relationship with God is the thing getting him in trouble. And so he tries to undermine that confidence and demoralize us. He wants to spread a cloud of concealment between us and the smiling face of God, separating us from both our motivation and our goal! Are you with me so far?
So that’s the problem I want to address today. And what are some of the things the Devil does to do this?
If you’re anything like me it could be bad news, the kind that throws us completely off track, which causes us to doubt. It could be loss of work, a relationship breakdown or things we see as personal injustices. And we begin to question whether or not we really are forgiven.
Or it could be another failure, letting down those we love yet again. Or not getting the marks we were hoping for in an assignment or exam. Or maybe it’s a long project that should’ve been done weeks ago, but is going nowhere. Non of which should happen if God was really involved in our lives. And we begin to wonder whether or not Jesus has indeed accepted us and holds us forever in his arms.
When worries and pressures begin to burden us, some of us turn from God, doubting if he was in our lives at all. We blame him for not warning us, not preparing us, for not protecting us from these trials.
Or, maybe most dangerously of all, we simply stop trying to nurture our relationship with him and we become stagnant, unhappy Christians. Not that these are necessarily Satan’s doing; unfortunately this world is messed up enough as it is that he isn’t behind everything. But when he sees a Christian actively seeking a stronger relationship with Jesus you can bet he takes notice!
Either way, the mist grows thicker. And we forget our starting place; can we still remember our starting place?
Matt 6:33-34
We forget this or we get tired of needing to keep giving everything to God. We’re only human and our trust and confidence can only go so far! His will is no longer what we follow, only our own. And the silent cloud has slid between us and His smiling face.
Its not a happy thought, is it? But this is one of Satan’s greatest weapons, causing us to question our status as eternally saved children of God. And its at these times especially that we need to remember God’s undying, indescribable love for us. A love that can’t be explained or measured, a love so pure it doesn’t have the limitations and the exceptions of human love
God’s love is amazing!
Friends, do you love being Christians? Because I read verses like this,
Showing that God has it in his hands and WHOA!
I love being a Christian! I love being one of those that God has chosen
I love forgiveness, the freedom it gives my soul; I love knowing personally the being who created the universe and I love that he wants to know me! I love the surety I have in life now, knowing that he backs me up; knowing that he has a plan for me that will be accomplished; knowing that when this is gone I’ll gain so much more; knowing that he is with me, always.
I love how some things just make sense now, the beauty of the world, the wonder of humanity, the way I feel when I know I need to forgive and the weightless feeling I get as I do…I love how it doesn’t matter that some things
still don’t make sense and maybe never will, cos my God is a far bigger mystery, He’s wilder, stronger and better than any of those things combined! And I find myself adoring him for it. And I love that my wife is a Christian
and we can share these joys! But most of all, the thing that makes Christianity so special to me is the knowledge that I am saved, that my future is secure and I have assurance! Hebrews declares this with awesome conviction in 10:22…
That’s right church, ‘Let’s hold unswervingly to the hope we profess for he who promised is faithful!! AMEN? AMEN!
This is the truth; we know it and we must hold unswervingly to it! And this brings me to my second point. When we know this truth there is only one thing we can do, and that is to surrender to his will.
On the youth camp, our speaker, Cory, spoke on the theme of Immerse. The main idea being that God is a filler who wants to fill us, immersing us in the Holy Spirit, so we need to make room for him to do so! On one of the days, surrender was an idea that my small group discussed at length. If we want to allow the Holy Spirit to fill us, if we want to create room for him, we need to surrender to him.
People will pray and ask God to fill them but all the while there is a strange insincerity, a contradiction within which stops our wills from surrendering to the point of letting God have his way. The great Olympian and Missionary to China, Eric Liddle, was recorded as saying with his dying breath, ‘It is surrender.’ People often repeat over and over, ‘Fill me now, fill me now, fill me now…’ But it doesn’t work because we’re resisting. I know this because I’m speaking for myself as well.
Say it all you want but God will still have to wait for our decision, wait for that part of ourselves that we’re saving from the cross. And we will go to the cross…For Jesus says in Luke chapter 9, ‘If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.’ And a person who is always on the cross, giving just one piece to God at time, cannot be a happy or fulfilled Christian. But when that Christian takes their place on the cross with Jesus once and for all, and they surrender, sure we die, but a glorious resurrection follows!
And the heavens shake with the celebration! Yes I do believe surrendered Christians are celebrated just as new Christians are! Friends, are there things contributing to a concealing cloud between God’s smiling face and us? The Christian life is surrender. We begin as Christians saying, ‘Jesus, I accept you as my Lord and Savior, I give you my life.’ And we end bowing before him in Heaven. And wont that be amazing, because its so right!
But it’s so hard to comprehend this, it’s so hard to hold onto this as encouragement for us because it feels so far away. And that makes it very hard to use as motivation to surrender completely to God. And so often its only by God’s grace that we remember that the Spirit is a spring bubbling within us still, waiting for us to surrender all over again so that He can burst forth.
Oh how I long to see the Spirit burst forth from my life, to see the Spirit overflow from each of us, pouring out of this church and into the community around us!…But we must surrender. Are we willing to go this route of victory with Christ? We can’t continue to be mediocre Christians stopped halfway to the peak!
Tozer tells the story of a character by the name of Sancho Panza who’s involved in an incident that leads him to clinging to a windowsill all night, afraid that if he let go he would plunge and die. But when morning light came, red-faced and near exhaustion, he found that his feet were only 2 inches above the grass. Fear had kept him from letting go, but he could’ve been safe.
He uses this illustration to remind us that there are many Christians whose knuckles are white from blindly hanging on to our own windowsill. The Lord’s been saying, ‘Look on me and let go! Trust that I have saved you and love you forever. Surrender and see my smiling face once more. But we refuse.
Paul says there is one thing we should do, forget what is behind, strain to what is ahead! I see people like this from time to time, some are in our church here, you can see them when you watch. Happy are those who have given God his way, who have talked back to the Devil in this, denying that cloud of concealment any power. Holding to what they know is truth and surrendering to his will! All that can be done has been done to assure our salvation! Christ died for us and has risen!
The Holy Spirit has been sent out, like a runner from the marks, he has exploded into this world and has made his presence known the very face of Almighty God shines upon us! Poetic language? No, truth! Amen! Amen.
