Sunday 03/05/17
Series: Doers of the Word
Message – The Hungry Soul
The Hungry Soul
Today we began with an encouraging reading of Psalm 34:1-22,
“(1) I will praise the LORD at all times; His praise will always be on my lips. (2) I will boast in the LORD; the humble will hear and be glad. (3) Proclaim with me the LORD’s greatness; let us exalt His name together.
(4) I sought the LORD, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears. (5) Those who look to Him are radiant with joy; their faces will never be ashamed. (6) This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him and saved him from all his troubles. (7) The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear Him, and rescues them.
(8) Taste and see that the LORD is good. How happy is the man who takes refuge in Him! (9) Fear the LORD, you His saints, for those who fear Him lack nothing. (10) Young lions lack food and go hungry, but those who seek the LORD will not lack any good thing.
(11) Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. (12) Who is the man who delights in life, loving a long life to enjoy what is good? (13) Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from deceitful speech. (14) Turn away from evil and do what is good; seek peace and pursue it. (15) The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their cry for help.
(16) The face of the LORD is set against those who do what is evil, to erase all memory of them from the earth.
(17) The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears, and delivers them from all their troubles. (18) The LORD is near the brokenhearted; He saves those crushed in spirit. (19) Many adversities come to the one who is righteous, but the LORD delivers him from them all. (20) He protects all his bones; not one of them is broken.
(21) Evil brings death to the sinner, and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
(22) The LORD redeems the life of His servants, and all who take refuge in Him will not be punished.”
Our focus for today is drawing near. I know the title of the message is The Hungry Soul, but drawing near is in fact the result of our souls being hungry and thus urging onward the pursuit….causing us to draw near. So let’s begin with our text, taken from James 4:6-8,
“(6) But He gives greater grace. Therefore He says: God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. (7) Therefore, submit to God. But resist the Devil, and he will flee from you. (8) Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, double-minded people!”
What is a Doer?
A Doer…
- Hears the word – Which means to bend over or stoop down near in order to hear (they are hungry to hear).
- Is NOT forgetful – They hold onto and continue to stay near what they’ve heard and let it abide in them (they are hungry for connectedness and intimacy).
- Doer of the work – They keep it, which means that they guard it, observe it and attend to it (They are hungry for company…companionship IN the doing…fellowship)
- He will be blessed in his keeping it!
Draw near with a hungry soul…
James 4:8,
“(8) Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, double-minded people!”
The default position for the child of God is NEAR to Him. It is unnatural in the extreme for a child of God to be positioned at a distance from His person. Simple spiritual hunger alone, drives the child of God TO Him. It is only when we believe the lies of the enemy or the nagging voice of our flesh that our desire begins to ebb and our soul looses the hungry impulses it naturally gleans from the influence of our spirit by the Holy Spirit.
Now, we know we are not talking about physical distance, in fact that is NEVER the case in all of scripture. How could a God Who is omnipresent be anything but near to everything and everyone?
This is analogous to God knowing everyone. He knows every thought everyone has had and ever will have, every action, every atom composing our bodies at any one moment. He knows our days, what stirs us up, what calms us down…God “academically” knows EVERYONE in an absolute way. Nevertheless, the scriptures tell us that many will hear Him say, “Depart from Me I never Knew you.” That means He was never intimate with them. He never had a interrelationship of knowing, investing and trusting one another. This is an entirely different kind of “knowing”.
So it is with the word NEAR in regard to us and God. As Tozer said, in the Pursuit of God, a man have a son who has never been away from him for more than a few hours or days at a time throughout that child’s entire life, yet at some point the child “draws near” to his father and they both enjoy the warmth and comfort of that closeness which before that time had only been immature and circumstantial at best.
So when we say draw near to God – we are not speaking in terms of physical distance but rather heart distance. It is the hungry response of a heart that longs for Him. THAT a child of God can be far from the Father in heart is clear in this passage and therefore needs no defense…but it does need exploration for us to understand the warning and encouragement James is here offering.
“NEAR”, is precisely the atmosphere in which the child of God was born and that in which he was designed to forever remain. Now I do not want to intermingle the words Near and Hungry so much so that they begin to appear synonymous, but rather that they are inseparable in terms of drawing near to God. Being hungry, encouraging a state of heart where being hungry is the norm, is very much a part of this process of drawing near.
Augustine wrote, “You have formed us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”
Of course this is a quote from, Confessions an auto-biographical book he wrote in Latin and so the translation somewhat differs from place to place, but in it you can hear his longing and hungry heart for God. Here is the full quote of it,
Late have I loved Thee, O Lord; and behold,
Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee.
Thou was with me when I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call, and cry, and burst my deafness.
Thou didst gleam, and glow, and dispell my blindness.
Thou didst touch me, and I burned for Thy peace.
For Thyself Thou hast made us,
And restless our hearts until in Thee they find their ease.
Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new.
Similar words to these are the normal refrain of men and women who have responded to the inner voice of their spirit’s driving them to the God and Father Who Jesus loved with devoted passion.
In fact, one of the things which will spurn on a hungry heart is surrounding yourself with those who have a hungry heart themselves…and not just you know…books, articles, music, even some movies from or about these people will stir a hungry soul within you as well.
Tozer himself was spurned on in his pursuit of God by the words of other great seekers who went before him. Here are some quotes from his book The Pursuit of God,
“God wills that we should push on into His presence and live our whole lives there…it is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day.”
“…the church is famishing for want of His presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged.”
God meant us to see him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile.”
With The veil removed by the rending of Jesus’s flesh with nothing on God’s side to prevent us from entering why do we tarry without? Why do we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and never enter at all to look upon God?
Like we sang this morning,
“Hope calls to hope
Deep in my bones there is an agony
I am aching for you
Nothing else will do”
A deep soul hunger!
Those who only experience God through the cold lens of theology might say,
“If you feel a soul agony for closeness to God that is not consistent with sound doctrine. God IS near to us – He never leaves us or forsakes us.”
These words are true beloved, but they are not accurate. God IS near to everyone. To the believer it is further true that He is ever near both to lead, love and protect, but the heart can experience a longing even for those things which are near. A hungry passion for more of what it already has an ample supply of – for with God, can the heart ever truly say it has had all of God it needs – even when it has all of God?
These are truths which transcend theology and move on to experience. I am NOT for a MOMENT suggesting that experience defines theology, but it DOES give pay to study! It takes the cool, dry facts ABOUT God, and experiences them so that their meaning becomes clearer than words could ever convey.
We see this in the life and ministry of our Lord and so why would it surprise us that His children and disciples should experience the same?
We are familiar with the sermon on the mount where Jesus took the words of the Old Testament and expanded on them so that those He was teaching could hear what He heard as He read those words.
“Don’t commit adultery” was heard through ears which loved the God OF the commandment and longed NOT for stiff obedience to written words, but a passionate, hungry fulfilling of desires of the heart of the One Who spoke the words.
The law to Jesus was not just a list of behavior modifiers, but modifiers of the heart!
Do not even lust after someone else’s mate in your heart…if you do, you have already broken the command.
A Pharisee might rightly have observed Jesus to have gone beyond what was actually written in the law – but did He overstep His human bounds by adding to the word? NO!
His passion of heart, His hungry longing for God caused Him, like Moses, to go beyond the sterile “to do” lists of the Scribes of His day or the Israelites in the wilderness wanderings, to press into the presence behind the veil, to seek the face of God and know Him, not just His words He had written. Those words were an invitation to a conversation. They were intended for dialogue not a monologue.
Psalm 103:7, “He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel.”
Which is to say, Israel at large had only a shallow and topical relationship with God knowing only WHAT God did, but Moses who persisted in God’s presence knew WHY God did what He did…Moses knew God’s ways!
So Jesus tells the religious leaders of His day, that life is NOT found in the written words of the sacred and holy text, but in pressing through the text to the actual experience of God Himself.
To prideful and defensive hearts, cold theology is enough. It allows them to experience a sensation of nearness to God while maintaining control. But to those whose hearts will not be satisfied with mere rules of conformity to God, but burn in desire to experience God themselves, they will pursue Him with passion. It is the Jacobs who are renamed “strives with God” whose hungry hearts will make the journey!
Teri and I were listening to a message from John Bevere the other day and we heard him say something I’ve said many times and it is taken from Isa. 45:15,
“Yes, You are a God Who hides Himself, God of Israel.”
Now this was often stated in one way or another in the Old Testament as a judgment over Israel, but it’s context is not always bad since we see it in the life of our Lord with His disciples.
But this verse reminds me of a song called Could it be? by Michael Card,
In the ebb and flow of living – As we wander through the years
We’re told to listen to a voice – We can’t here with our ears
They say to live by something – That you can’t see with your eyes
Is there really any purpose – To this foolish exercise?
Could it be You make Your presence known – So often by Your absence?
Could it be that questions tell us more – Than answers ever do?
Could it be that You would really rather die – Than live without us?
Could it be the only answer that means anything – Is You?
In our words and in our silence – In our pride and in our shame
To the genius and the scholar – To the foolish and insane
To the ones who care to seek You – To the ones who never will
You are the only answer even still
It’s a question you can’t answer – An answer you cannot express
That the gentle Man of Sorrow – Is the source of happiness
You’ll never solve the mystery – Of this magnetic man
For you must believe to understand –
Could it be….
You’ll remember that Jesus hid Himself from the view of His disciples on the shore one morning following His resurrection when He cooked them breakfast.
John 21:4-14, “(4) But when the morning had now come, Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. (5) Then Jesus said to them, “Children, have you any food?” They answered Him, “No.” (6) And He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast, and now they were not able to draw it in because of the multitude of fish.
(7) Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment (for he had removed it), and plunged into the sea. (8) But the other disciples came in the little boat (for they were not far from land, but about two hundred cubits), dragging the net with fish.
(9) Then, as soon as they had come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid on it, and bread.
(10) Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish which you have just caught.”
(11) Simon Peter went up and dragged the net to land, full of large fish, one hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not broken.
(12) Jesus said to them, “Come and eat breakfast.” Yet none of the disciples dared ask Him, “Who are You?”—knowing that it was the Lord.
(13) Jesus then came and took the bread and gave it to them, and likewise the fish. (14) This is now the third time Jesus showed Himself to His disciples after He was raised from the dead.”
Also on the road to Emmaus…
Luke 24:28-32, “(28) Then they drew near to the village where they were going, and He indicated that He would have gone farther. (29) But they constrained Him, saying, “Abide with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.” And He went in to stay with them. (30) Now it came to pass, as He sat at the table with them, that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. (31) Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him; and He vanished from their sight. (32) And they said to one another, “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?”
WHY? Why would He conceal Himself from them?
To cause them to see with truer eyes than those of the flesh and to evoke in them a desire to seek Him more.
Abiding
Going back to our list of what it means to be a doer.
A Doer of the work means they keep it, in that they guard it, observe it and attend to it.
God desires for us to abide in Him and He in us. Again, this is MORE than simply literal. It means to allow His WORDS to abide in us. We guard it, observe it and attend to it.
Cleaning or pruning of the vines
Let’s turn to John 14:20-27 & 15:1-17.
Jesus exhorts His disciples in love. He tells them,
“Whoever has my commandments and habitually keeps them, it is THIS one who love ME and whoever love Me will be loved by My Father and We will come and make Our permanent Home in him.”
The word KEEP is the word tēréō and means to guard it, observe it and attend to it.
God is NOT saying here, “Prove you love Me by being obedient!” No, this is not a challenge, it is merely a statement of truth. If you really love Him you will guard, observe and attend to the Words He speaks to you.
In other words, “If you love me, you’ll think about Me, you’ll ponder what I’ve said to you and you will cherish my words to you in your heart.”
Does this mean we do not have to obey? NO, of course not! What it means is that if He has your hearts passion and attention – He will also, have your obedience.
I mean, think about it, who would you rather move in with? Someone who simply obeys you, or someone who loves you so much that your words are cherished by them as loving letters from a friend or spouse?
Jesus goes on to explain the nature of our relationship using the illustration of a Vine Master, a vine and the branches.
In this illustration God the is husbandman, the Vine Dresser or master. Jesus Himself is the vine and we are the branches who grow and produce fruit out of our union with Him.
Our Father is seen as the One Who in His tender love and care, prunes us that we might bear more fruit.
Pruning is a process where old growth that has become hardened is cut off and new growth is encouraged. Concerning this Jesus said,
“You are already pruned (or clean) because of the word I have spoken to you.”
What prunes or cleans us for growth? The words HE speaks to us!
Are you seeing a similarity between what Jesus says causes growth into His character (being a doer) and what James says is being a doer of the Word?
Here is a short video illustrating the care and effort that goes into cleaning grape vines – Pruning the Vines.
We will pick up here next week…Blessings!
I hope this teaching will challenge you and encourage you to place your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.
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