And I Still Haven’t’ Found What I’m Looking For
Part 1: What’s Wrong?
Come my friends listen to the story:
Genesis 1:1; 26; 2:7-9;15;18 (MSG)
God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don't see…
God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image,
make them reflecting our nature
so they can be responsible for …the Earth itself…
God formed Man out of dirt from the ground and blew into his nostrils the
breath of life.
The Man came alive—a living soul!
Then God planted a garden in Eden….
God took the Man and set him down in the Garden of Eden
to work the ground and keep it in order…
God said, "It's not good for the Man to be alone;
I'll make him a helper, a companion."
How long the Man and the Woman were in this paradise we do not know.
But in the Garden they experienced love,
The real thing, not the weak, flimsy and fleeting stuff that we are all to familiar with today.
Creator and Creatures enjoyed koinonia—fellowship,
What I always refer to as a right relationship.
For real love and real fellowship to exist it must be chosen.
So God gave the Man one prohibition,
Do not eat the fruit from the tree of Tob and Ra, Of Good and Evil.
Eating will result in deterring, damaging and destroying the relationship.
Eating is to say no to the love.
Eating is to choose to leave the fellowship.
Eating is to exist solely as an individual.
But eventually the man and woman believed the lie of another who had broken fellowship with the Creator.
Eating will result in you being gods yourselves the Satan said,
So they both ate.
Having rejected fellowship, in a very real way they died spiritually
Genesis 3:8-9 (MSG)
When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God. God called to the Man: "Where are you?"
That question has always intrigued me
“Where are you?”
There is no answer because the Man no longer knows.
Out of fellowship with his Creator he is lost.
Fortunately God is love (1 John 4:16),
He is merciful and compassionate.
Genesis 3:20-23 (MSG)
The Man, known as Adam, named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living. 21 God made leather clothing for Adam and his wife and dressed them. 22 God said, "The Man has become like one of us, capable of knowing everything, ranging from good to evil. What if he now should reach out and take fruit from the Tree-of-Life and eat, and live forever? Never—this cannot happen!" 23 So God expelled them from the Garden of Eden
Why expel them from the Garden?
They are expelled so they would thirst for what was lost,
And seek their Creator to restore the fellowship,
To once again bask in His unadulterated love.
To be caught up again in the dance of the Divine.
To be who they were created to be.
Here we are millennia removed from original sin,
Yet “no matter how together we may appear, even to ourselves,
buried deep within our heart is the vague sense that something
is wrong. Dreadfully wrong.” (Crabb, locations 272-80)
[In this series I will be using Larry Crab’s book “Inside Out.” I purchased an electronic copy, hence the location references instead of page numbers]
You don’t have to be a history buff to, Recognize man’s inhumanity to man,
The wars, the atrocities, the oppression to realize that something is
wrong with how people live in this world.
Recognize that in spite of all our progress there is a deep seated corruption that sabotages every attempt at building a utopia.
You don’t even have to read the headlines,
To see that things aren’t getting any better,
That there is something fundamental that is wrong.
“Ever since God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden,
we have lived in an unnatural environment, a world in which we were not designed to live.” (Crabb, 281-88)
I think all you need to do is take a cold hard look in the mirror to see that you aren’t even the way you want to be.
We are not the people we were designed to be.
And perhaps, more often than we acknowledge or even realize,
The things that we do,
The goals, the dreams, the plans, the motivations,
The way we do relationships,
The habits, attachments the addictions
“are designed to bring relief from a vague sense”
that we are not right,
that there is something dreadfully wrong within
us, with us. (Crabb. Locations, 290-98)
That we can not answer God’s question: “Where are you?”
Today I will suggest that the answer is found in establishing a right relationship with God.
God knows where you are,
God can find you,
Only God can tell you where you are at.
It is through reconciliation to God that we begin to set things right,
To deal with our unease with ourselves, that feeling that something is
dreadfully wrong within us.
Then after again pointing the way to be found by God,
I want to talk about our desire to get back to the Garden of Eden.
I’ll call that our thirst.
A thirst that we want to be quenched.
I also want to warn you that I’m going to close this message in
such a way that it will leave you with questions,
the conclusion with be messy,
something for you to struggle with.
One of my heart’s desires to is to see people living their life to the full.
That journey starts by being able to answer the question:
Where are you?
There is only one way that I know of to find the answer to that question.
Have I told you at least a hundred times yet that
When a person accepts the fact that they are not living their life to the full;
When a person believes the promise of Jesus that He can empower them to live their life to the full;
When a person commits to learning how to live their life to the full;
That person is ready to begin his or her search to find out where he or she is?
That’s when a person prays “God find me, rescue me.”
God has an uncanny ability to find you no matter where you are,
no matter the circumstances you find yourself in.
When God finds you, I call that an encounter,
Something radically changes in you.
That causes you to see the world,
everything and everyone , differently,
because you know where you are.
Ephesians 5:8 (MSG)
You groped your way through that murk once, but no longer. You're out in the open now. The bright light of Christ makes your way plain. So no more stumbling around.
Only God can tell you the answer to “Where are you?”
No one else can tell you.
But God can, and when He does, you’ll know where you are and
realize how far from home you’ve wandered.
What’s your answer to the question of Eden?
Where are you?
One of the problems in the church today is that we think that once we’ve
experienced Jesus as Savior that we’ve arrived home.
We read or hear all the great and precious promises of the scripture,
And don’t understand that we must embark on a journey to
realize them in our lives.
If we do realize that faith in Christ is the beginning of the journey we often
get caught up in trying to earn what can only be received as a free gift.
In the 80’s a group names U2 produced an album,
for the younger generation a CD,
filled with social commentary called The Joshua Tree.
One of the songs is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzwR2TJFDA4 )
I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one, bleed into one
But yes I'm still running
You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame, of my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
The song is open to much speculation,
the writer has refused to interpret what he wrote,
all that U2 is willing to divulge is this is our gospel tune.
The way these stanzas hit me was even though I am a believer,
A Christ follower, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
That prompted me to ask a question:
How can that be?
I’m going to use another metaphor to describe this entire situation.
The situation where one who is sincerely accepting, believing, committing
and alive in Christ, could possible say
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
I’m going to use the word “Thirst.”
I thirst because I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
People are thirsty for Eden.
“People long for what God designed us to enjoy:
tension-free relationships filled with deep, loving acceptance …” (Crabb, locations, 547-54)
People are thirsty for fellowship with God.
Thirsty for the intimacy, love, belonging, acceptance, security,
That we once shared with our Creator.
That we once shared with the Other.
That made us comfortable in our own skin.
Considered how we so often chase after quenching our own thirst as we proudly
boast the we are Christ followers.
We think:
If we can clean up our act,
Follow the right set of rules,
Keep the right set of disciplines,
Get involved in Christian activates .
(Crabb locations 461-71)
Then our thirst will be quenched.
In other words author our own sanctification,
Our own becoming like Jesus,
Then my thirst for everything represented by Eden will
be satisfied.
No wonder you still haven’t found what you’re looking for.
“More is involved in quenching our thirst than increased
diligence on the outside activities.” (Crabb, locations 480-83)
We think:
If we just can muster up enough faith
Then God the Holy Spirit will zap us with thirst quenching power. (Crabb, locations 492-95)
Maybe if we are more obedient,
Do more of the right stuff,
Pray the right prayer,
Then we can bring a case before God.
We can plead, “Hey, I’m keeping my end of the bargain,
Isn’t it about time you come through on your promises?”
The answer doesn’t come, were still waiting for the zap
No wonder you still haven’t found what you’re looking for.
You can’t force your way back into Eden.
Though faith and obedience are extremely important,
Faith and obedience can’t buy you into Eden.
We think:
Pastor Mike is always teaching about working on your issues,
Dealing with the pain of your past that is sabotaging the present.
Maybe a Christian counselor and some therapy will help?
Maybe a good book or two dealing with my stuff will bring me the thirst quenching break through.
No wonder you still haven’t found what you’re looking for.
“…direct work on deeper issues beneath the waterline is essential to removing obstacles to spiritual
growth…
(Crabb, locations 504-11)
Christian Counseling and therapy can help you mature,
But it can’t quench your thirst for Eden.
Having eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil,
We have set ourselves up as little gods.
We are our own authority.
We think we can manage on our own.
Thinking we are so wise we set off in the course of our own choosing
often not even realizing that we are like children lost in the woods.
We go looking for what we think will quench our thirst.
We go looking in all the wrong places.
We poison ourselves believing the charlatans thirst quenching claims.
All our oasis’s turn out to be just mirages.
We’re dying from dehydration.
No wonder,
Even in the midst of sincerely trying to live out the ABC of the faith,
Accepting, believing, committing
No wonder you still haven’t found what you’re looking for
You have “deep longings for what you do not have and
stubborn independence reflected in wrong strategies for finding
the life you desire.” (Crabb, locations 556-63)
for quenching your thirst,
for returning to Eden.
Now you may have forgotten what Eden is all about.
Eden represents righteousness.
Righteousness means right relationship.
Eden represents relating rightly to God,
To Others, to your self and to the Earth.
The Chief characteristic of relating rightly is
LOVE.
But it’s a love like you have never known,
It is a communion of souls,
Intimate, transparent, intermingled,
Being one,
the separating boundaries disappear, and
together you are the music, the song, the melody, the harmony ,
the rhythm, and the dance of eternal life.
Never alone, never isolated, never cut off.
The dance steps of love are ever new while always repeating,
Security, belonging, acceptance, peace, sharing,
and delight, creating and redeeming and including.
It’s a love that embraces suffering and sorrow,
Redeeming it, transforming it into comfort and joy;
It dives into pain with the power to alleviate it.
It weeps but then fills with laughter.
It works and the labor results in satisfaction.
It is Love that is energizing, dynamic, and knowing,
flowing through you and out of you and filling you again,
uniting you with the other not only in purpose but also the
sheer joy of being, of existing. of thriving,
being seen and seeing,
being known and knowing.
It is a love that empowers you to be fully alive,
fully present and a full participant in the community
That’s Eden, that is what you are still looking for,
that is what will quench your thirst.
In the gospel according to John,
Jesus has an encounter with a Samaritan woman at a well.
John 4:5-14 (MSG)
Jesus came into Sychar, a Samaritan village that bordered the field Jacob had given his son Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was still there. Jesus, worn out by the trip, sat down at the well. It was noon. 7 A woman, a Samaritan, came to draw water. Jesus said, "Would you give me a drink of water?" 8 (His disciples had gone to the village to buy food for lunch.) 9 The Samaritan woman, taken aback, asked, "How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" (Jews in those days wouldn't be caught dead talking to Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered, "If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink, and I would give you fresh, living water." 11 The woman said, "Sir, you don't even have a bucket to draw with, and this well is deep. So how are you going to get this 'living water'? 12 Are you a better man than our ancestor Jacob, who dug this well and drank from it, he and his sons and livestock, and passed it down to us?" 13 Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again and again. 14 Anyone who drinks the water I give will never thirst—not ever. The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life."
Its only this fresh living water that can quench your thirst.
Jesus said… Anyone who drinks the water I give will never thirst—not ever.
The thirst for Eden,
Eden, what you are still looking for,
Relational Love with God and others,
Is experienced by drinking Living Water.
Living water is a gift.
Its something only Jesus can give you.
But Jesus only gives it to the thirsty.
Jesus only gives living water to the thirsty who ask.
Until you realize just how thirsty and how much in need for the
living water that only Jesus can give
you won’t find what you’re looking for
Standing in the midst of the Church,
Heir to the promises of God,
Born again—you still will not have found what you are
looking for.
Its only by discovering what we really long for,
That we thirst for Eden,
Its only by acknowledging our thirst that the path opens for Jesus
to draw near and offer you the cup of living water.
If you are a believer, and you still haven’t found what you are looking for,
You now know what’s wrong.
Your relationship to God, Self, others and the Earth still isn’t
quenching your thirst for Eden.
Have you found the path that opens access to Jesus and the thirst quenching
living water He offers?