I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.
Part 2 We’re A Thirsty People
We started a new series of teachings I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”
In the late 80’s Irish rockers U2 performed the song
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
It’s a song that the group refers to as the gospel song.
If you put that set of lenses on to interpret the song,
You find a very disturbing question.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiSRT-L_kSY
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
Even though I am a believer,
A Christ follower, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
How can that be?
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.
What?
How can that be?
Answering that question is what this series is all about.
So far we’ve discovered that its only by recognizing what we are still looking for
that we can ever hope to find it.
“…we are thirsty people who are still searching for what was lost in
the Fall.”
(Crabb, Inside Out, electronic edition, locations 635-42)
What you’re still looking for is the living water that only Jesus can give you.
Lets do a little review.
Genesis 2:15-17 (NLT)
The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”
Its being alive but not truly living is what was lost in the Fall.
Life to the full is what you are thirsty for.
We referred to it as Eden last time.
Only love can make you fully alive.
Only God’s love can empower you to live life to the full.
In the movie Braveheart, William Wallace says:
“Every man dies, not every man really lives.”
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1G_Bzu52DY )
He makes that statement while in prison,
Facing execution by torture.
Life to the full is not about creature comforts—
Its not about God making things easy for you,
Its not about your being happy,
Its about being holy.
Life to the full is being who you were created to be and
Doing what you were created to do,
Being and doing in the midst of “unanswered questions,
real disappointments,” major problems, with heartaches
and heart breaks. (Crabb, locations 829-35)
Life to the full isn’t found in situations and circumstances
its found in drinking the living water that Jesus gives.
You can’t get living water on your own.
Living water can only be given to you.
Jesus is the only one who can give you living water.
Jesus gives living water to the thirsty who ask.
Today I want to show you how to open that path that can lead you to Jesus,
So that you can draw near and receive from Him the thirst quenching
living waters of life;
the life and love of Eden that you’re looking for.
The path that will lead you to Jesus is one of acknowledging your thirst and
your desperate inability to quench it.
John 4:13-14 (MSG)
Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again and again. 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."
Even after God finds you and accepts you as His own,
Makes you His child and gives you a new life,
That He allows a thirst to start growing within you.
A thirst for something more.
As incredible as that statement is I’ve seen it played out in the lives of believers,
I’ve experienced playing out in mine.
I’ve done everything they told me to do.
I listened to the good news of the gospel,
How Jesus died for my sins that I could be saved.
I accepted the fact that I was a sinner.
No doubt in my mind I’d deterred, damaged and destroyed
Relationships.
There was a wake of relational messterpieces behind me.
I believed that Jesus could forgive me of my sins.
That sounded good to me because I had chosen to do some pretty
stupid things and having those blotted out—that was something
not to pass on.
I committed myself, made a vow to God to follow Jesus.
I knew I needed to learn how to make my relationships with God, with
others, with myself and even with the earth right.
Because the way I was living was wrong.
I did everything they told me to do—but still things went wrong:
Relationships went sour; hard work went unrewarded;
expectations weren’t met; suffered a heart attack,
wife got cancer:
I still have issues to work on;
Habits, attachments and addictions to rectify;
Frustration and temptations to overcome.
I still have times of loneliness, depression, weariness,
And confusion.
Maybe you also have accepted, believed and committed and
for a time you felt a new vitality coursing through you, flowing out of you,
but now there is a sense that something is wrong,
that somehow you got Christianity lite instead of the full body
brew of living water that radically changes your life from the inside out.
Here’s what life can look like when you try to quench your thirst with Christianity
Lite:
Try Harder, Fatigue, Quit, Guilt, Repent, Try Harder.
(John Ortberg, The Me I Want To Be, p. 38)
Here’s what life can look like when you try to quench your thirst with Christianity
Lite:
Try, Fail, Languish, Go Through the Motions, Give Up, Crawl back,
try again.
Maybe you feel lost in the desert, wandering around in a dry and thirsty land,
Wondering when all these good things you’ve heard that God does on behalf
of His children are going to start happening to you.
Maybe you’re wondering why you still haven’t found what your looking for.
The writer of Hebrews points us to the path that leads to a thirst quenching
encounter with Jesus.
Hebrews 6:1-3 (MSG)
So come on, let's leave the preschool fingerpainting exercises on Christ and get on with the grand work of art. Grow up in Christ. The basic foundational truths are in place: turning your back on "salvation by self-help" and turning in trust toward God; baptismal instructions; laying on of hands; resurrection of the dead; eternal judgment. God helping us, we'll stay true to all that. But there's so much more. Let's get on with it!
The path isn’t to be found in the midst of the elementary teachings of the faith.
You still haven’t found what you’re looking for because you keep repeating the
foundational course, accept, believe, commit, practice the 7 habits of a
disciple.
You still haven’t found what you’re looking for because you’re still doing
“salvation by self-help”
holiness by self-guided improvement.
Not realizing that its just a Self-centered preoccupation
(Crabb, locations 929-33)
You still haven’t found what you’re looking for because you want to live to be
comfortable instead of living to know God. (Crabb, locations 954-61)
Be honest with yourself—what do you want more,
Comfort or Christ?
I’ve told you before that God is more concerned about your holiness than your
happiness.
God is more concerned with your Christ-likeness than your comfort.
Happiness and comfort is the reward of a life time of faithfulness,
It the culmination of living your life to the full.
If you still searching for happiness and comfort you don’t know
where you are.
But if you have answered Eden’s question:
God calling out to His creation: “Where are you?
What you are still looking for is the life empowering thirst quenching water that
only Jesus can give through a relationships with Him that empowers you to
live your life to the full,
that binds you into a community of like minded believers.
That catches you up in an eternal song of love
But how do we draw near?
How do we draw near to Jesus?
First we have to find the path.
The message ended last week with what I consider a very powerful music video of
the song Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering.
That’s the path.
The path is found by acknowledging our deep disappointments,
our sorrows, our pain, our frustration, our problems,
our overwhelming challenges.
Over the greatest ache in our soul
Its when we embrace the incredible pain of never having been loved like we
need to be loved.
That the thirst quenching path opens up to us.
If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for its because you have never have
drank deep of the love that was ours in Eden.
That’s the thirst that you haven’t been able to quench on your own.
Its when we are at wits end, unable to help ourselves,
When we are out of luck and out of resources,
When we have exhausted all our efforts,
And realize that on our own we have no hope,
That the thirst quenching path opens up to us.
Me in you, you in me, God in us, we in God,
Transparent, liberation, aware, knowing, interdependence, acceptance,
A part of the whole, being the whole because you are a part of it,
Belonging, joy, a dance, intertwined, complete,
The embrace of comfort and courage,
No limits, no bounds,
An endless supply of love,
Bubbling up within,
Flowing without.
That’s the thirst that you haven’t been able to quench on your own.
When you allow yourselves to feel what you have been deprived of,
By seeing that what you do seems so “unimportant, and unappreciated by
others
when you’re not able to do what matters most deeply,
when people you care about don’t care about you,
when you suffer the loss of a relationship that deeply mattered,
or the sting of betrayal, or the burn of a lie,
when you grasp the truth that you are both victim and
perpetrator
when you feel a horrible emptiness within
the anguish of rejection, or failure….”
(Crabb, locations, 861-68)
That’s the path, the way of suffering,
that motivates you to draw near to Jesus to get what only He can give.
Living water to quench your thirst for righteousness,
For love,
For Eden.
Psalms 42:1-2 (NLT)
As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him?
In the desert wilderness water is life.
The deer in the desert needs water to survive.
Finding water becomes a passionate, desperate, focused search.
You know those habits, attachments and addictions,
What we could call compulsive sins—
They’re just failed attempts to quench the thirst.
“Most sins that you seem powerless to control
grow out of your attempts to relieve the unbearable tension that
results from your failure to deal with the disappointment
of your deepest longings for Eden, for right relationship,”
(Crabb, locations, 1023-31)
for being loved.
“Until we acknowledge the painful disappointment in our circumstances and
The emptiness of our relationships,
[and our inability to resolve them on our own]
we will not pursue Christ with the passion of deep thirst.
(Crabb, locations 894-900)
The path will remain hidden to us,
We still will not have found what we’re
looking for.
Here’s how I think this goes down in a life.
We were created for Eden, for love, for relationship,
Eden has been lost.
Yet the desire for Eden burns in our hearts.
We long for Eden and the relational love with God and others it represents.
Every time we try to grasp Eden it slips through our fingers.
We hurt, with unmeet desires, heartaches and heartbreaks.
The great unsettled feeling in the life of a believer,
That lack of joy,
That passionless religious comfort zone,
Is designed to make you realize
First:
How desperate you are for living water.
Second:
How utterly futile is every effort to quench
your own thirst.
As we allow the Holy Spirit to convict us and
we acknowledge our failure to love and be loved,
our failure to create community where we belong,
where we are accepted,
our failure to live a significant life,
the path to draw near to Jesus opens up.
When we see that so much of what we do is stained by a self-centered
commitment to avoid hurting,
and we grow sick of our own efforts,
of our desire to have it our way,
to control,
the path to draw near to Jesus opens up.
When we forsake our pride and our idols,
our efforts and strength, our confidence to figure it out,
and see ourselves as clueless, incapable and pathetic,
when we deny ourselves,
because nothing we’ve tried works,
the path to draw near to Jesus opens up.
When quenching your thirst is the only thing that really matters to you,
When quenching your thirst becomes your passionate focused searching
desire, your number one priority,
the path to draw near to Jesus opens up.
How do you find the path?
You find the path by walking the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering,
by feeling the horror of never being loved like you where designed to
be loved.
Here is the incredible mystery,
When the path opens, you don’t draw near to Jesus,
He draws near to you.
You don’t draw near because you can’t,
In fact every effort to draw near ultimately fails,
Because its you who are still trying to quench your
own thirst.
Its by acknowledging your inability to quench your thirst that the path opens
up and Jesus draws near to you to give you a drink of living water.
You can’t do anything but acknowledge the fact in the depths of your soul,
at the core of your inmost being,
that you can’t do anything.
That is your moment of surrender.
Your arrogance and pride,
Your self-confidence and self-protection,
is nailed to the cross.
That is your moment of letting go.
Your past with its victories and failures,
The things you trusted in for comfort and security,
Is nailed to the cross.
That is your moment of denying self.
Selfishness, with its schemes and ambitions,
With its desire to be God,
Is nailed to the cross.
When you realize just how thirsty you are,
How desperate you are for water--
That is your moment when Jesus draws near and places a cup of
living water to your dry cracked lips.
Christian, believer, Christ follower,
Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?
What’s Wrong?
Where are you?
Are you thirsty?
There are cups of water here on the altars,
If you realize just how thirsty you are come and drink to symbolize
that you want the Holy Spirit to help you find the path,
on which Jesus can draw near and give you living water.
Revelation 22:17 (NIV)
Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.