I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Part 4: Why The Well Keeps Going Dry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSma7Qg5G6s
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
Oh my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
The chorus echoes in my mind—I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
This is a gospel tune?
A song about life in Christ?
You’ve believed in the gospel,
Living the ABC of the faith—
Accepting, believing, committing in and to Jesus.
You’re practicing the 7 habits of a disciple—
Bible, Prayer, Fellowship, Service, Worship,
Obedience, Contemplation—
But you’re still running?
Cause you still haven’t found what I’m looking for?
I have got to ask why? I’ve got to ask why of myself.
Maybe you have too?
You’ve entered into a right relationship with God through faith in
Jesus.
Accepting the fact that you need a savior
Believing that Jesus is that savior
Committing yourself to a life of following Jesus
You called out to God to rescue you from a life
that was heading to hell.
God accepted your faith and made you His child.
Original sin was swept away.
The sins that you perpetrated were forgiven.
You became a new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5:17)
You try, try hard, try harder, try your hardest—
But yes you’re still running,
And if you’re are honest with yourself you admit that you still haven’t
found what you’re looking for.
In our series we’ve learned exactly what we are looking for.
We’re looking for the spring of living water,
The waters of the abundant life,
We’re looking for love.
We’re looking for the love that was imprinted on the human soul in Eden.
Eden represents righteousness, a loving fellowship with God,
With Others, with the Earth and with Self.
Intimacy, communion, belonging,
A dance of love in a world where there was no good and
no evil,
instead all things were simply right.
We were free, nothing to hide,
no sorrow, no pain, no guilt, no shame.
Love made us alive.
Love empowered us to live.
Love joined us as one.
The joy of Eden.
the peace of Eden.
The rightness of Eden.
Lost in an act of disobedience.
Eden lost, love lost, life lost and that’s what we’re looking for.
The search is like trying to quench a thirst.
We are thirsty.
Thirsty for Eden, thirsty for love, thirsty for life.
John 7:37-38 (NIV)
"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him."
Hearing the gospel you have gone to Jesus,
You’re a believer.
For a while your thirst was quenched.
“You manage to get your self rearranged and
held together to look like a person who’s living for God,
but you know something inside is very different from what the Bible
tells you can be there.
Something is missing. Something is wrong.”
(Crabb, locations 1976-85)
The realities of life start their relentless attack.
Difficulties, problems, things don’t go your way,
You struggle, bad things happen,
Relationships still get messed up,
Frustration, fear, failures,
Things still aren’t right.
And you think:
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
We’ve learned three possible reason as to why such a thing could be.
1. We haven’t acknowledged the desperation of our thirst that opens the path for
Jesus to draw near with a cup of living water for us.
2. We still are determined to be the author of our own sanctification.
Digging our own wells to medicate our pain, to find our own answers.
3. We have begun demanding God to correct the situation.
We’ve done our part, isn’t it about time He does his?
Today we need to look at a very harsh reality that will help us see yet another
reason why the well of living water keeps running dry,
leaving us with that uneasy feeling that
we still haven’t found what we’re looking for.
I want to talk about the chronic and pervasive problem of self-protection.
Protecting yourself sounds like a pretty good idea.
Every now and then I step out the front door and the memory of my mom’
voice says, Be careful.
We do a lot of things to secure our physical safety,
Locks on our doors, seat belts in our cars, all that kind of stuff.
That’s all well in good, but the type of self-protection we need to talk
about today is the kind that keeps others at arms length,
if we even let them that close at all.
Self-protection deters, damages and destroys right relationships.
We choose self-protection instead of risking love.
If we don’t risk loving and opening ourselves to being loved,
We will never find what we’re searching for.
James 4:1-2 (NIV)
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don't get it.
One great desire that battles within is the desire “to be.”
We want to be, safe, to be comforted, to be recognized,
to be appreciated, to be respected.
We want to be in Eden, we want to be loved.
We live in a broken world, full of broken people,
And the reality of this situation is that no one was ever been able to fully
satisfy your “to be” desires.
Not even yo momma has been able to fully love you with
Eden’s love.
All our unfulfilled “to be’s” cause us emotional pain.
And we do all sorts of things to protect ourselves from feeling the
pain of past wounds and from being wounded again.
We have developed numerous self-protecting strategies to insulate us from
the pain of our unfulfilled “to be” desires. (Crabb, locations 2106-16)
The problem with these strategies is that cut us off from love,
The very thing we’re looking for.
They stop the flow of living water,
The artesian well stops bubbling up from within.
The well runs dry.
Self-protection is one result of original sin.
Genesis 3:14-19 is often called the curse.
But I think its not so much God’s curse upon his creation
but rather a pronouncement of the result of what Adam had
chosen to do.
Let me just give you a glimpse of the origins of our sin of self-protection.
The curse for both Adam and Eve struck at their very identities as being
created male and being created female.
“For Adam, working now meant a battle with weeds and thrones,
a battle he isn’t able to fully overcome.” (Crabb, locations 2413-21)
That feeling of inadequacy is crushingly painful.
Adam must fight to be authentically masculine,
“a person designed to productively enter his world on the behalf of
another.” (Crabb, locations 2413-21)
Anything that reminds Adam of his inadequacy
he seeks to protect himself from.
Instead of engaging in love,
He chooses to protect himself from further pain.
No wonder he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
“Eve was designed to courageously give all she has to others in warm
vulnerability, wrapping herself with supportive strength around those
with whom she relates.”
(Crabb, locations 2413-21)
But after the Fall she “could no longer count on Adam to respond to her with
love.”
(Crabb, locations 2413-21)
Eve is scared to be authentically feminine,
to protect herself form further pain
“She has to become tough and hard” and now instead of finding
“joy in accepting and embracing others” she feels
compelled to defensively control her relationships.
(Crabb, locations 2413-21)
Anything that reminds Eve of her pain caused by vulnerability
Instead of risking love,
She chooses to push it away to protect herself from further pain.
No wonder she still hasn’t found what she’s looking for.
Because we live east of Eden (Gen 3:24)
we have developed strategies to self-protect
from the danger of being who we were created to be.
Those self-protecting strategies stop the flow of living water.
Self-protecting strategies are the reason the well runs dry.
Self-protection has become humanities way of relating to God, to Others,
and Self.
Self-protection is our default strategy for doing relationships.
Self-protection prevents us from fully engaging in love.
We are desperately searching for is the love we had in Eden,
The freedom “to be” because we knew love.
We are all deeply determined not to feel the pain of being unloved.
So we don’t risk opening ourselves up in love to the other.
We hold back because we are afraid of being hurt again.
We’re afraid of being found out, rejected, abandoned, and ridiculed.
We’re afraid of being judged inadequate, incompetent, and incapable,
We’re afraid of being betrayed,
Of being disappointed, let down,
Of not being loved.
We’re afraid to feel the pain of times in the past when our need to be loved
went un-meet, when our “to be” needs were left unfulfilled by the
very people we needed to meet them.
That’s why it sounds so mature and right and good when someone says
“I’m more interested in knowing how I can get on with my life.
What’s past is past. I want to learn to relate effectively to
people now.” (Crabb, locations 2128-37)
I don’t want to remember,
I don’t want to feel the pain,
I don’t want the anguish of not being loved.
So we develop self protecting strategies to deal with the past pains and
the fears we have of future pain.
Instead of reciting a big general list of possible self-protecting strategies,
I’m going to invite you into my world,
Into my struggle.
I have issues with abandonment.
The dictionary defines Abandonment as
to leave completely and finally; forsake utterly; desert: discontinue;
withdraw from.
My heart defines abandonment as utter horror and torturing pain.
I actually do not have words to communicate to you the depths of the
agony I feel when I someone abandons me.
Here’s my pattern of abandonment,
We love each other, a conflict arises, You blame me and you leave.
Sometimes you don’t even have to blame me,
You just up and die.
That pattern has repeated so many times in my life that I expect it to
happen in every relationship.
Yes even in my relationship with you.
So what do I do?
I develop ways to protect myself from getting too attached to people.
So instead of having a nice safe job, God makes me a pastor,
A job in its very nature requires you to get attached to people.
One way I self-protect from becoming too attached to you is Pessimism.
I enter into relationships with an assumption that they will not last;
That its just a matter of time before I say something,
or fail to do something, or whatever happens and you say bye.
“Thanks for all the fish,” but I’m outta here.
That pessimism keeps me from fully embracing you,
Fully investing myself in you.
Fully seeking to meet your needs,
Because I’m afraid you’re going to hurt me.
It’s just a matter of time until you too let me down.
Do you see the selfish self-protection in that?
I keep you at an emotional arms length to protect myself from your eventual departure.
If I am not too attached to you the pain of ripping my soul from
yours will at least bearable.
Since love between us east of Eden people is reciprocal,
Not fully loving you,
Means you’re not going to fully love me,
And that need to be loved continues to go unmet.
The well runs dry.
Do you catch the insanity here?
No relationships, no love, no Eden, which creates more pain.
Self-protecting strategies always hold something back that effectively blocks you
from the love you’re looking for.
Just think—we do the same kind of thing with all our relationships,
That means in our relationship with God too.
We hold back in our relationship with God because we are afraid He
to is going to disappoint us.
No wonder the well of living water has run dry.
It affects our relationships with others—
Consider this church family.
There is no reason in the world you should not have shared a
meal with every one who attends HBCC.
OK that might be extreme.
But there is no reason in the world should not know the
name of every one who attends HBCC.
“I just have a hard time remembering names Pastor.”
Can you name the castaways on Gilligan’s Island?
Can you name the members of the Brady Bunch?
Can you name the characters of Friends? Seinfeld?
We could run down this path for a while but lets get back on track—
We all employ ways of keeping people away,
In order to keep ourselves from being hurt again.
And all our self-protecting strategies result in the well of living water running dry.
So what’s the answer?
Self-protecting is the sin of not loving.
There is an inverse relationship,
The more I self-protect, the less I love,
The less I self-protect, the more able I am to fully enter into
relationship with God, Others and my Self.
The answer is to acknowledge suffering.
To feel the pain of all those unfulfilled “to be’s;”
To feel the incessant ache of disappointment;
To feel the sorrow of things never being right in this world.
The answer is to admit suffering
by coming out of hiding
by becoming vulnerable
by opening your life up to another, allowing them in.
knowing full well that they may hurt you.
The answer is to accept suffering
To realize that your heart is going to be broken a million times,
But you offer it up anyway;
To realize that your acts of self-less love will not be returned,
But you give yourself anyway;
To realize that your tears are used by the Holy Spirit to prime the pump that
gets the waters of life flowing out of you.
Acknowledging, admitting and accepting suffering is the price to crucify
self-protection.
Philippians 1:29 (MSG)
There's far more to this life than trusting in Christ. There's also suffering for him. And the suffering is as much a gift as the trusting.
Suffering that crucifies self-protection leaves you with the gift of looking only to
God to fulfill every one of you “to be” needs.
Suffering that crucifies self-protection leaves you with gift that allows rivers of
living water to flow through you, and out of you,
even if that love is never returned.
Suffering that crucifies self-protection leaves you with the gift of Eden,
not fully realized yet,
but enough to get us through to the time when the Father redeems all
our sufferings.
Suffering that crucifies self-protection leaves you with the gift that you’ve been
searching for.
The well of live begins to bubble up again from within.
I know that sounds absolutely nuts.
But refusing to open your life up and give room for suffering,
makes it impossible for love to thrive.
So what do you do?
You must willing surrender self-protection in order to enter into
the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings,
becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow,
to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Phil 3:10-11 (NIV)
If that is your decision
I invite you to come to these altars.
Scattered are nails, little spikes;
symbolizing the nails driven into the hands and feet of one who
sacrificed self-protection in order to love to the fullest.
Pick up a nail,
Carry it with you,
To remind you that suffering crucifies self protection,
That allows you to love and be loved,
To find what you’ve been searching for.
1 Peter 2:21 (NIV)
To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you,
leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.