Someone I'd Like You to Meet--Life With God Series

            I never thought I’d be able to say this, but it felt strange not to see the Royals in the playoffs this year. But even though I didn’t have the chance to cheer for them, I’ve still been able to cheer for my favorite player—Ben Zobrist of the Chicago Cubs!

            Many of you heard about my distant connections to Ben while he was playing for the Royals last year. Several members of his family attended the same Bible college that I went to, so I have some connections to his family. I’m on a first-name basis with his sisters, and I have some acquaintance with his dad, who is a fellow pastor.

            I’d be lying, though, if I said I had a relationship with Ben, because the truth is, I’ve never met him. Until that might happen, I won’t have a relationship with him no matter how many of his family members I know and no matter how much I know about him!

            For all of us, this principle holds true in every area of life—if you want to have a relationship with a person, you have to meet him first. This principle also holds true when it comes to God—if you want to have a relationship with Him, you have to meet Him first!

            Now, what’s it like to meet God for the first time? Well, that really depends on who you ask. As it turns out, you would get a very different answer to that question if you listened to the dominant idea of our culture or whether you listened to the Bible! Let’s talk about the different answers that we would receive.

What is it like to meet God for the first time?

Our culture—It’s like meeting a distant relative. There’s no reason to think we can’t hit it off just fine! I can build a closer relationship with my relative through my own efforts.

            Think about it like this—imagine meeting your third cousin for the first time. Your third cousin is someone who has the same great-great grandparents as you. I’ve never met my third cousins, but if I did, I don’t have any reason to think that we couldn’t have a great friendship from the get-go. We don’t have any bad blood between us because we’ve never even met, so it seems like we could hit off pretty well. All that seems to be required is for me to look them up and contact them. And as I long as I put in a little effort to stay in touch with them from now on, maybe it could be the start of a beautiful friendship!

            This idea of connecting with a distant relative is probably the dominant way that most people in our culture think about meeting God. They might say, “No, I’m not very close to God right now, but if I just started praying more often and going to church a bit more, me and God could get along just fine! We could probably get pretty close if I just stayed in touch a bit more!”

The Bible, though, paints a very different picture of what it’s like to meet God for the first time.

The Bible—It’s like making peace with someone whom I’ve deeply offended. Our relationship is broken, and it can only be repaired by God’s grace and mercy.

            When I’ve deeply offended someone, there are problems there that must be resolved before I can have a close relationship with that person again. And when I’ve committed the offense, I’m the one who has to ask for forgiveness. And as far as repairing that relationship, that ball really isn’t in my court. That ball is in the other person’s court – he has to decide whether he is going to extend forgiveness to me and whether he is willing to rebuild that relationship.

            According to the Bible, this is a more accurate picture of what it’s like to meet God for the first time – or to be a little more precise, we might say that this is what it’s like to meet him on friendly terms; to establish a friendship with him. We do learn in the Bible that we have always had a relationship with God, but unfortunately, it has been a broken relationship – even a hostile relationship! The Bible uses some very unflattering terms to describe what we are like in relationship to God because of our sinfulness:

·         An adulterous spouse (Hosea)

·         A rebellious child (Luke 15:11-32)

·         Lovers of darkness and haters of the light of God (John 3:19-20)

·         Following the spirit of Satan (Ephesians 2:2)

·         Ungrateful creatures (Romans 1:21)

·         Exchanged the truth of God for a lie (Romans 1:25)

·         Enemies of God (Romans 5:10)

            The reality of our broken and hostile relationship to God is why the Bible uses such dramatic word pictures to tell us what its like for us to come to be on friendly terms with God. A few of those word pictures are:

·         Moving from a state of spiritual death to a state of spiritual life (Ephesians 2:5)

·         Being forgiven of an oppressive, unpayable load of debt (Matthew 18:23-27)

·         Being freed from slavery (Romans 8:15)

·         Becoming a citizen after being a foreigner (Ephesians 2:19)

·         Moving from a domain of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Colossians 1:13)

·         Being crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20)

To make sure we all understand what is necessary for us to get on friendly terms with God, I’d like to focus on two more word pictures that tell us what is necessary for this to happen—one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament.

I Need a New Heart! (Ezekiel 36:22-27)

            The prophet Ezekiel ministered during the time when the Lord had allowed the people of Israel to be conquered and taken out of their land because of their sins against Him. We call this “The Babylonian Captivity” because they were taken as captives to Babylon, which was in the area that is now modern-day Iraq.

            One result of all of this is that the surrounding nations had started to really look down on the Jews and their God. They saw them as weak and powerless and thought that their god must be the same because he apparently wasn’t able to save them (though in reality, God had allowed all of this to happen as a discipline upon the people of Israel).

            In Ezekiel 36, God told the Israelites what he was going to do to restore His honor among the nations and provide forgiveness and spiritual life for the people [READ 36:22-26].

            Think about that word picture literally for a moment. If my physical heart is stone cold, then I’m dead! My heart cannot sustain life in that condition. It is the same with my spiritual heart, or my spirit. God is telling me as I read this passage that my heart cannot sustain spiritual life in its natural condition. I need a new heart, which only he can give.

            And the new heart that he gives is even a fitting place for his Holy Spirit to live! Notice verse 27 [READ v. 27].

            So here in this passage we read a very dramatic word picture that describes what it’s like to meet God. Coming to be on friendly terms with him is like receiving a heart transplant! He removes my heart which is stone-cold dead and gives me a new heart in which his own Spirit actually lives!

I Need to Be Born All Over Again! (John 3:1-7)

            One of the dominant word pictures in the New Testament for meeting God is just as dramatic as the idea of receiving a new heart. Let’s read in John 3 about an exchange between Jesus and a religious leader named Nicodemus [READ 3:1-7].

            So according to Jesus, nothing that we received in our physical birth is sufficient to give us a home in the kingdom of God. God’s Holy Spirit must give us spiritual life, which we can think of as being born all over again. We are receiving a new kind of life from a new source, the Holy Spirit.

            Don’t miss the fact that Nicodemus was a devoutly religious man! He was a Pharisee, and the Pharisees were famous for the great care that they took to obey God’s commands as closely as possible. If there ever was a man who could have been on friendly terms with God through his own efforts, it was Nicodemus! Yet Jesus told even this devoutly religious man that he needed to receive new life from the Holy Spirit if he wanted to enter the kingdom of God.

            The question before us now is, “How do we do it?” How do we come to be on friendly terms with God? How do we get this new heart; how do we receive this new life from the Holy Spirit? Well, the answer is described for us in this very same chapter – John 3. Look at verses 16-18 [READ 3:16-18]

            To receive this new life from the Holy Spirit, here is what you must do. First, you must acknowledge to God that what he says about your spiritual need is correct – that if you do not trust in Jesus, you are condemned already because you have sinned. You need to confess that you have been in rebellion against God; that you have done things you should not have done and that you should do no longer.

            And once you have admitted that God’s assessment of you is correct – that you are guilty and deserving of punishment – then you only need to accept the forgiveness that he offers to you through Jesus Christ. Place all your hope of being forgiven in what Jesus accomplished for you by dying for your sins on the cross. He, as the son of God, came into the world, died to pay for the penalty of your sins, and came to life again to achieve new life for anyone who understands their need for it and trusts him to give it to them.

            If you desire to have a closer relationship with God, you must meet him in this way if you never have before. Get on friendly terms with him today by acknowledging your guilt to him and receiving the free gift of forgiveness that he offers through Jesus Christ!

You're a Good, Good Father--1 Peter 1:3-5 (1 Peter Series)

            When people in our country think about Christians, they might think of the phrase “family values,” that familiar phrase from the world of politics. More or less, that phrase basically means that we think the traditional family structure is very important, and we want to see it protected and strengthened.

            I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of conservative Christians. We believe that the family structure was laid out by God and that he would want to see this structure strong and healthy. That belief of ours is one of the reasons why it’s very odd for us to read words like this from Jesus: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household (Matthew 10:34-36).”

            That sounds like a strange way to support family values, doesn’t it? Now please understand that Jesus spoke these words as part of a larger conversation in which he was telling his disciples that they would face opposition from other people because of their relationship with him. With these words about family members, I think Jesus was not describing his desire, but rather what the actual result of his ministry would sometimes be – even something as tightknit as a family could become divided as individuals made their choice of whether to accept him or reject him.

            The Christians to whom Peter wrote in the book of 1 Peter had almost certainly experienced the kind of division within their families that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 10. It is never a fun thing to find yourselves at odds with your family members, but in that day and age, being cut off from your family had some even more serious implications than what we might experience today.

            And so, as Peter begins the body of his letter in 1 Peter 1:3-5, he highlights for his audience—and for us!—the fact that:

God has caused us to be born again into a new family, with all of the blessings that family can bring.

            As we get into the body of Peter’s letter in verse three, we actually encounter one very long sentence in Greek that stretches all the way to verse nine. We can’t really reproduce that same sentence structure very well in English, so our translations have to break it up into several sentences. But it’s helpful to note that all of the grand theology and beautiful truths that were going to encounter in these verses flow out of this first, foundational exclamation in verse three: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

            That declaration is truly the long and short of the Christian life, all wrapped up into one statement. Are you enjoying the bright sunshine of life today or are you in its raging storms? Either way, the same declaration can be yours – Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Are you traversing the grand hills of life, it’s pleasant meadows, or its deepest valleys? No matter – the cry of your heart can be the same. Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

            This exclamation rings with the echo of Job’s declaration after that great man had suffered such great loss all at once. He said, “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21).”

            This declaration is not some head-in-the-sand mentality, where we’re just ignoring all of the ups and downs of life. Rather, it is based on everything that God has accomplished for us in the past that has set us up for such a glorious future. Let’s take a closer look now at these truths.

1. We’ve been born again into a new setting in life (v. 3)

            Since these Jewish believers had embraced Jesus Christ, they had likely lost any advantages that they may have had from being born into their respective biological families. So Peter reminds them of one of the blessings that we have from our new birth in Christ [READ v. 3]. That past event of Jesus resurrection – which is a certain as the fact that George Washington walked the earth – has placed us into this wonderful new setting in life that Peter calls “a living hope.” Here he is talking about the glorious expectations that we have for our future destiny with Christ.

            Now please don’t think that hope is some kind of wimpy expectation. When I was a kid, for some reason my friends and I thought that hoping for something was a rather weak attitude. If I said something like, “I hope Susie talks to me on the playground today,” we thought that was about the same as saying, “That’s never going to happen!” Sure, I wanted it to happen, but I really didn’t expect it to.

            The idea of hope in the Bible is precisely the opposite. Hope is a very confident expectation of something that you don’t have your hands on quite yet. The reason that biblical hope incorporates such a high degree of confidence is that the things we are expecting to see in the future are based on the things that were already accomplished in the past.

            So even though the present day reality for Peter’s audience was difficult, their new birth through Christ gave them a confident expectation of glory to come. And notice that Peter calls this hope a “living” hope. Now, what is one of the characteristics of living things? They grow, right? Now is it not true that so often when you observe an older saint who has been walking with the Lord for many years, they exude hope, don’t they? Their confidence in the life to come is so certain that it characterizes their whole lives! You probably don’t have to think very long before you can think of someone who is a perfect example of the way that Christian hope grows and multiplies. As we walk with the Lord, hopefulness becomes the very air that we breathe.

2. We have a better inheritance in store for us (v. 4)

            When these ethnically Jewish people became Christians, they were likely cut out of the will in their families. Any inheritance that they stood to receive was probably taken from them, which may have left them rather uneasy about the future.

            So Peter reminds them here that as children of God, they stand to receive a much better inheritance than their earthly family could have ever given to them. Verse four is to be tied in with the thought of being born again, and so Peter states that we have been born again “to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.”

            At a minimum, I suspect Peter is thinking about our home in heaven with God. As God’s adopted children, we now have the right and the expectation to one day be with him where he is. Parents and children are supposed to live together, and that is the promise we have from God for our destiny after this stage of life.

            Notice how Peter makes a big point to stress the lasting and enduring nature of our inheritance with God. He says it is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.” Our heavenly inheritance is not subject to any of the factors that might devalue our earthly inheritance.

            I don’t know what kind of inheritance you might stand to receive from your parents. Perhaps they have already passed and so you already have your inheritance, or perhaps they are still living and you stand to receive something from them when they do pass away. Whatever that inheritance might consist of, it is subject to decay, loss, theft, and just a general deterioration. If they pass on cash, that money will likely lose some of its value to inflation. If they pass on stock, it will be subject to the fluctuations of the market. If they give you a home, it will have to be maintained or it will deteriorate. If they give you land, it has to be managed and cared for somehow. And all of those things I just mentioned are subject to complete loss. Through various circumstances, you could wind up losing any of those things completely.

            But our heavenly inheritance is much different. It is not subject to decay or loss or theft. And Peter says that this inheritance is kept in heaven for you. The word picture is of something that has been tucked away for safekeeping, as you might put something in a safe deposit box until you need to retrieve it later.

            So even if we should lose an earthly inheritance because of our faith in Christ, our new reception into God’s family gives us a much better and much greater inheritance to look forward to. And as Peter mentioned that this inheritance is “kept,” he goes on in verse five to stress how we ourselves are guarded by God our father.

3. We have a new source of protection (v. 5)

            In ancient times, your family was your primary source of protection from all kinds of hardships and calamities. Remember that Peter was living and writing in a day in which there were no such things as insurance policies. So what would you do if your house burn down or your crops failed or you were injured? You wouldn’t sing the State Farm jingle and expect your insurance agent to magically show up! You would turn to your family before anyone else to find help and assistance.

            Likewise, how would you take care of yourself and your old age? To our knowledge, there were no such things as retirement homes. There was no Medicare, no Social Security, so once again, you would rely on your family to help. That’s one reason why barrenness was viewed as such a sad condition in biblical times. It’s a sad thing for couples today to deal with infertility, but that situation doesn’t necessarily put us into jeopardy as far as our own well-being is concerned. But at that time, it did.

            Given a cultural context like that, you can imagine how uneasy and afraid Peter’s audience may have felt if they had been kicked out of their families because of their faith – and again, I think it is likely that they were. They didn’t just suffer an emotional and perhaps financial loss – they had lost their main source of protection as well.

            But lest they think that they were now without any protection, Peter reminds them in verse five that they are those “who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” In the same way that their heavenly inheritance was under guard for safekeeping, these believers were themselves under the guardianship and protection of God. That fact did not rule out the possibility that they might face continued persecution for their faith, but it did mean that God’s plan for them would never be thwarted. His destiny for them would not fail to be realized.

            Notice again how the stress in this whole passage today is on the future. Peter wrote that they were guarded “for us salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” That might sound a bit strange to us, because we are so accustomed to talking about salvation in the past tense. We say things like, “I was saved back at such and such a time when I placed my faith in Christ.” That’s true of course, but I know I don’t have to tell you that God’s whole plan of salvation has not yet been realized.

            It’s the ultimate fulfillment and completion of our salvation that Peter has in view here, and notice how Peter stresses that it is all ready. There’s no doubt here about whether it’s going to happen – Peter says it’s ready to go right now! There’s nothing that remains to be done in order for your salvation to be established or acquired because Jesus completed all of that through his death and resurrection. So the full and final enactment of your salvation is ready to go – it waits only for the word of God to give the go-ahead for this stage of human history to come to an end.

            I know that some of you here might be able to sympathize with the situation of these believers in a very personal way. I know that some of you have faced at least a degree of exclusion from your own families because of your faith. Perhaps your convictions about how to serve God did not line up in every detail with their convictions, and as a result, you have faced exclusion and rejection to one degree or another.

            To those of you who fit this description, I hope the new realities that are yours in the family of God can be a great comfort to you. If your earthly family has turned from you, know that God never will. You have been born again and adopted and his family, and now you face a certain and secure future, within in perishable inheritance that is waiting for you, reserved for you, and you are protected by the very power of God so that you will receive it.

            And to those of us who have never faced this kind of situation with our earthly families, we need to remember that our greatest hope and confidence and security for the future comes not from those biological relationships but from the Lord. If we receive in earthly inheritance that’s fine, but let’s not put all our eggs in that basket! Let’s not tie all of our hopes and dreams and something like that – something that is still only subject to decay and loss. Let’s build our greatest dreams upon the living hope that we have through God, not the slowly dying hope that characterizes all of the goods and values of this world.

            May we all rejoice today, and make it our heart’s cry in every situation to say, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”