Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
January 20, 2008

Rev. L. John Gable

“THE PURSUIT OF GOD"

I John 1:8-10, II Timothy 3:14-17

There is an old story about a traveler who stopped to ask directions from a farmer.  The farmer asked; “Where are you trying to getting to?”  The traveler said; “It doesn’t really matter.”  Scratching his head, the farmer said; “Well, if it doesn’t much matter where you’re goin’, then it doesn’t much matter how you get there.”  Very true - but what about when we know exactly what we are looking for?  When I lose my car keys, I know I am best to start looking for them where I last remember putting them.  If I want to see a piece of artwork from the Louvre, once it has left the Indianapolis Art Museum, then I know I need to travel to Paris.  If I want to track down some former college classmates who used to live in Chicago, while it is true that now they could be living almost anywhere else, it only makes sense for me to start looking for them in Chicago.  So where should I go if I want to find God?  It only makes sense to start looking where He has shown Himself to be present - in the past, in His Word and among His people. 

If you were with us last week you will recall that we determined that we come to worship in order to find ourselves in the presence of God, and the beauty of this is, we come by God’s invitation; He seeks to be found.  Worship is what we were created to do because it reflects what we were created to be; children of God by faith in Jesus Christ.  If we pause to think about it at all, the very thought of being invited in to the presence of a holy God, the Creator of the universe, is an awesome and awful (awe-filled) thing.  Yet this is exactly what our God invites us to do; to be in His presence, in worship and adoration and praise.  Why do we worship?  Only because God is God, “it is He who made us and we are His.”

Given the enormity of this privilege, why is it then that so often we approach worship in such a casual manner?  Why is it that given this privilege to find ourselves in the very presence of God we sometimes say “yes” and other times say “no”?  Why is it that even when we are here, in this place, about this purpose, we are so easily distracted?  I will admit to you, and no doubt with you, that there are times when I leave a service of worship and I realize that I have not really worshipped at all.  Why is that?

The story is told of the couple leaving church one Sunday morning. The woman asked her husband, “Did you see the designer suit that woman sitting in front of us was wearing?”  “No, I didn’t”, replied the husband.  “Well, surely you noticed that the pastor’s tie didn’t match his suit.”  Again, he shook his head “no”.  “Don’t tell me you didn’t see who Bob Smith was sitting with today?”  “Well, no”, the husband confessed.  “I’m afraid I dozed off.”  She gave him a sharp look, and said, “Well, a lot of good church does you!”

If, in this act we call worship, we really are in the presence of this holy God as our faith teaches us, then why is it that we too often give it less than our full attention and less than our very best?  Why is it that we are so easily distracted in our pursuit of God?  Why is it that we act as though it doesn’t really matter what we’ve come here to find?

Perhaps one reason might be that too often we come to worship with a mistaken notion of what it is we are doing here and what role we have been given to play.  Perhaps you may recall the reference I made to the insights given by Danish theologian/philosopher Soren Kierkegaard during my candidating sermon.  He writes; “Too often when people come to worship they adopt an attitude of the theater, imagining that the preacher is an actor and they are the critics; praising or blaming the performance.  Actually, the people are the actors on the stage of life; the preacher is merely the prompter, reminding the people of their lost lines.  In the most basic sense, God is the audience.”  That analogy is so helpful as a reminder that in our pursuit of God, we come to worship not as passive attendees seeking to be entertained, but as active and engaged worshippers, seeking to please God and God alone.  In worship we play to an audience of One.

A second distraction for us may be that we are simply going through the motions of worship, rather than really being intent on pursuing God.  You know what I mean when I say that we can be here without really being here at all.  This may be particularly true for those of us who have been at it for a while, perhaps since childhood.  We think we have this worship thing down pat.  This is what we do and how we do it.  Why?  Because we have always done it this way.  Which you will recall are the seven last words of the church – “We’ve always done it this way before.”

When we come to worship we are seeking an encounter, an experience with the living God.  We are seeking to find ourselves in God’s presence, and many of the traditions that we have inherited from our ancestors in the faith help us to do exactly that.  Take for example the sacrament of baptism which we will share with Nathan Renner and the Mylin family today.  Baptism is but one of two sacraments we celebrate in the Protestant church and we have been doing it this way for centuries.  This is one of our great traditions.  However, there is a difference between “tradition” and “traditionalism”.  One theologian wisely said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead.  Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”  Traditionalism says, “I don’t know why we do it this way, we just always have, so we will continue.”  Whereas tradition says, “This is how we have worshipped for centuries and we find meaning in it still.”  This was Paul’s encouragement to Timothy in our Scripture lesson this morning.  He writes, “As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it.”  Particularly when we face challenges or struggles in our faith, we are encouraged - not to try to reinvent the wheel in the hope of trying to find our own way to God - but rather to remember and embrace the ancient teachings and the practices of our faith, and to remember those who, in our own lives, have taught us and modeled and loved us in the faith; parents and grandparents and Sunday School teachers and friends.  We can draw on the strength of their ancient practices and disciplining and traditions as we seek to experience God anew today.      

A third, and perhaps most fundamental, distraction for us in our pursuit of God is the reality of our own sinfulness.  We are an unholy people seeking to find our way in to the presence of a holy God, and we cannot do that on our own.  In our lesson from I John we read these perhaps familiar words, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (But) if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say we have not sinned we make God a liar and His Word is not in us.” 

There was a man in the first church I served who consistently came to worship 10 minutes late every week.  When finally asked “why?” he said, “I really don’t like that prayer of confession we say.  It is such a downer.  I don’t come to church to have someone make me feel bad about myself.”  Is that what the prayer of confession is - a downer that makes us feel bad about ourselves?  I don’t think so.  I believe it is a reality check.  It is an opportunity for us to be honest with ourselves and to come clean before God.   We read in I John, “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves… and we make God a liar.”  To deny the reality of sin is to undercut the whole economy of salvation.  If we say we have no sin, in effect we are saying that Christ died for no good reason and to no avail, and this lie we tell ourselves keeps us from the saving work of God.

Friends, our act of confession is anything but a downer.  Rather it is a liberator.  When we get honest with God through confession and repentance, we open ourselves to God’s healing forgiveness.  The response to the “bad news” of our confession is God’s “Good News” - “In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.”

You see, at its core, worship is an attitude of the heart.  It is the action of a heart set on knowing God, intent on pursuing God, or, as A.W. Tozier puts it, “on following hard after God.”  During the season of Lent, coming up in just a few short weeks, we are going to look together at the various ways Christians have sought to “follow hard after God” through the ages, and it all begins by recognizing that God is God and a relationship with Him is worth pursuing. 
       
So how do we do this?  How do we pursue God, undistracted, in this way?  There is no quick and easy answer to that question.   It is the lifelong quest of all who seek to know God more perfectly, but we are given some very good guides.

First, I would suggest that we can use our order of worship to guide us in this pursuit; not just on Sunday mornings, but each and every day, as we seek to practice the presence of God.  Whether we are contemporary or traditional service worshippers we can see a flow to the service.  The service begins even before the first words are spoken as the prelude beckons us into God’s presence and readies us to worship Him.  The call to worship extends God’s invitation for us to gather in His name.  We then move in to songs of praise and adoration, directing our attention away from the world and focusing our minds and hearts on God.  Whether it is an opening set of choruses or a hymn of praise the purpose is the same - to focus our worship on God, and God alone.

We then progress to the prayer of confession, where we admit our sin and hear God’s word of pardon and forgiveness.  In this act, we are wiping the slate clean, so that our worship may be pure and pleasing to a holy and righteous God.  We then turn to the hearing of God’s Word, pronounced and proclaimed in the reading of Scripture, the giving of a sermon, and the celebration of the sacraments.  God’s Word comes to us in numerous ways as we bow before Him in worship, but it is always to the same end.  As Paul writes to Timothy; “We do these things, we practice these great traditions, in order “to instruct us for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ…so that we may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

At various points during the service of worship we have opportunity to respond to God’s Word through the giving of our gifts, the offering of our prayers, and the surrender of our lives.  And finally, we conclude with the receiving of God’s blessing, the benediction, as we are sent out from this place and charged to live as God’s people in the world.

This flow of worship can offer a rhythm to our daily lives, as through our days we lift our songs of praise, offer our prayers of confession and petition, read and meditate on His Word, and offer ourselves in His service.  Worship is not confined to Sunday mornings.

In the middle 17th century a French monk named Brother Lawrence wrote what has become a devotional classic titled, The Practice of the Presence of God.  If you’ve not read it, I encourage you to do so.  Let me share with you several excerpts which give an insight in to his pursuit of God.  He writes, “I have found in many books many different ways of going to God and many practices in living the spiritual life.  I began to see this was only confusing me, as the only thing I was seeking was to become wholly God’s.  Thus I resolved to give my all for God’s all…(After confessing my sin) I renounced, for the love of God, everything that was not (of) God, and I began to live as if there was none but God and I in the world…I worshipped Him as often as I could, keeping my mind in His holy presence and recalling it back to God as often as I found it had wandered from Him…I drove away from my mind everything that was capable of interrupting my thought of God.  In short, by often repeating these acts they become habitual, and the presence of God becomes something that comes naturally to us.”

Brother Lawrence makes this practice of the presence of God sound so easy, but clearly it was not, even for him.  He continues, “This is how I began.  And yet, I must tell you that for the first 10 years I suffered a great deal.”  10 years he kept at this discipline of continually seeking the presence of God!  Then he writes, “When I finally reached a point where I wanted to quit, I found myself changed at once.  In my soul, which until that time was in distress, I suddenly felt a profound inward peace as it were its true place of rest.  Ever since that time I have walked before God in simple faith, with humility and with love, and I apply myself diligently to do nothing and think nothing which might displease Him…I cannot allow this state to be called a delusion because the soul which enjoys God in this manner desires nothing except God.  If this is a delusion in me, it belongs to God to remedy it.  Let Him do what He pleases with me, I desire only Him and to be wholly devoted to Him.”

Brother Lawrence struggled 10 long years to find himself adequately in the presence of God, but once he found it, he writes he enjoyed that presence for 30 years more.  Friends, I certainly pray that our pursuit of God won’t take that long, or be that difficult, but regardless of how long it takes or how difficult it may be, it is surely worth the struggle and the wait.