©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

08/31/03

Working The Work Of God

8/31/03 Working The Work Of God

What I have to offer you this morning

will be more personal in nature

than most of what I bring to our Sunday mornings together.

During the past week since we were last here

I have gone through a wide range of thoughts and emotions,

and I have decided that there may be some value in my sharing some of them with you.

Normally I do my best to organize and structure my thoughts

into a logical progression of ideas

that, hopefully, will make it easier for you to learn from what I say.

That organization will be noticeably lacking from what I share with you during the next few minutes.

But even without it,

I believe what I share with you

will be of value to you in your own life pilgrimage.

For more than a year now

we have had a man with us here in our fellowship

that, for more than 25 years, I have considered my friend.

I never knew him well,

but everything I did know about him I liked.

In fact, that doesn’t say it well.

The truth is,

everything I knew about him drew me to him,

made me feel as if he was one of those rare men I would trust without reservation.

One week ago today

he was sitting here with us.

Then, this past Tuesday,

he commented to a friend that he wasn’t feeling well and wanted to rest.

Within a matter of minutes his heart stopped,

his shadow life on this earth finally came to an end here,

and his real life began in the presence of his Lord Jesus Christ for all eternity.

If you hadn’t known him before he started attending here,

you very well may not have noticed him.

He never got up to the microphone,

or made any public comment that I am aware of.

But every week he gave me a gift personally

that I came to treasure more than I could ever express.

I tried to put it into words to him once,

but I’m sure he didn’t understand

how much it meant to me.

You see, every Sunday morning,

as soon as I would start teaching

Les’ face carried an expression

that made it appear as though he was deeply, genuinely hungry for what I had to offer.

There were times when I suddenly became aware that,

without realizing it,

I was preaching directly to him

simply because it was so encouraging to do so.

I got word of his death Tuesday evening.

Then, less than 12 hours later,

Sandee and I received a phone call from our daughter Joni.

Many of you know

that we found out about 4 months ago

that she was pregnant with our first grandchild.

She called because she wanted us to be praying for both her and the child.

For the past several days she had been experiencing

what seemed to be unusual and unexplained pain

and it had become severe enough so that she called her doctor.

The doctor told her to come in immediately,

so she set up an appointment for 5:00 p.m. Wednesday.

Some of you may remember

that, during the first few weeks of her pregnancy,

she almost lost the baby,

and to say that this new development put us all on edge again

is very much of an understatement.

I spent much of Wednesday staring at a blank computer screen,

attempting to be creative

while my mind and emotions were once again in Seattle,

waiting for a phone call following Joni’s visit to the doctor.

Finally, about 3:30 in the afternoon,

I turned the computer off

and went out to my still unfinished garage

and nailed a few boards up on one of the gable ends.

Earlier that morning I’d shared a cup of coffee with Darrell Knackstedt

and he commented on a fascinating statement he’d come across in the Gospel of John.

It was a statement made by Christ Himself,

a statement that has profound implications for us

as we seek to understand what our calling really is as Christians.

It’s found in John 6:29 and reads,

JOH 6:29 Jesus answered and said to them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent."

Now, in context that statement was made by Jesus the day after He miraculously fed all those thousands of people in the wilderness.

It was made to a greedy group of followers

who were trying to get Him to do it again.

They got into a raging debate with Him

about the “works of God”,

which in their minds meant coming up with more free bread and fish.

And in response to their demands for more miraculous works He said,

"This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent."

But the statement has implications

far beyond just signs and wonders.

In that single statement

Jesus was once again doing what He did so often.

He was taking a basic foundational principle of human existence

and distilling it down into a clear,

simple,

understandable statement.

And in that statement

He was also taking a basic premise of human existence,

setting it next to the truth,

and through the contrast between the two

forcing us to see the truth.

That basic life premise is this -

success or failure in life depends upon what I do.

It is my work,

my energy,

my productivity,

my effort that will shape the course of my life.

Certainly we know that we cannot control other people’s choices

or the circumstances they generate in our lives,

but our greatest defense against those circumstances,

and certainly our greatest hope of a truly productive and meaningful life

rests upon what we do.

And in contrast to that

Jesus says simply,

"This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent."

He says in effect,

“It is not your efforts, your energies that will ultimately determine your success or failure in life.

It is your attitude toward Me,

and your trust in Me,

and your perspective on My involvement in every event that enters your life on a daily basis.”

I believe most of us begin our personal pursuits of God

and an understanding of Him

believing that we need to integrate Him more into our lives.

Some of you are very likely here this morning

because you genuinely want to learn more,

to understand more about God

and want to establish a stronger, healthier contact with Him.

And in our minds

we may even see Him as responding to our efforts to reach out to Him,

maybe even His noticing us only in response to our efforts to reach out to Him,

just as a day-care worker might become aware of one specific child in the group

simply because that child keeps calling out the worker’s name

until the worker finally hears and responds.

In other words,

because we have lived so much of our lives

completely unaware of the presence of God in our lives,

we naturally assume that He has also lived most of our lives

unaware of our existence,

or at best

only becoming aware of us and focusing on us

at those times when we call upon Him

in some way that gets His attention.

Because we have been blind to Him,

we just naturally assume He must be mostly blind to us.

And as I thought about that statement of our Lord’s this past week

where He told us, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent...",

I began to realize that before we can begin to make some progress in this,

we must first deal with that other lie,

the one that has been telling us

that because we have been blind to our God,

surely we have gone unnoticed by Him as well.

You see, the truth is,

God’s awareness of you,

and His knowledge of you,

and His active involvement in your life

is and has always been at a level of intimacy

that is utterly beyond our comprehension.

Communicating this truth to us

was one of the major thrusts of all that Jesus was attempting to do during His few years among us.

We see this from the very beginning of His contacts with His disciples.

Did you ever notice the first words that passed between Jesus and His followers?

Where ever we have them recorded for us

they scream His deep knowledge of the lives of those He was meeting.

The first words that passed between Jesus and Simon Peter were these,

JOH 1:42 Jesus looked at him, and said, "You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas" (which is translated Peter).

Before Peter even opened his mouth

Jesus told him that He knew his name,

He knew about his past,

about his family background,

about his relationship with his father,

and even more amazing,

Jesus knew about Peter’s future.

And it gets even better in His first encounter with Nathanael.

JOH 1:47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!"

With Nathanael Jesus made it clear

that He didn’t just know the external facts of His life,

He knew the inner workings of Nathanael’s heart and soul.

He knew the very motives

that drove the things that Nathanael said and did.

And it didn’t stop there.

From that point on,

throughout His daily life with those men

He continued to communicate that same remarkable truth.

That message probably reached its most amazing level when,

in one of His conversations with His men He said this:

LUK 12:6 "Are not five sparrows sold for two cents? And yet not one of them is forgotten before God.

LUK 12:7 "Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear; you are of more value than many sparrows.

I wonder if we can hear what He’s really saying there.

Sandee and I are now parking in our still unfinished garage.

It has windows in it

and walls and a roof,

but it still has no garage door.

We came home from town this past week

to find that a little bird had flown into our garage and gotten trapped.

He was frantically trying to force himself through one of the windows,

flapping and fluttering against the glass,

obviously exhausted and frightened and confused.

I tried to open the window and coax him out,

but he only got more frightened and, rather than flying out the open section of the window,

or flying out the front of the garage,

he flew straight into another closed window,

then tried to peck his way through the glass.

I opened that window as well,

and then tried to nudge him through the opening,

but he got frightened and flew against one of the log walls

where he held on in terror.

Finally I was able to get him to step onto a piece of wood I help up next to him

and then slowly carried him to the open window

where he finally flew away to freedom.

Throughout the whole ordeal

his terror was so intense

that he had no idea what I was doing

or even that I was on his side, trying to help him.

From his perspective

I was just one more confusing, frightening element in a horrible ordeal.

And if that little bird would have had the ability to do so,

if he would described his ordeal to his fellow birds after his escape,

I’m certain he would have told them

that it was his own efforts and determination that brought him freedom,

that he just fluttered around until he finally found a way out.

And that, of course, is just the way most of us

live most of our lives with our Creator.

I found it fascinating

that, when Jesus attempted to put into words

the kind of involvement God has with us,

He chose a tiny bird,

and the hairs of our head.

And look what He tells us about them.

He tells us that not one tiny bird on this earth is forgotten or unnoticed by God.

And then He tells us that,

when it comes to us,

His involvement in our lives

is at the level of His numbering the very hairs on our head.

That’s the way He began His relationships with those who surrounded Him here on this earth,

and He wants each of us to understand

that He begins His relationship with each of us

on exactly the same basis.

He wants us to understand

that the depth of His awareness of us

and His involvement in our lives

is utterly beyond our comprehension.

We’re you aware of the last time you lost a hair?

Your God was.

He noticed because His awareness of you extends to that level.

And it is that knowledge of the depth of His involvement in our lives

that we need before we can correctly understand what He’s saying when He says,

"This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent..."

For, you see, to believe in Him

is to choose once again to believe that He is there,

and that He feels our pain,

and that He understands our fears,

and that each event and each moment of our lives are held in His hands.

And it also means

that we choose to believe

not just that He is there,

but that He is God

and He is good.

He doesn’t just observe the events of our lives,

He carries us through them each step of the way,

from the moment we place our lives into His hands through faith in Christ,

until the moment He sets us down in the presence of God the Father for all eternity.

As Sandee and I were waiting this past week

for Joni to call following her visit to the doctor

Sandee reminded me of a great concept she’d found in Dan Stone’s The Rest of The Gospel.

In that book he talks about what he calls “the holy but...”

He talks about how we will say things like,

“Well, of course I trust God and know He’s in control, BUT...”

And then he says that whatever follows that “BUT...”

is what we REALLY believe.

He’s absolutely right, of course.

My life, like yours, I think,

is filled with lots of “BUT’s...”.

And, somehow being reminded of that

made it a little easier for me this past week

to work the works of God

by choosing to believe once again in the goodness of my Lord.

Joni called from the steps of the Dr.’s office following her appointment.

We still have a grand child,

and in fact, apparently quite an active one

who is already doing a great deal of moving around.

Everything is progressing normally up to this point.

But, of course, it wasn’t that news that made God good,

or made Him worthy of our belief in Him,

any more than the news of Les Anderson’s death made God bad.

The truth is

He is utterly good in all His ways,

and because He is good,

and because He cares about us the way He does,

He is absolutely adequate to be our strong foundation

and our constant Redeemer

through even the deepest needs we will ever face on this earth.

"This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent..."