One of the great things of having more days off from work is that I can now choose to spend more time with God. [After all, why worry about relationships with other people if I'm not prioritizing him and really making my relationship with him a quality one?] I finally got to listen to the sermon from two Sundays ago that I said I would. In my two-plus years at Evanston Vineyard, I've heard a lot of great sermons, but this one was the first that hit me in a while (maybe I'd gotten complacent with this particular blessing?).
We are currently in a series called "Returning to God's redeeming love," which focuses on the way God relates to us, and what he desires from us in our relationship with him. I took a lot of notes when I listened earlier today to the sermon of which I am alluding. There is no way I can do justice to the power of all the truths listed. So to allow you, the reader to have a fuller benefit of receiving information, I will give you two links: firstly, the audio of the sermon (click here ["http://www.evanstonvineyard.org/assets/podcasts/2012-03-04_lover-and-adulterer.mp3"]), and secondly, an outline of the sermon (click here ["http://www.evanstonvineyard.org/blog/201203/hosea-lover-and-adulterer"]) [this'll save me a lot of energy right there! I need to use this more often].
In a nutshell, the sermon focuses on a marriage between a lover and an adulterer and it takes place in the book of Hosea at a time when a nation had a.) lost its way and gotten far away from God, and b.) had had 50 years of prosperity. God tells Hosea to take a woman who is a prostitute and marry her. Naturally, because she is a prostitute, she will continue to seek sexual contact with other men in exchange for money and/or other goods. You can read more of the details from Hosea here ["http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hosea+1-2%3A1&version=NIV"], but I wanted to touch up on a couple things about the sermon that really hit me:
1.) God as relational, passionate, intimate, and full of raw emotion; 2.) the fate of the United States of America. I'm going to spend this post on this first point; the second will be for another time. Sometime in the middle of last year I found myself in a similar position as Hosea. No, I did not get married, and no, I don't know anyone who is a prostitute (thankfully, on both counts). But I did receive an answer to something I had desperately wanted to seek: "what is love?" Much like Hosea's pain over his wife -- whom he loved to pieces, by the way -- continually giving all of her to others relates to God's pain considering his relationship with "Israel" and their spiritual adultery, I found that my love and my pain were similar. My love is furious, and it is an aspect of God's DNA that I do have. While I was in a position of risking intimacy with someone, there were some things I learned that destroyed me. Up until shortly before this point, I had tried my darndest to be objective, to be understanding, to try to be whatever the other person needed me to be, so long as I had my own distance from it. Needless to say, it hurt. But what it also triggered was a lot of my own sin, my own pride that I had been holding for years. Looking at it now, this incident also was necessary for me because it forced me to really look inside myself and find some things I did not like to see. What I had learned was I was desperate to forgive (because I cared for this person), but it meant fighting a war that even now is still not over. The casualties that resulted over the next six months cut deep.
When I listened to this sermon, it brought back a lot of memories of the last half of last year. It also brought back certain memories from childhood. I realized that I really needed to buckle down and deal with some of the things that a.) happened to me, and b.) I committed when I was a child. For a long time, I hid from all these things, and I allowed my fear to cover these things for me. And until I fully deal with them, future relationships with individuals (relationships of all kinds, to be clear) will be affected.
The truth is, there's a lot to deal with. And my habit for a long time has been running away. Even though I say I've felt like in a similar position to Hosea at times, I certainly haven't had the stones to do what he would do. This last Sunday there was another sermon that hit me (click here ["http://www.evanstonvineyard.org/assets/podcasts/2012-03-11_passionate-pursuit.mp3"] for the audio, and here ["http://www.evanstonvineyard.org/blog/201203/hosea-passionate-pursuit"] for the notes) that talked about God pursuing us by any means necessary to bring us back to him. There's the story about the football player who had two goals when entering university: 1.) tell the world about Jesus, and 2.) be the starting quarterback. The issue was that the second goal was first on the man's heart, even though he said otherwise. Through injuries, setbacks, disappointments, even a position change, God used the number one thing in this man's life to show him what was really in his heart, and that God needed to be number one. There's also a story about another man who realized early on that perhaps the pastorhood was his calling. After a few hefty disappointments and pains, the man gave up and did whatever he could to avoid leading in church, even going to another part of the world. But God kept pursuing him, year after year, by showing him what he was missing, things that he had really enjoyed only while in ministry.
In my life I've run away from all sorts of different things. I spent two seasons, both of which bookended my college years (and then some), in exile from the faith. I've spent a long time running from my calling, only now slowly having it brought back into focus. Other aspects of brokenness I'm only now beginning to heal from (what I've shared about last year really pushing this issue), although in some areas I'm still running from. All this healing is happening in stages: I'm back in a church community, and I'm at the beginning of figuring out my purpose in life. I'm still running from pains to the heart in relational matters, but even now I am slowly being dragged back. The war is still waging in this area, but I'm trying to be aware of what all is going on.
The final story my pastor shared was about a man who brought a woman who was a single mother of 2 and had been currently engaging in an affair with a married man to a concert at his church. [He didn't tell her that there was going to be a sermon.] Turned out the sermon that day was about sex, and it turned out to be a condemning, fear-based, negative sermon. To make it worse, the guy who had delivered the sermon also passed around a fresh, pristine rose and had everyone smell it, feel it, touch it, etc. At the end the rose, now tattered and wilted, was returned to him, and he held it up and said: "now, who in the world would want something like this?" My pastor's answer was simple: Jesus would. Jesus wants even those of us who had done the worst things and spent our lives in the darkest places. Jesus would, as written in the Gospels, and more current to this sermon, God would, as written in the book of Hosea.
God is often compared to a young man, perhaps when thinking about his bride on his wedding day: hotly passionate, relational, intimate, and essentially full of raw emotion when it comes to his relationship with us. I began to really see it last year in my own painful, heart-wrenching experiences. But moreover, because of how God sees us, he's willing to do whatever it takes to get us back and to live life with him in charge. I know I've spent far too much time trying to do things on my own strength. I still do, which is why my wars aren't yet over. But as I'm beginning to learn, painful things that seem like forever aren't. And things from my past that I've buried over the years are starting to come out and receive healing. I've still a long ways to go, but it's a start.