March 11, 2007

Thorns of Confusion

An Irishman walks into a bar in Dublin, orders three pints of Guinness and sits in the back of the room, drinking a sip out of each one in turn. When he finishes them, he comes back to the bar and orders three more. The bartender asks him, “You know, a pint of Guinness goes flat minutes after I pour it; it tastes better if you drink one at a time.”

The Irishman replies, “Well, you see, I have two brothers. One is in America, the other in Australia, and I’m here in Dublin. When we all left home, we promised that we would have a drink in this way to remember the days when we drank together.”

The bartender admits that this is a nice custom, and leaves it there. The Irishman becomes a regular in the bar, and always drinks the same way, ordering three pints and drinking them in turn. One day, he comes in and orders two pints. All the other regulars notice this and fall silent — assuming that one of the brothers has died.

When he comes back to the bar for the second round, the bartender says, “I am very sorry for your loss, and I want to offer my condolences on the great loss of your brother.”

The Irishman looks confused for a moment, then a light dawns in his eye and he laughs out loud. “Oh, no,” he says. “Everyone’s fine. I’ve just quit drinking for Lent.”

That boy was confused about Lent for sure. 

I don’t think any of us are confused about Lent per se.  We understand that Lent is a time for us to examine our selves and see where we have wandered off the narrow way, search out how that happened and resolve to make some changes so it won’t happen again.  It is a time of insight from the Holy Spirit about the changes we need to make to be the holy, Christ like people God desires his children to be. 

Even though we understand the purpose of Lent, we can still be confused about God, life and stuff. 

I remember the phone call as though it was yesterday.  It was a Saturday afternoon and my home phone rang.  It was 1984.  That’s 23 years ago.  But the call and ensuing circumstances still impact me.  I worked with a clinical psychologist back then.  We went to the same church.  Our church had been through a vicious split in 1981.  The pastor who stayed after the split became my good friend.  He helped Janet, Amy and I move from our apartment to our town home.  He had written 3 books published by Moody press and I was reviewing his fourth.  He was highly intelligent, caring and wanted to help people grow in Christ.  But he had his own personal demons that I didn’t know about. 

In 1983, he left the pastorate to start a ministry to help people grow in Christ.  He moved into our office suite and had bible studies on Sunday and Wednesday nights.  He taught the scriptures in a way that was unrivaled.  My oldest daughter would go into his office and talk with him.  She was 4 at the time.  My wife knew him.  He was our pastor and we respected him for who he was and what he meant to us. 

But on that Saturday afternoon my world was shattered.  Like a drowning man attempting to hang on to anything that floated by, I was struggling enough with God and my daughter’s illness.  She had major surgery in 1982.  I couldn’t make sense out of anything when that happened.  I asked questions like why God would want to hurt my little girl?  Or why didn’t he do something to heal her without every body poking and probing inside of her?  Or why he didn’t provide enough money to pay the doctor bills on time? Or why he didn’t stop people giving us advice who didn’t have a clue?  I was struggling to understand God even though I had been to seminary, even though I knew I was saved and God was good.  And then the devil threw a knock out punch that took me about 6 years to recover from.  It was in this phone call that I got one Saturday afternoon.

Bruce, yes, Bob.  I have something to tell you.  What is it?  Well, Joe was stopped by the Plano police on the service road by Target on 75.  And?  They arrested him.  For what?  3 counts of aggravated sexual assault.  They’ve got the wrong man, I protested.  Couldn’t be.  Not Jim.  He’s a bible scholar.  Great teacher.  A man of God.  Bob replied, “I’m afraid three women have identified him in a line up.”  I don’t understand.  We’ll just have to see what happens, Bob said.  I guess so. 

Upon hearing that news, I took my dog for a run in the park.  Confused, bewildered.  That was the last straw with God.  Nothing made sense.  On that run, I told God I couldn’t make sense of anything and that the only thing that made sense was studying moral development.  Obviously, you could know the bible but have holes in your morality.  So I was going to do my doctoral dissertation on how our relationship with our fathers affected our moral development.  That was the only thing that made sense to me.  God made no sense and I went even deeper into the wilderness.

You might be here this morning in a similar spot.  You’ve lost a loved one and that doesn’t make any sense.  You ask God why he took him or her so soon.  You say it isn’t fair. Or your adult kids won’t talk to you and you took them to church, youth groups, did the best you could for the glory of God and this is what you get.  Kids who never come over or call.   I talked with my 79 year old mom on Friday morning.  She told me a good friend of hers has cancer.  She told me she has said to God, “Come on, God if anybody doesn’t deserve cancer it’s her.”

We can have the expectation that God should bless good people with good health and give only bad people cancer but that will usually land us in trouble.  Max Lucado said in the Applause of Heaven, “Clouds of doubt are created when the warm moist air of our expectations meets the cold air of God’s silence.”  Our expectations of God can propel us into total confusion.  And confusion can snap or stretch our faith.  Confusion can snap or stretch our faith.    

My faith snapped when my pastor went to prison.  My expectations of people and God pushed me into a period of intense confusion.  Nothing made sense and I couldn’t hang on and wait for God to make sense for me.  So I wandered right into the desert like the children of Israel that we read about in I Corinthians 10:1-10.

You may be thinking that you will never go into the wilderness.  But remember Jesus was driven out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit.  So if Jesus went into the wilderness, you probably will too.  I would say that all great people of faith have gone into the wilderness.  David said in Psalm 63:1, “O God you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is not water.”  What I realized in counseling many people that given enough sand in your mouth, given enough confusion, given enough problems with no answers, most people will do whatever it takes to get rid of it.  They will even drink water that is toxic to their spiritual condition because at least, it’s wet. 

Remember confusion can snap or stretch our faith.   

That’s what happened to the children of Israel when they were in the wilderness.  Their faith snapped.  It was stretched for Moses, Joshua and Caleb but for everybody else it snapped.  In fact, it snapped for Moses when he struck the rock for water instead of simply speaking to it.  Because of his disobedience even Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the promised land.  Paul compares the children of Israel with the Corinthian believers because they too were in the wilderness with all the idol worship going on in that city.   

He compares the two groups in the first 4 verses of chapter 10.  He tells those in Corinth that they need to learn from their forefathers who were in the wilderness.  The children of Israel like the believers at Corinth had been delivered from slavery, from Egypt by the blood of the Passover lamb.  The believers at Corinth had been delivered from slavery to sin by trusting Jesus.  The children of Israel were all baptized into Moses.  They identified with Moses.  The Corinthian believers were baptized into Christ.  They identified with Christ, his death and resurrection when they were baptized.  The children of Israel ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink from the same rock, Jesus Christ, as the Corinthian believers did. 

Paul warns the Corinthian believers that they could suffer the same fate as the Jewish believers did in the wilderness.  Verse 5 of I Corinthians 10 says that even though the children of Israel were believers in Christ, God was not pleased with them and he took them home because of their lack of faith and terrible behavior. 

Remember confusion can snap or stretch our faith. Confusion can snap or stretch our faith. 

But what led to the children of Israel not exercising their faith in the wilderness?  I believe it was their confusion about what God was doing.  They didn’t trust his ways so they went their own way. 

According to Paul in verse 6, the children of Israel set their hearts on evil things.  The Corinthian believers had done the same.  They were following personalities not Christ.  They were tolerating a man having an intimate relationship with his father’s wife.  In fact, they thought it was kind of cool.  They were filing law suits against each other.  They were involved with temple prostitutes.  They were knowingly eating food sacrificed to idols.  And on and on it went.  We can do the same as well.  I believe the Corinthian believers were confused about God’s plan just like the children of Israel were in the wilderness.  And their faith snapped or was about to.  Clearly, the faith of those wandering in the wilderness did snap and so can yours and mine. 

Paul mentions in verse 7 that the people sat down to eat and drink and got up to engage in pagan revelry.  This is referring to Exodus 32 when Moses went up to Mt. Sinai to get the 10 commandments.  The children of Israel went to Aaron and said, “Come make us gods who will go before us.  As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

Moses had taken a little too long in coming down from the mountain and this led to a who knows what God is doing attitude.  They didn’t want to walk by faith. They wanted to see their gods so they made their own idols.    They made a golden calf and they got involved in sexual immorality, testing the Lord and grumbling.  God took 23, 000 of them home in one day and He allowed only Joshua and Caleb to enter the promised land.  Confusion snapped their faith. Confusion can snap or stretch our faith.  The next time you are confused how will you respond?

But what leads to not exercising our faith in the midst of confusion?  When my pastor was arrested, why didn’t I respond in faith? Why was my faith snapped instead of stretched?  Why when you went through that divorce, or lost a job or a loved one or had health problems was your faith snapped?  And how can we next time respond like Job did in chapter 23:8-10.  Job trusted that God had a higher purpose.  Somehow he knew God was testing him and he trusted that God knew what was happening to him and he could endure it as a test and resolve to pass the test and come forth as gold.  Why are we not so confident?

I believe Max Lucado got it right when he said doubt or confusion has something to do with our expectations of God.  We make God in our image.  We don’t worship a golden calf but we worship logic and reason.  We think God’s ways should make sense to us but as Augustine said, “Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God.”

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the prince of preachers said, “As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God.

Why God allows things to happen or directly intervenes is up to him.  We will not understand his ways or his thoughts this side of heaven.  Isaiah wrestled with this in Isaiah 55:8-9.  There the Lord said through Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways, my ways.  As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Paul says in I Corinthians 13 that we see through a glass darkly.  God’s ways are a mystery and we have to become comfortable with that. 

In her book The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom tells of an event that took place when she was 10 or 12 years old as she traveled with her father on a train from Amsterdam to Haarlem. She had stumbled upon a poem that had the words "sex sin" among its lines:

And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, "Father, what is sex sin?"

He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but, to my surprise, he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.

"Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he asked.

I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.

"It's too heavy," I said.

"Yes," he said. "And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you."

And I was satisfied. More than satisfied—wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions; for now, I was content to leave them in my father's keeping.

If God is our father and we are his children then we have to trust that He knows best.  God is sovereign and we have to trust that he is working everything together for good.  This is what Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane.  He cried out to his father 3 times to take the cup of suffering from him.  I wouldn’t say he was confused but I would say he didn’t like what he was going through.  But he trusted his father’s plan when he said, “not my will but yours be done.”  For our faith to be stretched and not snapped when we are in the wilderness, we have to know and trust that God’s plan is best for us, that he doesn’t seek our harm, that he only wants what is best for us.   If we do when we are in the wilderness, our faith will be stretched not snapped.

In his book, They Call Me Pastor, H.B.London tells a story that illuminates this for us.  Four doctors in surgical greens stood before Dave and Jana at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. I stood by helplessly as one doctor spoke. "Your baby has died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. We want to give you a chance to hold your child before we take her." I watched this young couple; their shoulders shook with emotion as they held their firstborn for the last time.

My mind raced to find something to say to the shocked young couple. I wanted to tell them that everything would be okay, but that wasn't true. Their baby was dead. All my pastoral training and experience seemed to fail me then. "Dave and Jana," I began, with words that were broken and slow, "I don't know why this awful loss has to come to you. But I know God loves you as if you were the only ones in the whole world to love. If you accept his love…if you believe he does love you, you'll make it. If you don't, you won't." Those were the only words I had for them. They seemed awfully empty at the time.

I choked back my own emotions while they tried valiantly to cling to their newfound faith. But something happened in that hospital room. Neither the couple nor I had words to erase the pain. A Holy Presence invaded that place. God joined the three of us. Just as in the Old Testament story of the fiery furnace, when God himself came to comfort Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we felt in the fiery trial of suffering an assurance that God was caring for us.

In all the pain, I remembered what a precious time we had a few weeks earlier when we dedicated their baby in the worship service. Now this. I confess that a few times in my ministry, the whys from my heart have almost made me quit. I am sure you have experienced similar anguish. But in our heart of hearts we know that there is no satisfactory human answer to the problem of evil.

One day, after coming to Focus on the Family, I received a letter with a picture of Dave and Jana holding a beautiful baby. They wrote:

H. B., you probably don't think we heard you when you encouraged us to cling to the love of God when our baby died. But we heard you clearly. So we have believed over and over that God loves us as if we were the only ones to love. We have learned to live in the love of God. We quote your words to each other often. The Lord is gracious. Notice in the picture we are holding a beautiful new baby—God's special gift to us. We don't understand why we lost our first child. We still hurt when we think about it, but we don't question God anymore…

I have thought a lot about their faith and mine since receiving that letter. Some tough situations are mysteries beyond our comprehension. Mysteries greater than our answers. Mysteries that stretch our faith. Mysteries that force us to turn to God because we can't find answers anywhere else.

May we remember that confusion can snap or stretch our faith.  May we look to our Lord and savior Jesus Christ who trusted his father’s will for his life.  May we rest in the sovereignty of God and allow our faith to be stretched so we become more like Jesus even though we are in the wilderness. 

And all God’s people said, Amen.