Lon Solomon Ministries
Hungering After God
We're going to study the Bible today, so let's open it together to the Old Testament, the book of Exodus, Exodus chapter 33, and if you didn't bring a Bible today, I don't have one for you. I'm sorry, but we're going to have one soon, but we're going to shoot the verses up so you'll be able to see everything, but we'll get that done quickly. Anyway, Exodus chapter 33 in your copy of the Bible, and today we come to the end of our series entitled Spiritual Bootcamp, and we've talked about a lot of important things in this series. We've talked about the reliability of the Bible. We've talked about the deity of Jesus Christ. We've talked about prayer and witnessing and eternal security and the return of Christ, but I've saved the message that I consider to be the most important for last. And today what I want to talk to you about is I want to talk to you about hungering after God. I want to talk to you about having a passion, an obsessiveness, a drivenness, to get to know God in a real, intimate, and personal way in your life, to let Him reveal to you who He is and what His heart is all about. Because friends, the bottom line of the Christian experience is not about knowing theology. The bottom line of the Christian experience is about getting to know God. And that's why I've saved this to last because everything else we've studied, if it doesn't issue out here, then it didn't mean a thing. This is where it all goes and this is what it's all about. Now I want to use a passage from the life of Moses as our springboard, a little bit of background. God has threatened that He's not going to the promised land with the Israelites, they're camped at Mount Sinai, because of their rebellious stiffneck behavior. And so Moses said, "I need to go out and see if I can change God's mind on this." And so that's where we pick up the story, verse 7 of Exodus 33. Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp, some distance away, calling it the tent of meeting. And whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise and stand at the entrance of their tents watching Moses until he entered into the tent of meeting, verse 11. And the Lord would speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks with his friend. Unbelievable statement in the Bible that God and Moses would have a conversation as casually as you'd have a conversation around the water cooler or the coffee pot at work with some friends you've got, unbelievable. And so this is the relationship that they had, Deuteronomy 34, since that time, since the death of Moses, no prophet has ever arisen in Israel like Moses whom the Lord knew face to face. And so the Lord in Moses, they talked this out, verse 17. And the Lord said to Moses, "I will do the very thing you've asked. I'll go with you to the promised lamb because I am pleased with you Moses and I know you by name." So Moses got what do you want? You think he would have been happy, but he wasn't because there was something else Moses wanted. He'd never dared to ask for it before, but now emboldened by God's nice words about their friendship, Moses decides to go for the gold. And so here he goes, verse 18, "Moses said to God, 'Now God show me your glory, show me your naked essence, show me your undiluted self, God I want all of you I can get, I want to see you more fully, I want to understand you more clearly, I want to experience you more deeply, show me your glory. Let it all shine on me, God.'" And how did God respond to Moses's request? Verse 20, "God said, 'Moses, I can't do that. You cannot see my face, you cannot see my undiluted glory, for no one can see that and live. It would melt the flesh off your bones, Moses, and then crack your bones and disintegrate them after that. I can't do that, Moses, but let me tell you what it will do. I'll give you everything short of that I can. Look what it will do. Verse 21, "The Lord said there's a place near me where you can stand in a rock and with my glory passes by, I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand to protect you till I pass by, so you flesh won't melt. And then, verse 23, I'll remove my hand and I'll let you see my back parts, but nobody can see my face, can't see my face and live. They say, "Lion, holy smokes me, what in the world did Moses see up there? Well, I don't know. But the interesting thing for our consideration today is not what Moses saw. The real key point for us is God's attitude. God's attitude is that God was excited about answering Moses' request. He was excited about revealing himself to Moses. He was excited about granting Moses the opportunity to get a more intimate knowledge of God than Moses had at present. God was thrilled with that and did it. And you know, it's interesting that the result of this is that Moses got to know God in a way that most people don't, Psalm 103, verse 7. God made known his acts to the people of Israel but revealed his ways to Moses. What is this really saying? Well friends, it's saying that the Israelites got to see the actions of God, they got to see what God did, the deeds of God, but Moses went way beyond that. He actually began to understand the ways of God, why God did what God did, why God acted the way God acted, what the heart of God was, what the value system of God was, what the very feelings of God were and what made God tick, Moses got to understand that. Can you imagine getting to know God so well that you or I could look at any situation in the world and because we know the heart of God, because we know the feelings of God, because we know the value system of God, we could look at that situation and go, you know what, I know exactly what God's going to do. I know exactly what God's going to do because I know God and I know how God's going to respond. Can you imagine knowing God that well, Moses did. Now that's the end of our passage but it leads us to ask a really important question. And we're breaking this place in, first Sunday morning here, so make this worthy of our first Sunday morning here, ready, one, two, three, ah, that was good, good, thank you. You say long so what, I, you know, how does this affect my life every single day? How does this change the way I live, Monday to Saturday, I mean I don't even know where Mount Sinai has never been there, I'm glad for Moses but God bless him, this doesn't have a thing to do with me, well yes it does because friends you know what, the very same God that Moses has, you and I have, God hasn't changed one bit, his heart hasn't changed, it's values haven't changed, his character hasn't changed, his nature hasn't changed and if God was excited about revealing himself to Moses then friends God would be just as excited about revealing himself to you and me, God hasn't changed. And if you want to know God more intimately, if you want to know God more deeply, if you want a sense where you begin learning the ways of God, the good news is God's the same God and he'll be just as excited about giving that to you as he was about Moses. And so what do you really want out of life friend, you want more cars, more houses, more furniture, more jewelry, what do you really want to know God, huh? If you really want to know God I got some good news for you, God is excited about letting you do it but there's some things you and I have to do to get there, there's some conditions we got to meet, Moses met him, we have to meet him, so let me tell you what they are just in case this is where you want to go and I hope it is. Number one, there's three, number one, we've got to realize that such a relationship like this with God is possible, you say well on come on now, of course if we're a follower of Christ of course we realize that this kind of relationship is possible, oh no I don't think that's true at all, friends I think there are lots and lots of followers of Jesus Christ who don't know this because they go to churches where it's never taught that God is a person and as a person we can have an intimate relationship with God like we can any person, I believe there are lots of Christians who have no clue that this is true. They go to churches where they hear about a salvation message, walk in the aisle, ritual and liturgy and wrote prayers, numbers and growth and expansion and money and tithing and social issues and political issues while the living presence of Jesus is never mentioned. When you know Bible teaching churches we tend to be some of the worst offenders because in Bible teaching churches very often Bible knowledge is emphasized as an end in itself as the preeminent goal of the Christian life is to know the Bible but isn't it interesting in Philippians chapter three the Apostle Paul and talking about the goal for his life, he did not say that I may know the Bible, he didn't say that. He said that I may know him, Jesus Christ, that's the goal, him. 8W Tozer the great Christian writer of the last generation said these words in this respect and I quote, he said sound Bible teaching is an imperative in the church but it can be carried on wrongly. The Bible is not an end in itself but rather it is a means to an end and that end is to bring us into an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God. That we might enter into him, that we might delight in his presence, that we might taste and know the inner sweetness of God himself at the center and core of our being until and unless we find God in this kind of personal experience we are not any the better for simply having heard the Bible end of quote. And as a follower of Jesus Christ what I want you to leave here today realizing is that God is a person and that God wants you to know him, he wants you to experience him, he wants you to understand his heart, he wants you to walk with him and talk with him like your best friend each and every day because friends above all else this is what the Christian experience, the Christian life is all about. If you're here and you've never trusted Jesus Christ as your real and personal Savior, I'd like you to leave here realizing that on the other side of that decision is not just the chance to go to heaven, not just the chance to have eternal life, not just the chance to have your sins forgiven, oh no much more than that, on the other side of that decision is the chance to be connected in relationship with the living God of the universe and have him begin revealing to you who he is getting to know God. I mean many of us would consider it an incredible privilege to get to know the president of the United States personally, we're not talking about the president of the United States here, we're talking about the creator, sustainer God of the universe here, how much of a privilege is that? And if you'll make a decision for Christ that's what's on the other side of it, something to think about. The second thing you and I have to do if we're really serious about wanting a relationship like this with God is not just realize it's there, but second of all you and I as followers of Christ have to hunger and thirst for this kind of relationship with God. Did you notice something here in Exodus 33, did you notice that even though Moses had more of God than any human being alive, he wanted more, did you notice that? He wasn't satisfied, he wanted it all. There was a passion in the man's life, there was a hunger in the man's life where he wanted everything he could get in terms of his relationship with God. David had the very same passion, I mean listen to what David said, Psalm 42 verse 1 as the deer pants for the water brook, soul my soul pants for you, oh God, now that's the language of passion, friends. Psalm 63 verse 1, oh God, earnestly I seek you my soul thirst for you, my flesh longs for you. Hey that's passion, friends this is what set Moses and David and all the great men and women of God in the Bible apart from the rest of the world around them. These people, Moses and David and Deborah and Ruth and these other people, they had a burning, consuming, obsessive, passionate, hunger and thirst for God that the rest of the world didn't have. And this is what you and I are going to have to have if we're going to get this kind of relationship with God. It's an interesting book called The Last Crusade, a story of a British detachment of soldiers that got marooned in the Palestinian desert during World War I fighting against the Turks and their leader, a fellow named Major Gilbert and the experience they had with thirst, the passion involved in thirsting, listen to what Major Gilbert wrote and I quote, he said our heads ate, our eyes became bloodshot and dim in the blinding glare, our tongues began to swell, our lips turned purplish black and burst open. Those who dropped out of the column were never seen again. But we desperately battled on towards Sharia, there were wells at Sharia. We fought on as men fight for their very lives. We entered Sharia on the heels of the retreating Turks and the first object that met our view with a great stone cisterns full of cold clear water, we clamored, we crawled, we scratched our way to those cisterns. Men fell down and drank on their hands and knees on their bellies. It took four hours before the last man was filled. And then Major Gilbert says I learned my first real Bible lesson on that march. If such were our thirst for God, for his presence in our lives, how rich the fruit of the spirit would be. What did Jesus say? Blessed are they, who what, who hunger and who thirst for God. And in using these words, why was Jesus using this language because friends he was trying to tell us something about the intensity with which we got to want God for God to respond. God is not interested in people who want him casually. God is not interested in people who want him one day a week or one hour on one day a week. God will not reveal himself to those people, God waits to be wanted. He reveals himself to the people who really want him. And if you and I want God, we can have him. But as the Bible says, we have to warn him with all of our heart and all of our souls what we got to search for him. And we'll find him, but God's not interested in people who are casual or cavalier. And if we're casual or cavalier, we're not going to find God. It's got to be a passion in our life. Third and finally, if we want this kind of relationship with God, third and finally, we have to be willing to pay the price for such a relationship. Hey, any, any good relationship, any intimate relationship has cost and a relationship with God's no different and there are three costs in closing I want to tell you about that you and I have to be willing to pay. Number one, the cost of spending quality time together. I mean, no man can build a quality relationship with his wife by talking to her four minutes a month. Nobody can build a quality relationship with their children by leaving before they're awake, coming back after their sleep and the most intense thing we ever say to him is pass the butter, please. I mean, there's got to be dedicated time to build quality relationships and no follower of Jesus Christ can build a quality relationship with God without the discipline of spending quality time. We've got to take time out of our insane schedules and devote it to God if we're serious about this. Time reading and meditating on God's Word, reading and learning who God is and what makes him tick right here in the Bible. Friends, we're never going to learn who God is from the Washington Post, God forbid, from time or news week. If we want to know who God is, we got to be reading the book where God tells us who he is and what makes him tick and where his heart is, time and prayer, talking to God, conversing with God, communing with God, meditating on what we've read in the Word of God. This is a cost we've got to pay if we're going to build an intimate relationship with God. You know, I went down to the inauguration yesterday. I really wasn't planning to go but somebody gave us some primo tickets, some seated tickets and I just thought I can't possibly turn these down. So I got up and went and as I was getting ready to go, I turned on the TV and they were all talking about, you know, the inauguration and I listened to this one lady reporter was telling me the morning schedule that President-elect Bush had had, which I thought was pretty interesting, spent the night at Blair House, got up at 6.30, had breakfast, talked to his father, yada, yada, yada. And then she said, I wouldn't even pay all that much attention, but then she said and then he went into his room privately and read from his daily Bible. She said, yeah, she said and his morning reading included from the New Testament, Matthew, and from the Old Testament, Genesis. And she said, this is a habit that Mr. Bush has. He never begins any day without taking time alone to read the Bible. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. And you know what I thought? I thought, you know, Lon, you're not dealing with nuclear proliferation. You're not dealing with people stealing plutonium and biological weapons and selling them on the black market. If this man who's dealing with all that stuff and lots more has time to go read the Bible in the morning, you do too. And friends, you do too. See, it's not a matter of whether we have time. It's a matter of whether or not we're willing to pay the cost of time because we value our relationship with God that much. Number two, the second cost is the cost of brutal honesty about ourselves before God. Hey, you know this, no two human beings can become really close unless they're willing to drop the plastic and really get honest with each other. And in order to be close to God, we got to do the very same thing. David prayed Psalm 139, verse 23, "Search me, O God, and know my heart, examine me and try my ways." I mean, what is David really asking God for, he's saying, "God, let you and me get real with each other. Let's take the plastic off. God, peel the onion back for me. Let me really get honest with you, really get brutally honest with you." And I wonder how many times you've ever prayed this prayer before God. Well, I'll tell you why a lot of followers of Christ don't. It's because when we allow God to really try our hearts and show us what we really are, we don't like what we find. What we find is not pretty. What we find is kind of ugly. There's nothing pleasant at all about this process except that God rewards people who are willing to go through this process with his forgiveness, with his mercy, with his compassion, and with a greater measure of his sweetness. I'll tell you, friends, I ain't nothing sweeter in the whole world than after God has revealed something really ugly about you to you, for God to say to you, "Hey, but you know what, I knew this all the time. Maybe it's news for you, but I knew this about you all the time, and it doesn't change a thing about how I feel about you." Man, I didn't get any sweeter than that. And if you and I really want to build a close relationship with God, we're going to have to let him rip down the mass, peel away the onion, and get really honest with each other. Number three, and finally, the cost we have to pay number three is a cost of affliction and suffering. You know, one of the greatest forces that binds human beings together to life, in deep, personal relationships, is going through suffering together. You know that. And although we as followers of Jesus Christ don't like to hear this, the same is true in our relationship with God. I mean, Moses suffered. Every great man and woman of God that ever got to know God well has been down the pathway of suffering. Moses, 40 years of rejection and isolation on the backside of the desert, David, years running away from Saul, hiding in caves, fleeing for his life, eating grasshoppers or whatever else he could find. And yet, David wrote, "It is good," Psalm 119, that I was afflicted. It was good that I was afflicted. Why, David? Because that's how I got to learn the ways of God. And Job, the crown prince of suffering in the Bible, what did Job say? He said, "Before I suffer, I had heard about you God with my ears, but now that I've suffered, now I see you, now my eyes, they see you." Hey, away with this nonsense that a suffering Christian is out of the will of God. Away with this nonsense that God never sends suffering into the life of his followers. That's nonsense. That's not biblical. That's not true. As a matter of fact, the opposite is actually true that for the people who are on the pathway to really getting to know God and to really being used by God, those are people who usually experience inordinate amounts of suffering because it's the only way God can get them where they need to go. Robert Murray McShane, great Scottish preacher, knew much about affliction with sick most of his life died at the age of 29. Here's what he wrote. And I quote, "He said, 'You cannot love trouble for its own sake. Bitter is always bitter and pain is always pain, yet for the blessings that suffering brings.' God often sends it. Suffering leads us to cling to Jesus. It leads us to hide deeper in the rock to be still and know that he is God and above all else it produces an experiential acquaintance with Jesus, a fuller taste of his sweetness." And then Mr. McShane said this, "There is a great want about Christians who have not suffered." End of quote. He said, "Lawn, what are you? Are you crazy? What are you suggesting here? You're suggesting I go out and talk somebody to running into my automobile, dragging me out from behind a steering wheel, beating me up so I can say I'm suffering and getting closer to God. What are you doing? No, no, no. I'm not suggesting that at all. If you go out in the energy of the flesh and try to do this, all you're going to do is get a red car and a black eye. You're not going to get any closer to God if you try to orchestrate this. I'm not suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is that you and I come to God and say, "Lord, I want to know you more and more and I'm serious enough about it that if it means I need to suffer than God, I'm willing to pay that price." You make the choice, but Lord, you send it and I'll end it up. And friends, let me just reassure you, God will never ask you to suffer to a degree beyond what he needs. He only needs to get the job done, whatever he needs to get the job done. That's all he'll ask you to do. It's enough to get the job done. You know, my wife, Brendan, and I have been married 26 years, almost 27. And the last eight of those years have been years of intense suffering in our lives. God sent us a little girl eight years ago named Jill and Jill is severely disabled, severely mentally retarded. I mean, she's still in diapers at almost nine years old. She can't feed herself. She can't speak. She doesn't have enough sense, poor thing to pull the covers up over herself as she gets cold at night. And outside and weather like this, she'd freeze the death. She'd never even know she was cold. And you know, I never realized it was possible to hurt as bad as we've hurt the last eight years. I mean, I grew up kind of living a charmed life. I never suffered. I didn't even know it was possible for people to hurt this bad. But I've got to tell you something, the suffering of the last eight years has been a blessing in our lives. I believe we have a stronger marriage today than we've ever had. We have a tighter family than we've ever had. God has given us the privilege to serve another human being at a level that you very rarely ever get to serve another person. And it's a privilege. I mean, it is a privilege to serve another human being like that. But I also believe that as a result of what we've been through, I believe I know God better today than I've ever known Him. And I believe I know God better today than I ever could have known Him if it weren't for what we've been through the last eight years, because friends, suffering has forced me not to live on the surface with God. Now it lay me down to sleep. I pray to the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray to the Lord my soul to take, amen, God bless your Lord. Good night. Now you can pray like that if you're not suffering. If everything's going great in your life, you can live and just bop across the surface like that. But you can't pray like that with your suffering because you can't survive praying like that if you're suffering. Man, you got to go deeper. You got to go down into God to find the hope and the strength and the resiliency and the perspective that allows you to make it one more day when you're suffering. Success never drives anybody deep and you won't go deep on your own. Suffering drives people deep into God where we learn who God is, where we see who God is, where we experience God. And don't get me wrong, it's not a cost I regret paying. It's been a cost. I don't regret paying it. I believe honestly. I think I can say this honestly. If God were to dial the clock back eight years and say, okay, Lon, now you got a choice. Your call. I can give you Jill or not give you Jill and you know what's coming. You know about the emergency rooms. You know about the rescue squad. You know about our almost dying. You know about the sleepless nights. You know about the exhaustion. You know about losing the way you thought life was going to be in your 40s and 50s. You know what it's going to cost you. You want her or don't you? And I think I can honestly tell you if I had that opportunity, I would say, yes God, give us Jill because of what it's done. It has been a blessing that's suffering. Not the suffering itself, but what God has used it to do in our lives. And one thing I can promise you that if you allow God this freedom in your life, if you allow God to send this into your life so that you can get to know Him better, the sweetness of what He will do with that suffering in terms of your relationship with Him will bring you to the place where one day given that same choice you'd say to Lord, send it on. I want it back because of what it's done. Leaving here today what I want you to take with you, number one, I want you to leave here knowing that God's a person and He has an intimate personal relationship for you with Him. I want you to leave here realizing that you've got to hunger and thirst for this, this has to be a passion in your life, this has to be a drivenness in your life casually, cavalierly, you'll never get there. God's not going to reveal Himself to casual people. And number three and finally, I want you to leave here understanding it's going to cost you something. It's going to cost you something to get a relationship like this with God. It's going to cost you time, it's going to cost you honesty, and it's going to cost you suffering. And so I want to encourage you to go home and ask yourself a question and that is God, how bad do I really want you? I mean do I really want you bad enough to say Lord I'm willing to do this? Because I got some great news for you friends that the answer to that question is yes. Jesus said blessed are they who hunger and thirst for me, why, for they will be filled. You come at God with passion. You come at God and say God, whatever it takes to get to know me, you send it on, just send me to Bill and I'm telling you friends, God is going to reveal Himself to you. You will be filled and I hope that will be your prayer, let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we've talked about even a subject among followers of Christ that isn't often talked about, about cost in our relationship with you. So often all we hear about are the benefits, how you want to make us healthy and wealthy and wise and successful and we haven't talked about that God, what we've talked about is pain and suffering and a brutal honesty, a willingness to pay the price to have a relationship with you that's deep and intimate and personal but God calls us to understand this is the truth of the Bible. We're not talking about Madison Avenue Christianity here, we're talking about the word of God as it is and grant that you might motivate your people to rise up and say yes God, this is what I want, yes God, I want you and God, whatever it takes, you send me to Bill and I'll pay it, give us that kind of passion for you God and grant that we might become men and women like Moses who learn the ways of God, we don't just stand around and see the acts of God. We pray this in Jesus name, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]