How Far Are We From God? ` 6/18/44
Scripture: Luke 15: 11-24
Text: Luke 15: 13b; “...and took his journey into a far country.”
The story of the prodigal son is familiar to hosts of people in every land, from Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope; to people of every language from the Russian to the pidgin used in many Pacific Island communities; to people of many religious faiths.
It is one of those stories told very simply, and directly, by a Master skilled in the art of putting great truth in simple words.
Here is this normal but head-strong youth grown tired of the routine and familiar scenes of his family life, looking for more excitement and perchance adventure. He had wanted that elusive thing called freedom. Like many another, he had not learned that the chief difference between slavery and freedom is that in slavery one’s responsibility is determined and commanded by another, while in freedom one’s responsibility is assumed voluntarily. But there is no escape from responsibility without penalty in a moral universe.
This young fellow had a youthful urge to escape from parental restrictions, rather than wait to grow and graduate in his family. Doubtless there were certain duties he wished to escape. Probably he wished to escape also the conventions and the staid respectability represented in his older brother.
Many another boy has tried it.
In some such way, grown men and women have sometimes tried to escape from God. They have said He doesn’t exist; or that He is only for someone else; or that one can’t know much about Him anyway, so why bother?
In the earliest literature of the Old Testament appears the story of one who was said to be the first man created - Adam. Things came his way for a while. He came to being in a garden. He was given dominance over the other creatures. He was sent a help-meet of his own kind, Eve. The story, poetic and powerful in its imaginative grasp on eternal truth, also says that he was given certain restrictions, with the power of choice. He chose to disregard the restriction. Then, knowing that he had gotten out of line with the way things just eternally are, he “hid from God,” says the story. But his hiding was only of his own imagining, for God was there, calling him to account for his own choice.
A fellow named Jonah was called by a deep moving Urge to go and preach to a people he didn’t want to see. And so he ran away from this call of God - this duty, only to discover in extraordinarily vivid fashion that God is even in the uttermost parts of the sea.
Like the Prodigal Son, another fellow who was a younger son, Jacob by name, ran away from home. In this case he had to flee for the safety of his life. He had tricked his father and wronged his brother. And the wrath of the older brother, outsmarted of his very birth right was something to avoid!
As Jacob fled through the wild out-of-doors to a far country, he slept in the open one night. He took it for granted that he had left God behind. But he had a dream of such vividness - as though he saw the very angels of heaven ascending and descending there - that he arose in the morning feeling that surely God was in that place, too. [Genesis 28: 10-22].
Years later, when he had gotten into trouble with his father-in-law, this same Jacob decided to risk going back and trying to appease the wrath of Esau in order to live back on the old home ground once more. This time, it was his wife, Rachel, for whose hand he had labored 14 long years, who had the notion that deity is somehow confined to one place. And so she stole the idols, the “gods” of her father’s household, and took them with her. [Genesis 31: 19].
In the early days of the sailing vessels which roamed the Pacific - whalers by the score, and traders and explorers, it used to be said that the sailors hung the ten commandments on the horn as they rounded the cape, and left them there until they came back with full cargo. Well, that is what many of them tried to do - and they brought unalloyed hell to the people of the Pacific Islands where they came ashore.
The evidence of ages of human experience is that God is as near as hands and feet and breathing; that God is inescapable, that he lives in precious companionship with his faithful, that he never leaves those who attempt to flee his presence.
And yet a haunting question rises again in our minds: Is God always as near as hands and feet and breathing? And as we ponder the question it seems as though God’s order is always inescapable. If we break his commandments, trouble follows; if we get out of line with his moral order disharmony and restlessness, and unhappiness and perhaps tragedy come. His way in the world of his creation is inescapable. We must deal with it in one way or the other.
But God’s goodness seems to be a different matter. Perhaps God’s goodness comes no nearer than we will it to.
I think often we put the Good God at a distance by our own designing. 1) Probably we put Him at a distance through so simple a neglect as staying away from his church. By putting forth no effort to find a Friend, we miss that friendship. Our neglect of prayer and the pondering over His word in the Bible, keeps him at a distance from us.
We put ourselves at a distance from Him by our selfishness. Did you ever want something so badly that it made you unhappy? And you found only misery in the desire that would not be satisfied, you felt, until you possessed what you wanted? And then, perhaps, there came a time when you let go of that desire and found life’s goodness suddenly sweeping over you again like a great breath of clean, fresh air. I know what that experience is, and probably you do too.
We keep God at a distance by our surrender to the paganisms of the world. When we become engulfed in the gospel of “getting mine,” it is hard to find the Good God. God has no chance to get near me when I am concerned with my freedom (but not the freedom of all others); with my rights (regardless of the welfare of others); with my desire to be equal to or better than the fellow who now seems bigger than I.
When we get engrossed in the material (forgetting that materials are tools for spiritual ends); when we are sunken in comfort, to the ignorance of the unpleasant; when we withdraw to a “fairy” world - how can the Good God get near us?
We let God come near us in moments of willingness to have Him; in decision to serve Him and His creatures.
Now service is no magic word. It is a word of care and discernment. When we are expressing Christian living in serving it must be not to the selfish aims of anybody, but to their needs.
We can find the Good God in working for the other fellow’s freedom; in freely granting the other fellow his “rights;” in guaranteeing him his equality of opportunity.
How far are we from God? We can not run from Him even if we would - any more than a little boy can run from his shadow or from the surrounding breeze.
Our distance from God is measured only by our will to know and to do His will! -- by our own state of mind. He draws us into His Goodness the moment we will it!
That we may perchance find Him very near to us now, let us come in spirit to the table of his Son, who urged his disciples to find the Father in such fellowship. Let us lay aside our concerns of self and think of Him, his ways, and all of His people.
[communion]
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, June 18, 1944.