Invading the Privacy of God - Week of Dec. 31

December 31

Devotionals 53 & 54

"God's Hidden Face" & "The Sender"

God's Hidden Face 

For nearly eight months I lived with one single biblical passage. Although I read others, almost every day I came back to Lamentations 3. Here are the major verses:

I have suffered much because God was angry. He chased me into a dark place, where no light could enter…. He attacked and surrounded me with hardships and trouble; he forced me to sit in the dark like someone long dead. God built a fence around me that I cannot climb over, and he chained me down. Even when I shouted and prayed for help, he refused to listen. God put big rocks in my way and made me follow a crooked path. God was like a bear or a lion waiting in ambush for me: he dragged me from the road, then tore me to shreds…. God took careful aim and shot his arrows straight through my heart…. He made me eat gravel and rubbed me in the dirt. I cannot find peace or remember happiness…. That’s all I ever think about, and I am depressed.

                                                            LAMENTATIONS 3:1-2, 5-13, 16-20, CEV

I wouldn’t begin to compare my problems with those of the prophet, but this passage captured my mood: God had let me down.

During those months, I prayed. I scrutinized my life. I searched my past, wondering if I had gone down the wrong road months earlier. Was I deceiving myself in thinking that I was all right with God? If I was all right, then why didn’t God answer? Why didn’t God smile—just a little?

Nothing but darkness filled my life. I don’t mean I was bedridden with depression or heavily medicated. I kept it all inside. It wasn’t a faith crisis—the dark night of the soul kind of thing. It was more that God was out there someplace, but not anywhere near me.

Then I began to notice the number of times the Old Testament speaks of God’s hidden face. It seemed not so much that God ran away or hid behind clouds of gloom. It was more the idea that God’s face turned away from the people of God.

We know the feeling. Most of us have been snubbed by someone. We approach, extend a hand or smile, only to have the person turn away. We know the person saw us, but we might as well have been invisible or not present.

That’s how I felt God treated me.

Day after day, I read Lamentations 3; I found comfort that I had connected with the pain of another person. Yet his words gave me no solution. God’s face was still turned away. I prayed, I confessed, I promised, yes, I even bargained, but nothing seemed to work.

Then I lingered on a psalm that has since become a permanently marked place in my Bible:

How much longer, LORD, will you forget about me? Will it be forever? How long will you hide? How long must I be confused and miserable all day?… Please listen, Lord God, and answer my prayers. Make my eyes sparkle again, or else I will fall into the sleep of death.

                                                                                    PSALMS 13:1-3, CEV

“If God would just tell me what I’ve done wrong or show me where I’ve gone astray,” I wailed to my friend Bob.

“Maybe you haven’t gone astray. Maybe God has a different purpose in mind.” Bob’s what I call a spiritual man, someone who doesn’t speak rashly. “Is it possible that this is a time of waiting for you and not one of punishment or anger? Do you suppose God wants to do something in you that can happen only in darkness?”

“What would that be?” I asked.

“Ask God,” he said, and smiled.

I asked. I asked. I asked. For days I bombarded heaven with my plea. A few times I got angry. “You want your people to pray, and then you won’t listen. Or if you’re listening, you’re keeping it a secret. What kind of God are you?”

As angry as I got, I somehow knew I could tell God how I felt. I believed God cared and heard me even though nothing happened.

From late September until the middle of summer, God’s face stayed turned away from me. I continued to pray, sometimes merely out of ritual or habit. I felt as if my fists had become bloody from beating against a six-inch steel door. But I didn’t give up.

Other times I tried to get God to hurry up and respond, but that seemed to throw me backward. Finally, I surrendered. “Okay, God, I’m willing to wait.” Every day I heard myself saying things such as, “God, I don’t like it, but I’m waiting for you to turn your face toward me again.”

My life did change—slowly. In fact, it was so slow and gradual that I was hardly aware of anything being different. But one day, I realized that a sliver of light had crept back into my life. I no longer wept over Psalm 13 or wailed over Lamentations 3. The dawn started to streak across the horizon. It was a beginning of God’s face turning toward me again.

At that point, I did a quick checkup on my life. What had happened in the months of darkness? I knew the situation had forced me to pray more—not merely in volume, but in intensity. It had been years since I had burrowed into the Bible as deeply as I did then. As far as I knew, I opened every part of my life to God’s searchlight. I didn’t always like what I saw, and I asked God’s help in making changes.

As more and more light penetrated my dark world, I began thanking God. I could hardly believe it, but I was giving thanks to God for darkness, for uncertainty, for confusion, for pain, for all the difficulties. Yes, I did—because “All things work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28).

Then I realized those days and nights of agony had strengthened me. I don’t want to repeat them. And I know Bob was right: God had a different purpose in mind.

I patiently waited, LORD, for you to hear my prayer. You listened and pulled me from a lonely pit, full of mud and mire. You let me stand on a rock with my feet firm, and you gave me a new song, a song of praise to God.  --PSALMS 40:1-3a, CEV

God, I hate darkness. 
I hate the silence. 
I hate it when you turn your face from me. 
But I’ve finally learned: it’s only for a short time, 
and you never leave me. 
You’re always there—even in the deepest darkness. 
Thanks, God. Amen.

***

The Sender

“You’re the only ones I can trust,” the old man whispered in his thick accent to the three younger men. “I’m counting on each of you. But even if two of you fail, there is a chance that one of you will make it.”

That’s a scene from a World War II flick I watched on TV.

The old man was dying, but he had gathered important information the Allied forces needed to defeat the Germans in a significant battle. The film revolved around the three men and the different routes they took. Two of them were caught and killed, but the third, the hero of the film, delivered the important message.

“I was sent, and I couldn’t fail.” Even though wounded, he handed the officer a coded sheet of paper before he passed out.

The film stirred me to think that those three men dedicated their lives to delivering a message. It made me realize that if we seriously read the commands of the Bible, that’s the kind of challenge we have from Jesus Christ.

Jesus sends us; we go. Simple.

In evangelical churches, we don’t have to attend very long before we get inundated about witnessing for our faith. In some of them, we even have choices of a half dozen surefire evangelism programs that will bring others to Christ.

Such an approach implies that God intends every single believer to be an evangelist. They try to get around that and simply call us witnesses. I’ve been in those situations and felt the grips of guilt for not being effective in witnessing. I’ve done it door-to-door, spoken in public forums, handed out tracts, memorized long lists of presumed objections with scriptural answers. I’ve done open-air meetings in the United States, Central America, and Africa.

Despite all that, it seems to me that the concept of evangelism as practiced today is too restrictive. We put the entire gospel into one phase—bringing others to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. I don’t minimize the importance of evangelism. But when Jesus commissioned his disciples, he had a much broader purpose in mind.

According to John’s Gospel, Jesus met with his eleven remaining disciples in the Upper Room after the Resurrection. “After Jesus had greeted them again, he said, ‘I am sending you, just as the Father has sent me’” (Jn 20:21, CEV).

Jesus Christ sent the first handful of disciples into the world. Matthew’s Gospel ends with what we call the Great Commission and the book of Acts begins with a similar command.

My understanding of Jesus’ commission is that he sends us with the total gospel. That is, he sends us to share the good news, but he also sends us to live it. To live it means to behave in such a way that our lifestyle attracts others to Jesus Christ.

In another translation, Jesus’ words read, “Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (Jn 20:21, NKJV). If I get it right, it says that God sent Jesus, now Jesus sends us. It’s not a commission to die on the cross—that job’s been fulfilled. But the commission is to teach and live the message of God’s love.

Here’s where I fall short. I can give instructions about coming to Jesus or expound on just about any doctrine of the Bible. The hard part for me is to live the message I proclaim.

As I reflect on the life of Jesus, I realize he taught about God, but he also embodied God’s message. He was both the message and the messenger.

In another place in this book, I point out that Jesus’ disciples came to him one day and asked him to teach them to pray. Why did they do that? Not just because he told them to pray, but because they observed him at prayer.

Or think about the scribes and Pharisees who came to him with questions. Some came out of sincere desire to know, others to mock, a few to discredit. The point is, they came. Why did they bother Jesus? I can think of only one reason: he lived what he taught.

Now, two thousand years later, Jesus sends me out into the world with the same commission. For Cec Murphey, it means I’m to go out to my world and live what I have learned, to embody the gospel by my actions as much as by my words.

Here’s something else to consider: Jesus’ teachings. At the end off the Sermon on the Mount, it says: “And so it was, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at His teaching; He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mt 7:28-29, NKJV).

I’ve been feeling great concern over my faithfulness in delivering the message. It’s easy to misinterpret, reinterpret, corrupt the intent, overemphasize the parts I like, and under-emphasize the ones I don’t.

The church has been doing it for centuries. In some periods, leaders have hit hard on laws and at other times on grace. Twenty years ago, every denomination seemed to have some internal argument over the “charismatic renewal.” In the early ‘90s, how many books did we suddenly see about angels, as if they were the ultimate spiritual experience?

All those things scare me a little. I’m as human as anyone else. I get caught up in trends too. I overemphasize one phase of the message, which implies an under-emphasis elsewhere.

Yet all the while, I’m responsible to the Sender. When I’m at my best, I hear myself praying, as I did today, “Jesus, help me live the life that honors you.” I sometimes say it in other ways, but my concern is to grasp the message right so that I live it right. If I live it right, I’ll share it rightly.

Unfortunately, I never do seem to quite get it right. I can blame it on being a fallible, sinful human being, but I have to keep trying.

I think about two Old Testament stories. God told King Hezekiah that destruction would come to his kingdom, but because he had been a good man, it wouldn’t happen during his lifetime. To Hezekiah’s grandson, Josiah, came a similar message. The difference in the two stories is the reaction of the two kings.

Hezekiah sighs and says, “Well, at least it won’t happen in my time.” Josiah goes all out to institute religious reform.

Isn’t that how it works with us? When we look at our lives, we see how we’ve mangled the message (if we’re honest with ourselves) by living less-than-perfect lives. Are we like Hezekiah and say, “Oh, well, Jesus, I’m saved”?

Or do we take the Josiah approach and cry out, “Jesus, help me get the message right. Help me teach it right by living it right.”

In my praying today, I focused on Jesus the perfect messenger of God. He came to earth and modeled the message. If we examine his life, we began to grasp what God wants of us. Our motivation is to deliver the message pure and untampered with. And if we do it right, people know and we don’t always have to tell them how spiritual or committed to God we really are.

An example comes to mind of our days in Africa. My wife worked with women and particularly helped them set up Sunday schools and training classes. She slept in the village, ate their food, and walked from village to village—like any African woman.

Only later did she learn that she was the first to “go native.” Her predecessor brought her own cot and bedding and demanded boiled water.

When we prepared to move from the area, one of the women came to Shirley. With tears in her eyes, she told my wife how much she had meant to them. The African woman’s appreciation sounded critical of Shirley’s predecessor.

“Wait,” Shirley said, “I know her. She worked hard and …”

“Yes, that is true,” the woman said. “She worked very hard, perhaps harder than you. But she only worked with us. You have loved us, and because you have loved us, we have listened more carefully to you.”

Is that what the Sender wants to get across to us? As important as purity of doctrine is or the primacy of evangelism, have we put doctrine or activity or zeal ahead of the real message—the embodiment that Jesus lived before us?

As I examined my own heart today and asked the Sender to help me live the gospel, I thought of the words of Jesus to his disciples just before the Last Supper: “My little children, I will be with you for a little while longer. Then you will look for me, but you won’t find me…. But I am giving you a new command. You must love each other, just as I have loved you. If you love one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” (Jn 13:33a, 34-35, CEV).

The Sender wants us to get the message right, and to do so means we’ve got to embody it by living it. That means a constant self-examination and asking the Sender to help us uncontaminate the message.

As we face this, we realize the one thing that will make up for our deficiencies is love. Once people understand that we love them, they allow for our mistakes and shortcomings. That’s where we find hope as we ask the Perfect Sender to perfect the message in our lives.

Jesus came to them [the disciples] and said: “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth! Go to the people of all nations and make them my disciples … and teach them to do everything I have told you. I will be with you always, even until the end of the world.” --MATTHEW 28:18-20, CEV

My Heavenly Sender, 
thank you for sending me to represent you. 
Forgive me when I present you in a less-than-perfect manner. 
Thank you for trusting me enough to send me out to live, 
to teach, 
and most of all to love, 
so that others will see you in my life. Amen. 

For more from Cec, please visit www.cecilmurphey.com .

Cecil Murphey has written more than one hundred books on a variety of topics with an emphasis on Spiritual Growth, Christian Living, Caregiving, and Heaven. He enjoys preaching in churches and speaking and teaching at conferences around the world. To book Cec for your next event, please contact Twila Belk at 563-332-1622.