Longing for Jesus
--Psalm 84:1-4 and John 4:4-15
When preachers get together, someone may comment, “That will preach.” Inspiration for a sermon comes from many people and places. A few weeks ago in our Academy for Christian Training and Service one of our readings for reflection came from the book YEARING TO KNOW GOD’S WILL by Danny E. Morris, the founder and Executive Director of the Upper Room’s Academy for Spiritual Formation. Morris’ reflection really spoke to Liz’s heart in a special way, especially these words: “Nothing is more urgent in our lives or in our congregations than yearning to know and do God’s will. We must keep our eyes and hearts on our purpose and goal.” [SOURCE: Discovering God’s Will Together by Danny E. Morris as quoted by Norman Shawchuck and Reuben P. Job in A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2006), 246]
Morris inspired Liz to write these words in her journal and share with us: “Do the people that sit in our churches on Sunday morning really pray for God’s will for themselves and their Church? What is God’s will for me? For the Church? Do we take it seriously?” [SOURCE: Liz Reynolds, Sunday Evening, 10 June 2007, Academy for Christian Training and Service, Trinity United Methodist Church, Kankakee, Illinois] Thus Danny Morris and my wife inspired me to preach this message this morning.
Danny Morris is conclusively correct: “Nothing is more urgent in our lives or in our congregations than yearning to know and do God’s will. We must keep our eyes and hearts on our purpose and goal.” That evening in our Academy for Christian Training and Service God directed me to two words that appear several times in Scripture: yearning and longing. Yearnings, longings are emotions, mind sets that drive us to achieve or obtain something. When we yearn or long for someone or something we are constantly and passionately driven towards that person or towards achieving our goal. Our yearning, our longing, is our passion, our priority. Our yearning, our longing, becomes the driving force in our lives.
What is your longing, your passion, your priority, your driving force in life? In July of 1971, having completed my first year of seminary at Asbury and becoming a Probationary Member and being ordained a Deacon in the Southern Illinois Annual Conference, I was privileged to accompany my friends The Rev. Henry Clay Wright and his wife Mary on their pulpit exchange to what was then Trinity Methodist Church in Sutton, Surrey, England.
Thirty years later I was an official delegate from our Illinois Great Rivers Conference and Liz an official guest to the World Methodist Conference in Brighton, England. All these years I have continually longed and yearned to return to The United Kingdom for an extended pastorate of my own in the British Methodist Conference, perhaps for as long as a two or three year period. It is still my prayer and my passion that someday the Holy Spirit may open those doors of opportunity for such a ministry.
That has been a longing, a yearning in my heart for over thirty-six years. There is never a week that goes by, or hardly even a day, that I don’t dream about it. But if that is my sole yearning, longing, passion, my only driving force in life, I am off track, for the Psalmist is right on target when he testifies in Psalm 84:1-4
How lovely is Your dwelling place,
O LORD Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints
For the courts of the LORD;
My heart and my flesh cry out
For the living God.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
And the swallow a nest for herself,
Where she may have her young—
A place near Your altar, O LORD Almighty,
My King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in Your house;
They are ever praising you.
For what does your soul yearn and even faint? Can you say it is “for the courts of the LORD?” The sparrow has found a home and the swallow a nest for her young near the altar of the LORD Almighty! Have we found your home there? Is our nest near His altar? Is our passion, our yearning, our longing, for our King and our God?
For what or for whom do you long and yearn? Yearning or longing are indeed a matter of our priority in life. Who or what is of most importance and significance in your life? Can you truly testify that your “heart and flesh cry out for the living God?” Do you find your happiness, your joy by dwelling in His house and every praising His name? Is your home, your nest near His altar? Is He your King and your God?
Isaiah testifies in Isaiah 26:9a:
My soul yearns for you in the night;
In the morning my spirit longs for you.
Our priority is in the right place when our spirit longs for Jesus in the morning and yearns for Him at night.
Other terms for longing and yearning are aspiration, hunger, appetite, and thirst. I never had a humongous appetite and hunger until I had my tonsillectomy at age seven in June of 1955. Since my fall on the ice in February which sidelined my running routine for weeks and still retards my daily exercise performance, it has especially gotten out of control. I crave King Size Almond Snickers, Dairy Queen Heath Bar Blizzards, Hostess cup cakes, potato chips, and pizza continuously. Our deepest hunger and thirst, however, are spiritual in nature. Only Jesus can satisfy our real, eternal hunger and thirst.
No one has ever expressed it better than St. Augustine, “O God, You have created us for Yourself and our souls are restless and searching until they find their rest in You.” Jesus speaks to the question of our deepest longing, yearning, hunger, thirst, and priority in the Beatitudes when He assures us in Matthew 5:6, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
The trouble with the world and the Church today is that our priorities are all screwed up. We hunger and thirst for things that never satisfy our deepest longings and yearnings. It’s like Waylon Jennings laments in his old hit song, “Lookin’ for Love”:
I’ve spent a lifetime looking for you
Single bars and good time lovers, never true
Playing a fools game, hoping to win
Telling those sweet lies and losing again.
I was looking for love in all the wrong places
Looking for love in too many faces
Searching your eyes, looking for traces
Of what.. I’m dreaming of...
Hopin’ to find a friend and a lover
God bless the day I discover
Another heart, lookin’ for love.”
[SOURCE: http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/w/waylonjennings4905/lookinforlove213825.html]
I’m a big drinker of Diet Pepsi and enjoy Poweraide, but whenever I really want to quench my physical thirst nothing can satisfy like a cool glass of water. Only a personal, daily walk with Jesus can satisfy our eternal yearnings and longings.
The Psalmist testifies in Psalm 42:1:
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
The term for pant as used by the Psalmist is a “passionate, emotional verb.” The deer passionately and emotionally longs for “flowing, living brooks of water to quench his thirst. During some of the hot weather we have experienced this summer, we’ve not only witnessed our dog pant, but our cat as well. They are hot and thirsty; their heart rate is elevated; and only a cool refreshing drink can satisfy their longing and calm their spirit.
The same is true with us in our longing and yearning. Only Jesus can satisfy. Martin Nystrom in his praise and worship chorus “As the Deer” expresses his deep longing that only Jesus can satisfy in these words:
I want You more than gold or silver,
Only You can satisfy.
You alone are the real joy-giver
And the apple of my eye.
[SOURCE: Martin Nystrom, “As the Deer” (Laguna Hills, Ca.: Maranatha Music, 1997)]
As only living, flowing water can satisfy the deer, Jesus alone can satisfy our longings. Only Jesus is the “real joy-giver,” and “our souls are restless and searching until they find their rest in Him.” Until we have a personal, daily walk with Him, we only are “looking for love in all the wrong places.”
On a personal level, only Jesus can satisfy our hunger, our thirst, our longings, our yearnings. In His encounter with the Samaritan Woman at the Well Jesus declares, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The same is true for the life of our Church body as well. Remember the words of Danny Morris that touched Liz’s heart so deeply: “Nothing is more urgent in our lives or in our congregations than yearning to know and do God’s will. We must keep our eyes and hearts on our purpose and goal.” The most urgent need for Trinity United Methodist Church is to “yearn to know and do God’s will,” and all of us “must keep our eyes and hearts on our purpose ane goal.”
I am currently reading the book I REFUSE TO LEAD A DYING CHURCH by Paul Nixon. Until recently Paul has served as the Director of Congregational Development of the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. On the first page of the “Introduction” to his book Paul boldly makes this prediction: “More than half of the congregations that call themselves United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Disciples of Christ, American Baptist, and United Church of Christ will likely disappear in the next half-century.” [SOURCE: Paul Nixon, I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church! (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), 9.] He gives even more shocking statistics for us as United Methodists. From 2002 to 2004 our denomination in the United States “saw an unprecedented loss of 150,000 people in worship attendance over just three years.”
[SOURCE: Nixon, 11.]. This is equivalent to loosing our entire Illinois Great Rivers Annual Conference. By these standards there is no longer a United Methodist Church in existence from Cairo to Kankakee; Trinity United Methodist is no more; we are not here today.
That’s the course on which our denomination and our Church are currently running. Every one of us has to honestly confess that right now our own congregation definitely is included in this downward spiral. As a concerned United Methodist pastor Nixon goes on to testify: “Then some of us suddenly realized: ‘This ship is really going down, all the way down, down to the bottom of the sea.’” [Nixon, 11.]
Paul Nixon “tells it like it is,” but he is not a pessimist. He sees in most of our mainline American denominations “two realities: (1.) a sea of dying congregations and (2.) a much smaller network of creative, innovative community-minded churches that are thriving, almost oblivious to the trends in their larger denominational family.” [Nixon, 11]. My home Church Marion Aldersgate, St. Matthew in Belleville, and Crossroads United Methodist in Washington, Illinois, are such congregations in our Illinois Great Rivers Conference.
Church, wake up and hear the repeated words of Jesus in Revelation two and three: “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” Church, listen to Paul Nixon’s invitation:
My premise is this: that God intends every servant of the
Resurrected Christ to be a servant of life. God has called
all leaders, lay and clergy together, to lead healthy, growing
spiritual movements. Any Church can blossom and grow
anywhere if it will become healthy enough spiritually
and pay attention to the needs, experiences, and
sensibilities of those it seeks to serve. . . .I invite you to
declare that, from this moment forward, you refuse to
simply go through the motions and play church. You
hereby refuse to help your church gracefully into the
grave. [Nixon, 13]
Nixon stresses that “a growing number of people will associate with organized churches only when those places ‘WORK FOR THEM’ in their personal quests for
meaningful theology, community, and service.” [Nixon, 10] He keeps affirming too
that the pastor and laity of growing, thriving Churches must be people who have “had a LIVING EXPERIENCE OF MEETING THE RESURRECTED CHRIST PERSONALLY, SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW!” [Nixon, 14 and20] That is paramount. Churches where the people do not “hunger and thirst to know Jesus and His righteousness” are yearning and longing for things that do not satisfy. They are “looking for love in all the wrong places,” and they are doomed to die.
God’s Word, the Holy Spirit Himself, Danny Morris, and Paul Nixon all plead with us today: “Nothing is more urgent in our lives or in our congregations than yearning to know and do God’s will.” Is this your personal yearning, your longing? Have you had a living experience of meeting the Resurrected Christ personally? Only He can satisfy. If you’ve not had a personal living experience of meeting Jesus personally, He waits to meet you at this altar of prayer this morning, and I as your pastor and friend invite you now to meet Him hear; I’ll personally pray with you and introduce you to Jesus.
I don’t doubt that many of you already have met Jesus personally, somewhere, somehow, but collectively as Trinity Church are we truly “working for the people we seek to serve in offering them meaningful theology, community, and service?” Do we just sit in our pew Sunday after Sunday, or do we truly pray for God’s will for Trinity Church? Do we take Jesus seriously? Do we “keep our eyes and hearts on our purpose and our goal?”
I believe with all my heart that everyone of us here today needs to be on our knees, at this altar of prayer asking God to “open our spiritual eyes,” to empower us to love and “PAY ATTENTION TO THE NEEDS, EXPERIENCES, AND SENSIBILITIES OF THOSE GOD CALLS US TO AND THAT WE SEEK TO SERVE!”
Will you join me in that time of obedience, surrender, and prayer? Today let us begin to “refuse to simply go through the motions of playing church. Let us refuse to help our church gracefully into the grave.” Let us long for Jesus, for only He can satisfy.
