West Greeley Baptist Church
December 9th 2001
“Seeking God”
Proverb’s 2: 1-5
Pastor Mark Hensley
“My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.”
Introduction: Following the news of ex-Beatle George Harrison’s death, "Today" show anchor Anne Curry interviewed Anthony DeCurtis, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. DeCurtis talked at length about Harrison’s search for a meaningful spiritual life. Curry said, "Apparently Harrison was the most spiritual of the group [speaking of the Beatles]; in a recent interview, he said, ’Everything else in life can wait, but the search for God.
Transition: A search a quest if you will for God is the most important of life’s decisions! While I appreciate the intent of George Harrison I am concerned that is ultimate discovery was for him horrific. He chose to pursue Eastern mysticism and in doing so missed the truth he seemed so desperate to discover!
Today in a message titled: “Seeking God” we will be reminded that God can be known! And that’s a search that we must pursue with complete and total devotion! Proverb’s 2: 1-5
“My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.”
Notice the markers that are on the path that leads to ultimate truth and knowledge of God.
Acceptance
Insight
Treasure & Knowledge
I. Acceptance: “My son, if you accept my words”
Have you ever thought about how much of life is not a choice? We can’t choose our parents or often the home we live in as children or the color of our eyes or hair or height or shape! Ok Ok…some things you can choose and heredity though playing a part can be masked! Other choices are made when we eat too many burritos’ Pizza’s or okra!
A lot of life….is thrust upon us and we become the product of our choices whether there good or bad. Sometimes we must choose between the good and the best, and at those times we often wonder if were doing the right thing.
My dear friend there is one choice that we must make and that’s to accept the Word of God! To get to know the author, to believe that God not only is someone to discover but someone who already knows us! And in that knowledge there is a plan, marvelous plans that unfold’s moment by moment….for the one who:
“Accepts His word’s” The writer of Proverb’s likens the instruction given as the council of a Father to a son. Isn’t it comforting to know that God wants to relate to us in a Fatherly way?
“A young boy was about 12 years old when a new preacher came to his church. I would always go in late and slip out early. But one day the preacher said the benediction so fast I got caught and had to walk out with the crowd. I could feel every eye in church on me. Just about the time I got to the door I felt a big hand on my shoulder. I looked up and the preacher was looking right at me.
“Who are you, son? Whose boy are you?’
I felt the old weight come on me. It was like a big black cloud. Even the preacher was putting me down.
But as he looked down at me, studying my face, he began to smile a big smile of recognition. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I know who you are. I see the family resemblance. You are a son of God.”
With that he slapped me across the rump and said, “Boy you’ve got a great inheritance. Go and claim it.” Ben Hooper would later say “That was the most important single sentence ever said to me.” Ben Hooper would one day be elected and re-elected Governor of Tennessee. Jamie Buckingham, Power for Living.
“My son, if you accept my words”
The right road begins with acceptance it continues with insight!
II. Insight: “My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding.
The ability to understand or perceive spiritual truth is something that only God can impart!
“The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”1st Corinthians 2:14
The writer of proverbs Solomon, the wisest person of his day, helps us to understand that within each of us there must be a desire for God!
Do you desire to know God? Would you describe your desire as a passion?
*There is a tale told of that great English actor Macready. An eminent preacher once said to him: "I wish you would explain to me something." "Well, what is it? I don’t know that I can explain anything to a preacher."
"What is the reason for the difference between you and me? You are appearing before crowds night after night with fiction, and the crowds come wherever you go. I am preaching the essential and unchangeable truth, and
I am not getting any crowd at all."
Macready’s answer was this: "This is quite simple. I can tell you the difference between us. I present my fiction as though it were truth; you present your truth as though it were fiction." G. Campbell Morgan, Preaching, p. 36.
“My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding.
There must be an impassioned yearning, a focused desire to know God! Were to accept His word assuredly. With acceptance there will come insight and you will discover that God has much to say to you, lessons to be learned insights to be acquired!
It is said that when the famous missionary, Dr. David Livingstone, started his trek across Africa he had 73 books in 3 packs, weighing 180 pounds. After the party had gone 300 miles, Livingstone was obliged to throw away some of the books because of the fatigue of those carrying his baggage. As he continued on his journey his library grew less and less, until he had but one book left--his Bible. Today in the Word, April 1989, p. 28.
I am not so sure that most of us would pack, or unpack in the same way!
God can be known. Your quest has a reality, but your discovery is only the beginning! I am speaking to someone today, and your faith is old. It has nothing to do with how many candles you blow out on your cake these days by the way! But old in the sense of tried, attempted…you have made the effort but now you’re fatigued spent weary.
Spiritual apathy can become the malady of the Pastor just as easily as the plumber! It can weaken the staunchest Christian heart, whether that heart beats inside the chest of someone 18 or 80!
Solomon stands at this juncture in our journey to seek God to remind us that acceptance while crucial must be followed by a real hunger for insight.
Perhaps my favorite story of my favorite preacher from a bygone error will explain what I believe our writer is saying to us today.
*Dr George Truett (Pastor of First Baptist Dallas from 1897-1944) was at his Doctor’s for a medical exam. He said: (Paraphrasing) “People say that I am a brilliant man, this is not so, I must study hard and long, to feed my people”
Dr. Truett was a night owl, his personal library at home numbered better than 10,000 volumes! He would study late into the night like a College freshman preparing for a final! His wife upstairs in bed realizing how late it was….would get up throw back the throw rug and stomp on the floor letting Dr. Truett that it was time to get to bed!
“My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding.
There was a man who not only accepted the word of the living God, but who had a passion, burning, real, focused for insight and he was not disappointed nor were the people he served! His quest was a starting place for a deeper walk with God!
That same relationship awaits anyone who accepts the Word of God, and desires to have insight and understanding!
Seeking God, results in acceptance, it leads to incredible insight…and treasure& knowledge!
III. Treasure & Knowledge: “My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.”
Unless you subscribe to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, you probably missed the story that was in the May 17, 1987 edition.
A rock hound named Rob Cutshaw owns a little roadside shop outside Andrews, North Carolina. Like many in the trade, he hunts for rocks, then sells them to collectors or jewelry makers. He knows enough about rocks to decide which to pick up and sell, but he’s no expert. He leaves the appraising of his rocks to other people. As much as he enjoys the work, it doesn’t always pay the bills. He occasionally moonlights, cutting wood to help put bread on the table.
While on a dig twenty years ago, Rob found a rock he described as "purdy and big." He tried unsuccessfully to sell the specimen, and according to the Constitution, kept the rock under his bed or in his closet.
He guessed the blue chunk could bring as much as $500 dollars, but he would have taken less if something urgent came up like paying his power bill. That’s how close Rob came to hawking for a few hundred dollars what turned out to be the largest, most valuable sapphire ever found. The blue rock that Rob had abandoned to the darkness of a closet two decades ago -- now known as "The Star of David" sapphire -- weighs nearly a pound, and could easily sell for $2.75 million. John MacArthur, Grace to You Newsletter, April 15, 1993.
He didn’t know what he had! Too many today fail to realize that the greatest of treasures can be known! It’s the treasure of relationship with God!
Treasure hunters have always fascinated me! As a boy I dreamed of finding a treasure map marked with an X …left behind by Colorado pioneers 100 years ago or more! I remember investigating cave’s on my family’s mountain property…dreaming of saddle bags filled with gold! All I found were spider web’s complete with spiders!
I never found that map! Mostly dirt! Yet when I was 12 I was introduced to God! Through the finished work of Christ…and I had (though I didn’t understand it then) a treasure in an earthen vessel!
The writer of proverbs wants people to pursue God, like an enterprising treasure hunter who is willing to spend all he has….in effort and passion in knowing God!
Do you pursue God like that?
“My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.”
Such a pursuit lead’s to a knowledge of God!
Knowledge is exploding at such a rate--more than 2000 pages a minute--that even Einstein couldn’t keep up. In fact, if you read 24 hours a day, from age 21 to 70, and retained all you read, you would be one and a half million years behind when you finished. Campus Life, February, 1979.
Yet you can know God! More importantly God knows you….and eternity will be spent knowing him better!
George Harrison missed it! He thought God could be known apart from the person of Christ…in your quest to know God…don’t make the same mistake!
Appeal: Acceptance/ His word!
Insight/ Comes from seeking Him!
Treasure & Knowledge/ Comes from
seekingHim with zeal!
