Seeking and Finding

Introduction

Today I’m going to start a new preaching focus – I don’t know if it should be called a series because it goes in a few different directions, so I’ll call it a preaching focus – and I’m calling it “Reasons to Believe.” It’s going to touch on some of the big questions of life, reasons for confidence in Christian faith, address some common objections people have, and hopefully deepen our understanding and ability to talk about some of the core beliefs of the Church.

Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to start a big new preaching project without a really long wind-up, but, once again, today is not that day. So for the first half of today’s message I’m going to share a testimony that came my way and unpack some of the things in my own journey and studies and thoughts that have caused me to want to dig into, and for the second half I’ll spend some time with Jesus’ words about seeking and finding and what they might mean for us and the people around us today.

A Truth I Can Surrender To

On Christmas Day one of the smaller independent news outlets I follow sent out something I wasn’t expecting by email – a testimony. I’ll send a link to it in this week’s newsletter because it’s a wonderfully written account of an unlikely conversion to Christianity by an English writer and one-time environmental activist named Paul Kingsnorth. And it was introduced with this statement from him that’s going to pop up a couple more times in the coming weeks: “My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis…”

Those are interesting words from a man whose first voluntary experience in a church was sneaking into an old church building at age fifteen, finding its guest book, and writing “I WILL DESTROY YOU AND ALL OF YOUR WORKS! HA HA HA!” before signing it “SATAN.”

After a few more visits like this somebody at that church put that guest book away and his fun was over. But, for reasons that weren’t clear to him, he kept visiting empty churches.

His spiritual search eventually took him to the Eastern religions. He practiced Zen Buddhism for a number of years, but he writes:

As the years went on, Zen was not enough. It was full of compassion, but it lacked love. It lacked something else too, and it took me a long time to admit to myself what it was: I wanted to worship. My teenage atheist self would have been horrified… Something was calling me. But what?

Obviously, it wasn’t Christ. I had read the New Testament a few times, and I mostly liked what I saw. Who couldn’t admire this man or see that, at root, he was teaching the truth? Still, he obviously didn’t die and return to life, this being impossible, and without that, the faith built around him was nonsense. I was a pagan, anyway. I found God in nature, so I needed a nature religion.

This was how I ended up a priest of the witch gods.

So he became a Wiccan, going out in the woods to worship a nature goddess under the stars in a cool-looking cloak. Until he started having dreams. Dreams about Jesus.

After the dream, it began to make sense. Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. They were coming out of the woodwork: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests coming me for help with their writing. I found myself having conversations with friends I’d never known were Christian, who suddenly wanted to talk about it. It kept happening for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving…

Then it happened: “I was at a concert at my son’s music school. We were in a hotel function room, full of children ready to play their instruments and proud parents ready to film them doing it. I was just walking to my chair when I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what was going on inside them and inside myself.

I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.”

Kingworth found his way into the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, and in his second-last paragraph writes: I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.

I find stories like this very helpful and encouraging. It’s not because of scorekeeping, +1 for Christianity and -1 for Wicca – take that witches! No, it’s because I like to hear of the different ways that God helps people find Him – something the Bible promises us that God will do when a person honestly seeks after God, or truth, or meaning, or beauty, or whatever the biggest and best thing is that they can grasp when they begin their search for something more.

For someone like me, who grew up in the church and in a Christian family, there were many wonderful benefits. There was the stability and community I enjoyed, the fruit of good religion. And instead of needing to search far and wide for meaning, a group of people who cared about me introduced me to Jesus right away. And I never found anything lacking in Jesus. His teachings, His way, and the blessings that came from following Him and being among His people were evident to me.

But there are some weaknesses to being brought up in the church like I was, two of which come to mind:

One is the lack of experience with seeking. It’s only through stories people tell me or that I read or listen to that I know something about what it is like to have an emptiness or longing and to have no idea how to satisfy it. It’s not that I didn’t have to do any seeking, or that the process of testing your beliefs or facing doubts and trying to deepen your faith has nothing in common with someone who is seeking, but I don’t know what it is to live unmoored from any spiritual truth I felt I could trust.

The other weakness with being brought up in the church is that, without having experienced the alternatives, you can become very critical of the Church or Christianity more generally. When I was an older teen and young adult learning to lead in church I often became fed up with all the flaws I saw. It seemed to me that if we could all just do what Jesus said more and get behind the mission of the Church more then everything ought to be working a lot better than it was!

Why were so many supposedly Christian church members so cranky and discouraging? Why was the Church’s witness in the wider world so poor – the Western Church was making it sound like the main point of being Christian was to prevent gay marriage back in those days. And why was the Church itself, or Christian countries and societies, guilty of so many bad things in recent or distant history?

My past self wasn’t wrong to be frustrated in some of these ways. If the Christians of the world were better at being like Jesus everything should be working a lot better than it is! We don’t represent our Lord very well sometimes. There is always need for reflection and repentance and reform and recommitment to keep making the Church more like Jesus would have it be.

But my present self is realizing that as I was finding fault in the common practice of my faith, I didn’t spend much time asking what the alternatives were. If Christianity doesn’t work as well as it ought to, does that make it untrue? Does anybody have a genuinely better idea?

I’m recognizing more and more now that in my earlier zeal for the Church I bought into some bad arguments against it. It’s much easier for me to see today that there is growing movement to make it seem like everything is going wrong and always has been. Western civilization has been declared a force for evil even by many westerners, because of its various injustices. The Church is tied up in that, and many people now believe what the late Christopher Hitchens put in the subtitle of his first book of the New Atheist era: religion poisons everything.

But that New Atheist movement of the early 2000s fizzled out pretty quickly. It turns out that that slogan they were advertising on city buses in major cities - “There’s probably no God so stop worrying and enjoy your life” – was inadequate. That kind of shallow atheism has very little to say about many of life’s biggest questions, or guidance to give about to find meaning and purpose and hope in life. It was also culturally blind to how much they themselves lived lives shaped by the Christian story.

This something that’s being chronicled very well by a British author and interviewer named Justin Briefly whose new podcast I’ve found very engaging, called “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” He also tell many stories of various scholars and thinkers today who have taken a fresh look at Christianity and come to a greater appreciation of its positive role, or even come to believe it is true and begun to following Jesus.

So, having spent the fall here talking about connecting to God, each other, and our community, I’m going to focus the winter’s preaching on belief itself. I think for the Church to find renewal after so much decline in the Western world it is essential that we come to confidently know our reasons for believing, and be capable of expressing them in a compelling and inviting way.

It’s also very valuable to understand some of the common objections and hang-ups people have about Christian faith and how to offer some perspective on why they may not be as problematic as people imagine if they knew a bit more about Jesus or what Christianity actually is.

So, in the spirit to knowing about more about Jesus it’s time to move from what’s been going on in my head recently and into Jesus’ own words given for our good.

Matthew 7:7-12

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

This is a passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the most concentrated dose of Jesus’ teaching contained in the Bible. It covers a lot of ground, but if I had to summarize the Sermon on the Mount I’d say it contains the instructions on how to live a citizens of God’s Kingdom. It starts with the values of God’s Kingdom, then how to live according to the ethics of that Kingdom on several important subjects, and along the way it gives a lot of attention to prayer, which is essential to actually living in the way Jesus proclaims.

Based on the present tense of the verbs used here this passage could also begin this way: Keep on asking and it will be given to you. Keep on seeking and you will find. Keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you.

Right away there’s the sense that this isn’t just something to do at one point in your life, or in a time of crisis, and then you move on. Asking, seeking, and knocking is ongoing – it’s a regular part of the Christian life.

But asking for what? Seeking what? Knocking on what door? There isn’t a specific answer in what Jesus says here. Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer, so He may have had some of the requests He listed there in mind:

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Those are things we are told to seek and to ask for. To know and do God’s will. To have our basic needs provided. Forgiveness. Guidance to avoid evil.

But I don’t think we’re limited to those. I think this invitation to ask and seek and knock extends to those who seek for meaning, who know that there’s more to living than what our world obsesses over, or who want a life that goes deeper in some way.

Here Jesus assures us that God will not ignore us. If you earnestly and expectantly seek, ask, and knock, God will respond. Prayer is at the center of these teachings, but it isn’t the only way people seek. Studying and gaining knowledge can be another component. Keeping company with wise people can be another. Or trying a new experience or adopting a new spiritual practice.

And I think it’s the heart that matters more than the specific way you seek. A heart that really wants to see truth, and is prepared to surrender to that truth when it’s encountered. And it may need to be a patient heart. Jesus’ promise that God will answer doesn’t mean we get a revelation the first time we pray.

I mentioned The Surprising Rebirth of Belief In God podcast and I’ll send a link to that out as well, in which a recent episode includes another testimony of a British writer who decided to seek for some deeper meaning by going out into the woods for 100 days. It took until day 100 when he was given a sign, a light from the sky unlike anything he had ever heard of that descended down into his camp and remained there for a time. Like Paul Kingsnorth, this was part of a build-up of things that led him to becoming a Christian.

The second half of this passage is mainly about assuring us that God’s love for us, which is so much greater than even the best human parents, gives us reason for hope in this. God wants us to find and to receive. God has good gifts he wants to give to those who care enough to ask. God isn’t trying to keep this stuff from us, He would like us to approach Him and ask!

One of the things that is maddening for a parent is when you have some exciting activity or cool trip or fun toy that you want your kid or kids to have and they are making it impossible for you to give it to them! There have been times when I just needed a tiny bit of cooperation – if everyone would just stop fighting and actually get dressed or do this one thing we have to do first we could go and do something everyone would love. Help me out the tiniest bit and I’ll give you this great gift that I want you to have!

It feels like Jesus is describing something along these lines. God, who deeply loves His children, is ready with many good gifts for them. But they’re too busy fighting, or too distracted, or just uninterested. They don’t seek, or ask, for want a door to be opened, and so God has to hold on to those gifts. Gifts of peace or purpose. Gifts of hope or wisdom. Guidance that’s needed for a tough decision. Character that holds up in times of strain. Confidence in who you are and where your life is headed. Spiritual renewal or power. If you read your Bible you’ll see many kinds of good gifts that can be given.

One way we make receiving gifts from God difficult is how we treat others. This is the context for Jesus laying out “The Golden Rule”: So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.Jesus didn’t just throw that in without a reason – this is part of what it means to seek, to ask, to knock. Honest seeker take care in how they treat others.

Taken altogether, I see this passage as Jesus encouraging us to try to connect to God through prayer in particular, bringing our deepest questions and longings to God, and to keep at it, expecting good things from our Father who has good gifts He wants to give us. And one key bit of cooperation that allows for these gifts to actually be given is loving others and treating them the way we want to be treated.

Conclusion

One more little bit of testimony I got from listening to Justin Brierly recently was of a woman who came from China to the UK to study. She had planned to get a Western education and then go back for a high-paying job in China, but she decided to stay in the UK even though it wasn’t as lucrative. The reason was because she found the people to be kinder, the government to be less corrupt and manipulative, and it just seemed to be a healthier place to be. She didn’t think about why at first.

But after a while she started to recognize that the differences between her old home and her new one weren’t an accident or coincidence, they were because of belief. The UK was still coasting along on the warm embers of its Christian past, while in China the state and money were the only things to worship.

Somewhere along the way she read a sermon, then started binging YouTube videos about Christianity, and then discovered the writings of C.S. Lewis, and at the time of the interview she was almost ready to be baptized as a Christian, she just wanted to finish reading the Bible first so that she could say she had full investigated things!

But the thing that stood out was her comment that once she started learning about Jesus and Christianity and recognizing how so much of the good she saw in her adopted culture flowed from those things, she couldn’t figure out why nobody seemed to realize this. “Why is nobody talking about this?”she asked.

That’s a good question. Why don’t more people think about their beliefs and where they come from? Why do we see advertisements for “life hacks” and “10 easy steps to do whatever” but nobody says much to say about seeking deeper meaning? Why aren’t more people asking the fundamental questions – why am I here? What makes for a good and meaningful life? Is this all there is?

I think we’re becoming spiritually impoverished, which makes me think Paul Kingsnorth is right and the root of the many problems we see around us is actually spiritual. If that’s the case then we need seekers and askers of questions, and spiritual door-knockers I suppose. There are lots of problems that need fixing in our world, but it’s hard to fix anything if you don’t have a solid footing. We don’t need more than slogans and hashtags and fads, we need belief that runs deep.

That ought to start with us. We will need to seek God personally, in prayer in in the company of other Christians as we learn and worship. This cannot be a lifeless habit, but a quest for the good gifts that our Father has for us, and wants to give us!

Guidance and strength and assurance. What would you do for a sign or experience that took you to a new place of understanding, or peace, or even removed all doubt that God is there, and that He cares for you? So far as I can tell, when they come they tend to come to those who seek and ask and knock.

There will be much more about belief coming up, but for now would you join me in a prayer to invite the Spirit’s help being good seekers, and good askers? I don’t know what each of you most needs to seek after or ask for, or exactly what obstacles stand between you and a deeper, stronger, more empowering kind of belief, but I trust that God does, so let’s ask Him to open some doors for people here among us, or people close to us who need some hope, a fresh start, a breakthrough, or something that they can actually build a life on.