90 103 Seeking and Finding -2

Let's stand and sing. Father, we thank you for that, that we can trust you. Praise you, Father, for all your kindness to us.

We ask that as we meet on this last Sunday of the new year, we may especially know your presence and your hand upon us, for Jesus' sake. Amen. Matthew's Gospel in chapter 11, verse 25.

Matthew 11, verse 25. At that time Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.

All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Now in the book of Hebrews and chapter 4. Hebrews 4, verse 4. For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words, and on the seventh day God rested from all his work. And again in the passage above he says, they shall never enter my rest. It still remains that some will enter that rest, and those who formerly had the gospel preached to them did not go in because of their disobedience.

Therefore God again set a certain day, calling it today, when a long time later he spoke through David as was said before. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.

There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience. This is the word of the Lord.

Amen. So remain standing. There's another little song that could well twin with that.

It's in Songs of Fellowship 377, My Peace I Give Unto You. It's a peace that the world cannot give, a peace that the world cannot understand, peace to know, peace to live, my peace, my joy, my love. A peace that the world cannot understand, peace to know, peace to live, my peace, my joy, my love.

Let's sit down and let's turn to 2 Chronicles in chapter 15. I'll read from the twelfth verse down to the fifteenth. It's the last verse from which our motto text this year is plucked.

If you haven't had a copy of our motto card, I believe we have a goodly quantity of them available by the welcome desk, so get one with our compliments and love as you leave the service. Verse twelve of 2 Chronicles 15, They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul. All who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, were to be put to death, whether small or great, man or woman.

They took an oath to the Lord with loud acclamation, with shouting and with trumpets and horns. All Judah rejoiced about the oath because they had sworn it wholeheartedly. They sought God eagerly, and He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side.

There's great wisdom in our motto text. What does the Lord want of me that I might seek Him? What does the Lord promise to me that He will be found of me? What will be the by-product of all that, the blessed spin-off, the Lord will give me rest on every side of my life? We do live in very difficult days. If you're not worried about what's going to happen this next month, then either you live in cloud cuckoo land or you really indicate the fact that you're utterly immature inasmuch as you're recognizing no responsibility to our world and the things that are facing modern men and women as a result of the problems in the Gulf.

How are we going to negotiate what might happen in these coming weeks? Let's just narrow the field a little, although all that will affect each one of us individually in some ways. How in going through to this next year with perhaps the testings and trials that you have had this year are you going to cope? Maybe you've come this morning not expecting a motto, text, message, but I want to set the scene for the new year and I'm anticipating it. And so maybe you're asking, is there a word from the Lord for me that will help me as I look towards this oncoming year? And if that is your question, if it's a question that at least you're agreeing to right now, even if you haven't formulated it when you originally came into the tab, I'm glad you're here and that you're asking this because I believe that I do have a word from the Lord for you.

Is there a rudder by which you can steer your life? Well, here it is. Here is the Word of God, the now Word of God for us today. Let's say it together on three.

One, two, three. They sought God eagerly and He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side. I hope you'll take that motto, text, stick it somewhere where you can see it in the home.

George Verver would suggest your television screen, but wherever you elect at least look at it from time to time and take some stimulus and correction from this verse as you negotiate these oncoming months in this year. Here in my text are several things for us to look very carefully at, and the first thing that I want us to consider as I break it open in a very easy-to-understand fashion this morning is that my text contains an example to be followed, an example to be followed. I'm not dealing with the historicity of the narrative because, well, we've looked into 2 Chronicles for so many occasions on past Sundays in the mornings, and you know something of the narrative and the way that the people of Israel were brought to a political and economic crisis time and time again, and the only resolution of their problem said the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord was a spiritual one.

Well, I want to take this text, and it's not plundering it from its context, and I want to drop it down in the ocean of the New Testament to measure the splash, because you can take the promises of God in the Old Testament and interpret them through the even greater revelation of God in the New Testament, and you can make that Word of the Lord from the Old Testament God's Word to you today. I believe that's a very legitimate way of handling Scripture. So, here I suggest in my text we have an example to be followed.

They sought the Lord. How do you get out of bed in the morning? Well, you say, I cup my legs over and I stand up. Well, I don't quite mean like that.

I don't mean so much physically, I mean psychologically. How do you cope with a day? Do you let the day sort of carry you along? You take it as it comes. In effect, you're like a yacht leaving Brighton Marina, and there's no rudder to your yacht, you just let the wind and the tide take you.

Well, that's not the way to approach life, even that daily grace of life that the Lord grants, not biblically, not in the Old Testament, nor indeed in the New Testament. We have in our verse of Scripture an example to be followed which speaks of determination. I have in my diary a little slot, a little section that says, things to do.

And each day towards the end of the day, I try to highlight several important things that need to be done the following day. It's the only way I can cope with my program, which is quite a full one. Now, it seems to me that this is the sort of example that our text is giving us.

It says that when these people came together in covenant, they determined to follow the Lord. They had a goal to aim for. Paul says in Philippians 3.12, one thing I do.

Campbell Morgan was once asked if that wasn't a restrictive text, and this great man of yesteryear preaching in the heart of London said, well, it depends how big your one thing is. As far as Paul was concerned, there was one thing that fulfilled the whole horizon of his life, this one thing I do, and he wanted to seek after the Lord Christ and to become more and more like Him. Listen to this.

It reads like a riddle in The Times Crossword, but it's not actually, and I devised it myself, so think it through. I'll put it to you on a couple of runs. If God is ultimately where you are going to be, if where you will be is of infinitely longer duration than where you are now, does it not make sense to spend huge chunks of where you are in order to prepare for where you later will be? Hear it again.

If God is ultimately where you are going to be, if where you are now is of infinitely shorter duration, to express it slightly differently than last time, than where you will spend your future, does it not make sense to invest huge chunks of time where you are now to prepare for where you will be later? They saw God because the future belongs to God. If you really believe that, it will be the controlling principle of your life. Now, who is it who seeks the Lord? Who sought God in the day of the historian as he writes up this particular verse that is becoming our motto? Well, it was the ordinary person.

It wasn't just the priest. It wasn't just the prophet. It should embrace both those two categories.

But it was everybody seeking the Lord. I do believe in the communion of the saints. I never apologize for the fact that so often in the tab we say the Apostles' Creed.

It's a summary statement of what we believe. We do believe in the communion of the saints. We do not believe in one-man government in a church.

We believe that God engifts certain people with specific endowments from the Holy Ghost. But our church is only effective as everybody is running with the Spirit of God, with sails set to the wind, and with rudder in His control. Every man, every woman, every deacon, every elder, every pathfinder leader, everyone who comes within the sound of my voice, my tape, are hearing me right now.

We are part of the communion of the saints at Worthing Tab through whom the Lord will achieve His purposes this coming year. Who sought God? Well, the collective people, they sought God, each one of them. And they didn't seek God in the same way as Jonah or the fishermen in Jonah's story.

Do you remember that? Well, I don't know that there were fishermen, but certainly there were seafaring men. I love David Kossoff's rendering of Jonah. He uses a little bit of Jewish imagination.

It's quite funny in the way that he brings it out. And these Gentile men, they realize that somehow they've offended God. And so the leader of the ship, the captain, he says, all right, fellas, get praying.

It doesn't matter who you pray to, but at least pray, because the only way that this ship is ever going to get safely into port is if God intervenes. It was prayer by regimentation. My beloved friends, that's not what I'm calling you to.

Not seeking God by regimentation, but seeking God from a full-blooded conviction that that is the only way for us as a fellowship to go. They sought God. My favorite quote, which I repeat so often from Abraham Lincoln, I am sometimes driven to my knees because I have nowhere else to go.

Ever felt like that this last year? You'll feel like it again this coming year, all of us. Who sought God? They all sought God. How was He sought? Well, the word is eagerly, seriously, as though there was nothing greater for the people to do because the situation was so terrible.

They were desperate. So serious was their concerns to seek God that in the culture of their day they had put to death the persons who would not agree to the covenant that they had made. And that falls hard on the ears of sensitive people in the twentieth century.

Do you know what is the hardest thing to achieve in a local church in Christendom today? Hear me. It's discipline. Discipline.

When I was in Thailand, I entered a very large church in the capital city one Sunday morning, and I'm not passing judgment on what was said and its rightness or wrongness, but I will relate to what happened. In the middle of a service of a couple of thousand people, and it was very spontaneous in its worship patterns, and I very much felt the presence of the Lord, the pastor read out a list of twenty-six names of people. And I gather from the rather poor translation that I was hooked into, those twenty-six people were going to be excommunicated.

And I thought to myself, or have subsequently, how little in the West we are prepared to apply the disciplines of the New Testament. The old days when the covenant was made, if people did not agree to the covenant, then they were put outside the people of God. The apostle Paul talks about Christian people responding to the ethics of the gospel, to the commitments that they make in Christ Jesus.

And he also goes on to say that in the last days, a little different is the context, but nonetheless I repeat it to you, in the last days there will come around about a category of people who are known as covenant breakers. In other words, you can't trust them. And that's one of the difficulties of the twentieth century, being able to trust people at the secular level, at the political level, at the financial level, so we get our stock market scandals and our problems within the echelons even of our police force, because not always can people's words be taken for what they seem to be.

How dreadful is the condition when the Christian's word cannot be taken for what it appeared to be. Jesus asks of you to covenant with Him, to be around His table, to be faithful in prayer, not to forsake the gathering of yourselves together with the saints, part of the covenant. My friend, how do you relate to these things? You see, these people, they meant business with God, they sought God eagerly with all their hearts.

Seek Him, I say, seek Him in the morning. Seek Him in the evening. Seek Him when the sun goes down.

Seek Him for your daughter. Seek Him for your son. Seek Him for your father.

Seek Him for your mother. Seek Him when you're in problem. Seek Him when you're jobless.

Whatever you do, I enjoin you from Scripture, seek the Lord. Seek Him in public. Seek Him in private.

But let it be the perennial theme that keeps coming back, just like the theme of one of Tchaikovsky's symphonies as he comes back to his open melody. May it be in your mind that time and time will ripple to the forefront. I must seek the Lord, for that's the sort of day in which we are in.

Seeking God should be a prime factor. Charles Simeon was a great man in Cambridge. I wish I had his ability as a theologian and as a preacher.

Henry Martin was a man who went to spread the gospel in India, an associate of William Carey. I believe it was in one of the Cambridge colleges that there's a portrait of Martin. Simeon is looking at the portrait, and he says, see that blessed man, what an expression of countenance.

No one looks at me as Martin looks at me. He never takes his eyes off me, and sometimes he always seems to be saying, or rather, and he always seems to be saying, no sometimes there, he always seems to be saying, be serious, be in earnest, don't trifle, don't trifle. They sought God eagerly.

They didn't trifle. Here is an example to follow. Who sought the Lord? All the people.

How did they seek God? They sought Him with enthusiasm. They sought Him because they had nowhere else to go. So, my text indicates this example for us to follow, but it also has within it a testimony to encourage.

Seek the Lord because He will be found of you. The Jerusalem version of the Bible translates this verse, they sought God so earnestly that He let them find Him. They sought God so earnestly that He let them find Him, as though the immensity of the discovery had some relation to the intensity of the search.

Did you hear that? The immensity of the discovery, God, related to the intensity of the search, they seeking for Him. Intensity, immensity, how do those two words balance in your spiritual disposition? Do you ever weigh them up? When will you learn God does not give His best prizes to indifferent seekers? The lover in the song of Solomon, she is deflected or seems to be by some of her colleagues when she spent the night waiting for her lover to come. She goes off into the marketplaces and she says, have you seen Him? And she describes Him.

And they say, well, we haven't seen Him, but there's somebody else. Why will not someone else do? Calm yourself. In our English proverbial expressions, there are many pebbles on the beach, but there's none like Him.

There's only one whom my heart loves and for Him I seek. Mary's there in the garden, and she won't be put off in her search even for the decaying bloody remains of our Lord Jesus. And someone comes up who she mistakenly takes to be the gardener, and this is how she articulates her longing.

Show me the place where you have laid Him, that I might go and bring Him away. You see, you can't deflect Mary. There's this sense of seeking, there is this sense of there is no other option.

I say that God gives His best prizes to those who search with great seriousness. Where two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of our Lord, Isaiah 55, 6, Jeremiah 29, 13. If you seek Me, you will find Me.

If you search for Me with all your hearts, and I will be found of you. The story of Moses I think is relevant. Here he is, Exodus chapter 34.

He's got a new task, at least a new assignment, a development of his original call, and he has to respond to it, and he's afraid. He's had enough trouble with the Israelites as it is, and to get a sort of PS on the original demands of God for him to lead this nation, that was too much, and Moses is not prepared to run with the responsibility anymore. He says in the fifteenth verse of chapter 33, if your presence of Exodus, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.

How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? He asks that he might find God, and in the thirty-fourth chapter, and in the opening verses, you get God pleased because of Moses' reaction to this greater responsibility He is imposing upon His servant. He says, Moses, all right, come early in the morning and come on your own, and I'll meet with you. Be ready in the morning, verse 2, Exodus 34, present yourself to Me there on the mountain.

No one is to come with you or be seen anywhere. Primacy, early in the morning, privacy, come on your own, and God responded to Moses' request as Moses hides himself in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God goes by. God is prepared to have dealings with you and me.

He is prepared to let His person, His being, be known to us in a more wonderful way than we have ever known Him before. A little lady was in the Anglican church, and she had been appointed as a lay reader. A diminutive figure that she was, she stood behind a rather tall lectern, and she spoke out to the congregation, and she said, if you can't hear me, let me know.

And a voice from the back says, well, we can hear you, but where are you? Where are you, Lord? We want to seek for you. Where will you disclose yourself to us during these oncoming months? And the Lord will tell you that there are certain places where He has agreed to go by. Martimeas pitches himself by the main road of Jericho, believing that the Lord Jesus will traverse that road.

Where can you see God? Where can you hear God? I say you can see and hear God in the byways and highways of Scripture. You can see God, you can hear God as you let these pages be part of your reading diet day by day, three chapters a day, keeps the devil away or something like that. I'm not suggesting that you need necessarily a mathematical approach, but I am saying that the majority of people read their Bibles in a mess with no cohesion, with no pattern.

And yet, this is the inscripturated Word of God addressed to you. Give it primacy in your reading matter during this oncoming year. Where does God meet with His children? Where does He reveal Himself in the communion, says our Lord Jesus? Or rather, the men on the Emmaus Road, as they reflect on Jesus drawing alongside them, did not our hearts burn within us as He showed Himself to us by the way? And it's when He broke the bread that they realized who Jesus was.

I do believe that the breaking of bread is more than symbolic. I believe that in the very breaking of bread and in the drinking of wine there is the mediation of the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. How do you seek the Lord? In the lanes of Scripture, in the communion table, around the communion table, in the preaching of the Word of God.

This is the reason why we put so much emphasis on preaching at the tabernacle. Not that the preacher himself is important, but this is the means that God has decreed whereby He will reveal Himself increasingly to people. Says a colleague of mine from Bible college days preaching a remarkable sermon in Washington that I heard some years ago, I am never hungrier and I am never angrier than when I walk out of church and there has been no sense of announcement, no hearing or seeing the Lord.

Why do you need to pray for your preachers? Well, you need to pray for them because it's through the act of preaching that very often God will disclose Himself in a more full, in a more wonderful way, so that you'll know what it is to tremble in His presence, so that sometimes you'll be caught up in elation, so that sometimes in utter wonder you will consider all that God has in store for you and you'll be lost in wonder, love and praise. This is why you should be faithful in the attendance of the exposition of Scripture. Here then I say is not just an example to follow, here is also a testimony to encourage.

But time is not on my side and I must hasten on, because it seems to me that also within my text you can start to round it off by arguing this, that there is also a blessing to anticipate, a blessing to anticipate. I remind you again of the words of my text. What does it say way back there in 2 Chronicles and chapter 15? Well, it says that when they sought God eagerly, He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side.

And if there's one thing that you and I require more than anything else surely during the months that are to be, it is this sense of rest. What is rest? It's not the absence of labor. It's not getting out of work.

It's resting in your work. It's feeling at harmony with God and with your environment, even though the external circumstances may be quite displeasing and unacceptable on the human level. In the Simbarak uprising in Zaire, a man was about to be led out.

At least the following day he would be led out and shot by the rebellious Africans. He was a missionary. The last word that he wrote in the margin of his Bible was the word, peace.

A young lady came to see me this last week and she told me something of the topsy-turviness of her experience during these last few months, and the way that God seems to have used those unpleasant experiences to bring her to a watershed in life where she's now prepared at least to consider full-time Christian service. And she said, you know Tony, the thing that's incredible for me is because it's not natural in my disposition. I'm just at peace.

I'm at peace. They sought God eagerly and He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side. I was going to take you into the book of Hebrews, but my time is going and I want you to latch on to the simplicity of my text without taking you into a further run of some theological teaching that I wanted to share with you from this remarkable epistle to the Hebrews.

So, I won't develop this section any more, but just to say this, that the writer to the Hebrews does speak of a rest that the children of God in the Old Testament never entered into. You could call that the Hebrews problem. Why did they never enter into rest as is indicated in Hebrews 3.11? Well, simply because they did not seek God as they ought to have sought God.

And what was the solution to the Hebrews problem? Well, it's found in 4 and verse 11 of that lovely epistle, labor to enter into rest. Doesn't that sound an extraordinary statement to make? Labor to enter into rest? How do you labor to enter into rest? When you rest, don't you just relax and stop sweating? No, because the rest that God promises us is not the rest of laziness. It's not the rest of inactivity.

It's what I mentioned earlier, the rest in work, not the rest from work. I would not have the worried mind that hurries to and fro. One great Christian statesman in the United Kingdom had as part of the memorial service this epitaph raised to him by his colleagues, he walked through life blithely.

I like that word. It means he wasn't ruffled. He was able to take the sunshine and the darkness, the storm and the calm, and within there was that inner peace that allowed him to show a peaceful and restful exterior.

Isn't this basically what my text is promising for you and for me, my brothers and sisters this year? They sought God eagerly, and He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side. Some of you worry far too much about your kids. I've told you that from the Lord, and I choose that expression quite deliberately.

During this past year, you get so worried about your adult children. Leave those worries now with the Lord. You did what you could.

He wants you to have rest and peace as you move into 1991. Some of you are troubled about advancing years. That's no joke.

It may be a joke to a younger person, but it's not a joke to an older person. Will my eyesight keep up? Will my mind remain clear? Will my bodily functions still allow me to retain my dignity? These are important things for older people, and will be important things for everyone in this congregation at some time in their life. And all I can say to you from the Word of the Lord is this, that He doesn't want you to be troubled about the things that are in store, because the future is His, and He will be there with you.

He will never leave you. He will never forsake you. What He asks of you is this, to seek Him, to follow this example, to seek Him eagerly.

And this is what He promises you, that He will be found by you day by day. And the blessed spinoff in terms of advantage is that He will give you the rest that you need on every side of your life. Take that motto text, and as my American friends say, run with it down these twelve months.

May it become the stimulus of your spiritual activity. May it become the balm that calms all your anxiety. And may there be such a sense of the presence of God that falls on this beloved tab, that I'll never need again to plead with people to come to prayer meetings.

I'll never need again to mention the subject of finance, never need again to try to bully you from the pulpit in terms of commitment to the ongoing work here or at Maybridge, that nor there'll be such an eagerness that our prayers and our workers and our givers will be so plentiful in number, their headache will be to fit everything that everyone wants to do into our timetable and how to allocate the finances that are committed for world mission. On three, let's read this text again. Let's stand and read it together, and we'll do so twice.

One, two, three. They sought God eagerly, and He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side. They sought God eagerly, and He was found by them, so the Lord gave them rest on every side.