Do lost people try to be found?
Let’s review.
What have we discovered so far? As human occupants on this earth we are displaced, hiding, lost and dead. But we have also learned that all is not lost because Jesus came looking for us to save us. So, when we see Christ coming we should be running to him shouting, “Over here, Jesus, over here.” Right? Not exactly. Not how the mind of a fallen human works. We in fact don’t admit we are lost. We pretend we know where we are and where we are going and become angry if you tell us otherwise. So, just as Adam and Eve hid behind the trees when God came calling, we too hide behind the trees when Jesus comes seeking us. After all, we don’t need a map. We aren’t lost. Why come out of the shadows?
Interesting that you brought that up.
Why wouldn’t we come out into the light when Jesus comes calling?
I mean if we were lost in the Amazon, or on the mountains of Colorado, or on the streets of New York, and we heard and saw the leader of our group coming toward us, wouldn’t we be running toward him or her, waving our arms, sending up flares, shouting, building a bonfire on the beach, anything to get their attention so we could be rescued?
- This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure (John 3:19-20 MSG).
We don’t want to be exposed.
Crazy, nuts? Yes, but this is depravity. Our thinking is mortally flawed. We don’t want to be found, we don’t want to be exposed; we will stay hidden in our denial and illusion. We will wish for the best, but we will die in our sins unless we come away from the trees. Cuckoo birds, the whole lot of us. We like what we have better than what God offers. Looney tunes for sure but just as in Eden, we are still seeking the goodness of life apart from God. It’s our sin and we’re sticking to it. We are holding out for “the better place.”
To be found we must know what it means to be lost, and only God can get through our defenses. Knowing how lost we were before Christ can be a benefit to our growth as a Christian, because when Christ finally finds us and saves us, we will know how saved we are. Here is what I mean. Too many times the enemy beats our heads against the wall with guilt, with accusations which penetrate our human ways and reasoning because we don’t understand how far from God we were, how dead we were, how without hope we were, how desperate, how lost we were. The enemy attempts to knock us down by attacking our goodness. And, yes, he hits a bullseye in pointing out our failure and sin. So what! He is shooting the wrong target!
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” – Winston Churchill –
When we fully realize and accept that our relationship with God depends on what Christ has done and not on our goodness, then his flailing away is meaningless. The fiery arrows are quenched by our shields of faith because we now know that we were lost and dead and could not have been any further from God than we were, and we know that God loved us and saved us while we were still his enemies. We have God’s full acceptance; we value the enemy’s opinion no longer. The accusations fall ineffective. The truth that lives in our hearts tells us that Jesus completely took care of our debt to God on the cross.
- As Scripture says, “Not one person has God’s approval. No one understands. No one searches for God. Everyone has turned away. Together they have become rotten to the core. No one does anything good, not even one person” (Romans 3:10-12 GW).
- … he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us (Ephesians 2:5 MSG)!
When we allow the Holy Spirit of God to instruct our minds to the true condition we were in before Jesus Christ did his saving work in our lives, then we are confident in the helmet of salvation against the hateful and lethal blows of the dark forces. There will be no surprises, no skeletons in the closet, no non-disclosures before God. It is all out there before him in all his holiness and fully and completely dealt with through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. All of our dark deeds are dragged before the light of God’s holiness and we have the blessing of “Yes, approved by God by the blood of the Lamb” applied to us as we believe.
(Excerpt from Beyond Pretend: A Sheep’s Guide to the Universe! by David Lee Scott, pp. 34-36. Copyright Notices © 2010 by David Lee Scott. All rights reserved.)
