DIG DEEP
Excavating the Depths of God and His Glorious Riches
August 24th, 2022
BEGIN AGAIN
Matthew 6:21, ‘”For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”’ (NIV)
We are learning that there is vast spiritual wealth available to each one of us who call ourselves Christians, who consider ourselves children of God. It is buried just under the surface of the Christian life, waiting to be discovered and drawn out. This month we are headed on a dig, so we can explore, excavate and extract the glorious riches God has for His children.
There is vast wealth inside you that you may not even realize exists, riches that remain untapped. I believe this because, if you are anything like me, you think you are the least likely, the most unlikely person Jesus could possibly ever plan to use for His Kingdom work. For me, for many years, I professed to be a Christian, that I knew Jesus. But, really, in all truth, I just knew of Him. Yes, it was true, I had accepted Him as my personal Savior as a child. I had walked the aisle of angst and shame on numerous occasions, recommitting myself to Jesus, promising it would be different each time around. And every time I messed up again and again; I knew He surely had given up on me. I used to fear that one day God would snatch me just like that because He didn’t want me to cause any more harm by causing people to stumble and practicing a double standard. I was a hypocrite. I can’t tell you how many second and fifth chances He gave me, how many times He forgave me, how many times He allowed me to begin again without throwing His hands in the air and walking away.
The problem was that while I knew of Jesus, I didn’t actually know Jesus. I was a name-dropper when it afforded me to be. I’d slide up on a barstool one night and walk into a church service the next morning and raise my trembling hands to a patient and grace-filled God. He is the One Who overlooked all my broken promises. The me of years ago who crawled from one high to the next, out of one bottle of escape into another bottle of bliss, trying to find hope at the bottom of little baggies of white dust. He heard me while I cried when the highs ended, swearing I’d never do that to myself and Him and my loved ones again, just to find myself there over and over. I was a busted record, offering up a bag of lies with my eyes shuttered and fingers crossed behind my back.
He was so graceful to me, to wait for me. He can be that graceful and patient with you too. See, Jesus came for people just like you and me, the shattered, the messy, the filthy, the unlikely. Back in the day, He didn’t really have a lot of patience and time for the religious scholars of that period. He flipped their tables, scoffed at their ideals and compared all their worldly wealth of knowledge and religion to being bankrupt. Meanwhile, He supped with sinners, opened the eyes of blinded men to be able to see His Father’s glory. He healed the weak and sick-at-heart, took time with those bound by enemy forces, drove out demons, wept over the lost, set captives free and loved on prostitutes and changed everyone’s paradigm and the way the world viewed itself. I think He cared more about those possessed by demons than He did for the men who claimed they knew everything there was to know about God. It—we are the unlikely He came to save, to lavish His attention on, to wait patiently for, while we foolishly try to figure it out on our own.
Because He knows there will come a day when our soul is unveiled, when we at once get it and realize we never got it before. He knows on that day our testimony will encourage others, will reveal Him to others who need Him desperately, will speak far louder than any words ever could about His forgiveness and grace. You can be told repeatedly He loves the unlovely, has extravagant purpose for the unlikely, but it never quite sinks in. You can be told He is not expecting and waiting for you to clean yourself up before you let your heart come home to Him, but how much more impactful and believable is it when you see a wretch like me suddenly shining with an unexplainable holy light from the inside out, praising Jesus for being a part of His rescue mission?
Why? Why does He choose you and me, the unlikely? 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 explains why: ‘Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.’ (NIV)
2 Corinthians 2:10b: ‘The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God had planned all along.’ (MSG)
