Experiencing God: Returning To God

"Experiencing God:  Returning To God"
Matthew 15:17-18; 22:37; Proverbs 4:23


I've mentioned before how I had been watching the back episodes of the show, "Bones."  It's about an FBI agent named Booth, who is teamed with a forensic anthropologist, who Booth has nicknamed, "Bones," to solve crimes.

Bones is a pure scientist and takes nothing figuratively.  Thus there are some sometimes amusing miscommunications between the two.  Booth is this tough guy FBI agent, but who's passionate and, though emotional, doesn't like to talk about his emotions.  When he does, he talks about his heart as the seat of his feelings.  Bones constantly reminds him that there are no feelings in the heart.  It is merely a pumping organ that distributes blood around the body.  Without it, we would die.  She doesn't understand when Booth talks about the heart as the center of a person's feelings.

In the Hebrew language, there is barely a word for heart.  Yet the word, "heart" shows up repeatedly in the Old Testament.  If you were to translate the Hebrew word literally, you would come up with the English word, "bowels."  The ancient Hebrew people felt a person's feelings came from the deepest part of them, which, physically speaking, would be your guts, or bowels.

See, again, as I've said before, there is no literal translation of the Bible, because it just wouldn't be understandable to say, "Love the Lord your God with all your bowels..."  Even Bones wouldn't have gotten that one, or approved if she did.  She would give you a lecture about the gastrointestinal tract.

           If you want to do something fun, go to the greeting card section at Dillons, look at each of the "romantic" cards, and replace the word "heart" for "bowels."  Here's one I found:
In my bowels, are the memories we've made, that I know time will never fade. the whispered secrets in the dark, the way your touch can light a spark. In my bowels is all the love I have for you, for making all my dreams come true. I knew right from the start, you would always be... in my bowels. You're in my bowels forever and always.

That's what people who don't have a life get to do for fun.

But that's why I like the Message's way of putting this verse:  "Love the Lord your God with all your passion...".   It is interesting, isn't it, despite Bones' protestations, that humanity has been linking the seat of their emotions to an internal body part.

So, whether it's the heart or your guts or your bowels or even your bones--what ever internal organ you want to use--what we're describing is this intangible thing called passion.

Conventional wisdom favors passion.  “Follow your passion!” commencement speakers have been urging in the last couple of weeks. “Whatever you do, do with all your heart!”  Passion is the key to the good life, these advisors advise.  Pursue passion with a passion, and everything else will follow. As far as popular culture is concerned, there’s no doubt about it; passion is in, it’s hot, passion is what gives life meaning.  Passion, the current literature seems to be saying, is the secret sauce on the hamburger of life.

One area of your life you have to have passion about is God.  In fact, your relationship with The Lord has to be your top, all-consuming passion.  Certainly people may have a few passions.  But if you have prioritized your list of passions and God isn't at the top, you will not attain what you want your passions to get for you--happiness.

We assume that once we find our passions, it isn't the finding that gets us revved up.  It's that once we find our passion we will at last be happy.  That may be partly true, but I need to adjust your thinking a little.  There is a proper order your passions have to take in order for true and authentic happiness to be experienced.  As I said, your relationship with The Lord has to be your topmost passion.  If that is so, all other passions will then fit and find their proper place in your life, as well as bring the fulfillment and happiness you are really looking for.

All of your passions, no matter how important you think they may be, have to be subject to your top passion, which is your relationship with God.  If you don't have your passions thus correctly ordered, what you've done is create idol worship.  Your top passion, whatever it is, has become your idol.  And you probably know how God feels about idol worship.

It isn't that God is trying to eliminate all your other passions.  Or the passion you think you are trying to attain.  God just wants to make sure that your passions are topped by your passion for Him.  Then all the other passions, under God's preeminence, will make sense.  But the more you try and search for that which you are passionate about, without even considering God, and especially keeping God down the list, the more you will miss the secret sauce on your burger of life.

Let's look at the three Scriptures I've chosen this morning and how they relate to what I'm talking about concerning passion for God and our relationship with The Lord.

The first, I've already mentioned.  Matthew 22:37 says, in the Message translation, "Jesus said, 'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.'"  The first thing I'd call your attention to is the little word, "all."  There are two words in Greek for all.  One describes a limited all, such as, "All the people in this room."  The other all is a universal, all-inclusive all, which when you'd use it in the first example would be "All the people in the world--everyone."  The "all" in Jesus' statement is the second use of all.  He means ALL.  Not just a collection of your passion, or a portion of your passion.  All your passion.

One of the daily scriptures I read this week in my morning prayer time read:  "Let all (again this is that same all encompassing all) the details in your lives--words, actions, whatever--be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way" (Colossians 3:17, MSG).

That's the kind of passion God desires from us in our relationship with Him.  ALL!  Everything about who you are, everything about your actions, everything about what you say, coming out of your passion for God.  Brian Schwartz, author of the award-winning "50 Interviews" series once said, "A consuming passion is the last thing you think about before you go to bed at night and the first thing you think about when you wake up."  That's what God wants to be in your life.  That's what God wants your relationship with him to be--an all-consuming passion.

There's something that I need to point out about this ALL, in an all-consuming passion.  If we think about this in terms of math, we may get frustrated.  If we have ALL our passion here, and we subtract ALL our passion and give it to God, then that means there's no passion left over for anything or anyone else.  But God doesn't work according to our mathematics.

It's like saying to one of your children, "I love you with ALL my heart."  Well, does that mean you don't have any love left over for your spouse, or one of your other children?  No, because love, like passion, doesn't work that way.  Love and passion multiply when you give them away, rather than subtract.  If you give ALL your passion to God, God has a way of multiplying that, and transforming that passion, so that you have even more to spend on other things.  And, when you give ALL your passion primarily to God, God then transforms that so that anything else you give your passion to will be under the direction and for the service of God, and brought into the passionate relationship you have with God.

In the second verse from Matthew (15:17-18) Jesus is teaching.  He evidently was asked a question about what makes a person ritually unclean.  And the question had to do with food.  For the faithful Jew, they couldn't eat certain foods.  If they did, they would be considered ritually unclean.  They would have to do certain purification rites, then go to the priest at the temple and be proclaimed ritually clean.  Only then would you be allowed into the Temple to worship.

Jesus turned that around and said it wasn't what goes into a person's mouth (like certain kinds of foods) that makes a person unclean.  It's what comes out of the mouth.  Jesus said, "Don't you know that the food you put into your mouth goes into your stomach and then out of your body?  But the words that come out of your mouth come from your heart.  And they are what make you unfit to worship God." (Matthew 15:17-18)

I think part of what Jesus is saying is that our passions come from our heart (or bowels, or whatever), but that if our hearts aren't right, neither will our passions be right.  Our passions, if they come from an evil or misguided heart, will be similarly tainted.

John Maxwell, motivational speaker and author on leadership, describes passion as "fuel for the will." Passion, says Maxwell, turns "have-to’s into want-to’s."  He takes the position that if you want something badly enough, you will find the willpower to achieve it and you won't stop trying until you do.

I think Maxwell is right, but what he doesn't mention is that if our passion is, indeed, "the fuel for the will," then if our passions are skewed because our heart is skewed, then our will will be fueled by something destructive.  Our hearts have to be right.  And the only way to have our hearts right is to make sure that our whole hearts are God's.  That all of our heart, and thus all of our passions, are bound up in and by our relationship with God.  That way we know that anything that comes out of our heart and passions will fuel our willfulness for God's best.

And the final verse is Proverbs 4:23.  "Keep vigilant watch over your heart;  that's where life starts."  What ever you use to describe the seat of your passion, whether it be the heart, or the mind, or the spirit, or the guts, the thought that ties all that together is that what directs your life is an inside out process.  The most vital part of you is internal, and then all the externals are directed by the vitality of that inner you.

Life.  Vitality.  Passion.  All that begins inside you.  That's why, wherever that place is in you, it has to be God's.  If it's not God's, your life, your vitality, your passion is going to be messed up.  You have to give the heart of you over to God, and your relationship with God.  If you don't do that, you will be filled and directed by a sense of a lack of vitality and passion.  You will be on a constant search for passion, and it will always elude you, as long as you haven't given that over to God.

Life coach Jan Gordon describes passion as "the essence of commitment." She says, "Passion is that which deeply stirs us. It's the fire from within and that which motivates us. When passion is missing, our actions lack meaning and we don't get the results we want ... passion is the seed from which commitment blossoms!"

I would go one step further than what Jan Gordon states here.  The main reason our "passion is missing" and our "actions lack meaning" is because we haven't yet given over that heart of ourselves to our relationship with God.  What Gordon describes is what we gain when our heart is God's and not ours.

Filmmaker George Lucas said, “You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over hurdles, and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don’t have that kind of passion for what it is you’re doing, you’ll stop at the first giant hurdle.”  That "something" isn't your passion.  It's your relationship with God, that then gives you the passion and the strength to bust through the walls and hurdles that are in front of you.

If you've strayed from God and your relationship with God; if your relationship with God is not where it should be; if your heart is still looking for that passion that is an overcoming passion; then I'd like to say, "return to God."  Give God your whole heart, and let God set that fire of passion in your heart from which all life starts.