When God Seems Far Away

Religion

This sermon was preached at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cherry Log, Georgia on Sunday, June 30, 2013 by Pastor Paul Mims.

Acts 23:1-11
The joy of the Christian faith is the knowledge and experience that God is present with us. This gives us courage to climb the spiritual mountains and to cross the raging rivers that are before us. It is blessed and sweet to the soul to read the scriptures and have them sink deeply into our hearts ablaze with meaning. To pray and sense his holy presence and hear him speak to our minds to guide us keeps our lives on course. To serve him with the anointing of his power and see results is a thrill of accomplishment. This is mountain top living and we want to stay there always.

But there are also the valleys in our lives and as we walk along and look up at the top of the mountain we say in our spirits, “God, you are up there and we are down here and we can’t find you.” It was the Old Testament character, Job, who voiced it for us; “O, that I knew where I might find him.” The Psalmist said in 10:1: “Why, O Lord, do you stand afar off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” In Psalm 6:3, “My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?” In Psalm 77:7-9; “Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has God in anger withheld his compassion?” In Psalm 83:1, “O God, do not keep silent; be not quiet, O God, be not still.” Even Jesus, in Matthew 27:46 asked, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Apostle Paul must have felt like that in our scripture passage today. Chapters 21 and 22 of Acts are the background for his situation in chapter 23.

I. THE RETURN OF PAUL TO JERUSALEM.

After over ten years and three missionary journeys which launched the Gospel of Christ in Mediterranean world and thousands of converts in many churches, he returns to Jerusalem to report to the mother church. His friends had pleaded with him not to return there because of the hostility toward him that was brewing. They told him that his life would be in danger, but he wanted to be there for the Feast of Pentecost. Roman historians tell us that there could be up to two million people in Jerusalem and environs during these great times of National celebration. Hostility had mounted toward him over the years from the Jewish synagogues because they thought that he was undermining their teaching on the Law of Moses and in saying that Jesus was the Messiah. From the cities where he had established churches, the Jews came to Jerusalem for Pentecost.

Dr. Luke says, “When we arrived in Jerusalem, the brothers received us warmly. The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. Paul greeted them and reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. When they heard this, they praised God. Then they said to Paul: ‘You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs. What shall we do? They will certainly hear that you have come, so do what we tell you.’”

II. THE REJECTION OF PAUL BY THE CHURCH, SYNAGOGUE, AND CITY.

Here were the elders of the church in Jerusalem telling Paul to placate those who had accusations against him by showing that he was Jewish by participating with some men who were going through purification rites at the Temple. Paul gave in to their pressure and made one of the greatest mistakes of his ministry. He went to the Temple with them and some men from the Province of Asia saw him and said, “Men of Israel help us! This is the man who teaches all men everywhere against our people and our law and this place. And besides, he has brought Greeks into the temple area and defiled this holy place…The whole city was aroused, the people came running from all directions. Seizing Paul, they dragged him from the temple and immediately the gates were shut. While they were trying to kill him, news reached the commander of the Roman troops that he whole city was in an uproar.”

The political atmosphere of the city was that of rebellion against the oppression of the Roman troops and the religious atmosphere was against Paul because of his teachings about the law and the Messiah. The tinderbox was blazing in a very short time.

Even the Christian Jews who made up the church in Jerusalem were mad with Paul. They had compromised the Gospel and had gone back into the rituals of the Law. They failed to see that God had made a new covenant through the cross and they continued to live under the old covenant of the law. Paul had not rejected the Law. He said that Christ fulfilled the Law and some of the requirements were no longer necessary.

III. THE REMORSE OF PAUL

Paul was saved from death by the Roman Commander. Briefly, he was given opportunity to address the crowd and he affirmed that he was a Jew and gave his testimony of conversion. He told of how God called him to go to the Gentiles. “The crowd listened until he said this. Then they raised their voices and shouted, ‘Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live.” The Roman Commander saved him from a flogging because Paul told him that he was a Roman citizen. He was then protected by the soldiers who kept him in the barracks overnight. The next day he was called before the Sanhedrin and had an encounter with the High Priest. Again the uproar was so violent that he was taken again to the barracks.

Here we come to the main emphasis of the sermon. We can well understand how Paul felt. His Jewish heritage had rejected him. The church had rejected an important emphasis of his ministry. None of his friends were with him.

What was in his mind as he sat as a prisoner that night? In the darkness sleep would not come. He had strong and confusing emotions. He certainly looked upon his return to Jerusalem as a failure. He had been insulted, misunderstood, and wrongly accused. He must have been overwhelmed with a sense of failure. His spirit was dejected, disappointed, and despairing because his future ministry was in peril.
Where was God? Why did he allow this to happen? Why did God not guide Paul around these events? His prayers fell on the floor and did not rise to heaven. God was silent and far away.

This is the similar experience of many Christians who faithfully serve the Lord. C. S. Lewis wrote of his experience in A GRIEF OBSERVED. He had finally in his fifties found the love of his life. Four years after they were married, Joy died of cancer. “Meanwhile, where is God? When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. . . . Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

The Catholic Nun, Mother Teresa, who ministered in the slums of Calcutta, India wrote: “Now Father—since 49 or 50 this terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God—which gives me that pain deep down in my heart.—Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.—When the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God—and then it is that I feel—He does not want me—He is not there.—Heaven—souls—why these are just words—which mean nothing to me.—My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls—to go where?—Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does not want me.—Sometimes—I just hear my own heart cry out—“My God” and nothing else comes.—The torture and pain I can’t explain.”

Historian David Steinmetz describes the terror which Martin Luther experienced at these times as a fear that “God had turned his back on him once and for all,” abandoning him “to suffer the pains of hell.” Feeling “alone in the universe,” Luther “doubted his own faith, his own mission, and the goodness of God—doubts which, because they verged on blasphemy, drove him deeper and deeper” into despair. His prayers met a “wall of indifferent silence.” He experienced heart palpitations, crying spells and profuse sweating. He was convinced that he would die soon and go straight to hell. “For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy of God.’” His faith was as if it had never been. He “despised himself and murmured against God.” Indeed, his friend Philip Melanchthon said that the terrors afflicting Luther became so severe that he almost died. The term “spiritual warfare” seems apt.”

C. S. Lewis, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther were all restored from their sufferings and grew deeper in their relationship to their Lord. When we go through these times it not always due to something that we have done. Like as a father lets go of his child’s hand to teach him to walk, our Heavenly Father let’s go of our hands so that we can learn to walk by faith plus nothing. It is in these times when we have nothing but faith that we grow strong and deep in Christ.

Some Christians quit serving the Lord because they can no longer feel the presence of God in their lives. There are some reasons why this happens. We grieve the Holy Spirit when we refuse to let go of a sin, or we foster a wrong relationship with someone holding a grudge, or we just refuse to grow up spiritually. When we act childishly toward God, he doesn’t play our games and we short circuit our relationship with him. Some of this is brought on by depression and we feel closed off toward God. However, the true believer will believe the un-seeable and the un-feelable. But God always comes to his own and lifts them up.

IV. THE RE-ASSURANCE TO PAUL OF GOD’S PURPOSE FOR HIM.

On the second night when Paul was in such anguish, Luke records: “The following night the Lord stood near Paul and said, ‘Take courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome.” (23:11).

“The Lord stood by him.” We may not hear the voice of someone we know for a while, but when we hear it again we know it. Paul had become familiar with the voice and presence of the Lord Jesus and this caused his soul to leap with joy. Do not despair in your situation for the Lord will come to you.
“Take courage! Be of good cheer!” Paul had experienced the most difficult seasons of the soul before. Now he knew he would be victorious again. Perhaps this is where he learned, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

“You have testified of me in Jerusalem…” With this was the Lord’s understanding of what Paul went through because he could say with Paul, “They rejected me there also.” Our Lord Jesus understands our deepest needs because he lived among us as a human being.

“You will testify of me in Rome.” In this statement the Lord said, “I am not through with you yet. There awaits you a whole new ministry in Rome.” It would be the writing of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, I and II Timothy, Titus, and Philemon and the evangelizing of the guards of the Praetorian guards who were place around him. Most likely, he appeared before Caesar and gave his testimony of the lovely name of his Redeemer.

These words were penned by a forty three old Chicago business man, Horatio Spafford, who suffered great agony of soul:

“When Peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll, Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, ‘It is well, It is well with my soul.’”

“Though Satan should buffet, tho’ trials should come, let this blessed assurance control, That Christ has regarded my helpless estate, And hath shed His own blood for my soul.”

“My sin, O, the bliss of this glorious thought, My sin, not in part but the whole, Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, O my soul!”

PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME!

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