Return from the Unreal 1975

And all of us, I believe, have a desire that this should be. And yet we also know that if it's going to be, it has to be real. And one of the problems that we face that underlies our lack of liberty in praising God is that all too often, even the hymns that we sing now, in whatever restrained fashion we sing them, are way above where we really are in our hearts.

And we find ourselves going on and on very often in the motions of faith and devotion to God and obedience to the King, while in here, in our hearts, there's a vacuum. And if we're honest, many of us have to ask, and some of us have been asking, what happened to this? Where is this blessedness I knew when first I saw the Lord? Where is that joy that I once had that somehow it flew out of me? And how come? And very often we want to blame it on God. I just want to read a couple of verses from Jeremiah chapter 3, verses 21 through 23.

A voice on the bare heights is heard, the weeping and pleading of Israel's sons, because they have perverted their way, they have forgotten the Lord their God. Return, O faithless sons, I will heal your faithlessness. Behold, we come to thee, for thou art the Lord our God.

Truly the hills are a delusion, the orgies on the mountains. Truly in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel. Now there may be some excuse for a person who has never tasted the reality of God.

Although even this person, no matter how twisted or perverted our mind may be, in the most warped mind there is still some light. This mind still knows more concerning the living God than it wants to admit. But for the person who somewhere in his or her past has seen, tasted, touched, handled the reality of God, and then finds himself or herself once again surrounded by darkness, who's to blame? Once we've heard the voice of Jesus that literally raised us from the dead, and once we've experienced the relief that comes when the guilt is lifted from our hearts, once we've seen the glory of a living Son of God, from that moment on, we know the unreality of everything that denies God, and we know the deceitfulness of everything that refuses to acknowledge the Lordship of His Son.

Reality is the humiliated, despised, rejected, bruised, bloodied Lamb of God. He is reality. And everything in the universe, seen and unseen, derives its reality from its relationship to Him.

See, but how fragile is our grasp of that? See, and how quickly we lose our vision. And as soon as we lose our vision, we immediately want to turn around and blame God. How come God gave me a vision of His Son and then allowed me to lose it again? And we sit there in our darkness, pretending that we had nothing to do with it.

You know, do you think I like sitting in this darkness? You know, is it my fault? But even as we protest our innocence, we know that at some point, we did have something to do with it. It wasn't as if, you know, we just—the darkness just came and swamped us, or that God reached down and grabbed a vision and took it back to heaven again. But at some point, we turned away from the vision God gave us in order to pursue another vision, a vision which, sooner or later, we will have to admit is a lie.

Moreover, at any point we want to, even while we're pursuing the lie, we can turn around and face reality anytime we want to. When the prodigal son took the wealth the father gave him and went off into a far country and wasted his, you know, all the city he had in loose living, he was pursuing a vision of happiness that he had seen a thousand times on television. Now, this vision eventually turns out to be false, and he knows it, really, all the time.

And even when he ends up feeding the swine, starving to death, you know, he still doesn't want to admit that he's been following a lie. But then finally he comes to himself. And the instant he comes to himself, even though he's still feeding the swine, his life has changed.

See, how many of my father's hired servants have bread enough to spare, and here I perish from hunger. I will arise, and I will go to my father and admit the truth. Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.

Treat me as one of your hired servants. Now, if there is something blocking the clear light of God in your life right now, if there's something robbing you of the assurance of his presence, crippling you so that you cannot walk the walk Jesus calls for, you can be sure that down beneath all this defeat and this weakness, you have begun to dwell in a delusion, and you've done this of your own will. It says in the passage we read that the hills, see, are a delusion, and the hills are the place of idolatry, and idolatry is simply the worship of a God that is unreal, no matter what that God is, called, and there are lots of people who wave their Bibles around and say, praise the Lord, thank you Jesus, who are worshiping a God who is unreal, not the son who died on that cross and rose from the dead, even though they use his name.

For instance, perhaps there's somebody here, you know, who's at this moment, and we know this assault, wrestling with alcohol. You know, and a hundred times you've promised, I'm never going to touch that stuff again. You've gone to meetings, you've read articles, you've been prayed for, you've talked to brothers and sisters, but down in your heart you know that you absolutely have no control over your drinking.

All right, you have no control over your drinking, but of this you do have control. You have control over whether or not your heart is choosing to dwell in the unreal world and its unreal God that alcohol brings you, or whether you're willing to turn away from that and come back down to reality. That you have power to decide.

See, it's up to you whether you're going to continue to live in that far country, or whether you're going to come back to reality, whether you're going to come back to the Father's house. And the minute you decide that you're going to come back to reality, you won't have that problem. Now there are people in this gathering right now who are walking in an almost constant depression.

It doesn't matter whether the sun's shining or whether it's raining. When you look out the window in the morning, all you want to do is crawl back under those covers and stay there forever. You know, and you've read books about how to phase your way out of prison, you know, and you've tried gimmicks to cheer yourself up, and brothers and sisters have laid hands on you and prayed for you and done this and that for you, and yet it seems that you have no power over that cloud that hangs over your life.

But you don't have to look far into your inner life before you will find that somewhere in here you took a turn. You know, you found the real world too painful or too demanding or too frightening, and you began to retreat into the far country of delusion. You know, and that doesn't mean you have to become psychotic necessarily.

See, but what really happens is that, you know, now you begin to dwell in the past. All the time you're looking back and idealizing all those wonderful things you once were able to do, all those marvelous successes that you once performed, or you're living in the future. You're forever making plans.

You're going to do this and you're going to do that, and you never do any of it. You know, you make a few little motions, you're going to jump in the pool, and you never get further than your big toes. You know, or your mind is, you know, you're on that desert island with that handsome man or woman, you know.

Every time you see a Howard Johnson's, you're either up there or you're in the dining room. You know, now, no wonder, see, every morning becomes a shock, because every morning when you wake up, you are reminded of the day you're going to have to wake up to a reality you'll never be able to escape. Now, maybe you can control that depression, or those migraine headaches, headaches, or that sick feeling in your stomach, but you can't control it.

Whether or not you're going to keep wandering out there in the far country of delusion, or whether you're going to come back to the reality that waits for you with open arms right now, who is indeed your refuge and your strength and your very present health and brotherhood. Now, there are others among us who have managed to make it, for the time being at least, in that wonderful world of self-confidence. You know, I used to think I needed God, but now I've been released from that.

I don't need God. I don't need anybody. I am free.

Self-idolatry. When you're so wrapped up with yourself, the whole world is boring. What, can I help it, that I'm so intelligent? Can I help it that I'm a born leader? Or that I'm so beautiful? Or so handsome? Or so artistic? Or musical? Or poetic? Or a mass genius? But you can help it that you have deliberately shut your eyes to the emptiness of your stagnant, self-centered life, and you can help it that you are even now worshipping a god of your own ego, which you very well know in your heart.

And some of us have escaped into the place where the older brother of the prodigal son was. We have a cynical spirit, which is always the other side of a spirit of self-pity. The two always go together.

No. So we're cynical about our younger brother who lives loose out there in that far country, and we're cynical about our father, and we're cynical about all our brothers and sisters in the body, when there's hardly any of them real. They're all hypocrites.

And we're cynical about the world, and we're so sorry for ourselves. I mean it. Here we are, living right under the shadow of our good father, and we never taste his love because we're too cynical about it.

I can't help it, that's the way I am. No, it isn't. That's the way you've made yourself, because you've deliberately taken hold of a false image of God and let go of the true one, to which you can return anytime you desire to open your eyes.

You know, the pitiful thing about all these unreal worlds into which we've run, and we could go on all morning talking about many more, is that these worlds are so obviously unreal, it's a wonder we stay in them for one day. And yet here we are, many of us, struggling along inside them for a lifetime. We forsake the God who is our refuge and strength, our very present help in trouble, right there with us, for a phony refuge.

Sometimes at our house, if we get a little careless and throw the newspaper on the floor, the cat goes dashing under it, you know, and she feels so safe and comfortable there, you can hear her purring, you know, she's so secure, looking out from underneath her secret hiding place, nobody knows where she is, and all the while she's completely unaware that her tail is sticking out for a mile. You know, I don't know if cats can feel silly, but if they can, I'm sure Simon does, when we finally reach down and pick up the newspaper, and there she cocks her head and, how in the world did you ever find me? You know, and this is exactly what God does with us. He lets us hide under the newspaper for a while, and finally he comes down, picks it up, you know, and then we have two choices.

We can either admit that we've been, you know, running around in a world of delusion and turn our hearts back to him, or we can go scampering off and find some other delusion to hide under. There are plenty more around. And what we do makes all the difference in the world.

A voice on the bare heights is heard, the weeping and pleading of Israel's sons, because they have perverted their ways. They have forgotten the Lord their God. Return, O faithless sons.

I will heal your faithlessness. Now, if we want to know the blessedness we once knew, when first we knew the Lord, and if we want to come back to that light, that burning, shining light of our original vision, we have to join the sons of Israel on the bare heights. They've been cleaned right off of trees, so you can't hide under anything.

And we have to admit with them that we have perverted our ways. Nobody did it to us. We did it.

And we have forgotten our God. And we have forsaken the truth we knew. And we have abandoned our first love.

We did it. Nobody did it to us. It's not your wife's fault.

It's not your husband's fault. It's not the hypocrite's in the church. It's not the boss at work.

It's you. And it's me. We have to join the prodigal son and do what he did.

We have to come to ourselves and admit that nobody put us out here in this far country of delusion. We put ourselves here. I will arise, and I will go to my father, and I will admit the truth.

Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.

And what does our father do? What does he say as he waits by the road, looking down the road for his sons and daughters to come home, yearning for the opportunity to kill the fatted calf and put the best robes on them, and shoes on their feet, and rings on their fingers, and crowns on their heads? What does he say? He says, return, oh, faithless sons and daughters. I will heal your faithlessness. I will heal you.

All you have to do is come back. Now, you can't heal yourself, and you can't make yourself clean, nor can you give yourself life. I have to do that, and I've provided for that through the blood of my son and the Holy Spirit that I've poured out.

But you can come back to me. And that you can do, if you will. And he's not only saying this to the hardened sinners.

He's saying this to half-faith believers, to confused sons and daughters, to the people who are afraid to make a commitment, to the people who know very well they're still lying to themselves about something they know they have to do. Who of us here in this room would say that we've really lived in the light of the vision God gave us even this past week? Return, oh, faithless sons and daughters, and I will heal your faithlessness. Behold, we come to thee, for thou art the Lord our God.

Truly, the hills of idolatry are a delusion, and the orgies on the mountains. Truly, in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel. Now, we know the real from the unreal.

We pretend we don't, but we do. We know that the hills of idolatry are a delusion, and we know that the orgies on the mountains never satisfy, and we know where our salvation is, and we know what we have to do, and we have the power to do it. We may not be able to do the thing that has to be done a year from now or six months from now, but that step that is necessary in repentance and faith right now, we have the power to do.

Now, our Lord has warned us that very soon the door will close, and those who, when that door closes, are not living in the light of their vision will be outside. But right now the door is open, and the light still shines, and the Father still waits by the road, and the Son still says, Come. And if we will, we can forsake the delusions into which we have run, and we can come home to the Father's house right now.

Let's pray. Lord, we look to your Holy Spirit to quicken to each of our minds exactly how this applies in his or her life. Point out to us and make so clear that we can't possibly escape those areas where we've really been willfully deceiving ourselves, and bring us back, O God, to the truth.

Deliver us also, Lord God, from the fallacy of seeing everybody else's delusion and explaining everybody else's problem and diagnosing everybody else's disease and never seeing our own. Help us, Lord God, this day to take the step that we need to take to come from darkness to light and from the power of the Father of life back into the truth. We ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen. For all things, that we may be enabled nevertheless to hear your call anew. Enable us, O God, to confess the truth.

Deliver us, Heavenly Father, from being so taken up with what's wrong with everybody else that we miss what you're telling us about us. And bring us, Father, into that liberty that we must have. And grant that this may be, this may mark the day when we leave the road of compromise, of self, of unbelief, and of deceit and follow on those bleeding footsteps of Jesus all the way through the cross to glory.

Move on us, O God. Deal with us as this service progresses. Lead us into your worship and also lead to decision and to whatever needs to be done in each life so that when we leave this place, Heavenly Father, we may leave as your sons and daughters under the anointing of your Spirit afresh.

We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.