This message by Glenn Meldrum was originally produced
by In His Presence Ministries for the Radical
Truth Podcast.
You can listen and subscribe to the Radical
Truth Podcast by going to www.ihpministry.com
You are welcome to reproduce this message for
free distribution.
This message is part of a series entitled,
The Radical Jesus.
In last week's podcast, we began a new
section on radical pursuit that is part of
our continuing study on the radical Jesus.
In that lesson, we concentrated on God's radical
pursuit of mankind, which is a phenomenal truth
about the wonder of God's love that is
worth the investment of our time and energy
to learn about and apply to our lives.
In this week, we will look at man's
response to God's pursuit of us.
As we saw in last week's lesson, Christ's
pursuit of mankind is thoroughly radical.
His pursuit of us is far more than
the historical event of His crucifixion because it
reaches into the distant past before creation existed
and time began.
For God to create the human race when
He knew that they would willfully rebel against
Him is reasoning beyond what our mental abilities
can process.
To create people in His own image as
the Genesis creation account records means that the
Lord had to give mankind a genuine free
will.
This is important because authentic love cannot exist
without free will.
It will not be long before mankind invents
the technology that can make computers and robots
communicate in ways that make them appear to
have legitimate emotions.
The insurmountable problem this technology faces is that
without genuine free will, there cannot be legitimate
emotion, and this includes love.
Scientists may develop elaborate computer programs that work
through powerful computers that respond to the emotion
of people with what appears to be legitimate
emotion.
But we must not forget that those responses
can only be the result of programmed computers
and robotics working together, not of that which
comes out of a genuine life.
Man is not a mere sophisticated organic machine.
In Genesis 2-7 we are told the
Lord God formed the man from the dust
of the ground and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life and the man became
a living being.
To be a living being, or as the
King James translation translates the word, a living
soul, we must have an authentic free will.
God created man and woman in such a
way that they could love each other and
this cannot happen without the choice of a
will.
Since the Lord created us with the capacity
to love each other, there is then the
ability that we can know the love of
God and love Him in return.
This is God's design for humanity, and though
sin marred and perverted our free will, it
did not eradicate it as some have claimed.
If sin destroyed our free will, then we
would not have the ability to love each
other to love God.
The Lord said in Genesis 1-26, Let
us make man in our image and in
our likeness, and let them rule over the
fish of the sea and the birds of
the air and over the livestock and all
the earth and over all the creatures that
move along the ground.
God is the only truly free being that
exists, which means that He does not need
anything outside of Himself to exist, to be
who He is or to be fulfilled, for
He is perfect and complete in and of
Himself.
For God to make mankind in His image
tells us that He gave us authentic personhood,
similar in nature to His own, but our
personhood is finite, while His is infinite.
For us to have genuine personhood, we must
have an actual free will.
Though we have free will, ours is not
like God's since we are not free as
God is free.
Our freedom is limited, His is infinite.
We need God, but He does not need
us.
We cannot live without God.
He can live without mankind and still remain
fully who He is.
We need to be loved because we are
created to love.
God does not need our love, nor is
He benefited by our love, yet we are
totally benefited by His love for us.
For God to be free, He must be
able to freely love with a disinterested love.
For mankind to love God and to know
His love, they must have a free will,
or there can be no reciprocal meaningful relationship
between God and man.
Now, I have said all this to lead
us to the idea that the Lord, who
is all-knowing, knew that when He created
mankind in His own image, they would have
a free will with the ability to love
Him or not to love Him.
The historical account of Adam and Eve's rebellion
teaches us that when their free will was
placed in certain conditions, they would rebel against
God.
And we know that this is exactly what
happened.
Love must be willed or it cannot be
loved, which leads us to the conclusion that
for Adam and Eve to love, they had
to be given the opportunity to make a
choice.
So the Lord created knowing that we would
rebel and that the only way there could
be reconciliation was for Him to become human
and take upon Himself the sins of the
world as the Lamb of God.
Can you get a glimpse of the pursuit
of God that began before creation even came
into existence?
I think one of the reasons Christians do
not passionately follow Jesus is that they do
not have eyes to see the phenomenal love
that He has for us that is proved
through His radical pursuit of us.
Sure, there are tons of sermons preached every
Sunday on God's love, but much of it
is watered-down, humanistic, man-centered love that
does not represent the magnificent love of God.
Though we are made in God's image, we
must lay hold of the fact that He
is not made in our image.
To make God in our image is idolatry,
for it creates a God out of our
own imagination and then bows down and worships
it.
The difficulty we have in understanding God's love
is that His love is by nature infinite
while ours is finite.
There are depths to God's love that is
beyond human reasoning, and at times when we
get a peek at it, it can seem
as if He was not very loving at
times.
Then we have the added problem that our
sinful nature has perverted our love into a
selfish, taking, grasping thing, which is all we
have as a point of reference in this
fallen world.
Our sin nature causes us to either misunderstand
His disinterested love or to be oblivious to
His selfless nature of divine love.
If we could see a little more clearly
God's radical pursuit of mankind, then we would
understand that man's pursuit of God should display
that same passion.
It, too, should be radical.
But how often is this the case with
most professing Christians?
The norm for the American church is so
low that it does not resemble Jesus, who
is the standard of the New Testament faith,
nor does it resemble those early saints that
walked with Jesus.
The Lord not only deserves our passionate pursuit
because of who He is, but because He
deserves the reward of His suffering.
Jesus did not die on the cross so
He could give us a sickly, anemic response
to His work on the cross.
He fully gave Himself for us so that
we could fully give ourselves to Him.
Most people respond to His loving overtures with
indifference and at times even utter rejection.
The Lord spoke through the prophet Jeremiah in
chapter 7.
I spoke to you again and again, but
you did not listen.
I called you, but you did not answer.
The context of this verse is that the
Lord is calling those that were supposed to
be the people of God, but they had
given themselves over to their sin and idolatry
and so refused to respond to God's call.
The Lord then declared in verse 20, We
know that history proved this prophecy to be
true.
Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians, who also
destroyed the temple at the same time.
In chapter 1 of Malachi, we find God
confronting Israel over the compromise that had crept
back into the people after they returned from
their Babylonian captivity and the rebuilding of the
temple.
How quickly we can turn a living faith
into a dead religion.
The people accused the Lord that He did
not love them when the fact was that
the people did not reverence the Lord.
In Malachi 1.14, we hear the Lord
declare, For I am a great king, says
the Lord Almighty, and my name is to
be feared among the nations.
We are obligated to God to give Him
the absolute best of our life, time, and
wealth.
The Lord is a great king that deserves
to be feared and loved.
It is very important that when we look
at the subject of the fear of God,
we understand that love is an integral part
of the equation.
Whenever people love God correctly, they will rightly
fear Him, and whenever they rightly fear Him,
they will genuinely love Him.
He is a great king and deserves our
wholehearted devotion, for no one has loved us
as He has, and no one has proved
His love for us like the radical Jesus.
In spite of man's willful ignorance of God's
love for us and of all the ridiculous
lies we hurl at Him, He presses on
with deliberate, persistent desire for us and for
our salvation.
How long would our love endure if we
were rejected as mankind has rejected the Lord?
The frailty and limitedness of our love would
soon give way under the first wave of
rejection.
Our shallow love would quickly turn to hatred
after the first time we were aggressively attacked
by people.
Would you die for the salvation of those
that hated you, for those that rejected you?
In John 1, verse 11, we are told
that Jesus came to His own, and His
own did not receive Him.
And we are among that number, though that
verse is directly speaking of Israel.
If you were all-powerful, would you destroy
those people if they hated and attacked you
like they did Jesus?
Or maybe we would have destroyed them way
before such events got that far, like right
after Adam and Eve sinned.
God is good to us, and as revealed
in Psalms 103.10, He does not treat
us as our sins deserve or repay us
according to our inequities.
And still we are prone to make our
excuses for why we do not passionately pursue
Him like He pursued us.
We think ourselves noble if we are more
passionate about God than most professing Christians, yet
we fail to seek Him as He sought
us.
He deserves the reward of His suffering, which
includes our passionate pursuit of Him.
If we fail to comprehend God's radical pursuit
of us, how will we be able to
grasp the urgency of the matter?
The Lord loves mankind with a radical love
beyond human comprehension, but there is an urgency
to His radical pursuit of us.
He pursues people with urgency because He knows
our lives on earth are as a vapor.
We are here today and gone tomorrow.
There is a narrow space of time in
which we can be reached, and that space
of time is far shorter than the span
of our lives.
For each person, the space of time in
which he can reach us is as varied
as the number of people.
The Lord must work within the few years
we live, and then there are only so
many minutes, hours, days, months, or years that
we will be open to His call.
Though He is laboring behind the scenes to
save us, He is ever moving us to
the point of decision.
He does not want us to be as
stillborn babies that never come to life, nor
as preemies or sickly babies that die before
their time.
There is an urgency in God's call such
as can be found in Hebrews 3, verses
7-12.
So the Holy Spirit says, Today, if you
hear His voice, do not harden your heart
as you did in the rebellion during the
time of testing in the desert, where your
fathers tested and tried Me and for forty
years saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that
generation and said, Their hearts are always going
astray and they have not known My ways.
So I declared on oath in My anger,
They shall never enter My rest.
See to it, brothers, that none of you
has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away
from the living God.
Three times in Hebrews, Paul quotes Psalms 95
-7, Today, if you hear His voice, do
not harden your hearts.
The Lord knows that we are in desperate
need of Him.
Actually, there is nothing we need more than
Christ.
Israel fought against God for forty years in
the wilderness.
They had hard, unrepentant hearts, so they never
entered God's rest, which is symbolized by the
promised land.
They died in the wilderness outside of God's
promises, which strongly implies they died in their
sin and were separated from God forever.
With relentless passion and limitless energy, the Lord
is driving people to the foot of the
cross so they might be saved.
But He will not force His salvation on
anyone since He gave us a genuine free
will.
He uses every means at His disposal in
His loving attempt to win man's devotion so
He can bring them to His eternal home.
He draws some people through the ache of
loneliness.
That ache burns in our hearts so that
we might look for a better and lasting
love that can satisfy our yearning to be
faithfully loved.
He uses physical suffering that can wrack the
bodies of the young and old alike to
show them that they are frail and in
need of a great physician to heal their
sin-sick souls.
He uses the depression and feelings of hopelessness
that can immobilize people to drive them to
the only place where there is true hope.
He also uses the painful consequences that our
sin produces to open our blind eyes that
only He can satisfy the deepening longings of
the soul.
And He even uses the hordes of hell
to drive people into His loving embrace after
they have suffered the horrors of being a
plaything of hell.
The Lord fully understands the urgency of the
time because He knows when He will return
and bring to an end the insanity of
sin that has taken control of the human
race.
The Lord spoke through Paul in 2 Thessalonians
1, verses 6-10.
God is just.
He will pay back trouble for those who
troubled you and give relief to you who
are troubled and to us as well.
This will happen when the Lord Jesus is
revealed from heaven in blazing fire with His
powerful angels.
He will punish those who do not know
God and do not obey the gospel of
our Lord Jesus.
They will be punished with everlasting destruction and
shut out from the presence of the Lord
and from the majesty of His power on
the day He comes to be glorified in
His holy people and to be marveled at
among all those who have believed.
The only reason the Lord delays His second
coming is that He is compassionate.
2 Peter 3.9 informs us that the
Lord is not slow in keeping His promise
as some understand slowness.
He is patient with you, not wanting anyone
to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
Though God patiently delays His second coming out
of compassion, we must not misunderstand that delay
as an expression that He is not greatly
bothered by the sins of mankind.
He delays so that He can save all
that want His salvation.
Yet there is a time that is fast
approaching when He will say, Enough!
Until that time, we can hold to the
heart of God as revealed in Ezekiel 18.
Do I take pleasure in the death of
the wicked, declares the sovereign Lord?
Rather, am I not pleased when they turn
from their wicked ways and live?
I will judge you, each one according to
his ways, declares the sovereign Lord.
Repent.
Turn away from all your offenses, then sin
will not be your downfall.
Rid yourself of all the offenses you have
committed and get a new heart and a
new spirit.
Why will you die, O house of Israel?
For I take no pleasure in the death
of anyone, declares the sovereign Lord.
Repent and live.
Can you not hear the urgency in God's
appeal in these verses?
He knows that salvation is a gift offered
to people only in this life.
In the next life, it is too late
to repent, too late to be saved, and
too late to fall in love with God.
When we pass through the veil of this
world into the next, the condition of our
character in this life will be fixed forever
in the next.
People that die without God in this life
will get their wish for eternity.
They will not have God forever and ever.
Wherever Jesus is, there will be heaven, and
wherever He is not, there will be hell,
since hell is the tangible absence of God.
And since God is good, kind, loving, and
beautiful, those that will spend an eternity with
Him will only experience the wonder of who
He is.
Only what is good, kind, loving, and beautiful
will be in the new heaven and new
earth.
But hell is the total absence of everything
that is good, kind, loving, and beautiful.
In this fallen world, we can see to
a limited degree what is good, kind, loving,
and beautiful, but in hell, they will not
exist in the least.
Think about that for a moment, and let
that sink in.
Think of the horror of what it is
to never see beauty again, because beauty comes
only through God and is defined by God.
Or to never know love again, because God
is love, and where God is not, there
can be no love.
So this is the total absence of love.
In hell, there is no kindness.
I do not think we can fathom a
world where there is no kindness at all.
And God is the only good that exists.
There is no evil in Him.
So goodness will fill what He fills, but
where God is not tangibly present, there can
be no expression of good.
Hell is an existence without any expression of
goodness, kindness, love, or beauty.
And I do not think that we can
comprehend such an existence, nor grasp its horrors.
So is it any wonder that the Lord
is filled with an urgency to save all
that will embrace His salvation, because He fully
knows the joys of heaven and the terrors
of hell?
Oh, how foolish it is when people fight
against the only One that can do them
infinite good.
How crazy it is to run away from
the hound of heaven that is in hot
pursuit of us to do us good and
not evil.
To have once known the Lord and then
to turn our back on God is the
greatest act of insanity that could ever be
committed by a human being.
To run from the One that offers us
life so that we can chase after the
very things that will produce our ruin, misery,
despair, and damnation is the most irrational, idiotic
thing that can be done, yet people do
it all the time.
Should not the lives of those who call
themselves Christian be the complete opposite of those
that are rushing to hell?
Should not the lives of those that want
to flee from the wrath to come so
that they can know the glories of heaven
live like they want to go to heaven?
Yet the life of the typical, self-proclaimed
Christian today is full of the very things
that will be the downfall of those that
blatantly do not know Christ.
Church folk can watch the same filth that
is on TV and in the movies that
the mass of people rushing to hell watch,
but they think that for some illogical and
unscriptural reason that they are safe from judgment.
They can be immersed in the same porn,
greed, sexual immorality that will damn multitudes to
hell, but for some very foolish reasons think
they are exempt from the spiritual law that
they will reap what they sow.
You can have people engrossed in the same
devilish party spirit that grips the world, smoking
dope, sucking down beer, sipping wine and hard
liquor, and yet think that their actions are
not damnable.
In the end, it all comes down to
this.
If we had a passion for God, we
would not allow any form of compromise in
our lives.
The pursuit of holiness is all about the
pursuit of God.
Legalism is never the pursuit of God or
the pursuit of holiness, because legalism is all
about trying to be right with God through
our own moral goodness, which is not obtainable
for fallen man.
It is one of the weakest and most
despicable lies when people justify their compromise by
claiming that they are not legalistic, that they
are free in Jesus.
To use Jesus as an excuse to practice
sin is a very evil thing to do.
Paul warned us of this in Romans 6,
verses 1 and 2.
What shall we say then?
Shall we go on sitting so that grace
may increase?
By no means.
We died to sin.
How can we live in it any longer?
Grace gives us victory over sin.
It does not allow us to practice it.
Whenever our love for Jesus grows, so will
our love for holiness.
Do you want to overcome a sin in
your life?
It begins with a growing passion for Christ,
to love Him enough that we do not
want the least expression of sin or compromise
in our lives.
Peter warned us in 2 Peter 2.19
of those that teach we have a right
to practice sin.
While they promise them liberty, they themselves are
slaves of corruption.
For by whom a person is overcome, by
him also he is brought into bondage.
You will not find a person that is
in passionate pursuit of God to be an
alcoholic because they want to be so close
to Jesus that they will not let alcohol
touch their lips.
The more God fills our lives, the less
room there will be for any expression of
sin, compromise of the world.
Empty lives have little interest in God.
They are too full of the world to
be holy, too busy to pray, too busy
to study God's Word.
Much of the church has become as self
-absorbed and pleasure-driven as any professing atheist.
Selfish people who claim to love God while
they are sleeping with the devil are no
closer to heaven than those in deliberate defiance
of God.
Prostitutes and drug addicts are closer to entering
the kingdom of God than the self-righteous
that justify the practice of sin by claiming
that they are saved by grace and are
walking in the liberty of the Spirit.
There is a very important question that would
be good for us to answer with all
honesty.
Do we really love Jesus?
And I think that there is another equally
important question that logically follows the first.
What proof do we have to offer that
we love Jesus?
If we truly love Jesus, then there must
be substantial proof of it in our lives.
Love is proved by our actions far more
than by mere words.
The flip side is also true.
When we do not love God, then there
is ample proof for that as well.
How can people say they love Jesus and
not respond to His love with actions that
prove that love?
Is it not reasonable to expect that genuine
professions of devotion should have substance behind them?
But what do empty promises and professions of
love without substance really mean?
Let me present an analogy to illustrate my
point.
Think of a young man who passionately longs
to marry the woman of his dreams.
She has accepted his offer of marriage and
openly wears the engagement ring that signifies their
commitment to each other.
How would that young man feel if he
found out that his bride-to-be is
actually in love with his personal antagonist and
archenemy?
Would this not be an offense of horrendous
magnitude?
Would this not break his loving heart and
justify his righteous anger?
But this is exactly what a large portion
of professing believers do all the time to
Jesus.
While claiming to love Jesus, they flirt with
the world that is openly hostile to Him
and hang out with the devil that stands
in defiance of Christ's rule.
They want all the benefits associated with a
relationship with Jesus yet without any of its
obligations.
When you look at the lives of people
that live in compromise, you will see the
undeniable fact that they have given their hearts
to the very things that make up the
kingdom of this world.
At best, their love for Him is half
-hearted.
At worst, it is totally counterfeit.
It does not take a Bible scholar to
know that there is something terribly wrong with
mingling the world with the Christian faith.
Jesus did not radically pursue people so that
they could become spiritual whores, prostituting themselves from
the world Jesus came to deliver us from.
We see this thought many times within the
prophetic books of the Bible and it also
comes out within the New Testament.
Just look at why the Lord judged Jude
in Jerusalem through Nebuchadnezzar and you will see
an example of His reaction to the spiritual
adultery and prostitution of Israel.
The Lord declared through Isaiah in chapter 1,
verse 12, See how the faithful city has
become a harlot?
He later made a similar statement through the
prophet Hosea in the fifth chapter.
Their deeds do not permit them to return
to their God.
A spirit of prostitution is in their heart.
They do not acknowledge the Lord.
I believe that a spirit of prostitution has
a strong hold on much of the American
church.
Israel's sin was far deeper than just the
accumulation of their outward sins.
It was what they had become, spiritual prostitutes.
Our outward life is only a reflection of
the condition of our inward life.
A spirit of prostitution had filled their hearts
so that it defined their actions.
Their love of self and sin kept them
from returning to the Lord.
The idols they served and the pagan practices
they performed were only the byproduct of the
spiritually corrupt condition of their heart.
What they had become on the inside also
revealed what they believed about the Lord.
It is easy to look at the events
of ancient Israel and think they are different
than us, but that is not a very
wise approach to the study of Scripture.
These accounts were given to us for our
admonishment so that we would not be taken
up with the same sins that they were.
Much of the American church is in a
very similar position with the Lord, as was
ancient Israel.
We can claim to love Jesus while we
prostitute ourselves with the world.
Half-hearted devotion always keeps people striving to
live between two worlds.
And the deceptive nature of sin can cause
us to believe the terrible lie that we
are right with God even when we are
in the practice of sin.
Time and again, the great compassion of the
Lord is revealed through the Spirit's convicting power.
Only deep, heartfelt repentance can lead us to
the only source of power that can transform
our hearts and lives.
If we want God's transforming power at work
in our lives, then we must fully embrace
His gift of repentance.
The urgency of God's pursuit of us for
our eternal good can be seen in His
calling us to repentance.
Only an aggressive commitment to love God and
to break off every expression of sin and
every association with the enemy will allow people
to possess the real life that can only
be found in Christ.
Let me be honest with you with this
closing statement.
I fear that many professing Christians are quickly
heading into eternal judgment because they have not
understood the urgency of the situation, the dangerous
condition that they are in, or the power
of sin to bind and enslave them.
God is pursuing us for eternal well-being.
Do not fight against His astounding love and
compassion.