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BREAKING the SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11

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BREAKING the SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 Good morning Life Fellowship. Last night I led my family in our devotional through Romans Chapter 2. And then, as I prayed for my family, my heart’s prayer last night was that we as a family would be ready to hear whatever it is the Lord wants to do in our lives. I didn’t grow up in the church and so it wasn’t just like this thing I was used to, but I realized as you just kind of grow up in this, and you go to church all the time, you find that you get yourself in a little bit of a rut if you are not careful. And this can happen to me, even as a minister. And so I hope that you will just be thinking this morning about what it is that God has you doing. Are you here just out of religion, out of routine, or are you here because you really want to know God more. You want to know what His word has to say to you. You want to feel closer to Him. Because there are just enough games going on right now, isn’t there? And we don’t want to play Christian games. We really want to know our God, so that we can love Him and engage Him. So I am going to ask you if you will to bow your heads and I want us to be prepared as I pray. Father, we get busy, we get crowded, we lose perspective and I just pray, God, that you would sort us out this morning so that we can experience your glory, your power, your word and your truth in a new and fresh way. Help us to be receptive to what the Holy Spirit wants to do in our lives. I pray for those that don’t know you that they will today, that they feel the wooing of your touch in their innermost being and desire you to be the Saviour of their life. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Well, this week we are going to hear about this a lot. And I am sure you have already seen quite a bit of stuff on John F. Kennedy who was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, fifty years ago. Another person who died on that day, and his death was overlooked because of the significance of JFK’s death, was C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis was the great professor at Oxford and Cambridge. He wrote the ‘Chronicles of Narnia Series, Mere Christianity’ and a plethora of other books. And if you know anything about C.S. Lewis’ life, you know that he was a gifted writer. What makes him extra unique is he was a literary scholar, and he was this great genius in ancient literature and medieval literature. And he could read about all these stories in just amazing ways that brought to bear as he would write as a Christian apologist. But he started off as an Atheist and then he began to believe in God and then he became a Christian. And you have heard me share with you his story of becoming a Christian before. He was on his way to a zoo sitting in a sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. And he said, “When I got in the sidecar of the motorcycle, I was not a Christian. When I showed up at the zoo, I was a Christian.” Quite a conversion story, right? Great things can happen on motorcycles. Page 1 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 And so C.S. Lewis gets saved and his life is awesomely changed. But as a layman in the Anglican Church, C.S. Lewis was such a scholar that he would rise up to be considered the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. And apologetics was basically his hobby as a layman. That is how bright he was. He had a photographic memory. He was a first rate erudite. He was brilliant. He was sharp as a tack. He could read a book and he could remember it. Now, C.S. Lewis wrote a book by the name, ‘Surprised by Joy.’ It was a partial autobiography on his life. And then a few years after the book was published, he would end up marrying a lady by the name of Joy. Now, talk about irony in this, he writes ‘Surprised by Joy’ because he was blown away by the joy that the Christian worldview provided. As a person who wondered how do you get joy in your life, he found that joy truly is found in knowing Jesus Christ. So he writes ‘Surprised by Joy,’ and then he would meet Joy and they would fall in love. And he would go into a marriage with her knowing that she had limited time to live because she was dying of cancer. He married her at an elderly age. They never had children. In fact, he found children a bit annoying. Isn’t that interesting? He writes ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ and kids love him, but he found them to be a bit pesty. So he falls in love with Joy and they have this amazing relationship. She was a very bright lady and they were into idea swapping. And they would talk about grandiose ideas, and she loved the way that C.S. Lewis wrote. She was just intrigued by his writing style. So here they are, they fell in love, and they would listen to music together, read poetry together, read and discuss ideas together, love God together, go to church together, worship together and take walks together. But the hourglass was emptying and Joy would soon pass away. And C.S. Lewis would feel a void that was so gaping that he would wonder if he could ever recover from such a thing. To lose Joy felt like a part of him had been amputated. And as he wrestled in the midst of his despair, he would write in a book that I read this week on his grief. This is what he wrote, “Meanwhile where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that 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. Then after that - silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this Page 2 of 13 pages 11/17/2013 BREAKING THE SILENCE – Habakkuk 2: 1 - 11 mean? Why is He so present, a commander in our time of prosperity, and so very absent of help in times of trouble.” C.S. Lewis, from ‘A Grief Observed.’ What an honest approach. Now I think to balance it out some would say, man, it is in my pain and affliction where I feel closer to God. So I think we can’t impose one situation upon another. But many have known what it is like to enter the dark hour of the night, and feel as though they are pounding on the floors of Heaven when it seems as though God is taking a respite. God, are you taking a siesta? Are you sleeping? Are you checked out? And in another quote from C.S. Lewis’ book, he would write, “Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell,” speaking of his wife, “if it is now doomed to crawl back, to be sucked back into it.” That is writing right there. Wrestling in his pain, writhing in his emptiness, and he wonders, God, where are you? We have all raised our questions and our complaints as we go through difficult times only to be met with silence. You cry out, God, fix my marriage. God, give me employment. God, please help cure this disease of my loved one. God, please help me in my pain. Calm my nerves. And nada, nil, nothing but silence. This is what God can feel like at times. And God doesn’t need to test us in order to see the measure of our faith so that He can discover that. No, it is often in the test that we discover who we really are. In many ways it is the emotional tortures of life that reveal to us whether or not we believe Jesus Christ as the way, the truth and the life. It is not until we have been inflicted. It is not until we have endured the dark night of the soul that we really know if we really believe. It is not that God needs to put us through a trial to discover it; it is we discover the depth of our faith in the midst of our pain. See, it is easy to follow Him when your marriage is rocking, when your finances are soaring, when you’re climbing up the corporate ladder, when you are living healthy and vibrant, and your feelings feel great.
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