Recovery of Wonder
Revelation 2:1-7, 2 Timothy 4:10 Exodus 16:4
A Sermon by Jimmy Allen, preached at the Baptist General Convention of Texas, October 1978
Introduction
There is stark contrast in this day of incipient spiritual awakening between those who are experiencing a sense of wonder and those who have lost it. Across our nation and across our Southern Baptist family there are vast wasteland’s in which the sense of wonder about the workings of God has evaporated. There are also fresh stirrings of the spirit lifting our hearts in celebration and our eyes to new visions of challenge where the sense of awe over God’s workings has been restored. A sense of expectancy vibrates once more in many hearts and many congregations.
In an article in the New York Times last November, religious sociologist Andrew Greely pointed out the persistence of man’s yearnings for wonder. The article was in titled, “When religion cast off wonder Hollywood seizes it”. It’s centered in the space movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and contended that the basic religious question raised by the movie was whether there is wonder in the universe and whether that wonder might even be gracious.
Greeley says: “The churches have given up wonder for such things as instant political relevance and bargain-basement psychology, so science-fiction has moved into the vacuum with the dazzling array of wondrous events and an army of wonder creatures… You can demythologize the wonder out of your sacred books, but you cannot demythologized the hunger for the wonderful out of the human personality.”
The hunger for wonder has been ignored or killed off by many churches. The church at Ephesus is a classic case. The Spirit of God speaks to them and through them to us about the loss of their first love. They had abandoned the wild enthusiasm of their first love. When the gospel got to Ephesus, as recorded in Acts 19, there was a pitch battle between the message of light and the darkness of Diana, goddess of the night.
The Spirit of God was freed to move in great energy and force. The response was awesome. A bonfire of religious talismans and magic books, a riot stirred by Demetrious, a wildfire of response… Exciting days in Ephesus.
But the days have come and gone. The beach head has been established. The volcanic energy has cooled down. Correct behavior, careful doctrines, consistent activity… And boredom has set in at Ephesus. James Angell graphically describes it in his Put Your Arms Around the City by saying, “Boredom clings to the walls of some Sunday School classrooms like mustard gas.“
Demas, on an individual scale, had lost the wonder. We don’t know enough about his biography to know how he was laid hold of by God in the first place. But something stirred him to a vision. He walks beside Paul and Timothy and Luke on the quest. He was moved upon by the Spirit and had high hopes and deep yearnings. He left the security of his home to give himself with a sense of abandon to the task. But now he is gone, “having loved the things of this present world.” We often castigate Demas for materialism, conjecturing that he was greedy, or for hedonism, deciding that he gave his appetites reign over him. However, he may have simply opted for the viewpoint of this present world. It’s easy, you know, when you’re tired, pressed, bored, lonely, a little scared that you’re missing something in life. Many a Demas has found himself depending on himself and losing the awareness of the eternal in his life.
It is intriguing to watch the pendulum swings in the pilgrimages of religious writers in our day. Some have wandered to the edge of agnosticism in their effort to avoid the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the encounter with God. Others have urged silence in our God talk, saying we are too flippant in our conversations about and with the Father. The pendulum swing from the rejection of wonder and ecstasy of response to God has now set in.
John Killinger is one of these. He describes this shift of attitude from rejection of wonder to recovery of wonder in these words:
“Nothing is marvelous to the man who has lost the feeling of dependency, except maybe himself…and that is small marvel….Life dried up as I lived by that philosophy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the world was getting smaller and tighter and more highly organized for me. And then one day I saw that my independence of everything was false, that it didn’t really exist at all. It only seemed to be independence because I had cut the universe down to my size. It was a tragic inversion. I had increased and the world and God had decreased” (in For God’s Sake, Be Human).
I want us today to examine this sense of wonder and dependence and expectancy as reflected in the experience of Ephesus and Demas and Israel and in our own lives. Let us see if our universe has shrunk, if our God is too small. Let us search for ways our shriveled spiritual lives can be touched by the spirit of God to equip us for the challenge of our day.
The Loss of Wonder
The Wonder of the Manna
The manna is the constant provision of the blessings of God. One of the most common tragedies of short-circuited spiritual lives is our failure to be grateful for the miracles God provides in our daily existence. He gives life, sustains life, provides spiritual energy, guides us, and provides for us. Because this wonder is so common, we miss it. The people of Israel knew the joy of being provided for in the giving of the manna, but God says that He gave this constant blessing “that I might prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or not”. There is a testing of God in the affluence which He gives us, in the constant provision for our needs.
Charles Swindall captures the picture in his humorous description of the Israelite cook’s problem in his little book of essays entitled Second Wind. He says,
“Mrs. Moses’ cookbook surely had a special section on ‘A Thousand and One Ways to Fix Manna’. Unless I miss my guess, she had tried them all…. Ninety-nine times! What potatoes are to Idaho, pineapples are to Hawaii, wheat is to Kansas, and crab gumbo is to New Orleans, manna was to the wandering Hebrews for forty weary years. They boiled it, baked it, broiled it, barbecued it, breaded it, and buttered it. They ate it cold, hot, raw, cooked, sliced for sandwiches, bakes in pies, and sprinkled on their cereal. You name it, they tried it. When everyone came into eat, they didn’t ask ‘What’s for supper?’ They asked, ‘How’d you fix it today?’ Mealtime was about as exciting as watching paint dry or listening to the minutes of last year’s meeting. The most familiar sound around the table was not slurping or smacking but gagging. Oh, how they hated it. But it was a test. God custom-designed the diet to be a day-by-day, week-by-week test of their obedience, their patience, and their determination to persevere in spite of the monotony of the manna” (37-38).
We are sometimes bored with the blessings of God. However, we are far more often so inured to His blessings that we take them for granted.
This fact came home keenly to my life when our youngest son was born. He is now a college senior, wrestling with learning New Testament Greek. At his birth, a mistaken laboratory report in the little town’s only medical clinic had left us unprepared for the fact that he would be wrestling for life itself. Precious time elapsed before we found that the yellow jaundiced color of his skin meant that he had an RH factor problem and would have to have his blood exchanged. I still remember giving him to God as I carried him up the stairs of Baylor hospital in Dallas. It was weeks before we knew whether the several blood exchanges were going to work. I spent that time on the children’s ward of that hospital. Across the hall was a little four-year old boy named Johnny. Johnny was in the hospital for his eighth major surgical procedure. He was born without a leg and with all kinds of internal disarrangement. He was to be operated on so he could wear an artificial leg. Bright, uninhibited, and gregarious, Johnny’s world had been the white antiseptic world of hospitals. One day we were talking, and I said, “Johnny, you know I’ve got a little boy who is just the same age as you. He is four hears old. His name is Mike.”
“Does Mike wear cowboy boots?”
“Yes, Mike wears cowboy boots.”
“Does mike wear two cowboy boots?”
“Yes, Johnny, Mike wears two cowboy boots.”
“The doctor says after this operation I can wear two cowboy boots.”
I walked down the hall, fighting back tears. I thanked God that my little boy wore two boots. I had just thought everybody was supposed to wear two shoes. But that is a wonder, a blessing of God, to wear two shoes!
We do take Him for granted. God works a miracle. A little child becomes a believer in Christ. His whole life is affected by it. His eternal destiny is decided by it. And we say, “Oh, well, it’s about time for him to join the church.” A man becomes a baby right before our eyes. God has done a deed. He becomes a new-born soul in Christ. And we say, “I thought Joe would join someday. His wife is so faithful to the church.” We lose the wonder of the manna. The provisions of God are so fantastic. He has blessed s with such unusual resources. His constant blessings are indeed a testing to see if we will talk in His law or not.
The Wonder of the Message
Gospel means Good News, but that news has become old news for us in our gospel-glutted age. We have heard its words so often that we have lost the freshness of its tune. The miracle of what we say when we announce that “God so loved the world” has been lost in the repetition of it. It is a word of hope in a world of despair. It is the word of assurance in a fear-filled world. It is the world of love in a world of hostility. It is the word of life in a a world of death. Yet we act as if it were simply another philosophy among philosophies. Or we act as if we are simply promoting an organization to grow larger than other organizations.
We need to be refreshed in wonder about the message. This is why I anticipate our Wednesday night New Members’ Table in our church family. I eat with those who join our family. I tell them how the message got to me and where I see myself in the journey. They, in turn, tell me how the message got to them and how they have been responding to it. I come away refreshed in spirit no matter how fatigued I have been. The kaleidoscope of patterns by which the Father gets His message through is a source of unending wonder. The spirit of conviction cuts through like an acetylene torch through the metal of resistance. The hound of heaven tracks men down with the Word. The sustaining spirit of God helps people fight against all odds to get to Calvary. Others are thrashing around in agony of wrestling with God. The common denominator is that, wonder of wonders, Jesus loves me!
That is the message! Rejoice in it! Experience it! Share it! Somehow the Ephesians lost it. Demas lost it.
Does it still thrill you?
The Wonder of the Mission
The greatest loss Ephesus knew in losing its first love was the loss of the wonder of its mission. Confusion about our mission is a corrosion which robs us of the energy God is seeking to transmit to us. In this day of complexity and causes, we are sometimes perplexed about direction. In this day of promotion and manipulation, we are jaded by slogans and immune to challenge.
Killinger describes our age and its erosion of feeling by saying (in his book For God’s Sake, Be Human): “We have become so dead to feeling, so inured to wonder. The stimuli of our age have been so gross as almost to kill off the senses, or at least, to dampen our mute them. Television, radio, rock ’n’ roll, jet planes, sonic booms, housing projects, concrete jungles, land erosion, water pollution, traffic congestion, smog, saturation advertising, 30,000 new book titles a year: We are the first generation in the history of mankind to commit suicide by orgy”.
Into that atmosphere, the call of God is back to Caesarea Philippi and the basic command. Jesus launches his church, built upon himself, built out of flawed man who are touched by his spirit and in the process of being transformed. He says to us, “Your mission is in the keys of the kingdom. You are to set men free!”
Our task is to search out people of every culture, clime, language, country, economic status: trapped in their sins, guilt, struggle, and despair, and set them free. Free them from every force that holds them down and keeps them from being what God intends.
Free them from rebellion against God.
Free them from racism’s curse.
Free them from hunger and malnutrition.
Free them from manipulation and materialism.
Free them to be God’s people, doing God’s work, looking toward God’s ultimate triumph.
Ephesus lost the wonder of it. Demas lost the wonder and chunked it all. And what do we do with it?
Our Southern Baptist leaders dared to dream a dream. It was born out of the New Testament. Confront every person in the earth with the Good News of Christ in this century! We call it Bold Mission Thrust. Double our mission personnel. Double our cooperative giving. Enlist 5,000 in the future. Those with a sense of wonder shrug and say, “Well, that sounds good, but it is not realistic. We know it really can’t be done. We need some denominational slogans, so I won’t fight it. I just don’t’ think they can do it.”
Where is the sense of Awe? Where is the sense of wonder and expectancy? Lost in the merciless heat of our skepticism.
The Recovery of Wonder
Since we cannot accomplish the task of Bold Mission Without a sense of expectancy and dependence on the power of God, how can we recover it?
Remember
The Ephesians are told to remember how they heard and what they had experienced. Buried under the scar tissue of a hundred disappointments, deep in our memories are the experiences we have had with God. Students of the subject tell us that our brains will not let us remember pain or joy. We cannot remember emotions. If we could, the cumulative memory would unhinge us. Therefore, we recreate pain or joy by remembering the experience and the factors contained in it.
Remember your plight before you met Jesus. Remember what He had done on the cross of Calvary for your sins. Remember the place and events where you last heard from God.
In the remembrance of that and of Him, the joy of wonder can be rekindled afresh in your spirit. Jacob did it by going back to Bethel. He remembered in his distress a day, a presence of which he had not been aware, and a promise. He journeyed back there to rekindle the wonder and the word of God in his life.
Where is your Bethel? Journey there. Allow the spirit of God to rekindle in your soul what He was doing then and to come with fresh force into your life.
Repent
It is not enough to stimulate those warm feelings of awareness of His presence. The Ephesians were told to repent. Shriveled spirits and spiritual myopia are sinful. They are blockades to the progress of the reign of God in the affairs of men. They discourage those who are searching for God. They shatter the visions of God’s people before they can become reality There is something diabolical about the refusal to be moved by the wonder of being included in God’s plan for sharing himself with all of his creation. To refuse to obey the commands of Christ is sin. One of his commands is to “Lift up your eyes and look on the fields which are white already for harvest ….”
Repent of refusal to see. Malcolm Muggeridge, that controversial philosopher and recent convert, has written some of his observations about life as he celebrated his 75th birthday. He gave 25 lessons he had learned. One of them was, “There is no such thing as blindness. There is only refusal to see.” Spiritual refusal to see on the part of the leaders of God’s people is sin. The day is too critical. The task is too pressing. The need is too overwhelming. The joy is too wonderful. The grace is too amazing. The entrenchments of evil are too challenging. The privilege of partnership with God is too thrilling. For us to be deliberately blind to God’s task is sin. Repent!
Repent of mediocrity in God’s mission. There is no more disturbing word in recent pronouncement from religious leaders than Dr. Elton Trueblood’s statement, “Deliberate mediocrity is sin.” Even those of us with limited ability can avoid being mediocre. God’s spirit has chosen to breathe His power upon us in our weakness. God says, “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The sin lies then in the rejection of wonder. It is deliberately to be mediocre in a day which demands greatness. It is to reject great challenges. It is to ignore the demands of “first love”. It is to be satisfied with the routine and ordinary in a day of unprecedented opportunity. Repent of burying the one talent because it looks so small. Repent of failure to produce the fruit of becoming a withered fig tree. Repent in a day of Bold Missions for refusing to be bold.
Restore
The recovery of wonder comes when we return to the first things as the Ephesians are told to do. We are to restore our priorities.
What are these priorities in the recovery of wonder?
We are called to BE: to be followers of the Way, believers in the Word, disciples of the Teacher. Nothing we ever say or do is as important as what we are. Touched by the eternal. Given a new song. Once lost—now found. We are to be walking demonstrations of His wonder-working power.
We are called to BEHAVE. He lays out the descriptions of the citizens of his kingdom in terms of radically altered attitudes. There are no outsiders anymore. Every person of every skin color or disposition is the object of God’s love and of our attention. Integrity and honesty are not just a policy—it is wrapped up in who we are. The wonder is that God furnishes the power to live out what He has called us to be.
We are called to BELONG. We are now in the fellowship of God’s family. We are to find our way to the local church. We are to belong. We are to enter into the spirit of the mission. First love ignites a sense of concern for brothers and sisters. We pray for each other. God galvanizes the fellowship into one of expectancy and excitement. A sense of wonder creates that elusive thing called “momentum”. Athletic teams in playing at the games of competition in life know that momentum makes the difference. It ignites the interaction which means victory. We are to allow that momentum to be experienced in our lives. We are to belong: to Him, to each other, and to the mission.
Conclusion
The ultimate wonder is that God makes us vital partners in His ultimate victory. Wonder recovered means a sense of instrumentality. We are aware of His hand on our lives. Dying to ourselves we are recreated within, with a sense of instrumentality, used of Him and fulfilled within, we sense His immediacy. He is present and at work. But we also know that He will ultimately triumph and we shall be there.
The most moving of experiences is recounted by Leslie Weatherhead. He tells of going into London to a presentation of Handel’s Messiah with his aged father-in-law. His father-in-law had been a Christian for decades, a follower of Jesus, a preacher of the gospel. As they sat together through that magnificent oratorio, the time came for the “Hallelujah Chorus”. They stood with the others as the words rang out: “And He shall reign forever and ever, king of kings, lord of Lords. Forever. Forever.” With tears streaming, the old man seized his arm and said, “That’s my Jesus they are singing about!”
Yes, that is my Jesus they are singing about. It is a wonder…that he loves me!
Edited by Dwight A. Moody, September 2019
