Thirsting for God's Word

Thirsting for God’s Word

We are in a series I’ve entitled Thirsting for God and this morning the aspect of our spiritual thirst that I want us to look at is our thirst for God’s word so let’s turn together to the book of Amos chapter 8. It’s a short book and hard to find, so if you go to the middle of the OT, and turn right you’ll come to the major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, then two minor prophets, Hosea and Joel then you’ll come to Amos. 

Amos 8:11-12

God says the day is coming when there will be a famine, not of food and water, but of the word of God. Israel will hunger and thirst for the word of God, but they will not find it. Just some quick background on Amos before we look at this famine.  Amos was a shepherd and fig-tree farmer in Judah when God sent him north to Israel with a strong message of judgment. It was a time when Israel was prospering economically, but straying far from God and from His word. So Amos comes with the message that judgment is coming, and, not surprisingly, Israel doesn’t want to hear this message. They stop their ears and urge Amos to go back to his sheep and figs. So God gives Amos four visions of judgment. The first three are in chapter 7 and we’ll touch on one of them in a few minutes, but the fourth vision is found in the opening verses of chapter 8. Look with me at the unusual dialogue between Amos and God in verses 1-2:

[1] This is what the Lord GOD showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit. [2] And he said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.” (Another translation puts it this way:  “I will not delay their punishment”). (Amos 8:1-2)

We might wonder, what does a basket of fruit have to do with the end coming, but it’s a play on words: the Hebrew word for “fruit” and “end” sound alike. God is saying His patience toward Israel has come to an end and judgment is coming, and one of those judgments is found in verse 11: there will be a famine of God’s word and a drought of God’s word. They will hunger and thirst for the word of the Lord, but it will be nowhere to be found. 

It’s the worst judgment that God could impose on His people: God will be utterly silent. No guidance from God’s word, no comfort, no encouragement, no revelation, no correction. It’s a terrible judgment, but it’s also a judgment that fits the crime: they don’t want to hear God’s word, so God says, OK, the day is coming when you won’t be able to hear My word no matter how hard you try to find it. He’s simply going to give them what they wanted. CS Lewis once wrote, There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done."

There is a sober warning for the church in this passage.

1. Where the church loses its commitment to love and hear the Word of God, the word of God will be increasingly hard to find in the church

This is really just a long way of saying, use it or lose it! If we in the church don’t uphold God’s word by valuing it, reading it, meditating on it, and seeking to heed what it says, it’s like there’s an abundance of water all around but we are refusing to drink, so over time the flow of living water will diminish. When the church doesn’t hunger for the word of God, and insist that pastors preach messages that are based on and faithful to God’s word, over time the word of God will be silenced in many pulpits. We see that happening today as many denominations are rejecting the authority and inerrancy of God’s word. 

We live in a country where the word of God is plentiful. Most homes have at least one Bible, and many have more than one. There is no famine – the table is bountiful for us – but are we sitting at the table and eating? Jesus said, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Do we live as if that were true? Do we go to God’s word as the final authority on what we believe and how we live? Do we feed our souls on the living words of the Lord, and do we embrace His correction and rebuke spoken through His written word? 

One of the ways we can avoid a famine of God’s word is to be committed to a high view of scripture. We want to be committed to love this word, and give heed to this word – even when it says something we don’t want to hear – and treasure this word. In countries where the Bible is outlawed, people will risk their lives just to get one page of God’s word because their thirsty souls know the eternal sustenance that the Bible provides, and yet I can be guilty of neglecting the word in my life because I don’t treasure it.

Let’s be committed to love and heed God’s word in our daily lives and in our church. Amos gives us two insights into how we can do that (I am sure there are more, but I want to highlight these two ways): 

1. We love and heed God’s word by making it the plumb line by which we measure everything else by (7:7-9)

I want you to flip back a chapter to Amos 7:7. Remember I mentioned that in chapters 7-8 God gives four pictures of coming judgment. The third of these four is found in verses 7-9. Let’s read them together.

7 This is what he showed me: behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. 8 And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them; 9 the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

God is promising judgment against the “holy places” that are anything but holy, and in order to mete out that judgment God says He’s going to pull out a measuring tool called a plumb line. The plumb line was a string with a weight on the end that was used by builders to determine whether a wall was straight or not. What God is saying is that He is going to judge the “straightness” of His people, if you will, using a measurement that will give an accurate reading. 

God’s word is the plumb line that can help us keep our lives and our thoughts and our actions straight. When we abandon the objective and true measurement of God’s word to determine what we think, what we believe, how we will live, and how we measure right and wrong, we will find our lives way out of plumb and – to continue the thirst motif – will encounter a barrenness of the soul that, in the end, will leave us desperately thirsty. The reason for this is that we’re hopelessly out of plumb. Sin has tilted and twisted us so that we have no ability to generate a true plumb line from ourselves. Our motives are never completely pure, our perspectives never free from bias, our beliefs never unaffected by our wants. 

Jeans Jacques Rousseau is a vivid example of someone who generated his own plumb line and when 

he came to the end of his life was a desperately thirsty man. Rousseau was a writer and philosopher who lived in the 18^th century and his political philosophy had a great influence on the French Revolution. His classic work, The Social Contract, opens with the line, “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Sounds like a promising startbut Rousseau had a very different kind of freedom in mind than we might envision. He saw society gaining freedom by transferring its complete loyalty to the state. A citizen, he wrote, can become "perfectly independent of all his fellow citizens" through becoming "excessively dependent on the republic (state)." He went so far as to write that the responsibility for educating children should be taken away from parents and given to the state because he believed the state could do a better job of raising kids than the parents could. His writings influenced a lot of people, and helped to fuel a bloody revolution, but where did Rousseau come by these beliefs? Was his plumb line straight and true? Or did his beliefs bend and lean in order to fit his wants? 

Consider this: at the time Rousseau was writing The Social Contract, he was also struggling with a personal dilemma. He had fathered an illegitimate son with a woman called Therese, and he didn’t want this illegitimate child to hurt his social status among the Parisian society, and he didn’t feel he could think or write with the noise of a child in the house. So a few days after the baby was born, a wrapped bundle was left on the steps of the state orphanage. He gave the responsibility of raising his son over to the state. But it didn’t end there. He and Therese had four more children and each time a few days later a wrapped bundle would appear at the state institution. How did the state do at raising these children? Records show that most of the children in the institution died, and the few that survived became beggars.

Rousseau’s beliefs and actions were not plumb. Whether he was consciously aware or not, he bent his beliefs to justify his own heartless abandonment of his five children. He was able to take an unforgivable thing and make it sound noble and right. But as he came to the end of his life he felt a deep guilt and grieved that he had lacked "the simple courage to bring up a family." Like many philosophers who tell us how to live, he died a broken, nearly insane, and desperately miserable man. The terrible thirst of barrenness and regret. 

There’s a lesson in Rousseau’s sad life for all of us: if God’s word isn’t our plumb line, then, like Rousseau, we will inevitably bend what we believe to match what we want to believe! We will redefine right and wrong so that our lives appear in the best possible light. are all do it. When we get angry and lash out at someone, our first impulse will be to bend the plumb line to cast our angry words and actions in a righteous light, or at least a minor sin provoked by the far greater wrong of the other person. If I act selfishly my plumb line will mysteriously shift so that it reads my selfishness as straight and true. The sad reality though is that these self-generated plumb lines, if carried out to the end, lead to the terrible thirst of regret and emptiness and unresolved guilt.

God’s word is the plumb line that is straight and true. We shouldn’t come to God’s word to confirm how we’re living, but to conform how we’re living to His word. We shouldn’t come to God’s word to confirm what we believe, but to conform what we believe to His word. It can be painful at times to have our lives evaluated by His perfect standard but it’s a good pain because first of all, it drives us to Jesus for forgiveness and grace. We recognize that we can’t live up to His perfect measurements and that we need a Savior. Jesus’ life measured perfectly straight and true by God’s perfect measurements, and when we place our faith in Jesus he credits our account with his righteousness, as if we lived lives that were perfectly straight and true. 

But there is also a thirst-quenching joy in going to God’s word as a plumbline so that I can see where my life, my thoughts, my motives, don’t measure true so that I can repent of my crooked ways and ask God for the grace to change. We love and heed God’s word by making it the plumbline by which we measure everything else – including ourselves.

1. We love and heed God’s word by listening to it more than we listen to our culture 

Look with me at Amos 8:12-14

People will wander from sea to sea. They will wander from north to east.

They will look everywhere for a message from the *Lord. But they will not find it.

v13 At that time, the beautiful young men and women will feel weak.

They will need to drink. v14 Those people made promises by the shame of Samaria.

They said, ‘By the god of Dan that lives’, or ‘By the way of Beersheba that lives’.

But those people will fall. They will not get up again.’ Amos 8:12-14

The shame (or sin) of Samaria was the worship of Baal, the god of Dan and the way of Beersheba refers to the two golden calves that King Jeroboam erected so that Israel would make the trek to Jerusalem to worship God in the temple. It was idolatry, but it was idolatry that was fueled by cultural pressure: it was culturally cool to worship these idols. They were being like the nations around them who worshipped idols and false gods. It wasn’t so cool to worship Yahweh, especially not cool to take Him as seriously as Amos did. 

So these beautiful people will look for the word of the Lord everywhere but not be able to find it because they’re so intertwined with an apostate religion and culture that even in their thirst and weakness they won’t turn to God but they instead turn for help to their culture and their false gods. 

There’s a temptation to listen more to our culture and what’s popular than to God’s word. By that I don’t mean that we should be building walls between the church and our culture. Quite the opposite, I believe the Bible teaches us to be aware and involved and engaged with our culture. Jesus wasn’t an isolationist, he was always engaging with the people around him, and he met them where they lived, he didn’t sit in some ivory tower and demand that they come to him. But Jesus was also very counter-cultural in that he confronted the culture of the day with the politically incorrect truth of God’s word. He alienated the movers and shakers of the day, and even though he went to the sinners and outcasts, he went to them with the truth and then they moved towards him. Jesus went to the homes of drunkards and sinners, but he didn’t get drunk and sin with them. He embraced the culture so that he could impact the culture, and that is what God calls the church to do today.

Trying to be relevant or acceptable can tempt us to a Bible lite approach where we water down God’s word and soften what it says in order to attract the crowds. We only preach on the “happy verses”. We shape a message that is culturally acceptable because it doesn’t say anything that offends or challenges the culture. 

Recently I watched an interview between Oprah Winfrey and a well known pastor and author. Now he is admittedly a controversial figure, but he professes to be an orthodox Christian. Time magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Which is why my heart ached as I heard this interview. Here are a few of the questions Oprah asked this pastor: 

1. What’s your definition of God? The song you hear in another room and you think, that really sounds beautiful but I can only hear a little bit. So you start opening doors and rearranging furniture and open windows so the other houses can hear it.
2. What do you think happens when we die? I think there’s a ton of ohhh, cause there’s all these people that have gone before you. Some people say then you’ll meet God, I think, yeah, but I never met my grandpa. So when I think of dying I think, “I’ll get to meet Preston.” 
3. What do you know for sure? That… you can say yes to this moment and experience a joy that can’t be put into words, that is actually possible, I know that for sure.
4. (Finish the sentence) The world needs…all of us to wake up.
5. I believe – that we’re going to be fine. I really do.
6. Heaven is – here and now and then and there and at hand and among us and upon us and available and real.
7. God is – oh love! Stick to that one, God is love!

I felt like Oprah was giving him every opportunity to make a bold statement about Christ and his saving work. What happens after we die? What do you know for sure? The world needs…But his answers were generated from his own imagination (his own plumb line) rather than a biblical answer and seemed tailored not to say anything that could offend anyone. He was culturally very acceptable, but the living waters of the gospel of Christ are not to be found in his answers. There is a famine in his words, a drought. That’s why my heart ached: if he is one of the 100 most influential people in the world, he is missing the opportunity to influence them towards Christ and life. He never mentioned Jesus in the interview.

Listen, I’m not advocating that we become some kind of angry, Bible pounding fundamentalists. Jesus was very attractive to the crowds. Paul writes to Titus that in every way we should make the teaching about God our Savior attractive (Titus 2:10). But we need to be careful to listen to God’s word more than we listen to our culture and we need to be faithful to preach the word of God to our culture in a way that is winsome and attractive, but also true to God’s word and not watered down.

The gospel is relevant to the culture not because it runs comfortably with the culture but because it cuts cross grain with the culture. The gospel is counter-cultural but it is also the power of God for salvation to all who hear and believe.

Application – what do we do with this?

Let’s (re)commit to loving and heeding God’s word by reading, studying, and meditating on God’s word every day (at least very consistently).

Insist on God’s word being preached. Be like the Bereans – study to see if what I say – or any preacher -is so. Not in a judgmental way (that is just pride) but in a careful way. Don’t swallow what someone preaches just because they’re famous or say it well. God’s word is the authority. My thoughts and opinions are worthless unless they are based in this book. 

We should not only allow God’s word to measure us, but welcome God’s word to measure us. The pain of conviction is one of the most redemptive of pains if it drives us to Christ for grace and power to change

Let’s have a higher goal than being accepted by our culture. Let’s make it our goal to affect our culture with the message of the gospel and by the power of God. 

Let’s not only thirst…let’s drink…of the word of God!