Many moons ago, over Christmas break, I went skiing with a few high school friends. We all piled into one of our friend’s mini-vans and began driving toward Colorado. As we passed Wichita, heading north on I-35, something didn’t seem right. Though I had ridden to Colorado a handful of times, I had never been the driver, yet as we went north out of Wichita, the road did not look familiar.
Back in 1992, we did not have electronic navigation or smart phones. If you needed directions, you had to count on Rand McNally and their massive book of maps. I asked our navigator to check the atlas and let me know if I was on the correct road.
“I-35?” I asked.
“Yes, I-35,” was the response.
So we kept going on that Interstate … headed toward Kansas City! Now I was not a geography major, but I knew enough to understand that Kansas City was to the east, and I knew we needed (ultimately) to go west. We pulled over and looked at the map again. A simple mistake had been made … on the map, it said 135 … but our navigator mistook the “1” for an “I.” Could have happened to any of us. Interpreting the map correctly, we were able to turn around, and get back on the right track.
When we were in the car that day, all of us knew where we wanted to go. We had a common and determined destination: Copper Mountain. We also had a guide to help us get there: an up to date copy of a Rand McNally atlas. But simply having a desire and owning an atlas were not enough to get us there. We had to properly INTERPRET the atlas, then obey its directions. Only then would we arrive at our destination.
I was thinking about this today as I prepared for Sunday’s sermon. We are currently in a series called “roundtrip: coming back home to worship.” In this series, we are scanning the books of Ezra, Haggai, and Nehemiah to see if it is possible for someone who has walked away from God to come back home to Him. We saw in week 1, that because we have a God who loves us and desires fellowship with us, it is possible to come home to Him! But what does it look like for the one who is coming home? How can we tell if our hearts are truly coming back to Him? Well, last week, we saw that part of what it looks like is that the trajectory of the returning prodigal prioritizes the worship of God. But is that all?
In this week’s message (part 3 of our series), we will look at Ezra 7:1-10 and Nehemiah 8:1-8 to see that coming back home to Him also involves us coming back TO and UNDER His Word. It is not enough to simply say that we desire to come back to God or that we own a Bible – just as it is not enough to WANT to get to Copper Mountain and HAVE an atlas in the van. We need to understand what the Scripture actually says, and then obey it!
Certainly, we do not and cannot earn our way home with our obedience (it is by grace that we have been saved), but the heart of the Christian longs to know God’s Word, and seeks to follow it in faith and action. In this way, we return NOT just to WORSHIP, but also to the WORD. One of the tell tale signs of Christians is their growing understanding of and obedience to God’s Word.
Join us Sunday in our 8:30, 9:45, and 11:00 services at Wildwood as we explore this more from these great Old Testament texts, supported by New Testament themes. See you Sunday … and bring friends!!