Focal Point

Mike Fabarez: There's a lot of things that jockey for attention in our lives. There's a lot of things calling for us to invest in, and I know we've got to live in the world and we've got to pay our taxes and we've got to provide for our families and all of that. But the bottom line is God says your supreme interest in life ought to be getting to know the God who created you. The Psalmist said if you would just taste and see that the Lord is good, you'll get a taste for this and you'll want this and this will be the passion of your life.

Dave Drewie: Our priorities can often get out of whack. In the busyness of life, it's easy to turn minor tasks into major pursuits. That's why we need to follow the examples of people who have a good handle on what's really important. Today on Focal Point, Pastor Mike Fabarez points us toward a biblical role model for needed insight.

The Bible says Enoch truly understood what mattered and spent his life in pursuit of God as priority number one. Pastor Mike calls today's message, "Ardently Seeking a Deeper Relationship with God."

Mike Fabarez: I like to eat. Is that obvious? You like it too, though, don't you? A good burrito, some guacamole, maybe some tamales. Yeah, it's good, isn't it? There's nothing really for our bodies better than fueling up, especially when you're hungry on the thing that God designed our bodies to consume. As Paul said, the stomach for food, the food for the stomach. That doesn't take a Bible verse to figure out. We figure that out as little babies. It's the perfect thing and nothing feels more satisfying than when we're famished to engage in a great meal.

Jesus knew that his first-century audience understood that as well. That's why in John chapter six, he made this analogy. If you have your Bibles, it'd be worth looking at John chapter six. Jesus is there with a crowd that he had just fed. They had been fed previously in his ministry. They had followed him. They wanted to be fed again. If you remember, it was because he'd been teaching all day. They didn't have anything to eat. The disciples said, "You better send them home. They don't have any food." Jesus ends up providing for them miraculously, and much like in the Cana miracle, when Jesus makes bread and fish, I'm sure it was the best-tasting bread and fish they'd ever had. They were greatly satisfied with the meal.

So they go looking for Jesus in the bottom of chapter six of John. In verse number 23 and 24, you can see how they're scurrying around to find Christ. It says in verse 25, when they found him, they said, "When did you get here?" It's like, "We've been looking for you. Where are you?" Jesus looks right through their "We want to hear from you, Rabbi" and he says, "I tell you the truth, you're looking for me not because you saw the miraculous signs, which always point to something revelatory, something that God is doing. It wasn't that you were interested in what God was pointing to here. It's that you ate the loaves and you had your fill. You had a great free lunch and you want another one. So that's really why you're looking for me."

But if you really want to go searching for something, if you want to expend your energy trying to get something, he says in verse 27, "Don't work for food that spoils. You ought to work for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man, by the way, will give you. On him, the Father has placed his seal of approval." They said, "What must we do to do the works that God requires?" Jesus said, "This is the work that you've got to do. God's work is this: to believe or trust in the one he has sent."

So they're back to the food issue here. "What miraculous sign are you going to do? What are you going to give us so we can believe and trust in you? What are you going to do? I've got an idea. Back in the old days, in the desert, they brought manna out of the sky and manna from heaven. That would be great." Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, it's not Moses who's giving you bread from heaven. Really, it's my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

"Sir," they said, and I don't know if they're getting serious now or still trying to end around this discussion, but they said, "Well, give us this bread." Jesus declares, "You want to know the bread that God gives that satisfies to eternal life? Here it is. I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who trusts or believes in me will never be thirsty."

They were hungry for a meal, and Jesus says, "Yeah, stomach for food, food for stomach and all that, but really what you've been made for, what your soul has been made for, what you as a person have been made for, is to connect and trust and interface with the living God. God is giving you the Son for you as the focal point of your trust to put your trust in him. And if you do that, if you come to me, if you trust in me, you'll be satisfied and it will be a kind of satisfaction that's unlike food. You won't need to repeat this. You will just be able to bask and enjoy and deepen this relationship with me and it'll satisfy."

We talk a lot about this, particularly in the book of Hebrews. We've seen it reoccurring in the book that God is reminding us that he's made us for himself. As Augustine said, our hearts are going to be restless until we find our rest and our contentment and our fulfillment in him. So we say throughout the book of Hebrews as we've been studying it, this really needs to be our priority. There's a lot of things that jockey for attention in our lives. There's a lot of things calling for us to invest in. I know we've got to live in the world and we've got to pay our taxes and we've got to provide for our families and all of that. But the bottom line is your supreme interest in life ought to be getting to know the God who created you.

That's the best and most fulfilling and gratifying endeavor. It's the kind of thing, as the Psalmist said, if you would just taste and see that the Lord is good, you'll get a taste for this and you'll want this and this will be the passion of your life. Or as Asaph said in Psalm 73, you'll get to the place where you realize there's no other desire that really matters. There will be nothing on earth you'll desire more than knowing God. The problem in the modern church is a lot of people think that getting into the Christian life is all that Christianity is about.

It's about getting in the family of God. It's about getting your ticket to heaven. It's about being adopted. All that's good and fine, but Jesus said in John 17, really eternal life is not just about getting in. It's about knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom the Father has sent. That's really what the Christian life's all about. I'm all for getting in. It's good to be adopted in the family. I want to make sure I've got my ticket to get out of hell. That's important. But God says if you really want to know what should consume us, it's this unending pursuit of knowing God. The more we do it, the more we'll find it satisfying, and the more the satisfaction and gratification we derive from this, the more we're going to see this is what we were made for. This is what it's all about.

We've been studying in Hebrews and we've gotten to chapter 11. We've seen one person through this long list we're going to go through of Old Testament examples and we saw Abel giving his best to God. The second person that's named in Hebrews 11 is an example of someone not just giving his best to God, but using his life and his priorities to seek God with all of his heart. The second person on the list is a guy named Enoch. When we think of Enoch, if you know your Old Testament, you usually think of the supernatural way that he left this planet. People always fixate on that, but the writer of Hebrews wants us to know that all of that was predicated on something that his life was all about. It was all about knowing God.

As a matter of fact, we'll see that his translation from this earth was based on his priorities in life. So if you have your Bibles, let's turn to Hebrews chapter 11 and let us understand that if you're looking for a motivation, a template, an example to follow as it relates to making God and the pursuit of your relationship with God the template of your life, then here's Enoch. We don't know much about him, but what we know about him is what we need to fuel us into going a few levels deeper in our knowledge and relationship with God.

Hebrews chapter 11, begin in verse number five, where again, the theme of the chapter, faith, trust in God, is how Enoch really was taken from this life. By faith, Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. He couldn't be found because God had taken him away. That's what he's known for, but notice this, bottom of verse five, "For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God." That's what he was known for. If you want to know what that's about, it's about a life of earnestly seeking God.

Next verse: "Without faith, this trust that he had, it's impossible to please God. Anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those..." Here's the key phrase that summarizes Enoch's life: "...those who earnestly seek him." Why was Enoch a person that pleased God? Because his life was all about an earnest, passionate, ardent desire to know his God. Take a look at the historic record of it in Genesis chapter five. What we've just read is really the New Testament inspired commentary on the account in Genesis five. So let's get the original description of Enoch's life. Genesis chapter five.

We first see the name Enoch in chapter five, verse number 18. We find out that he's got a dad named Jared, who had lived 162 years and he became the father of Enoch. If you're thinking, "Wow, that's kind of old to have a kid," it's kind of old to really do anything. 165, what's going on here? Just remember all this comes before chapter six, and chapters six, seven, and eight of Genesis is a pivotal point. It's the flood. This is the antediluvian world we call it before the flood world. Before the flood, it was a really different place.

One of the things, without any comment here, is that people lived a long time. People speculate about it, but certainly, we had an earth that was a little bit different before this cataclysmic destruction of the world as we knew it. It was much more conducive, apparently, to a long biological life and everybody's living it seems like a ho-hum thing, 800 or 900 years. No big deal. So he's having a kid at 162, and don't picture the guy on *Good Morning America* all wrinkly at 101 or 110 or whatever they are. They were living in a different world. This guy probably looked like a 27-year-old and he has a kid named Enoch.

Verse 19: after he became the father of Enoch, Jared lived 800 years. So he's got a lot of life left in him and he had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Jared lived 962 years and then he died. I would think so, right? Verse 21: when Enoch had lived 65 years, now he's getting to it right away apparently, at least based on his father's example, he becomes the father of a guy named Methuselah. Ever heard of him? Methuselah, he's known to be the longest-living guy, but really not by much. He was the oldest one recorded in the antediluvian world. But anyway, Enoch's his dad. So now we've got some point of reference.

Now this is an interesting phrase, verse 22. Circle this word "after." "And after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters." Something happened there. As a matter of fact, he's known as this man of faith because of Hebrews 11, but extra-biblical writings usually call Enoch the man of repentance because something happened here when he has this kid and his life is redirected and he begins walking with God. He walked with God 300 years, had other sons and daughters.

Verse 23: altogether Enoch lived 365 years. Enoch walked with God and then was no more because God took him away. Now, if you read that and you didn't really have the sense of what we're seeing now in Hebrews 11, you might think, "Well, I don't know, that could just be a euphemism for death." It's not. Clearly, they understood this, both pre-New Testament and New Testament times, as this guy was supernaturally sucked off the planet like that little canister at the bank drive-through. He just left the planet that way. Off he went.

Now that, according to Hebrews chapter 11, is though it's sensational, it's really not the point of Enoch's life. The point of Enoch's life is here's a guy who walked with God. Now that's an analogy of what Hebrews defines as a life that pleases God, and the life that pleases God is a life of faith that earnestly seeks God. So here we have what little that we know about him, something happened at age 65, redirected his life. He had a kid and now he walks with God. He is walking with God as a man who seems to be intimate with God, seeking God earnestly for 300 years and then he has this supernatural translation at the end of his life. The only other guy in that club is Elijah, right? Who gets to leave the planet without death? Enoch and Elijah are at least the only two recorded in the Bible leaving the planet without dying.

So those are the three things we know about him. If Enoch is going to be a template for you and I to redirect our priorities and say God needs to be a bigger priority, my relationship with God needs to be the focus of something I cultivate from day to day, then I think we should ask the question: why is it that we need examples like this and why is it that everybody isn't like Enoch? The reason is because when it comes to cultivating relationship with God, there's several barriers. Three primary barriers that Enoch's life illustrates.

I want to talk about when it comes to cultivating or ardently developing or deepening a relationship with God, I want to talk quickly about understanding the problems. Number one, we need to understand the problem. The problem comes in three categories to try and sort some of this out. Enoch's life, we know three basic things about his life and all of those address conquering the three problems or three barriers, if you will, that stand between us having intimate, close fellowship with God.

So the chart looks something like this: the problem, the effects, and the solution. Thankfully Enoch dealt with all three of these problems with the biblical divine solution. Problem number one: Enoch just like us, the reason that he had to conquer this first-level problem was because he, like us, were born as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. That's how Lewis put it in the *Chronicles of Narnia*. The problem with that is that we are children of people that have been banished from God's presence. He had a sinful heritage just like we do. He wasn't born walking with God. That's my point.

If that's a struggle for some of you or you grew up with this doctrine of original sin and you didn't quite understand it, your homework assignment is to go home and study Romans chapter five, verses 12 to the end of the chapter. Starting in verse number 12, we get a very clear explanation that when God banished Adam and Eve from his presence, the progeny of Adam and Eve, all the descendants of Adam and Eve, were born in that state of separation from God. That was a necessary consequence of them being excluded from God's personal presence, that everybody born was born outside of a relationship with God.

They're not like a lot of people think today, children being born innocent or in relationship with God and then they have to sin at some mysterious age of accountability to get cast out of God's presence. No, everybody's born outside of a relationship with God. Everybody is. We're in a world that sees the effects of God, and God may be doing things for us and our children, but we're all born outside of fellowship with God. That's the problem of Adam and Eve's sin that has been merited or imputed to his descendants.

Enoch, like us, was born in that condition. As David put it in Psalm 51, if you're taking some notes, not that you need this if you're parents of young children, but he says, "I was conceived in sin, I was sinful from birth." Again, if you have young kids, hopefully, I don't need to tell you that. We observe that. We see that. Kids are not born in a state of fellowship exemplifying the virtues of godliness. They are born in a state of alienation. We have to train them, teach them to come to a place of connecting with their Maker.

The problem with being born as a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve and being alienated from God is that the effect of that sinful heritage is that we are all, I'll put it this way, have a problem of divine separation. To put it in a more active way instead of a passive way, it is a divine hostility, the Bible says. I am by nature born into a world and because of my sinful heritage, I am at odds with God. Really, to put it really frank, the problem is that we have this built-in hostility that God has. There is a natural hostility between a holy and righteous God and sinful people. That is a problem that needs to be fixed if we're ever going to live in a place of fellowship with God and blessing. We need to have that problem solved.

That is solved, at least from our perspective, by coming to God on his terms. He's got to pay for it, which we're going to look at at the end of our service. The payment was the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. But from our perspective, I need to respond to his call. His call is for me to do two things in Scripture. Two parts of one response, and those are the words in Scripture we see over and over and over again. If you want to get right with God, there are two words that come at us over and over again. What are they? The first one starts with an R: repent. You have to repent of your sins and the next one is you have to put your faith or your trust in Christ.

We call it turning and trusting. You've got to do that. If you do that, if God works that in your heart, then you have what we often call salvation. How does God solve that problem? From our perspective, he gives us the call to repent and put our trust in him, specifically from a New Testament perspective in his Son, the Lamb of God, and then we will be saved. Another word for being saved or salvation is the word in Scripture reconciliation, which is why, by the way, at the end of chapter five of Romans, we see that word show up because if we're alienated at birth, we need Christ to then bring us back to God.

Not that we were with God as little children. No, the last time we as humans were with God was in the garden in Genesis three. We lost that fellowship. Every successive generation now has to make peace with God. They have that opportunity by God's grace if they would repent of their sins, put their trust in God's provision, and then we are reconciled to God. So did that ever happen for Enoch? Back to our thinking about Enoch. Genesis chapter five, what we know, and it may seem a little subtle and implied, but we have Enoch, no description of his life prior to, just that he's a dude who has a kid at 65, but after that, the Bible says he walked with God.

Second Corinthians 5:15, I quote it all the time, but we are called to live for him who died for us and rose again. Enoch had no interest in living for the one who would provide for his salvation. He had no interest in living for God, apparently. He was one, though, that after age 65, was known as a man of repentance who walked in peace with God. He had a turning point. I would hope that when it comes to our problem of not knowing God, that we could open up the mic and you could stand up here and say, "Yeah, I can testify to a time in my life, hopefully, it wasn't 65, maybe it was 25, maybe it was 35, maybe it was 15, where you said, yeah, you know what? I wasn't walking with God, but then I came to the place of repentance and faith. God saved me and I began to walk with God."

That solves the problem of divine separation. You can then say because I'm a Christian, I am reconciled to God. The barrier of hostility that exists between a holy God and sinful people for me was solved on the day I put my trust in Christ. How long does that take? It takes a moment. It takes a moment when God works in my heart real biblical repentance and faith. That solves the problem of divine separation. Now Enoch had that thing wired. When could he look to that? Age 65, "I got right with God." How about you? When did you get right with God? Hopefully, you can say, "I know a date when that happened. There was a year in my life, there was a change in my life, I got right with God."

So since that time, since you got right with God—and I can look at a time in my life, I was 18 when I got right with God—here's the thing: I never since that time sinned ever again and I was in perfect fellowship with God forever my whole life, right? Just like you. Is that how it worked for you? No, and it didn't work that way for me either. Because just because we're reconciled to God doesn't give us perfect fellowship with God, does it? There's a lot of other problems that take place.

The second layer of problem, I'll call it this, is our sinful acts. While our Christian life, I hope, mitigates the sin in our life, and while I'd say there's a whole lot less sin than there used to be, I can point to consistently, and the more I get to know God and read his word, the more I see it's every day I see that I am not walking in perfect fellowship with God. I still sin. John writes to his audience and he says in chapter one, verse eight, "If you say that you're without sin, you're a liar and the truth is not in you," right? And he says, "we, us, we." He's including himself in that. Not in the same degree, I hope, not with the same frequency, but we still have the problem of sinful acts.

Now this may be controversial to you. I'll try to show you in Scripture where this is clearly taught, but I want to say if we continue to sin in our Christian life, which all of us do—you're guilty of it and I'm guilty of it—it creates another problem. We may have been reconciled to God spiritually. I may have my account clean before God. But when I sin, there's a problem. It creates a problem of relational distance. The point is our sinful behavior, our compromise, our engagement in idolatry—if I can use that word and you understand what I'm talking about, that other things become supreme priorities and loves in our lives—if we would just humble ourselves, God will close the gap. We can have a tight and close relationship with God.

Dave Drewie: Maybe you've never thought of Enoch as one of your heroes of the faith, but there's a great deal we can learn from his example of growing close to God. We'll continue our conversation about Enoch next time on Focal Point. It's just one portion from a longer series from Mike Fabarez titled *Ambitious Faith*. We'll hear more about all kinds of biblical heroes over the next few weeks. It's the perfect study to invite a friend or coworker to listen in on as well. To find these lessons anytime, go online to focalpointradio.org or download the free Focal Point app and subscribe to the podcast.

This month's featured resource fits right alongside what Hebrews has been putting on the table. The journals of Jim Elliot, edited by Elizabeth Elliot, gives you unfiltered access to a young man wrestling hard with what it means to be fully God's. He wrote to stay honest, not to impress, and that kind of transparency has a way of getting under your skin and inspiring your next steps. If Hebrews 11 has been stirring something in you, these journals are a great way to keep that momentum going and seek a deeper relationship with God.

Request *The Journals of Jim Elliot* by phone at 888-320-5885 or online at focalpointradio.org. You can also send your donation by mail. Just write to us at Focal Point, P.O. Box 2850, Laguna Hills, California 92654. And friend, this program stays on the air because there are listeners who have decided that solid, text-driven teaching is worth putting something behind. If that's you, thank you. You're a fundamental part of what keeps this ministry going. And if a monthly commitment has been on your mind because these messages have been doing real work in your life, we'd be glad to have you join us. Sign up as a Focal Point Partner with a monthly gift of any amount by calling 888-320-5885 or by going to focalpointradio.org.

I'm Dave Drewie. We'll see you tomorrow for part two of Pastor Mike's message, "Ardently Seeking a Deeper Relationship with God." That's Thursday here on Focal Point.

Mike Fabarez: Hi, Pastor Mike here. God's word promises it'll never return void. So I wonder, how is God's word moving in your heart right now? Drop us a line. Let us know. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to be praying for you here. Just go to focalpointradio.org. And then be sure to join us again tomorrow right here as we continue to explore the depths of Scripture. We'll see you then.

Dave Drewie: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.