Abandonment & Belonging

—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Rom 8:35–39

Andrew Fountain – June 25, 2017

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Outline

Abandonment & Belonging
God’s Plan for how we belong
How we receive this

Isaiah 49

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth;
break forth, O mountains, into singing!
For the LORD has comforted his people
and will have compassion on his afflicted.
But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me;
my Lord has forgotten me.”
“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are continually before me.

1. Abandonment & Belonging

What does it mean to have a sense of “abandonment”?
I don’t belong
There is nobody like me
I am different
I don’t fit
I don’t have anywhere that is really “home”
I am rejected and abandoned
There is nobody to take care of me if everything goes bad—I’ll be isolated

We all need to belong
- At high schools you see kids desperately trying to find a group that accepts them
- How can you tell what group a teenager identifies with?
  - clothes
  - music
  - hairstyle
  - way of talking
Would you agree with me that it’s very important for kids at highschool to feel they belong?
- It’s a very strong need that we all have
People make friends with someone “like them”
- I can’t believe how similar we are!
- We like all the same things
People fall in love with someone “like them”
- I remember hearing a girl saying “we are so similar—can you believe it—we both like chocolate!!!”
- Anne and I spent hours going through all the music we liked and books we has read
- It is such fun to discover a person who is just like you!
Conversely it is horrible when there is nobody like you!
- My strongest feeling of “not belonging” was when I was young I visited a friend in France

David wrote in Psalm 41

All who hate me whisper insults about me to one another; they plan ways to harm me.
Even my close friend whom I trusted, he who shared meals with me, has turned against me.

Jesus quoted this verse and applied it to Judas

Jesus reveals that he had a tender care toward Judas
- Jesus was fully God, but he was also fully human, he could love and be disappointed
- Even though he knew Judas would eventually betray him, he could honestly say:
  “Even my close friend whom I trusted, he who shared meals with me, has turned against me.”
Jesus understands what it’s like not to fit, to feel “different”
- there was, in fact, nobody like him!!
- he really didn’t fit in
  - If you think you have trouble fitting in...
- This must have been really hard!!
- Yet he reached out to others and formed really close attachments
  - The last supper—he was longing to spend the time with them
    - With a passionate desire I have desired to eat this meal with you.
  - And how did they respond? —did they say “we’re with you, right to the end...” (one of them did!)
but then all the rest of the 12 disciples abandoned him
- he was totally alone
- Jesus understands what it feels like to be alone

Isaiah 53:3

He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
one from whom people hid their faces
he was despised, and we valued him as nothing.

John 17:9-24

Before he died, Jesus prayed an amazing prayer
- probably the most amazing prayer in the whole of the Bible
- so good it’s hard to believe it’s true
- put in bold the things I want to focus on
- It is amazing that Jesus is talking about the level of unity between us being like that between him and his father!!
  - The unity that his people are going to have is on a level with them
  - spirit-to-spirit union. No fear
- “Belonging” and “rejecting” language is being used (scroll up)
  - “Joined” at a deep spiritual level
- So how can this happen?
This must be an important issue if Jesus spent so much of his last few hours praying about it.
- Read this passage if you feel you need more of a sense of belonging.
- Let these words seep into you like water into dry soil
Choose to believe what Jesus said
- The opposite of belief is unbelief
- The oposite of Jesus is Satan
- Chose to believe Jesus’s promise of belonging, not Satan’s lies
So how can this happen?
- Jesus had made a promise about the Holy Spirit in John 14

John 14:16-23

Could you get any more extreme opposite from being abandoned to “make our home with him”
The Holy Spirit is the promise
- He is the carrier of this “piece of Jesus”
This is how it works:
- Here we are in a world of misfits and broken friendships
- Jesus didn’t try and patch up this old world and just help us to feel better in this mess
- He started something completely new and brought his people, one by one, into it
- He brings us in, by giving us a piece of himself, to live in us
  - As we receive him, we receive some of this new creation, this new community
Receiving something unique makes us part of a new group
- In my last year of Junior high, there were about 30 kids in the class
- everyone was going to different high schools
- About 4 (including me) were going to a school called King Edward’s
- Suddenly we were friends (we hadn’t been before) because we had all been given something, we all shared something
  - The future that we shared had brought us all together
First going to the USA
- citizens or “aliens”
Process of coming to Canada and feeling we belonged
- student visa, work permit, landed immigrant (resident), citizen, driver’s license
- As you receive something, it brings you into a new community
- Jesus’ gift to us of himself is what unites us
I am going to give you a rather risky illustration (because I don’t want you to take it wrongly)
- Story of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos
What this looks like in practice is the church, called a “body” by Paul
- Many places we could look at
- Paul talks about this in Ephesians 4:1–7

Ephesians 4:1-7

1 Corinthians 12:4-27

3. Receiving this

You need to belong to Jesus to have his Spirit
It is by faith in Jesus’ words that we enter into this
- Opposite of faith is unbelief
- We need to take these truths and grab hold of them
- You are loved and needed!

Romans 8

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?…
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.