Go Back to Bethel
Go Back to Bethel by Rev. L. John Gable
August 25, 2019
I have confessed to you before that I am directionally-impaired. When Kris and I are driving somewhere and we get disoriented we have learned that if my instinct is to turn right then we are best to turn left. For this reason I am forever grateful for whoever it was who invented the GPS.
But what do you do if you really do get lost? One of the earliest lessons I learned in Boy Scouts was, “If you get lost go back to the last place where you knew where you were.” This is exactly what we see Abraham doing in our story this morning.
Putting this story in context, this is just one chapter away from the famous call and covenant story in chapter 12 when God chose Abram and his wife Sarai from the land of Haran and told them that He would bless them with land and offspring and blessing such that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through them, and given that promise alone Abram and Sarai pick up, taking their nephew Lot with them, and set out for the Promised Land. When they arrive in the land of Canaan Abram pitches his tent at a place called Bethel (translated “House of God”) and builds an altar there and here we see that the name of the Lord is invoked for the very first time. Shortly thereafter a famine hits the land of Canaan, so Abram and Sarai and Lot depart for Egypt where they have a very interesting misadventure which I will leave to your own reading, all that in chapter 12.
We pick up the story in chapter 13 as the threesome return to the land of Canaan, both Abram and Lot are now both wealthy men rich in livestock, gold and silver; but at the same time they are lost, disoriented, homeless. So where do you go when you are lost? You go back to the last place you knew where you were, so Abram goes back to Bethel, back to the place where he heard the voice of God, back to the place where he first built an altar and called on the name of the Lord.
We too know what it’s like to be lost, don’t we, not just directionally, but spiritually? We know what it is like to feel spiritually empty, adrift, disoriented. So what do we do? Where can we go? Is there a Bethel we can go back to? Gospel singer Andre Crouch had a song that I just loved to sing along to, “Take me back, take me back, dear Lord, to the place where I first received you. Take me back, take me back, dear Lord, where I first believed.” Do you have a Bethel? Can you call to mind that place, that experience where you first received and believed? How might you get back there? One way I will suggest to you would be to reflect on what were you doing then that you aren’t doing now?
For some of us there is an actual place that we can return to either physically or in our remembrance, a place where we first experienced the presence of the Lord; but even going back there doesn’t always produce the same effect; we have changed. However, I do believe there were certain practices that we put in to place early in our walk with the Lord that perhaps we have wandered away from, that we would do well to return to.
Such as the regular reading of Scripture. New Christians, young believers are always encouraged to spend time in God’s Word, making it a daily practice and discipline. This makes good sense. If we want to know more about the character of God, to learn more about His promises, to get to know Jesus better and trust Him more fully, it only makes sense that we would want to spend time reading His Word. The question is, as more mature Christians, have we maintained that daily practice of Scripture reading? I know many have, and we have certainly encouraged it through our yearly “Read Through the Bible”, but many of us have let that discipline slide, perhaps thinking “I’ve read it before”, or “I’ve seen the movie and know how the story ends.” I can’t imagine us giving that same response to any other relationship we want to develop or deepen. So, if you are feeling lost or aloof or dis-oriented, spiritually, let me encourage you to re-engage with God through the reading and study of Scripture as a way to get back to Bethel.
Prayer is certainly another practice that will take us back to a place of familiarity with God. If friendships and relationships are built and maintained through conversation then it only makes sense that prayer would be an important part of our spiritual re-orientation. I am not thinking of the kind of formal prayers we offer when we gather in worship, as much as I am the kind of “conversational prayers” we can carry on with the Lord throughout the day. The practice of prayer is certainly the most effective and efficient way to open our ears and eyes and hearts to the voice of the Spirit of Christ speaking to us and through us. As we increase in our practice of prayer we also increase in our “practice of the presence of Christ”, to borrow the phrase from Thomas A’Kempis.
Fellowship with other believers in regular worship, in study, in service, in friendship and recreation is another good way to find our way back in to the presence of the Lord. So many people I have spoken with through the years who have wandered away from the faith or at least from their regular practice of it, have spoken of simply having gotten out of the habit. Like the shepherd who spoke of his sheep saying, “They don’t intend to wander off, they just nibble their way lost.” Through the years I have spoken with many people who have “nibbled their way lost.” Some have said, “I started going to church when I was going through a rough patch in my life, but once things got better I stopped going.” I’ve even had people say, “I don’t need to go to church, things are going just fine.” Is that how we view what we do here and why we do it? Are these principles and practices of the faith the means to maintain our life in Christ, or something we can take or leave as we need them, like a visit to the ER or the auto mechanic when things aren’t working quite right? The regular practices of the faith are not only helpful ways to find our way back to Bethel; they are also helpful ways for us to actually “pitch our tent” and live there.
Certainly there are many other practices and disciplines we can, and have, incorporated in to our lives; curiously our order of worship offers a helpful guidance that we can use, not just on Sunday mornings, but every day, in our own private devotional lives. Consider what we do here, together. Our order of worship includes music which lifts our spirits and tunes our hearts to God’s presence; a call to worship which invites us in the presence of God and a prayer of confession and assurance of pardon which remind us that God is God and we are not, yet in our brokenness we are assured of God’s forgiveness through Christ Jesus our Lord. In worship together we read and reflect on God’s Word, something we can do in our own daily practices. Here we enjoy fellowship with one another and communal prayer, and offer ourselves in service to Christ and His Kingdom work through the giving of our tithes and offerings. Each of these practices, individually and collectively, bring us back to Bethel.
The benefit of these, as a daily and weekly practice, is not just to be found in what we experience or enjoy in our time together, but in the way what we do in here influences the way we live out there. Faithfulness in here helps us develop the spiritual muscles to practice faithfulness out there.
Look again at our story from Genesis. Returning to Bethel Abram discovers that the land won’t support all of the livestock owned by both him and his nephew Lot together, so they decide to separate and in doing so Abram does a really remarkable thing, he lets Lot choose first. Certainly Abram had every right to choose the land he wanted; he was the elder, he was the one who had originally been chosen by God and brought to this land, but he lets Lot choose first and the choice is obvious. From where they are standing looking to the east they see the lush, fertile land of the Jordan River valley, “well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord.” Looking to the west they see only barren, rocky land and a mountain range unsuitable for agriculture, and to the south the vast desert of the Negev. The choice was a no brainer; and, no surprise, Lot chooses the fertile land to the east, leaving Abram with only scrub.
Why is this an act of faithfulness and not simply a poor business decision? Because the land Lot chose, while fertile was also base in sinfulness; this is the land of Sodom and Gomorrah. (I’ll invite you to read that story on your own as well.) Abram’s allowing of Lot to choose first was an act of faithfulness, an act of trusting the promise and provision of God even when such faithfulness was from every other perspective seen as pure foolishness. We read, “After Lot had separated from him, the Lord spoke to Abram, ‘Raise your eyes now and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.” There at Bethel God was restating the promise he had made to Abram when He first called him to follow Him. “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth… Rise up, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.”
This story reminds us that God remains faithful to His promises even we have been unfaithful, even when we have “nibbled our way lost.” God’s faithfulness is a call for our faithfulness. No matter who we are, where we have been or what we have done, it is never too late to go back to Bethel.
I’ll close with this story. To Catch an Angel is the autobiography of a young man named Robert Russell. Russell lives alone on an island located in the middle of a river and what makes that a particular challenge is that he is blind; yet one of his joys and daily activities is rowing on the river. This seems improbable, perhaps even impossible, given his blindness, but he does so by means of a fairly simple, yet ingenious, system. On the end of his dock he has placed a bell. The bell is attached to a mechanism and a timer so that the bell rings every 30 seconds. With this system in place he can row up and down the river, judging his distance and direction by the sound of the bell. It is the sound of the bell that directs his way safely home again. Russell writes, “The river lies before me, a constant invitation, a constant challenge, and my bell is the thread of sound along which I return to a quiet base.” In a spiritual sense, this is precisely what Abram did in his return to Bethel, as well as what we do here and why we do it. We too live along a rushing river and we venture out into it every day and sometimes we will confess that we lose our way and journey far from our moorings, so worship, prayer, our study of Scripture and fellowship with other believers and the like is like the ringing of the bell spiritually. It is the means by which we find our way back home and without it, we are lost. When we feel lost, alone, unloved, unlovable, unforgiven or unforgivable, spiritually empty or disoriented these are the ways we find our way back to Bethel, back in to the presence of the Lord.