“Searching for Jesus”

Scripture: Luke 2:41-52

For all too many people, attention to the significance of Christmas and Easter seems to be sufficient for their faith. We celebrate the arrival of God in our world, and it is a wonderful day. The grand cry “Emmanuel”, “God is With Us”, is our confirmation that the Lord cares deeply for us, that he wants to be with us, and that is good. And Easter, the day of his resurrection from death in the world into a new and glorious life, is also a reason to worship Jesus. But what about everything in between? What about everything that came before? Everything that is yet to come?

How deep must our relationship with this God Incarnate be? The truth is that depth of faith isn’t really the question! The real issue is how authentic our faith in Christ is! A genuine and heart-felt faith is what the Lord is looking for. In Revelation 3:14-22, God tells us that he fears for us when we are only lukewarm to his grace. He is speaking to the church in Laodicea when he says that he knows their every deed, and knows that they rejoice in their own self sufficiency, and that this will be their downfall. And these same words must ring true in our lives as well.

Have each of us truly and honestly sought out the blessing of a life in Jesus Christ? Not just a day or two a year, not just a half hearted life in him that only looks good on the outside, not one that doesn’t interfere with the life we want to make for ourselves, but one that truly honors the Lord! Have you looked for him where he is, or are you still looking where you want him to be?

Read Luke 2:41-45

How in the world could a 12 year old boy get so lost? It’s easy. In those first dozen years of life, Mom & Dad are constantly nearby, and when they aren’t, somehow they are supposed to know exactly where you are. Every child knows this.
When our son Chris was 3 or 4, we took him to the mall in Western New York while we did some shopping. I think we were in a Sears store looking for some clothes, when all of a sudden, Chris was nowhere to be seen. Frantically, we called his name and began looking around all of the clothing racks. We quickly found him, and then realized, that even at that tender age, he was playing with us. But “Hide and Go Seek” is not the game to play in a store – or at least that was our opinion. And of course, it didn’t take very long before he was gone again. After we found him and warned him that he had to stop hiding and that he had to hold on to our hand, he laughed, and we knew that the game wasn’t over yet.
But this time we watched him closely, and when he got away from us and tried to hide a third time, we beat him at his own game - we hid first and then watched. Very quickly, he began to react to “no Mom & Dad”, and fear began to spread through his entire demeanor, so we stepped out of our hiding spot, and he came running. That ended the game.

Now, this story about Jesus wasn’t about his hiding from Mom and Dad. It wasn’t a vindictive act on his part – he just felt that he had to be somewhere other than with his parents. The time had come to head back home after Passover, and as was the custom in those days, the girls and younger boys would travel with the women in one group, and the older boys with the men in another. Jesus would have been right at the age when he could have been with either group, and as luck would have it, both parents thought that he was with the other. At the end of a day of travel, the truth was discovered, and panic set in. “Where could he be?” “Oh no! God trusted us with his gift to the world, and we’ve lost him!”
No one in the caravan had seen him, so it was back tracking all the way to Jerusalem to search for him there. Now understand that this was Passover, and literally tens, and even hundreds, of thousands of visitors were in the city. How do you find one small boy in the middle of all that?

Read Luke 2:46-52

After 3 days of frantically searching for Jesus, he was found in the most unusual place – the temple. And his explanation for this apparently thoughtless act? “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” Why didn’t you know where I would be?

Mary and Joseph had been looking for Jesus in all the wrong places. First, they assumed that he would be where they expected him to be, but he wasn’t. And you can almost hear the “blame game” start up between them – “Where’s Jesus? Isn’t he with you?” “No, I haven’t seen him all day. I thought he was with you!” “How could you let him out of your sight?” “How could you let him wander off?”
Second, when they arrived back in the city, they began looking for him in the places that they had gone, and not in the place where he would go. They looked in the house where they had stayed. No Jesus. They checked with the vendors who had sold them the sacrificial lamb. No Jesus. They traveled the streets they had walked, went to the merchants they had called on, went to the homes of friends they had visited. No Jesus. After 3 days of failure, they finally happened to go to the temple where the sacrifice had been made, and there he was.
But the Lord wasn’t just listening to the learned elders – he was asking pointed and profound questions of these men, he was responding to the opinions that they offered, and he was challenging the best scholarly minds of the day. Why would the Incarnate God be anywhere else?

Where do we look for Jesus? In the places where we want him to be, or in the places where he wants us to be? Do we want him to be part of our activities, or do we want to be involved in the things that reflect him? And that’s the problem today – all too often, we expect the Lord to come looking for us, to join us wherever we want to be, without thinking that maybe, just maybe, he wants us to be somewhere else, so that we can be doing something else!

The author Jim Stuart writes:
For many years, my approach to leadership [was “top down” – authoritative – demanding – self centered] . Then I was hit by a series of personal tragedies and professional setbacks. My wife died. A mail-order venture that I had started went bankrupt. The universe was working hard to bring a little humility into my life. Rather than launch another business, I accepted a friend's offer to head an aquarium project in Tampa.

I spent the next six years in a job that gave me no power, no money and no knowledge. That situation forced me to draw on a deeper part of myself. We ended up with a team of people who were so high-performing that they could almost walk through walls. Why, I wondered, was I suddenly able to lead a team that was so much more resilient and creative than any team that I had run before? The answer: Somewhere, amid all of my trials, I had begun to trust my colleagues as much as I trusted myself.
- Jim Stuart, Voices: The State of the New Economy, Fast Company, September 1999, 114.

And I believe that he had begun to trust God far more than he trusted himself. He had allowed himself to be put in a place where the Lord could begin to reshape him. And that’s the point of it all. Once we take that step in faith toward Christ, when we finally confess that our way just isn’t working, when we finally admit that we have been searching for Jesus in our places instead of his, it is then that our life in the Lord can truly begin.

Searching for Jesus is not a complicated process – but it does require that we look for him in his situation and his way. And it will most likely be in the last place you would expect to find him.
Mary and Joseph began the search for their lost boy in those places where they wanted him to be, but he wasn’t there. They had to walk many unnecessary miles, they lived 3 frustrating and fearful days that were filled with failure, and it wasn’t until they stumbled onto him in the temple that a faint glimmer of understanding could begin to creep into their hearts.
Jim Stuart thought that a successful life could be defined by strength and power and absolute authority, but began to discover a new and better way at an aquarium project in Tampa. And it was only then that he came to appreciate a totally different way of life because of it.
The Pharisee Saul thought that God should be in a rigid and spiteful faith, but instead, discovered Jesus on a dusty road between Jerusalem and Damascus, and when he did, everything, including his name, became new.
Peter should have already known Jesus, but on that lake shore the morning after a long and unsuccessful night of fishing, he discovered a depth in Christ that he could never have understood without the Lord’s forgiveness.
Nicodemus thought that God should be in the law, but instead discovered Jesus in unexpected steps – through a midnight encounter, a supportive comment at the Lord’s trial, and finally at the foot of the Cross.

Each of these people had begun by searching for Jesus on their own terms, and each had failed miserably. But when they finally set themselves aside and went to where Jesus was, when they let their failed practices fall away and let his truth begin to fill their hearts, when their search finally lead them in his path, it all began to come together for them.

And what came of the relationship between Jesus and his parents? Scripture tells us that he went home with them and was obedient – he began to understand the anguish that a parent has for their child when they fear for their safety. And Mary and Joseph? They still had a hard time understanding the boy, but we are told that Mary “treasured all these things in her heart”.

Where have you been searching for Jesus – in your way or his, in your place or his? Have you discovered treasure or only frustration? How has your search been working out for you?