Aiming at foolish target and still missing

Here is your quiz for the week:  What does Duck Dynasty, The Air Force’s’ ATP long-range targeting pod, and faith all have in common.  They are interested in and affected by targeting!  The Duck Dynasty guys are all about hunting, shooting and blowing things up.  Those guys pride themselves on being crack shots who always hit the target.  And, the new ATP targeting pod contains the very latest video data links, dual-mode laser markers, and a high definition mid-wave forward looking infrared (FLIR) for automatic tracking and laser designation of targets with real-time imagery that’s presented on cockpit displays.  Again, all about hitting the target. These two make sense, but faith?  This is the one you’re probably scratching your head over, but it is actually the most important.  

With our advance targeting systems it’s nearly impossible to miss the bull’s-eye.  When the computer laser-lock is on a marked or “painted” target, it will be guided to and hit the target being marked.  There will be no miss – the target will get hit.  The problem arises when the wrong object is being targeted!   This Sunday, in our current series on sin, “If God is so good, why do I feel so bad?” we will explore another aspect of sin which makes life not only frustrating, but confusing.  It’s how we aim at foolish targets with our lives, and even then, we miss!   

 In Romans 3:23, Paul says that “we all sin,” we all miss the target - by a long shot! But, it’s not for lack of trying. We just set our sights in the wrong direction and even then, we still miss!  The biblical writers - no matter what image they use to express it - say again and again that sin is more than just missing the target, sin is choosing the wrong target in the first place.  And in some cases, in our misguided targeting, we’re wandering off the path just to rebel against God simply because He is stronger than us. 

 

Ultimately, this poor targeting, poor aiming, and continually missing the mark is an offense to God.  It’s why we feel so bad.  The reason we are not the way we are supposed to be, is that we’ve been aiming at the wrong targets.

 In Cornelius Plantinga Jr.’s book “A Breviary of Sin,” he says this very plainly, “Aiming and shooting at wrong and foolish targets is just silly – folly.  And, when we hit one of these self-contrived, self-devised targets of our own making, we take the further self-defeating and God-denying step of acknowledging or grading the mission as ‘accomplished.’” In other words, sin is both wrong and dumb! 

 

He goes on to say, “Human desire, deep and restless and seemingly unfulfillable, keeps stuffing itself with finite goods, but these cannot satisfy.  If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed but under nourished, and we find that day by day, week by week, year after year, we are thinning down to a mere outline of a human being.”

This happens all the time.   “People hungry for love, people who want to ‘connect,’ will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow, self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.” 

 
As Richard Lovelace remarks, to flee from God to some far country and search for fulfillment there is to find only a “black-market substitute.” “Instead of joy, the buzz in your temples from four martinis; instead of self-giving love, sex with strangers; instead of a parent’s unconditional enthusiasm for you as a person, only the professional support of a fashionable therapist who will indeed pump up your ego whenever it loses pressure but only while the meter is running. This type rebellion against God and flight from God removes us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.”  

Now that we know, what do we do? We will expand on this conversation Sunday morning – if you can correctly target Markham Woods!