You think you've had a bad day recently. Let me tell you about a bad day. It's the summer of '97, you're a cosmonaut on Russia's space station Mir. While you've been there you've already had to battle a fire on board. Then a supply ship runs into you in a docking procedure and you lose 40 percent of your power. You've already had your fill of bad days for one mission. But then, one day the central computer on the space station suddenly shuts down and suddenly you are tumbling through space in what reporters call "chaotic flight." As you know, I'm not making any of this up! The day that computer failed, it threw those cosmonauts into a particularly dangerous situation. That space station is solar-powered and all of a sudden, as one reporter put it, it lost its orientation to the sun. Which means you don't have the power to meet the demands of your flight and worst case your life is in jeopardy. Why? All because, as CBS News said, Mir turned it back on the sun.
Well, I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "With Your Back To The Sun."
There was a crisis that faced that space station, not enough power to meet the demands. It's a feeling most of us knows in our own lives. The demands of our family, our relationships, at work, our responsibilities, frankly, our resources often aren't enough. Do you ever feel like you're running without the personal peace we need, the love, the power? And maybe the description of that space station's situation in a way describes your own - "chaotic flight."
It could be that the confusion, the power failure is for a similar reason, too. That space station is designed to draw its life from the sun. Listen to these words from the Bible about how God designed us. Speaking of Jesus, it says we were "created by Him and for Him" (Colossians 1:16). That Him is the Son of God, that's S-O-N. Our lives are essentially tumbling aimlessly when we lose our proper orientation to the Son. And according to God's Book, we all have.
Our Word for today from the Word of God, Isaiah 53:6 - "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way." Three words explain why we feel so spiritually disoriented, "his own way." The One who gave us our life was supposed to run our life and we have simply taken over our life and run "our own way."
If you wanted to draw that in picture form, you'd put you on the left side of the page and God on the right and you would be walking away from Him, with your back to Him to the source of the love and the peace and the power you desperately need. If you die with your back still to Him, erase God from the picture forever. And that's hell. Unless you can find a way to get rid of your sin and get back to Him, like the space station without the sun, the result is ultimately death.
But I'm so glad that "gone astray" verse doesn't stop there, it also tells us the way to find the God we've lost. It says, "And the Lord has laid on Him the wrongdoing of us all." The Him is Jesus and all the sin that cuts us off from God was laid on Jesus, God's sinless Son, when He died on that cross. You can literally walk up to that cross and say, "For me. He's doing that for me."
The day you tell Jesus you are putting your total trust in Him to rescue you from your sin is the day you find your Creator, the sun you were created for. For you, that day might be today. If you say, "It's time to begin my personal relationship with Jesus," tell Him that right where you are.
Hasn't your "chaotic flight" lasted long enough. It's the Son - the Son of God - that you need right now. He has all the power you will ever need to meet the demands of your life.