Seeking the Lord (Devereux Jarratt) | The Whole Counsel

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snider and Chuck Baggett is with me again and we're looking at the book,

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Salvation in Full Color. That is 20 sermons by the Great Awakening preachers and it's been edited by Richard Owen Roberts and it really is a book that's worth your time.

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We've been looking at the doctrines of salvation in a very specific theological order.

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So we looked at things like the character of God, the law of God, the depravity of man, the heinousness of sin, the problem with dead works, and then the book takes a shift from our need to God's provision, it talks about the divine love, the atonement, the work of regeneration, the effectual calling, the spirit's work in our salvation.

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And now we reach a chapter written by Devereux Jarrett, a minister in the early days of the colonies and Jarrett's sermon is called

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Seeking the Lord and the interesting thing about this, and we want to talk about it more in a little bit, is that this is the first sermon in the book where the writers are going to talk to us primarily about our response to God.

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So we've looked at the bigness of God and the holiness of God, the seriousness of his law and the depth of our stain, the provision of Christ, but now he's going to direct us, how do we respond?

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So just a few things about Devereux Jarrett. Devereux Jarrett was mainly a minister in the

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Virginia area with the established church or the Anglican church or what gets called now the

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Episcopalian church. When he was a young boy, his father died and he had to leave school and then his mother died while he was still young and he ended up moving in with his older brothers.

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Now his older brothers were not believers and they exposed him, Mr. Robert says, to numerous temptations and virtually no spiritual instruction or help.

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Now he finishes his education and at age 19, though not very well educated, he's given a job as a teacher in a school and so eventually he moves in with a family that has a very godly woman.

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So he's a boarder, he's renting a room there and the mother of the family is godly and they require that the boarders would be with them each evening for family worship and they read through the sermons of a

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Puritan named John Flavel. So Devereux Jarrett at this time decides that he will kind of clean up his life outwardly and so he sits through these sermons and he kind of wears the mask of a person who's interested, but in spite of his best efforts,

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God really begins to get a grip on Jarrett and eventually this leads to his conversion.

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Now he shifts his job, he goes to another school, so he leaves the home of that godly family and goes and lives with some ungodly people.

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He starts to really struggle in the Christian life. Eventually he goes back to that house and really moves forward spiritually.

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He feels called to the ministry and he's ordained as a preacher and soon it becomes clear that he is wonderfully blessed by God and he not only is very successful as a pastor of his own church in Virginia, an

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Anglican church, but in other Anglican churches in the region. So he kind of becomes the leader, the hub of a great revival in Virginia.

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Now, a couple of things I wanted to point out. One is that the people in his own denomination generally reject him.

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They feel that he's one of those revival men, he's one of those Whitefield guys, what they called the new lights.

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And so in the same way that George Whitefield was opposed by the English church in England, Jarrett is opposed by the

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American Anglican church in Virginia. But God still uses him. Also, early on, before he heard

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John Flavel sermons, he found a copy of George Whitefield sermons. He'd never seen a book of sermons before, so he decided he would start reading it.

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But the church he was attending really despised Whitefield's preaching. And so after reading a few sermons, he found out that his church didn't like Whitefield.

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So he put it away and treated Whitefield's sermons as if they were heresy. But of course, in spite of that,

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God saved him. So our sermon is on seeking the Lord. Chuck, why don't you give us the outline of that?

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There are four major points, the manner in which we must seek the Lord and what is implied by that, when we should seek him, some encouraging motives to seek him, and then application.

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And there are a number of sub points under those. Yeah, really, it's a very simple, sometimes our outlines for the podcast are kind of complicated.

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This is a really simple sermon. Very helpful to stir the heart to seek. So I hope you'll take the time to read it.

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Right off, though, let's just stop. There's a couple of introductory issues, and one is the doctrine of God's sovereignty and man's depravity, what generally gets categorized as reformed kind of thinking, or some people used

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Calvin as the nickname Calvinism. This is often presented as something that would kill all motivation to seek.

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But as we were talking before the podcast, we actually feel like it's the exact opposite. The great truths that we've been looking at through the podcast from the character of God and his law and sin and the provision of the atonement, if those are viewed outside of the work of Christ, then yeah, we feel that they do kill all motive to seek the

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Lord. Do you really want to draw near to a God that's that big when you're that sinful? And then you look at the atonement and you think, well, that's wonderful.

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But is it for me? When you look at regeneration, oh, so you're saying that God has to work within me.

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So maybe I should just be passive. But as we talked about earlier before the podcast, when these great doctrines of salvation are viewed through the work of Christ, then we see them in the right light.

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And they are infinitely attractive to anyone who's desperate and who wants to be right with God.

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And really, they become the motivation to seek the Lord, not a motivation to stay away from him.

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The passage for this sermon is Isaiah 55, verses 6 and 7. Seek ye the Lord while he may be found.

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Call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto the

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Lord. And he will have mercy upon him and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. And really, in the introduction, he backs up to verse 1 and that invitation to come without money and without cost.

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And a person reading this might be tempted to think that it's too good to be true.

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It's just this fairytale kind of language. And not as significant or not as real as what you feel under conviction, the shame that you feel, your sin.

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And the promise is just, again, too good to be true. But Christ came.

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God sent his son and he went to the cross. He died, was resurrected. And these all demonstrate

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God's love and his commitment to these truths, that they are indeed real.

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Yeah. He starts off by saying that the command to seek the

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Lord while he may be found. It implies that there's something lacking.

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We don't seek for things that we already have that that's, you know, just understood. So there's something that we don't have or there's something that we've lost.

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And he mentions a few of these things we have in humanity's fall in Adam and Eve.

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We have lost the image of God. So while we still have a soul, and that makes us different than animals, we have no access to God apart from Christ.

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We've lost that initial purity and innocence. He talks about because of that, we've lost the nearness of God.

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Eden is quite a clear picture. Sin requires that man be removed from God's presence in Eden.

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And there's even an angel placed at the entrance to make sure that man never attempts to return physically.

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And then he says, we've also lost the way to happiness.

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We are like travelers. And on our journey, we think that we're going to make it, but the sun sets and the night is all around us and we're confused and we don't know the way to happiness.

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We've lost that. So man's loss ought to provoke man to seek the

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Lord. But then he gives us some ideas of how to do that. So what are those things,

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Chuck, that he says there? Jared's second point is how to seek the Lord.

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And he gives a number of helps here, a number of ways to do that. One is that when we seek him, we should seek him earnestly, not half -heartedly, but with, as the

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Bible speaks of, a holy violence. Jeremiah 29, 13 is a verse that speaks to this.

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It says that you will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. So not a half -hearted seeking.

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He also says we are to seek him humbly. So, you know, while we are pleading with the

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King to give us what we need for life, there isn't an attitude of entitlement. Obviously, it's coming as a beggar.

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The passage in Isaiah 55, you know, seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near, let the wicked.

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So this isn't an invitation to people that deserve. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts.

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And the picture there is that God would freely offer them this banquet by God's own payment.

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So we seek him humbly. We're desperate. We're not entitled. We come as beggars. We don't come offering

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God partial payment. If so, I see that God has given Christ his son.

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So Jesus plus anything ruins it. You know, in a sense, we can think of it this way. The King meets us at the door.

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And if you bring anything to him other than Christ and the promises attached to Christ, then you're refused entrance.

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You know, Jesus plus my membership of church. Jesus plus my baptism. Jesus plus my quiet times. So, you know, that sounds like an easy thing for a person.

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You would think, well, it's hard for me to give up sin. But, you know, it's not hard to say, you know, just Jesus.

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But really, I think it is. It's pretty difficult for people like us to be serious about religion and not to add our religion to Christ for hope.

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He talks about that as this gospel market, how everything there is at no cost.

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Not like you were saying, not half cost, but no cost. And how when we come with our stuff, we come proudly and we're offended that there's no cost attached, that I can't pay for it.

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But it's only the proud that's offended. The person who's desperate is not offended that there's help here available at no cost.

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Yeah. And I think this, you know, I think that a right understanding of this kind of steers us between two extremes that we find today.

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One extreme is we could call it easy believism. And that's where you come to the marketplace of Christ. And everything's, it's like penny day.

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Everything's a penny. Doesn't matter what it used to cost. Forgiveness is a penny. God's love is a penny. You know, adoption into his family is a penny.

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So the bar is so low. All you have to do is kind of tip your hat to Jesus and you're in. Well, that's easy believism.

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But the opposite of that is kind of, you know, what we think of as like a really, really devout kind of approach, you know.

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So, you know, the cost of discipleship and Bonhoeffer's book. There's a lot of good points in that book.

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But if you're not careful, you get the idea that costly grace, Bonhoeffer says, is the opposite of this cheap grace.

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But I think actually that's not the best way to state it. I think it's, it's not just that it's costly.

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So it's not penny day and it's not a hundred dollar day. It's, you know, it's not penny day. It's not million dollar day.

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Like, well, man, let me, let me kind of work up some more before I come. It's that it's so expensive.

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You couldn't ever pay for it at all. So it is very costly, but it's so costly, no man will ever pay for it.

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It's the God man. And so we come, like you said, only, we only will come if we're humble enough to be the beggar, to take the food that is so expensive that you can never buy it.

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And yet, so, and yet because of the work of Christ, it's completely free, you know?

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So it's a paradox there. But I think that's the only way to steer between easy believism and kind of a legalistic approach to conversion.

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To, to come like that and to leave all your stuff behind and all your efforts behind, we have to also seek

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Him repentantly, turning from what we are, as well as what we have, our good things, as well as our bad things and leaving them behind.

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Not trying to, to come with our arms full, but recognizing that we have nothing to offer.

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And that's a, again, a blow to pride to realize that and then to be willing to do that. But we must repent.

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We're like the person in the scripture who finds a field that has a great treasure in it.

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And because of the desire to have that treasure, we're willing to part with everything else that I can have that.

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So it's not giving up the, just the bad stuff.

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It's maybe even giving up what seems like the good stuff to have something that's so much better. Yeah. So the shameful sins, we know, yeah, you shouldn't bring, you shouldn't bring the girlfriend, uh, you know, to the wife and say,

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I want to restore my, my relationship with my wife because I've been an unfaithful person. Well then why would you bring her?

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You know, if you're serious about seeking the Lord, are you going to drag your favorite sins right up to God?

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Well, no, but like you said, but what about the good stuff? What about all the things that I would say to God deep within when no one else is listening, but God, I'm pretty good.

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I'm, I deserve a little bit of your love. I deserve more than that person deserves because of this and whatever this is, you'll have to lay it in the dust.

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And that takes a work of God that, I mean, it's one thing to see the foul stuff and say, well, I should leave that behind.

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But the good stuff, um, to, to want to leave that behind is a work of the

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Lord. Yeah. So to seek him repentantly, seek him believingly.

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So the things that we've been looking at, uh, these great doctrines leading up to this sermon, we could just look at those as examples.

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Do I really believe what God says about himself? Do I really believe what God says about the law?

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Do I then believe what God says about me? Yes. Do I believe what he says about the work of Christ?

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If he helps me, I will believe him. I'll risk everything on the fact that Christ is true.

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Then we will seek him. It's easy to think of Hebrews chapter 11, that without faith, it's impossible to please

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God because no one will really seek the Lord unless he believes that God is, and that God is a rewarder of those that seek him.

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If all you have is a sense of shame and guilt and emptiness, but you are not convinced that the

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King means you good, you would never go to that King. It's only the combination of, uh, you know, believing what he says about me, but also believing what he says about the work of his son.

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When those two come together, then a man seeks, you know, but until then he doesn't.

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So seeking him believingly. We must also seek him perseveringly.

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We must keep seeking until he answers and not be dissuaded by anything less.

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There's a real temptation to, uh, hear a number of temptations here. One is to seek the wrong thing.

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We could try to seek, um, after peace or to seek assurance or to seek, um, conversion as a, we want to be converted, but ultimately what we need is

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God. We want to seek God and not a short stop. Yeah. And not, not an experience.

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Like I need the experience. And God gives us like the things you mentioned, peace, assurance, even the experience.

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God gives us those things if we seek him. Um, but like you said, if stopping short, if we seek something good other than God, we are liable to get it and then say, that's all

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I wanted. Like really all I wanted to know is I wasn't going to go to hell. So I have a sense of assurance now. And then you can always tell that in a person that they've sought and found the wrong thing.

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If after like initial kind of, you know, there seems to be a real earnestness for God after that initial kind of flash in the pan religion, they stopped following Christ.

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But a person that seeks the Lord, when we have the Lord, one of the evidences is we continue to seek him.

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I mean, there continues to be a delight to cultivate a relationship with that God. And we don't stop when he says to us, you are mine and I'm yours.

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That's a help for the person who is seeking to evaluate themselves and not, uh, be overly enthusiastic about initial excitement to press on until you have to make sure you're seeking the

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Lord. And he's answered you. It's also though a help to, uh, to ministers or to others who are dealing with souls as you are dealing with souls.

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Again, we're excited about any work of the Lord, but we want to make sure that it is the work of the

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Lord. And it's not, uh, you know, seeds springing up this soon choked out and doesn't really bear fruit.

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Yeah. Yeah. Really the, the parable of the soils is a, is a, it's an alarming and necessary parable for us.

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Um, you know, one thing we want to say is in seeking perseveringly, you might find that even in the church setting, there are discouragements to seek the

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Lord. And you wouldn't think that you would think that, look, when I get together with God's people, when I hear God's word read or preached, you know, when

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I'm in a prayer meeting, it's going to be all pushing me toward Christ. And we wish it was always that way, but sometimes it's not.

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And sometimes like the Syrophoenician woman who comes to Christ and asks him for help. And he says, it's not fitting to take the food meant for the children to give it to the dogs.

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All right. So at that point in his ministry, he was reaching the Jews and she was not a

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Jew. So in a sense, he's saying, it's not time to give you what I've come to give to the Jews. And her response is so wonderful.

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She doesn't say, you're right, Lord, I don't deserve any of this and walks away in gloom. She says, even the dogs get crumbs from a table.

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Like, can you give me a crumb? I'm not leaving until I get a crumb. And so he says he has never seen faith like that in Israel, you know, and here's a woman who's not a

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Jew. Wonderful picture of persevering. What if when you're looking and we have many people as pastors,

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I can think of so many that say, look, I sought the Lord. I read my Bible every day. I cried out to the

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Lord. I said, please save me. But he didn't do it. And so I'm done with him. And they walk off. And you want to say to them, you should have sought him.

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You should have beat against the gates of heaven by faith until he answered. And he would have answered.

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But so this apparent seeking that only lasts a little bit and then you give up and go off and live for yourself. You know, that's not the kind of seeking that we want.

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We want the kind of seeking like the Syrophoenician woman that even if God himself seems to be discouraging, we don't leave him alone.

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Or you can think of the blind man, you know, son of David, have mercy on me.

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And so the disciples, what if Christians are discouraging? What if the preacher's discouraging? You know, he says that he says wonderful things from the pulpit, but he gets out of the pulpit and his life doesn't match it.

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And you think, forget it. I'm done with this stuff. Or fellow people sitting on the pew beside you.

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What if they're not even interested in the sermon and you're there to find Christ? They're chatting or they're not paying attention.

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And it's very discouraging to a seeker. And we hope that's not the situation. But what if it is? In the case of Bartimaeus, even the disciples came to him and said, quit bothering

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Jesus. What if a person in the church turned to you when you were seeking the Lord and said to you, you know what?

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Jesus is pretty busy today. Why don't you go somewhere else? Why don't you just go back to living for yourself? Would you say to yourself, fine,

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I've had enough of this religion? Or would you say, no, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me, you know, cry out all the more loudly.

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And that would be great advice. If you find church discouraging, if you find even the

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Bible discouraging, you're discouraging, cry out all the louder. God have mercy on my soul for your namesake, you know, save me.

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So different ways to seek. Then he talks about when to seek. He starts off by saying, seek him when you're young.

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And the logic is pretty clear. Why not live your whole life with God, by God, for God?

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Why wait until the last moments of a life and kind of give God the leftovers? If God is as good as he says he is, then you would want to seek him early.

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Another time to seek the Lord, as Jarrett mentions it, is in finding times.

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The passage speaks of seeking the Lord while he may be found. And there are times when it seems like the

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Lord is especially near to us and dealing with us. And why would you waste such an opportunity?

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God doesn't have to come near and deal with you. But if he has, then press forward and cry out to him.

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Don't don't waste that moment. Yeah. Think of a kind of an ancient world picture.

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Think of a king who is traveling through all the region of his, you know, of his lands.

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And, you know, and he's going to come through your town. And the king's never done that before. Your town's small and insignificant.

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You know, he doesn't come to little towns. But there he goes. And you see this entourage. And so all these, you know, all these attendants are going and then there's the king and his carriage or whatever.

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Wouldn't you want to make the most of that? You know, wouldn't you want to be out at the end of your driveway or on the street to see him?

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When God is dealing with you, when the scripture seems to be particularly effective, bothering you, stirring you, you know, when you can't seem to shake it, that's the time that the

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Puritans would say, seek him in finding times, times like those. He gives some motivations for seeking.

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And really, it's just the motivations that are found in the passage. All these wonderful promises that God will be all these things to us, that he would freely feed us.

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He would forgive us. He would, you know, bring us to himself in peace. So that's all the motivation we need.

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Now, before we come to the application, he talks in on page 196.

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There's a great quote there that we noticed, I suppose, especially being people that are called to preach.

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It's interesting that he says that the people that he preached to often complained that he was kind of a gloomy preacher, that he was always kind of saying, you know, you always tell us how sinful we are.

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And so this is what he said. He says, it is frequently said among you that I never prophesy any good concerning you, that I preach you all to hell and there

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I leave you, that I give you no encouragement and such like. What's his answer to that?

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In answer to such, I would say, how can I bless those whom the

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Lord has not blessed? And he gives a couple of passages to talk about, you know, saying peace, peace, when there really isn't peace, that's not really loving.

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And then he says this, the word of God does not furnish me with a single sentence with which to comfort or encourage any man that will persist in his sin.

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So if you plan to still love your sin, I have not one sentence from the Bible to encourage you.

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Then he goes on to say this, but it does abound with encouragements to those who will forsake sin and return to the

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Lord. So really a great response to people who might unjustly say, well, you know, you only say discouraging things to me.

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Imagine a parent whose child kind of throws that up, you know, a teenage child maybe says, you're always down on me, you know, and there's a lot of ways to, you know, kind of trick your parents.

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And, you know, you make these big complaints and you expect your parents to say, oh, I'm so sorry, but it'd be really a great, that'd be a great response for a parent.

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You know, I have so many kind things I'd like to say to you, but I cannot say them if you continue to love self above Christ.

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So great, great response there. So what's his application here? Well, before we even get into the application, he mentions that he feared, as you just said, the majority of his heroes were not seekers.

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And so I think they're kind of geared toward them. He noticed that they were careless in their prayers, talked about their posture, how they lounged as they listened.

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And you can see it. Sometimes you see people who are attentive and people who obviously are not. So I guess these people had checked out.

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Well, for one application that we would suggest for the sermon is maybe a self -test.

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When a person is a seeker, one of the evidences that you're a genuine seeker, so we could say like earnestly, perseveringly, you know, repentantly, believingly.

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Well, one obvious evidence of that would be that your life makes no sense to people unless they know you're looking for something.

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So if I came to your house, Chuck, and I knock on the door and you holler, come in because you're busy doing something.

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So you don't have time to come get me, you know, come open the door. I come in and Chuck is buried head down in the cushions of his couch, rooting around in there.

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I mean, I would think that was really weird. Like, well, hey, Chuck, what are you doing? But when

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I see that, I would probably recognize you've lost something and you really need to find it. So it's so desperate.

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Like, you don't have, like, I don't have time to come answer the door. I got to find this thing, you know? So when we think about seeking, the activity of a seeker would look really strange, except when people realize, oh, you've lost something and you really want it.

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So for a Christian, I mean, so for a person seeking the Lord, there is a sense in which that physical, you know, picture is reflected spiritually.

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That is, you begin to make decisions in your life different than you did before. You begin to make these decisions because you're seeking something and your old friends look at you and they're confused.

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They think, what is wrong with you? And it's true, your life would not make sense unless there is a

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Christ worth finding and you are desperate. You gave an illustration earlier.

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Yeah, so Peter mentions that, you know, that your time of living like the

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Gentiles has passed. You formerly were carousing and all those things, but now you don't do that anymore.

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And he mentions how the people are surprised that you don't follow after them doing that. And so, you know, you seem strange because you don't live like you used to live.

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Yeah. Well, seeking, as Tozer has often pointed out, A .W. Tozer would say that the

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Christian is a paradox because they have found what God has offered, but it's infinite.

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And so they continue to seek. It's not like, you know, it's not like a seeker who's lost it. It's a seeker who every morning you wake up and God says to the finite life,

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I am infinitely yours. And you think, can I have more? Yes. And so, you know, we cultivate the constant behavior of a seeker who has already found, you know, and it's the wonderful paradox of the

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Christian life. We hope that you'll take time to read this. If you cannot find this book, and it can be difficult to find, just go to the show notes.