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| Posted: 12 Jun 2013 10:01 PM PDT God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth gives way and the mountains fall to the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. There is a river whose stream makes glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts His voice, the earth melts. The LORD Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Come and see the works of the LORD, the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes war cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire. He says 'Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.' The LORD almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. (Psalm 46) Do you know this God? I mean really, do you know this God? Jeremiah 9:23-24, "Thus says the LORD: "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD."" Do not boast about how smart you are. Do not boast about how intellectual you are. Do not boast about how rich you are. You have one boast in this life, and it is that you know God. We’re focusing tonight on our persecuted brothers and sisters in three countries, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. India, a land of a million gods, literally hundreds of millions of gods who are worshiped. I can’t get out of my mind images from Central India walking past Hindu temples and seeing people bowing down before idols, throwing money before idols, weeping before idols, dancing before idols—false gods. They have such a warped perception of God. But ladies and gentlemen, so do we. We have a warped perception of God. I’ll draw your attention to one article on the cover of one section in the Wall Street Journal entitled Redefining God, and listen to the thesis of the article. “Across the country the faithful are redefining God, dissatisfied with conventional images of an authoritarian or paternalistic deity. People are embracing quirky, individualistic conceptions of God to suit their own spiritual needs.” You say, “Yes. That is what the culture is doing." No, it’s what the Church is doing. We have this dangerous tendency today to create God – to redefine God – to be who we want Him to be. And really, we create a god who looks a lot like us. He’s a nice, middle-class, American God. He looks like us, and he thinks like us, and he’s comfortable with our lifestyles. He’s comfortable with our self-saturated, lukewarm faith. He’s comfortable with our apathy. He’s comfortable with half-hearted devotion to him. He’s comfortable with materialistic indulgences. He’s comfortable with all those things, because we are. We fashion a god who looks a lot like us. Don’t miss the danger here. If this is the case, then when we gather together in this room every Sunday, or the church that you are a part of gathers together for worship, and you sing songs and lift your hands out to god, this god that you’ve created, the reality is you’re not worshiping God. You’re worshiping yourselves. And even when we are known as a people who worship in the church, the reality is that the object of our worship has been grossly mis-defined. So I want you to know from the very beginning of our time together tonight that our goal is not to redefine God. He is not open to redefinition and He will not be trifled with. Our goal is not redefinition. Our goal is revelation. We want to see how God has revealed Himself to us in all of His beauty, and all of His grandeur, and all of His terror, and all of His might. We want to see who the God of the Bible is. So if you have a Bible and I hope you do, then let’s get to know the One who wrote it. … What you see after Jeremiah 9 in your Secret Church study guide, are some quotes there from a guy named A.W. Tozer. A little background here, because you will see quotes from Tozer sprinkled throughout our time together tonight. He wrote a little book called Knowledge Of The Holy—which by the way, in the very back of your study guide, there’s a list of recommended reading of some books if you want to go deeper into some of these things. Knowledge Of The Holy is back there. It’s a thin book, one of the classics on the attributes of God, and probably the book, when it comes to the doctrine of God, and understanding who God is, that has had more impact on my life than any other book. Tozer just says things in very powerful ways. So you’re going to see different things that he said, and I kind of want to set the stage before we dive in tonight with some of the things that Tozer challenged me with. I went back and re-read it. Tozer says, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” What comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. He goes on, “Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question ‘What comes into your mind when you think about God?' we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we may be able, with some precision, to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow." I want you to think about that. Your understanding of God affecting what your life is going to look like. And especially among church leaders all across this room. Our understanding of God today will affect what the Church looks like tomorrow. He goes on, It’s not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze and wonder at the I AM, the self-existent self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good—about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. For this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularization of our religion and the decay of our inner lives. Tozer addresses the things, the trifling things, that we fill our minds with and our conversations with, when we neglect contemplating and looking at the being and the essence of who God is. Last quote I want to put before you at the start here. It's when Tozer says, “The heaviest obligation lying before the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him—and of her.” I think there are few things more important we can do together on a Saturday evening than contemplate the being of God and who He is. The challenge is how in the world do we fit this in between now and midnight. This excerpt is from the beginning of Secret Church 4: Who Is God?. To access or purchase Who Is God? in its entirety, go to our Secret Church resources at Radical.net. |
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