Sunday Sermon

 

God Who Is

Isaiah 48:9

But for my own sake I will be patient. People will praise me for not becoming angry and destroying you.

Humans need God in our lives and working in us. This is not said because we need God to save us from the punishment of our sin which our God does but because we as humans are lost without God. We are told that God breathes His spirit into us and that we are created in His image. How can we even image that we are not deeply connected to the God of creation? When we reject the God who created us we reject the very core of who we are. We need God just to exist with any degree of wisdom and direction for our lives. I don’t want to talk about being lost because we reject the source of life that is God and so end up in sin but I want to speak just about the basic process of living and how we need God in our lives every day if we are to make sense of life and to get through it. The fact is that we as humans were built to be servants of God. From this we can know that we will serve something because that is our nature. If we do not serve God we will serve other things but those will not give us the hope and peace that serving God gives. All the things that God teaches us are aimed at how to be good servants of both God and other people. When we learn to serve God we find that we are at our best and that is a wonderful thing. Rejecting God also cuts us off from the wisdom of God which we need to get through our everyday lives. I know that when we reject the wisdom of God we often find the result is anger and frustration. God’s wisdom is not some high flying thing that only really smart people need but it is about our regular lives and how to live them with meaning and purpose. One of the things that God’s wisdom does is teach us how to treat other people and that is a powerful thing that will help us as we live each day of our lives. In short we need God to just get by each day and when we seek God and learn about who He is we will find that our lives are made so much better. Each human who serves God becomes a better person and that makes the world better. To get a better world we need to learn what God has to say about our daily lives and make it a point to live by the principles God explains to us. We need God and without God our daily lives get much harder so I am glad that we have a God who wants to show us how to live our lives in the way they should be lived. We don’t worship a mean God who demands we serve Him we worship a God who wants us to know how to live each day with joy and hope no matter what that day brings. This is the God we need and that God is the one who is here with us each day. Giving God glory for all He does is such and easy things to do.

One of the most under represented parts of our God is that we have a God who is interested in giving us direction and explaining to us how the universe works. Leaving all the sin questions to the side we have a God who wants to talk to us about how to live lives of meaning and purpose. God longs to teach us how to live each day with a sense of joy that we cannot find any place else. Think about the Ten Commandments for a second. Again set aside the moral lessons and just look at what it says about how to live. In the Ten Commandments we are to think about and look out for other people. God calls us to restrain ourselves because that restraint is good for us and will help us be psychologically strong and heathy. If we want what our lives were meant to be then learning what God has to say is critical to anything we do. If for no other reason we should work on living by the Ten commandments because it is good for us but yet there is more to that. In one small package God explains the basic moral frame work of the universe. Like the law of gravity the moral law of the universe is a foundational principle that if rejected can only bring trouble to us. Again I don’t want to make this part of sin but I just want to talk about how we are to think and behave that is good for us and good for those around us. Our God wants to help us live our lives and so He offers to give us some great information that will be so helpful to how we live each day. It will require that we learn to think the way God teaches but learning to be righteous loving person is a good way to live. I know that taking directions from God can sometimes be at conflict to what we want and what we think is good for us but that is the whole point. Trusting that God knows what is good for us and wants us to live our best lives is a wonderful part of our faith we do not give God enough credit for. There is this great big God who loves us and cares about us enough to be honest with us and to teach us about life and how to live it. This is a God I want to serve.

A running concept that I talk a lot about in ministry is the idea of what our faith is all about. So many people think that their faith is about obeying commands from God and if they do a good enough job they get to go to heaven. That concept is so wrong it hurts my heart because people are believing the lies of the enemy instead of learning what God calls faith. Yes, we do end up living by the ideas God lays down but it has noting to do with getting to heaven. Living by God’s principles is a response to God Himself. Our faith is in God and who he is so we need to know and understand the very nature of God if we want our faith be what it should be. Our verse gives us a great look into the nature of God in a really simple but effective way. We have a God who wants to be involved in our lives. That seems like such a unsophisticated way of thinking about our faith but it is truly what God is all about. God wants to deal with our sin not because we need it but because God wants to deal with it. It is the very nature of God to redeem people and to save people from the destruction of sin. When we reject God we cut ourselves off from the only source of live and so death can be the only result. But instead of letting us suffer from our own choices God invites us to come to Him so He can fix our broken lives. The nature of God is not to send people to hell but to save people from a terrible choice they have made. This is the God who I worship and the God who I want people to know. Look at the first phrase of the verse. We have God being patient not because it works for us but because it is the nature of God. To understand the magnitude of what this means we need to grasp that God is broken by our rejection of Him not because our rejection means anything to Him but because our rejection means our destruction and that breaks God’s heart. Faith means we trust in a God who always does the right things and loves us enough to die for what we have done. Learning to find joy when God speaks to us about our sin should be a fundamental part of our faith because we know God does so because He cares about us. Trusting God is not about obeying rules or even trusting in miracles but it is about knowing the nature of God and trusting in that. It will take work to get to that point and trusting in a God we can not see and we have no control over is not easy but each step we take us toward believing in a God who’s very substance is to care about us is a good move on our part.

The second half of the verse is so cool because it tells us how much God wants to fix us. Giving God praise because instead of getting mad at us and destroying us God longs to make us right. This is why we trust in God Himself and not what God does. It is the very essence of God to want to deal with what is broken in us. From this essence flows what God does and what God has to say to us. God teaches us because it is his nature to care about us so we should learn what God says because God is right and true and wants us to know that. In fact God should be angry with us because we are doing stupid things that put us at risk but instead of punishing us God is patient with us and tries very hard to persuade us to change what we are doing. When God talks to us about sin He does it to keep us from being ruined by our sin not because He wants us to feel bad because we have done something wrong. There is never a time God will lie to us and He always tells us what is true and right even if the make us uncomfortable. Yes, God does destroy evil but those are rare times when the only answer is that. The choice God wants to make is to sacrifice Himself to save us and that tells us who God is too. We should praise God because He wants to save us from ourselves and to teach us how to live lives of meaning and purpose. Our hope is in this kind of God and that is the kind of faith I want people to have. To trust this God we have to know who He is and what He is about. The great thing is that God does not hide Himself and He even comes and lives with us so we can know Him in greater detail. Are we willing to choose this God and to trust in Him because if we do there is such great blessing?

To end this I want to be clear that there is judgement here and that it is a good thing. Because we have rejected God as the authority over our lives God has judged us guilty and rightly so but again God does not want to punish He wants to redeem. If we choose to reject what God offers then we will reap the curses that occur with those choices. This is not what God wants but God will let us live with the choices we have made. So we can accept God’s authority and his teaching and find the life we were meant to have or we reject this loving and merciful God who wants to save us from ourselves. God for His own sake longs for us to choose Him and we find this God instead of pouring out punishment to us He offers His presence to us. We as believers in the living God need to speak to the world about this amazing God and we need to embrace the nature of this God in all we do.