In case you haven’t noticed yet I often preach things
that I need to learn.
Jonathan Edwards, a great preacher of the
period in American history known as the Great Awakening, said in his sermon
entitled, “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” that;
There
is a great deal of difference between a willingness not to be damned, and a
being willing to receive Christ for your Savior. You have the former; there is
no doubt of that: nobody supposes that you love misery so as to choose an
eternity of it; and so doubtless you are willing to be saved from eternal
misery. But that is a very different thing from being willing to come to
Christ: persons very commonly mistake the one for the other, but they are quite
two things. You may love the deliverance, but hate the deliverer. (1)
(1) Jonathan
Edwards, “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” www.jonathan-edwards.org,
(accessed 7.16.2014).
So people can love the idea of being saved but really
have little regard for their Saviour. I am wondering how many Christians truly
love their deliverer.
I need to learn how to truly love my Lord, love my
Saviour, love my Creator.
Moses said to the Israelites and had written down for
posterity;
Deuteronomy 6:4 ¶ Hear, O
Israel: The LORD our God is one
LORD: 5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy
God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And God told Moses to
also tell the people;
Leviticus 19:18 Thou shalt
not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself: I am
the LORD.
The Lord Jesus Christ
reaffirmed when a lawyer asked Him what the great commandment in the Law was;
Matthew 22:37 Jesus said
unto him, Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. 40 On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
What does it mean to love God with all of your heart,
soul, and mind, and as Mark recorded in Mark 12:30 Jesus as adding, with all thy strength?
What does the very first principle of the Christian
life entail? Do we have a complete understanding or one that just satisfied our
mean-spiritedness in that we’ve done enough by doing what God has said to do
and not doing what He has said not to do and condemning other people who fall short?
Or is our understanding limited to merely reverence or awe so we can put God on
a shelf and take Him down and dust Him off on Sunday to satisfy our desire to
justify ourselves and feel holy?
We can find verses to limit ourselves to a definition
that makes us feel justified if we want.
But what about a complete understanding of what it
means to love God, one that doesn’t violate the spirit and intent of what the
Holy Spirit has given us through the men who wrote the Bible?
In one aspect God is our parent. As Paul noted in
quoting a pagan poet;
Acts 17:27 That they should
seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be
not far from every one of us: 28 For in
him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets
have said, For we are also his offspring.
We are His offspring? In the form He took as a man,
the Lord Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God the Old Testament also talks
about how we are His offspring. Jesus quoted the first line of Psalm 22 from
the Cross to direct us to it. In that Psalm it says.
Psalm 22:30 A seed shall
serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.
How do you love a parent? How is that love expressed?
Well, there are several things that seem to follow the profession of love for
someone who gave you life and sustained you in your helplessness.
The first
evidence of a love for God I want to talk about is obedience. Moses said to the
Israelites;
Deuternomy 7:9 Know
therefore that the LORD thy God,
he is God, the faithful God,
which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations;
See how and connects
two like things; loving God and keeping His commandments?
Jesus confirmed;
John 14:15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.
It is kind of interesting how Jesus defined the
essence of the Law given to Moses in those verses in Matthew and then capped it
all off with a new commandment that affirmed the essence of the old ones.
John 13:34 A new
commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you,
that ye also love one another. 35 By
this shall all men know that ye
are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
Just think about those verses again in Matthew 22,
Mark 12, John 13 and 14. Christ’s commandment for us and our love for our
brothers and sisters in Christ is so intertwined as to be indivisible as John
also wrote;
1John 4:15 Whosoever shall
confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.
16 And we have known and believed the
love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in
God, and God in him.
17 ¶ Herein is our love made perfect, that we may
have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this
world. 18 There is no fear in love; but
perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is
not made perfect in love. 19 We love
him, because he first loved us. 20 If a
man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth
not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
21 And this commandment have we from
him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.
5:1 ¶ Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ
is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that
is begotten of him. 2 By this we know
that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.
3 For this is the love of God, that we
keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. 4 For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the
world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. 5 Who is he that overcometh the world, but he
that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?
So, let me ask you. Is proof of our love for God, we Gentile
Christians, a rote following of the Law given to Moses and our condemnation of
everyone else who falls short? Or is the proof of our love for God the love we
have for our brothers and sisters in Christ and how faithful we are to the
doctrines of Christ; who He is, what He came for, and how we will spend
eternity with Him?
Remember what Paul said about the Law given to Moses?
Galatians 3:23 But before
faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should
afterwards be revealed. 24 Wherefore the
law was our schoolmaster to bring us
unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. 25 But after that faith is come, we are no
longer under a schoolmaster. 26 For ye
are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
Is Christ talking about obedience to the Law given to
Moses or obedience in faith to Him? He told the Jews very clearly;
John 6:28 ¶ Then said they
unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God? 29 Jesus answered and said unto them, This is
the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.
Now don’t get me wrong. The Law, the Ten Commandments,
are very important. They represent God’s standard of righteousness in the sense
of the moral laws. That has not changed. But, you aren’t proving you love God,
love Christ, by simply saying; I go to church, I tithe, I pray, I read my
Bible, I don’t curse, drink, smoke, look at porn or do immoral things, and I
vote Republican, and give to the NRA. You could be totally cold to God and do
all those things and look pretty good to others who believe like you do. You
don’t have to love Him to do those things.
You certainly don’t prove you love God by being
mad-as-all-get-out because others on TV do wrong and you think they ought to be
exiled to Mars. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying you aren’t proving
your love for God that way.
No, you prove your love for God, for Christ, loving
your brothers and sisters in Christ through Him and believing what He said
about Himself.
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto
him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man
cometh unto the Father, but by me. 7 If ye had known me,
ye should have known my Father
also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him…9 Jesus saith unto
him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?
The first proof of your love for God is
your obedience in loving your brothers and sisters in Christ all over God’s
green earth and here in your presence and your belief that He is God, your
faith in Him, and trusting in His righteousness and not your own to get to
Heaven.
The next evidence I want to talk about in showing that
you love God is trust. When I was a
small child I completely trusted my Dad. He could do no wrong and I believed
that anything he did for me was for my benefit.
Even though I screamed and cried after being spanked I
never once thought my father spanked me because he hated me. When he taught me
to Box and would beat the living snot out of me I never thought he was being
cruel. I craved his attention. One of the things he used to say to me when I
was older about what he loved when I was his little boy was me standing in the
car seat next to him (this was before car seats when a stiff arm was the only
thing between a kid and eternity in a car crash) one of the things was me
saying happily, “We has lots o’ time togedder don’t we Daddy?”
I just wanted to be with him and I trusted him
completely. If he said it, it was true in my finite mind even if he was fudging
the truth a bit like telling me that I got here when a buzzard dropped me on a
flat rock and the sun hatched me.
One of the things I’ve loved about my animals; from
the Belgian Shepherd named Rinnie who was my companion as a child to my cats in
my old age has been their trust. They want to be with me. They expect kindness
and gentleness from my hand. And if I must force them to take medicine they
forgive me quickly. It is a precious thing to me for my old cat to rest her
head on my arm and throw her paw over it, just feeling safe and secure from all
alarm.
Trusting God has always been difficult for me. I fear
Him. I don’t always think that this or that will turn out okay. I assume that
at the end of every struggle or challenge there will be a lot of pain. I am not
an optimist. But, God promises things when we trust Him.
First, there is something call perfect peace, something I crave.
Isaiah 26:3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee:
because he trusteth in thee.
He promises wisdom and guidance if we trust Him.
Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the
LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. 6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall
direct thy paths.
Trust isn’t just optimism though. It is accepting that
sometimes what God causes or allows to happen to you hurts. The word evil is sometimes used for trouble,
disaster, pain, suffering, and calamity.
Matthew 6:34 Take therefore
no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of
itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
So, here we have an indication of how painful life can
be.
Job 2:10 But he said unto
her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive
good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In
all this did not Job sin with his lips.
Lamentations 3:37 ¶ Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it
not? 38 Out of the mouth of the most
High proceedeth not evil and good?
I pray for God’s mercy every day. But, I need to learn
to trust Him even when things happen I don’t want to happen.
Job 13:15a Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him…
Then, there is this scene with the Hebrew young men
threatened by Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar.
Daniel 3:14 Nebuchadnezzar
spake and said unto them, Is it
true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship
the golden image which I have set up? 15
Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet,
flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall
down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into
the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands? 16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and
said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are
not careful to answer thee in this matter. 17
If it be so, our God
whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will
deliver us out of thine hand, O
king. 18 But if not, be it known unto
thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image
which thou hast set up.
The idea that you may
have to trust Him to your death or that while you know He could deliver you
from something horrible, He might not, is a terrifying prospect.
Trusting that God knows
what He’s doing and that, in the end, He knows what He’s doing in all issues
that He allows to happen even ones that rhyme with cancer, car accidents, and
your kid having a drug overdose is a terrifying thought, just terrifying.
And yet, He tells us
not to worry about anything, to not be full of care;
Philippians 4:6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer
and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.
He has blessed us with
so much, protected us in so many situations we are not even aware of, and so
many times not let us suffer the consequences of what we so richly deserve and
yet, in the end we may suffer a great deal. But, we must trust Him. He loves us,
He has everything in His power, and we have an eternity with Him waiting on us
when we cross death’s threshold.
I obeyed my father,
when I obeyed him, because I loved him and feared him. I trusted him because I
knew he loved me even when what he did didn’t make me feel very good.
I wanted to spend time
with my Dad. How much time do we spend with God? That is another way you show
your love for your Creator, by spending as much time in prayer as you can
talking to Him and as much time as you can reading His words in his Bible,
letting Him speak to your heart of hearts.
History tells us of
famous men like John Wesley or George Washington spending as much as two hours
per day in prayer. The Bible tells us to be in a constant state of prayer.
1Thessalonians 5:17 Pray without ceasing.
Romans 12:12 Rejoicing in
hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer;
When I was a kid we
were taught little prayer poems, like some kind of magic chant, I suppose we
expected would protect us but I don’t remember much meaning or heartfelt
emotion behind them.
“God is great. God is
good. And we thank Him for this food. Amen.”
Or;
“Now I lay me down to
sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray
the Lord my soul to take.”
They would have been
good prayers if they were heartfelt and earnest, but they seem pretty lame to
me now, being repeated mindlessly each day.
I always appreciate a
heartfelt prayer, one that comes from deep inside a person, rather than just
something to fill the air when they are asked to pray.
Matthew 6: 5 ¶ And when
thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the
corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you,
They have their reward.6 But thou, when
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to
thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall
reward thee openly. 7 But when ye pray,
use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do:
for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Jesus gave us two model
prayers at different times which show just how direct and concise God wants
prayers to be.
Matthew 6:9 ¶ After this
manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in
earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we
forgive our debtors. 13 And lead us not
into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Luke 11:1 ¶ And it came to
pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his
disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his
disciples. 2 And he said unto them, When
ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom
come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. 3 Give us day by day our daily bread. 4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive
every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver
us from evil.
Understand that a
temptation can be anything that tries or tests your faith, from sickness to
your own sin, while evil is trouble or disaster, even just a bad day but here
they are synonymous. A temptation is an evil in that it can call your faith
into question. For instance, the pagan Roman or fundamentalist Muslims’ demand
that a Christian renounce Christ or die. That is a temptation that they faced
and many Christians around the world face daily.
In these prayers we see
that God wants to be our acknowledged source of life and safety and peace.
Centuries ago common people believed that every moment was a miracle and that
God’s hand could be seen in virtually every event, every second of every day, in
some way. Then, Isaac Newton and his colleagues came a long and reduced God to
a sort of benign first cause. They started looking at everything from its
smallest part on up rather than looking at the big picture, looking at God and
the majesty of His creation on down.
It did not take long
for wicked, sinful mankind to simply remove God as the first cause and blame it
all on random chance or just the nature of the way things are without
intelligence behind it.
We need to spend more
time in prayer, talking to God, and we need to spend more time in the Bible,
listening to God, and we need to spend some time in silence, contemplating God.
This brings me to the next thing I wanted to discuss with you which, as I said,
if you only take this alone without the personal dimension of love and joy you,
too, will reduce God to a first cause and then push Him out the door entirely.
The next way we show
God our love for Him, the next way it is expressed is in our awe of Him, our
reverence of Him, and, yes, our fear.
The Bible says;
Psalm 111:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they
that do his commandments: his
praise endureth for ever.
Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
What is the fear of the
Lord? Shall we spend all our time hiding under a table in the toolshed? The
Bible defines itself.
Proverbs 8:13 The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the
froward mouth, do I hate.
Proverbs 9:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.
Paul talks about Godly
fear as reverence;
Hebrews 12:28 Wherefore we
receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may
serve God acceptably with reverence and godly
fear:
Psalm 33:8 Let all the
earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.
His name is holy, not
something to be spoken lightly or part of a curse.
Psalm 111:9 He sent
redemption unto his people: he hath commanded his covenant for ever: holy and reverend is his name.
What He has done and is
doing is beyond the understanding of the finest minds of men.
Psalm
19:1 « To the chief Musician, A
Psalm of David. » The heavens
declare the glory of God; and
the firmament sheweth his handywork.
In the book of Job,
when God answers Job out of a whirlwind, He explains that the reality we know
and even that we have no experience of comes directly from Him. I’ll just use
one part of His declaration to make a point here.
Job 38:25
¶ Who hath divided a watercourse for the
overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; 26 To cause it to rain on the earth, where no
man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; 27 To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and
to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? 28 Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten
the drops of dew? 29 Out of whose womb
came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? 30 The waters are hid as with a stone, and the
face of the deep is frozen. 31 Canst
thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?
32 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in
his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? 33 Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst
thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? 34
Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may
cover thee? 35 Canst thou send
lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are? 36 Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or
who hath given understanding to the heart? 37
Who can number the clouds in wisdom? or who can stay the bottles of
heaven, 38 When the dust groweth into
hardness, and the clods cleave fast together? 39 Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill
the appetite of the young lions, 40 When
they couch in their dens, and abide in the covert to lie in wait? 41 Who provideth for the raven his food? when
his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat.
In God’s rhetorical interrogation of
Job He asks several questions which may seem perplexing to us. In verse 25 a
connection is made between lightning and thunder, which we now understand more
clearly. Aristotle, as late as the third century BC, attributed thunder to a
collision between clouds. The
disturbing, again, implication in verse 25 is that even when there is flooding,
God disperses overflowing water as He sees fit. This is a frightening prospect
if we consider what the Bible is telling us that even in a seemingly random
process God is in control. Did you ever imagine that?
Here, God speaks about how He causes
all things, even where man is nowhere around to witness the things. It rains in
places where man is not to soak the parched ground and cause plants to grow
that man will never see. Think about this. From the dense forests of Borneo to
the jungles of Brazil there is life and there are events happening that we will
never know about experientially. There are things happening a million
light-years from us that we have no knowledge of now or at any time in our
lives. Man is not the measure of all things as the Greek philosopher,
Protagoras said. The universe God built for Himself. We are a part of His plan.
But, we are not the only part.
Verse 28 places God squarely as the
author of every drop of dew. Think of that. Imagine it, if you will. Every
snowflake, the ice on a pond, the frost on the ground, all of it, every
microscopic piece of it created by God, not just the result of a random
process, an, “accident of nature,” but a direct execution of divine will. It
staggers the modern mind.
The anthropologist, Susan Friend
Harding, wrote, “The membrane between disbelief and belief is thinner than we
think.” (2) Most Christians in America seem to believe in a caretaker God, like
a gardener, watching over life processes and natural events that He can only
affect in a minimal way by exerting Himself from outside of the process, by
interrupting the process, like a landlord we call on to fix the plumbing in our
apartment when it leaks. American Christians, even fundamentalists, can’t wrap
their minds around the God presented in the Bible. They can wrap their minds
around the God presented in their culture. That God is a sort of manager, or at
times a warrior-king, or at times a big brother, and at times even a
benefactor, but He is most certainly not the God presented in the Bible who
controls every moment everywhere in His universe. He is neither surprised nor
at a disadvantage when a thing happens. He either made it happen or permitted
it to happen. Period. And that is just and right and as it should be, your
fear, your grief, your pain, your discomfort notwithstanding.
God now moves masterfully in His
speech to the farthest reaches of outer space, to the nearby atmosphere of
earth, and into the human heart, the spiritual heart of understanding, emotion,
and reason, to underscore His sovereign reign over the sum total of reality. He
even speaks of causing clods of dirt and providing food for wild animals and
birds. He does this, Himself. He is the author of it.
This is a different earth, a
different universe, than what we are used to imagining. Be honest with
yourself, when the snow piled deep in your yard you didn’t think of it being a
direct act of God any more than when you started your car did you think
that.
We have lived for several hundred
years in a universe we thought was governed by blind forces. The only
difference between many Christians and atheists have been that Christians
thought there was a benevolent and powerful entity who wound up those forces
and who would intervene occasionally to interrupt those blind forces on the
Christian’s behalf. Both are wrong. Dead wrong.
(2) Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Falwell: Fundamentalist Language
and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 58.
Are you in awe of God?
Do you bow your head in reverence to the mind, the Spirit, capital S, of such a
being? Can you even imagine His thought processes, His reasoning, in the things
He is capable of doing and does?
When we think about it
we should be stunned. Unbelieving people will tell you that something came from
nothing by random chance or rather, a “quantum fluctuation” but common-sense
tells you that something does not come from nothing without an intelligent mind
involved.
Not only did God create
the universe but He holds it together. Unbelievers can not understand why if
attraction is based on gravitational pull and that on mass why 99% of the mass
of the universe must be missing. What holds it together, they fret? They imagine
things they cannot see or experiment on like Dark Matter. But, then they add
Dark Energy to the list of things they fantasize about in order to avoid God.
And yet, our own Bible tells us what, who rather, holds things together.
Colossians 1:17 And he is
before all things, and by him all things consist.
This God who simply is;
Exodus 3:14 And God said
unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say
unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
…is unbelievably
amazing in every aspect. We should be on our faces in complete and utter
astonishment all the time. But, we are finite creatures and like a bug or bird
we must go about the task of living in this reality. But we are missing out on
the most wonderful thing of all, thinking about His glory and who He is.
Finally we should be in
awe for the fact, in wonder, that the God who forms stars in the furthest
reaches of space looked down into the earth and picked, “a certain man,” or, “a
certain woman,” as the Bible so cleverly labels those anonymous people who
performed a certain function as a part of God’s will. He picked you to spend
eternity with Him. He offered you His unlimited and undying mercy and you
received the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior, trusting in His
righteousness only and not your own for your salvation and eternal life. But,
He loved us first at the Cross, an event so awesome it has boggled men’s minds.
The God who created us, this awesome being came to live as one of us, died,
paying the penalty for our sins at our own hands, and then rose again for our
justification and eternity with Him.
He is simply astounding
and there are no words to describe the God of the Bible. If you don’t love Him
now I hope you can learn to love Him. It is what He wants from us. Even under
the Old Testament Law He wanted to walk with us.
Micah 6:8 He hath shewed
thee, O man, what is good; and
what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
thy God?
Obedience, trust,
spending time, and awe are some ways we show our love for God in our hearts.
I hope you will
consider what I’ve said. It is incomplete as I am sure you can think of other
things to say. I just want to love my Lord and to keep that in the forefront of
my mind. Christians can get so wrapped up on the doing of things that we don’t
stop to contemplate and experience a love for our Creator, our Saviour. God
bless you all.
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