Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

Our Great God

What you believe about God determines how you will live, what you live for, and why. It determines how you view yourself and others and how you interact with them. It determines your ethics and priorities and sense of reverence and gratitude or the lack thereof. It determines how you view history and culture and life and family and children and race and sexual choices and the created order and painful circumstances and lifestyle choices and education and spending habits and what you do with your time and the risks you take or refuse to take and how you will face death. It's all tied up in what you believe about God.

What DO you think about when you think about God?  And where did you get those ideas?  This is important.  We all have ideas about God, but the important thing to ask is this: Are they the right ideas?  And where did we get those ideas? 

 

A few years ago, Al Mohler and Marianne Williamson appeared together on a news talk show.  Al Mohler is the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (the seminary Jared graduated from), and Marianne Williamson is a “New Age” religious practitioner.   Ms. Williamson said something about how the “god” she knows wouldn’t judge people, or tell them they were sinners, or send people to hell.   The host asked Al Mohler for his response to that statement.  Dr. Mohler said something to this effect: “Marianne, where are you getting these ideas about God?  They do not come from His Word.  You are just talking about a god of your own imagination.” 

 

God isn’t merely who we imagine Him to be or want Him to be.  He is who He is.  And we discover who He is from Scripture.  Therefore, our view of God must conform as closely as possible to that of Scripture. But many churches have, and are still continuing, to move away from that. Not long ago the committee that is putting together a new hymnal for the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (a liberal denomination, not to be confused with the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America) dropped the hymn “In Christ Alone” because it contains the phrase, “’Til on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” I guess the mention of God's wrath (one of the attributes for which He is to be praised) is no longer permissible in that denomination.

 

The cry of our hearts should be the same as that of C. S. Lewis when he said: "I want God, not my idea of God." That is, I want to know Him as He really is and not as I (for whatever reason) would want Him to be. And that is what the Bible gives us: God as He really is; a God so majestic as to make us kneel in adoring awe or take our breath away as we worship before Him.

If we want to have right thoughts and ideas about God, we need to get them from His Word. 

And so, beginning this Sunday, we are going to begin a new sermon series, “Our Great God.”  Over the next several weeks, we will look together at the Word of God and discover what it teaches us about God.