Our Omnipresent God Series

Our Omnipresent God

Since this is Super Bowl Sunday, I thought it would be a good idea to begin with some football terminology that has made its way into church.

Draw Play ­ What many children do with the bulletin during the service.

Backfield in Motion ­ Making a trip to the bathroom during the service.

Two-minute Warning ­ The point at which you realize the sermon is almost over and you begin to gather up your belongings.

Instant Replay ­ The preacher loses his notes and falls back on last week’s illustrations.

Sudden Death ­ What happens to the attention span of the congregation if the preacher goes into “overtime”.

Let me briefly summarize where we’ve been so far in our series called, “Getting to Know God.”

We began the New Year with a timely message from the book of Ecclesiastes entitled, “Our God of the Second Chance.” No matter what we’ve been doing, or how we’ve been living, God invites us to get to know Him. If we want our lives to have meaning, we need to live out the conclusions of Solomon ­ to stand in awe of God, and to do what He says.

The second message of this series established the truth that “Our Knowable God” wants us to get to know Him better than we do right now. We can do that by just relying on our Imagination, or we can respond to His Invitation by understanding His Revelation. Instead of just coasting in our relationship with God, He calls us to a serious Investigation so that we can get to know Him deeply and personally.

Two weeks ago, we were moved by Isaiah’s experience of coming into the very presence of the thrice “Holy God.” When we see the Lord’s Majesty, we will come face-to-face with our own depravity and long for the Lord’s Mercy. Once we experience His majesty and His mercy, we are then in position to respond to His Mission.

Last week, as we focused on “Our Creator God,” we learned that God is intimately and personally involved in the creation, development and delivery of life in the womb. All of life is sacred and full of dignity because we have been made in the image of God. By the way, because of the response to last week’s service, we’ve made printed copies of the sermon available in the hallway.

The Omni-Attributes

This morning we’re going to learn about God’s omnipresence. There are really three attributes of God that should always be kept together in your mind ­ they all begin with the four-letter prefix “omni”: Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnipresence. God is all-knowing, He is all-powerful, and He is everywhere present at the same time.

Tony Evans writes that these three attributes always work in tandem:

God knows what needs to be done ­ that’s omniscience.

He has the power to do it ­ that’s omnipotence.

He’s always wherever He needs to be to do whatever needs to be done ­ that’s omnipresence.

My pastor friend Ray Pritchard says that our topic today ­ God’s omnipresence is one of the most difficult doctrines of the entire Bible. The question, Where is God? is a very important question. The seeker wants to know…and so does the skeptic… and so does the guilty sinner so he can run the other way. And so does the hurting person who feels abandoned by the Almighty ­ “Where is God when I need Him?”

The reason this one is so hard for us is that we have nothing to compare it with. We can only be one place at one time ­ except maybe if you’re Regis Philbin! Man, that guy seems to show up all over the place. But, only God is everywhere at the same time. We can’t even be two places at once ­ a fact that we sometimes forget!

Here’s a simple definition of omnipresence: “The Lord our God is everywhere at once.” He is everywhere present all the time. Paul Little states that “God is not a substance spread out in a thin layer all over the earth ­ all of Him is in Chicago, in Calcutta, in Cairo, and in Caracas, at once and the same time.”

Someone else has said that God’s presence is like the air we breathe. Air is odorless, tasteless and invisible. Although, when we lived in Mexico City, it smelled terrible, it tasted bad and you could actually see it! Most of the time we don’t even think about the air we breathe, yet we depend on it for our very existence. Likewise, God’s presence is all around us, and if it were withdrawn, none of us could survive for even one moment.

The Omni-Passage

As we learned last week, Psalm 139 is a rich, deep, and very personal song that declares God’s creation in the womb. It also definitively establishes God’s omniscience and omnipresence. For our purposes this morning, I want to park in verses 7-12. Let’s read this passage together.