All Things New: God Revealed Series

All Things New: God Revealed

Beartown Road Alliance Church

Last week we began a series called All Things New. We’re looking at the amazing transformation that God wants to make in our lives. The purpose of these next few weeks is to restore in us a sense of awe at the nature of God and a sense of gratitude for the way that He loves us. We began with a snapshot of humanity. Not the picture that most of us would like to think that we look like, but a view of reality, a view of the way that Scripture presents man. This picture of humanity, of you and me, is not a popular one. We want to believe that we’re basically good and that we’re OK and that we really don’t need God. We looked at the choice of Adam to sin and the consequences of that in our lives. We are destined to live lives of sin, selfishness, and struggle. Just like our picture of who we are can tend to be skewed, our picture of who God is can tend to be off as well.

On our vacation a few weeks ago, we got to enjoy the beauty of the Adirondacks, it was the first time that I had ever been up into those mountains. It was amazing. I love the mountains. I remember the first time I ever saw real mountains, in high school I was flying into Denver and I remember watching the sun set behind the Rockies and just being in awe of how beautiful they were. When we go and visit the Banks family in Haiti, it’s the same thing. I could sit for hours and just look at the huge mountains off in the distance, there is just something about mountains that I really enjoy. When we moved to Ohio from Syracuse, one of the things that we hated was the landscape of that area. Central Ohio is completely flat. There are highways where you can literally drive for hours and the landscape never changes, its flat as far as the eye can see. It’s very plain and very ugly terrain. When we candidated here, we stopped at my mother’s house in Lewisburg to drop off the kids, and made the drive to Corning up through PA on 15. I think that is one of the prettiest stretches of highway that I have ever been on. We were so happy to see hills and when we got to Corning, we loved the fact that it was in a valley and surrounded on all sides by mountains. We love this area because of the natural beauty. A funny thing happened though. After spending time in the Adirondacks, driving through and enjoying those mountains, when we got back, ours looked smaller somehow. Whereas I would have talked about them as mountains in the past, I find myself referring to them as hills now. When we see something bigger and more impressive, it tends to make everything else pale in comparison.

Just like my perspective on the hills of Corning was changed when I was confronted with the Adirondacks, there are times when I think I know what God is like, I think I have it all figured out and my picture of Him is complete, and then He reveals something more to me or He moves in a situation in some unexpected way and I realize anew that He is beyond what I have imagined, He is bigger than my definition of Him and my perspective is changed.

As we begin our look at God this morning, I want you to understand a few truths as background to these sermons. This is the first.

1) God is bigger than anything we can or will describe this morning.

When Ethan and Catie were little, we used to ask them the question, “How big are you?” And then we’d stretch their little arms out and say “Soooooo big!” Usually this was followed by tickling and laughter. They loved that. Over and over again we’d play the little game. Were they as big as they thought? No, but it was an exercise to impress upon them that they were growing and that they were getting bigger and bigger. When people ask us about God, we can say to them, He’s sooooo big! The difference is that for our kids that answer is and exaggeration, for God, that answer is an understatement.

JOB 11:7 "Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? JOB 11:8 They are higher than the heavens--what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave--what can you know? JOB 11:9 Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.

There is simply no language that can truly describe the God that we serve. God has chosen to make Himself known to us, He has chosen to reveal Himself to us in many different ways, each providing another piece of the puzzle as we begin to put together a picture of God that is far different than what many people imagine. But what we can understand and comprehend will never be the complete picture, there are aspects of who God is that we will never be able to fathom or grasp, in our humanity. We can know Him, we can see what He has revealed, but God is always bigger and there are aspects of His being that will always be a mystery and that we simply could not handle. We cannot know everything about God, but in His love for us, He has revealed to us all that we need to know about His character, His love, and His plan.