Getting To Know God

Let me start today by showing you clear evidence of where America stands.

In a recent poll:

- 67% of Americans believe God can solve all of our problems.

- only 18% said they would devote themselves to God.

- 85% said they believe a day of judgment will come upon all of us.

- Less than 10% said they were concerned with that judgment.

Why is there such a discrepancy in the way we think? Why do we claim to believe in a God, yet refuse to follow Him? Could it be that we really don’t know God, and are too stubborn to try to learn about Him?

We talk about a lot of things in our sermons, but today, I thought we might talk about God so we can get to know Him personally.

We preach from the standpoint that there is a God, and He has always been and will always be. We do not try and prove He exists, we know He exists. He wrote His name throughout the Bible and sent it to us – for our benefits.

Throughout history, mankind has wanted to know what God is like; what He looks like and what He feels. Is there any place we can really look to find that information?

We can look in nature and see His hand at work. Look at the wonders of the world. He has given us the beauty of the Grand Canyon; the wonders of the dense forests; and those awesome sunsets! But this only scratches the surface, doesn’t it? If we want to see a complete and detailed picture of God, we need to look no further than Jesus the Christ. Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen My Father.” So, to see God we must first look at Jesus.

Let’s begin by looking at …

1. SEEING GOD IN JESUS

God’s word should be food that nourishes us, not medicine that upsets us. But to be that kind of nourishment, God had to show it to us before we would accept it.

This is not the best analogy, but it will serve to show you what I mean. My dog, Buddy, loves to eat treats. But before he will eat one, he has to sniff it and look at it. He must investigate it so he will know what he is eating.

Man has the same problem trying to accept something into his life. He has to investigate it and try to understand it before he will ever accept it. God’s plans are so much higher than ours that we will never understand Him, so He sent His Son to us, that we might get to know Him through the Son.

JOHN 4:24 says,

‘God is a Spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’

God must have a form, since He made man in His own image, but it is a spiritual form. And we shall never see His physical form while we roam this earth. We will only see God the Father in all His glory, as He really is, in Heaven. So we know that God is a spirit.

And God is a Person. He knows, feels, loves, hears, and speaks. He even acts. The Bible always refers to Him as the living God, but He is not like us; He is not bound by the physical realm in which we are tied. It has been said that no man understands infinity. In other words, think about outer space. It goes on forever; it never stops; it has no boundaries. And we cannot fully understand that because we are creatures of boundaries and limits. Every attribute I just mentioned is also seen in Jesus Christ. But since Jesus was also man, we can begin to understand who God is if we really look at Jesus and get to know Him.

What a wonderful day in glory that will be when we finally make the journey across the Jordan and walk on those golden streets of Heaven. When Paul talked about keeping his focus on the end of the race, that is what he was talking about; the rewards of being taken to Heaven to spend time without end in the presence of our God.

Now let’s look at …

2. HOW HOLY GOD IS

The Bible strains to tell us how holy God is, but it is limited to the words we can understand. And no word we know can fully describe God’s holiness. The Bible says He sits upon the Revelation throne; the angels cry out, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty!” Isaiah was the most righteous man of his time, but when he saw the true holiness of God, he had to hide his face because he felt so unclean in God’s presence. If we could somehow catch even a small glimpse of God’s glory today, we would also hide our heads and cry out in our uncleanness.