My Name Is Noah - And I Made God Smile Series

Introduction

One of the key elements of a good sermon is making sure you have a really good illustration.

For those of you that preach, I know I have had to only come up with 3 so far, but tonight I would like to take you into the world Noah.

Whole sermon is almost an illustration. But through it I would like to show you how a man of God made God smile.

You see we often loose track of the fact that God has emotions. He weeps he cries, he laughs and he smiles. He smiles because of us. We are his pleasure. Through our worship we not only bring him honor, but we make sure he has a good day. He smiled because of what Noah did. Pleasing by what we say and do is called Worship. Now Noah did not have a great praise and worship group onboard the ark – so how did he make God smile, how did he worship him and bring him pleasure. Lets listen as uncle Noah tells his story. See if we can identify 5 points that ensure we can please our father and make him smile. Lets listen to Noah and his testimony:

Noah’s Testimony

Good evening

My name is Noah, the son of Lamech, who was the son of Methusaleh, and he in turn was the son of Enoch… Now there was a man for you. Enoch. Walked with God he did. They say that one day he and God were out walking and God said: "Enoch, we appear to be closer to my home than yours, so why don’t you come on home with me?" Enoch, now there was a man to pattern your life after.

I have been asked tonight to come and tell you of the flood. Not that I get asked much else, I mean Noah and the Flood, that’s my only real claim to fame, I mean no one wants to know about Noah the Home Improvements guy its just flood flood flood…anyway...

Well The flood… I was a young man then. A mere 500 years old. I read your local newspaper while I was waiting for Craig this afternoon. I don’t have to tell you what a wicked place my world was, just look around you. Anyway I don’t want to dwell on what it was like. It was bad.

Hard to raise 3 boys in that kind of atmosphere. Shem, now he was my oldest. Then there was Ham, my 2nd born. And Japheth, he was my youngest boy. They were good boys. It was hard to raise them right in that evil world

But I suppose what saved us was that we loved God and I knew he loved me in the same way that I loved my sons. I was always telling them of God’s faithfulness and power and mercy and love. Even after they were married, we met regularly to worship. We’d offer up sacrifices, sing praises to God and bow our faces to the dirt in prayer we would just know we were in Gods love.

You have a writer that walked in the time of our Lord. Matthew was his earthly name. He said it just right. In that time we had to love God with our heart soul and mind and body. In the time of the flood, as Mathew described it for you now the most important thing in life.

One day, out in the fields I heard the voice of God. I don’t know how I knew it was God’s voice - I’d never heard it before. But He said to me: "Noah I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I’m surely going destroy both them & the earth."

Build me an ark 300 cubits long, by 50 cubits wide, by 30 cubits high. … Oh, I forgot, you folks probably don’t even know what a cubit is, do you? Well, a cubit was the distance from a man’s elbow to the tip of his fingers. But then you don’t need to know what a cubit is to know that was one BIG boat. Three stories high and longer than a field of grain.

I was a builder then. I built houses, chairs, small boats. You name it, if it was made of wood, I could build it. But still… I’d never taken on anything quite this big before. Wasn’t sure I could get it done. But like I said… doesn’t pay to argue with God.

Besides, down deep I knew He was right. This was a wicked generation and something had to be done.

We had to rely on that Love we had for God. We had to trust him. My family trusted me enough to come on board, excuse the PUN, and we had to rely on that trust implicitly. People camped outside the building just to watch the spectacle and laugh. We couldn’t go into town to buy supplies caus’ people would just throw stones at us and laugh. We had to rely on God for everything. We had to trust him for our very survival. It was tough days. I mean they really thought we were mad. So did I sometimes. I main you folk get your mind around this technological age so quickly; here was a man of 500 trying to get his mind around the concept of rain.