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.
So, God is holy, but He is also eternal. This is yet another area where we have troubles trying to understand. We do not understand “eternal.” Oh, we understand the definition, but the concept is so enormous we cannot wrap our minds fully around it. God was always here. He had no beginning. That loses a human right there. But God was, well, He was always. And He will be always.
If you were to take a trip back into the past; back before the earth existed; back before any of the stars existed; back before anything existed; you would still be in the presence of a holy and eternal God. As humans, we have a beginning, so we try to put that limitation on everything. We understand that the mountains had a beginning and every living creature on the planet had a beginning, but we cannot really understand that God never had a beginning, because He was always.
God is many things, including omnipotent, or all-powerful. If we go back in time again, but only a few hundred years, we will see men who thought they were all-powerful, too. Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Hitler, and even Saddam Hussein thought they were the mightiest rulers. But God has a way of showing people, over time, that they are as fragile as a thin piece of glass.
In 1 KINGS 12, we find an example of a ruler thinking they are all-powerful. King Rehoboam was confronted by his people, saying that the king’s father, who was Solomon, had made it very difficult for them and they wanted King Rehoboam to make things easier for them. The king sent them away and told them to come back in three days.
He consulted with the men who advised his father and they told the king to be nicer to the people and the people would follow him. The king didn’t like that advice, so he consulted with some young men he grew up with, and they told him to tell the people if they kept griping he would make it even worse for them.
This passage shows a man who did not seek the counsel of God, but of men. And not only that, he only sought what he wanted to hear; that which agreed with what he already had decided to do. The king had grown up in the lap of luxury, so what did he know about the common people and their woes anyway?
In MATTHEW 11:28-30, we find a passage that shows how a true leader feels. He cares about His subjects.
‘Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.’
The king only cared about himself, not the people. But in Jesus, we see what a true leader does; he wants to take care of them and make sure they have what they need.
You have heard the expression, “History repeats itself.” That is true because humans are so set in their patterns they become very predicable. The king was brutal to his subjects, and God eventually took him out.
Look at Adolph Hitler. He thought he was the most powerful one in existence, and he even tried to annihilate the Jews and create a new and superior race of humans. Yet, in the end, he hunkered down in a shelter and committed suicide.
Saddam Hussein ruled over his people with hatred and anger. He let his two sons do whatever they wanted, even to small school children. He had cars drive over the arms of six-year-old boys who had been caught stealing food from stores. Their arms would remain crippled the rest of their lives to serve as an example to others and as a reminder to them.
And in the end, his two sons were shot to death hiding in a house and he was caught in a small underground room, hiding like the rat he was. And for every generation, there seems to be a tyrant such as these.
What do all of them have in common? They each believed they were the supreme ruler. They each believed they had the power to do whatever they wanted. And they all had another thing in common. They all were hunted down and killed for their sins against the people.
JEREMIAH 32:17-19 makes a bold declaration.
‘Ah, Sovereign Lord, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for You. You show love to thousands but bring the punishment for the fathers sins into the laps of their children after them.
’Oh, great and powerful God whose name is the Lord Almighty, great are Your purposes and mighty are Your deeds.’
Let me reiterate that no matter what we might think, God is the only all-powerful person in existence. And He will yield that to no man, any place, or at any time.
In the Old Testament, people had to be in the tabernacle before they could worship the Lord or be in His presence. Ever since Jesus, we can worship God everywhere because He is omnipresent, or everywhere.
ACTS 17 says that God is never far from us. I think we would be more careful in how we live our lives if we would just remember that no matter where we are; no matter what we are thinking; and no matter what we are doing, God is there with us, watching and listening.
Now the question for all of us is this: If God is there watching and listening to everything we do, will that have any bearing on what we say and what we do?
Now let’s see if …
3. GOD IS A GOD OF REWARD, OR OF PUNISHMENT
We can answer that best by saying God is a God of both love and punishment. Now that might put a lot of people off because they don’t like to talk about punishment, but we have to remember something. Why do parents punish children? Because children do something wrong! The parents aren’t wrong; the children are wrong.
In the same way, God punishes us because we do something wrong. He punishes sin, but at the same time, He rewards righteousness. We cannot break the law of God and expect to get away with it, any more than we can expect to break the law of the land and expect to get away with it.
Of course we are talking about things that happen in this world. In the world to come, a true child of God will never have to be punished because he or she will never do anything wrong.
How many of you have ever run a race? It is a grueling and very hard thing to do. It takes a mighty toll on your entire body, and after you cross the finish line you still suffer by a severe lack of oxygen. This cause your stomach to fill somewhat queasy and people even pass out from it.
In the same way, Paul says this life is a race. He tells us not to put our focus on it, though, but to keep our focus on the reward at the end of the race. That reward is heaven, where we shall sit forever more at the table of Grace with our Lord and Savior, Jesus – our Christ.
A preacher died and stood before God for judgment. God asked him if he had always been pure and the preacher said, “No.” God asked him if he had always been righteous, and the man had to say “No.” God then asked him if he had always been holy, and again the man had to say “No.”
Knowing what the punishment was that he deserved, he hung his head and wept. And then he saw a bright light shine about him. He lifted his head and saw Jesus Christ standing beside him. And he heard Jesus tell God that even though the preacher had not always been any of these things, he did stand for unashamedly for Jesus while he was on earth, so Jesus said He would stand for the preacher in Heaven.
MATTHEW 10:32 clearly warns us,
‘Whoever acknowledges Me before men, I will also acknowledge before My Father in heaven.’ But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before My Father in heaven.’
We are talking about whether God is a God of reward or a God of punishment. My answer is that He is a God of both. He rewards faithfulness and He punishes disobedience.
Before time existed, God wrote the laws that we are to follow. And just like the local laws, if we make a decision to break them, we open ourselves up to paying the consequences of our actions. It is against the law to rob, but if I go over to Walmart and rob them, I will get sent to prison. How much sense would it make if that were to happen, that I would sit in my cell and cry out that the law had no reason to send me there? It would make no sense whatsoever, would it?
Likewise, if I break God’s law, the punishment that has been set forth is that I either repent or go to hell. How much sense would it make for me to cry out that God had no right to send me there? That also would make no sense. Why? Because in both cases, I was the one who put myself in that position by the actions I chose to take.
But we find that most people have the mindset of “Why would a good God send people to hell?” The answer is; He doesn’t – they send themselves because they have broken His law and have stubbornly refused to repent and turn away from their sin and towards Him.
But when God judges, He will be a very fair judge. He will judge all those who have refused to live for Jesus Christ. The rich, the powerful, the poor, the king and the slave; He will judge them all according to the very same standards: Did they follow His law or did they not follow His law?
I have often said that you choose tomorrow’s verdict by how you live today. How are you living today? You might go to church and you might be a very nice person, but is Jesus at the forefront of your mind in all you do; all the time? In other words, do you live for Jesus or do you acknowledge Jesus?
I know a couple who claim to love the Lord and yet they live together without getting married. Do you think they are fooling God or fooling themselves? They have made the decision to ignore God and they will pay the consequences of their sin. Is there anything in your life that you know God would not want? If there is, what decision are you going to make about it today? Are you going to ignore it and continue to do it, or are you going to just give it to God and turn away from it? Let me ask another way. Do you want God’s reward for what you do, or are you willing to accept His punishment for what you do?
I want you to think about this. When we choose to live in sin, we are as pitiful as the little child making mud-pies in the slums because he doesn’t understand what is waiting for him on a vacation at the beach.
Too many times, Christians use their belief in God to get special requests on demand. We want the benefits of walking with God but do not want any of the responsibilities for walking with God.
Sometimes, fear of consequence keeps us within the realm of the law. One mother was frustrated at all the speeding cars going down her neighborhood road. So she parked her car at the corner and stood by it while she pointed her black hair-dryer (which looked like a radar gun) at the speeding cars.
The results were amazing. Every single car slowed down. Why? Because they feared they would receive a ticket if they didn’t. Fear can be a great motivator.
According to the word of God, there are two judgment thrones waiting for us. The first one will be the Judgment Seat of Christ, where Jesus will judge all believers according to how they served Him in what they did, said, and thought. The second judgment is the Great White Throne where He will judge all non-believers, and judge them according to how they refused to serve Him. There will be no pleas of “not guilty” for He will look in the record and the record will be accurate.
The one thing we should fear the most is what our records will reflect on that day we stand before Him in our own personal judgment. And that fear should motivate every one of us to run to an altar and make sure we have fully given ourselves to Him. And the fear of how we have lived should be enough to keep us living for Jesus and being devoted to Him in everything we do from now on.
If you confess Him here, not just with an occasional word, but also with your whole heart, He will confess you there. And you will receive His wonderful reward. That reward is spending eternity in heaven; free from the struggle of sinfulness we have today; and forever bathed in the light of His glorious love.
4. THE FINAL REWARD
We offer Communion at this church every Sunday as a way for us to focus on Jesus and remember what He did and why He did it. We are commanded to remember, but in our daily lives, things sometimes get so hectic we forget to remember Him.
In that final reward for those who chose Jesus, we will never have to fight to remember again. In heaven, we will have the perfect communion with our Lord – that of unbroken fellowship with Him, where congregations never go home because worship services will never end.
God is a loving God who sees so much value in you – even if you don’t. God yearns for a rekindling of that personal relationship with you. God gives you His very best if you will only take it. If you don’t, there will be a day in your future when you find out that all you have is the devil’s worst. But it is your choice and only your choice.
An elderly couple died and went to heaven. St. Peter met them in front of the Pearly Gates and escorted them inside. They went into a beautiful and spacious mansion, the grandeur of which, neither one had ever seen before. St. Peter told them it was theirs. The man asked how much it cost, and St. Peter reminded them that it was free.
St. Peter then took them into the dining room where table after table was full of beautiful food. Again the man asked how much that cost, and was again told it was free.
Then they stepped out the back door where they saw the most beautiful golf course either had ever seen. St. Peter told him that was free, too. At which the man turned to the wife and said, “You and your bran muffins! If I’d have eaten the way I wanted, I could have been here twenty years ago!”
Now I don’t think heaven will have golf courses, but that illustrates that it will have more beauty and life than we have ever known here on this earth. And it is yours for the taking. All you have to do is drop the charade and finally open your heart to Jesus Christ.
No matter how well you think you know God, you do not know Him well enough. Are you ready to know Him better this morning? Or, are you ready for the hour of your personal judgment to come? If you are not ready for your judgment to come, you had better get closer to God. You have been given a chance to do that right now. But it is your choice. Be sure that the choice you make today will give you the consequences you want tomorrow.
If you come to God through Jesus the Son – everything will be well with you forever – and ever – and ever.
INVITATION
