Sunday
March 30, 2008 River of Life Ministries Pastor Michael West
Series: His majesty, His Names part 3 — El Shaddai
Sermon: God’s Goodness Scripture: Psalm 139:17
Read: Isaiah 63:7 / Psalm 34:8, 36:7
In all my adventures, from home to home to foster home. From one school to another. From my adventures in the US NAVY, different jobs and travels in the world. From all the setbacks or if you will, temporary setback, disillusionments, heartaches, let downs, ups and downs, happiness and even in my losses, I can and will speak on God’s kindness, goodness and mercies. For He is El Shaddai.
He reminds me, “My grace is sufficient for thee, for My strength is made perfect in weakness…” (II Cor. 12:9 KJV)
...‘My grace is enough for you: for power is at full stretch in weakness.’ It is, then, about my weaknesses that I am happiest of all to boast, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me…” (NJB)
El Shaddai: the All Sufficient One, the God of the Mountains, the Lord God Almighty! God, the source, the all-sufficient source of all of our blessings. God, the all-powerful, never-failing God. God Who is bigger than our problems and is more than able to handle them, if we would let Him.
He is El Shaddai. His power is seen in His judgment and in the covenant He made with Abraham—
Genesis 17:1-3, 48:3, 49:25, 35:11 and in Psalm 90:2—
"Before the mountains were born, before the earth and the world came to birth, from eternity to eternity you are God." (NJB)
El Shaddai. Mighty God, what a wonder You are.
The church today needs to rise above it’s big bad spiritual self and become humble in the sight of the Lord. We say we are grafted in, but we never seem to rise to the occasion to bear fruit. Let’s face it, the church today isn’t full of new disciples in the making, we are full of ourselves. We are full of transplants. People calling themselves Christian yet, fail to follow Christ and, in their disjointedness feel compelled by something they call the “spirit” led them to what would be a better church. And so, history repeats itself.
No tribe or nation ever rising morally above its religion. If a persons religion says that God is not all that, then their religion will be based and blossom around that concept of God. If they believe that God is a big God, true, noble, all-loving, even though they are not redeemed by Jesus Christ, their religion will follow that concept of God. Ever upward they will go, a pagan religion without redemption.
Take Christianity today. At any given time is strong or weak based upon the belief of the believer or church and in that strength or weakness is found the concept of God. Who He is. Unfortunately, we have forgotten El Shaddai. We have forgotten the wonder of God. The mighty God we serve. We have forgotten Who He is and it is evident in the way we are come Sunday morning.
Our religion has become ineffective in the world. We are being rejected more each day. The world wants us to take our little god and go somewhere else. Our religion has become powerless because we believe in a powerless god. Our religion is weak because our god is weak. Our faith is weak because we have believed in the words of men, rather than the Word of God. We have stopped seeing God for Who He really is.
It’s time for us as Christians to wake up, to rise up, to speak up to believe up, to brush off the world and raise the standard of Jesus Christ above the rest. We need to repent and walk in faith again before it gets any later than it is already.
David wrote Psalm 34:3 when he was faking insanity and Abimelech drove him away; “O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together.” (Amplified)
The word magnify means to make larger and it can be seen two different ways: make God look bigger than He is or see Him as big as He is. Put something under a magnifying glass and it will look larger than what it is and that would be impossible to do with God, so magnify here must mean that we must try to see God, the best we can, as to how big He really is.
The church, our church, will only be as great as our conception of God. As individual Christians, we will succeed or fail depending upon what we think and believe about God.
All Christians need to have a knowledge of the Holy One, a deeper knowledge of El Shaddai, God Almighty, God of Wonder. We can do that by way of the Word of God, but we can also know Him by way of nature around us. Sometimes it helps to have a good visual.
Psalm 19:1-4 puts it this way—”The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky displays what his hands have made. 2) One day tells a story to the next. One night shares knowledge with the next 3) without talking, without words, without their voices being heard.
4) {Yet,} their sound has gone out into the entire world, their message to the ends of the earth. (GW)
Now nature may not be all that clear on the subject of God, it still speak loud and we can always find more clarity of God in His Word.
It is important for us to go past what we think we believe and start believing with intensity, believe by way of intimacy. God is a good God. Do we believe it? He is full of loving-kindness. Do you believe that? We must go beyond believing we are saved, to believing that God is a Mighty God of Wonder. We must know and believe that God doesn’t have an ugly thought about anyone and never has.
An attribute of God is His infinity. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. He is perfectly good. God is not a God mediocrity nor a God of half-way, part-way. God is a God of all the way. Limitless all the way. Loving all the way. Good all the way. He is the same yesterday, tomorrow and forever. What God is and was, God will forever be.
God is not sometimes merciful and sometimes just, but he is eternally infinitely just and merciful." God is infinitely and unchangeably good (Zeph. 3:17 Amp)
“ The Lord your God is in the midst of you, a Mighty One, a Savior [Who saves]! He will rejoice over you with joy; He will rest [in silent satisfaction] and in His love He will be silent and make no mention [of past sins, or even recall them]; He will exult over you with singing.”
God’s goodness is incomprehensible by the finite mind (Rom. 11:35, 36 Amplified) “Or who has first given God anything that he might be paid back or that he could claim a recompense? 36 For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.
[For all things originate with Him and come from Him; all things live through Him, and all things center in and tend to consummate and to end in Him.] To Him be glory forever! Amen (so be it).
God’s goodness appears in two things, giving and forgiving.
God isn’t using a remote control or put things on auto-pilot. He is a hands on God and is still excited about His creation.
Hebrews 1:3...He is the perfect imprint and very image of [God’s] nature, upholding and maintaining and guiding and propelling the universe by His mighty word of power…(Amp)
The invisible Word of the universe is what makes things run.
When science arrived, we got laws, explanations of how God did things and we lost faith because we began to understand things that our Bible didn’t tell us. The Bible knew that God was there. If it rained, God watered the Earth and thunder was God’s voice…
Read Psalm 29
The wonder of God is that He is indifferent about anything. People are indifferent, not God. He either loves with boundless unremitting energy or He hates with consuming fire—Hebrews 1:9
The goodness of God requires that He cannot love sin.
How is it that we deserve anything? The answer is, God’s goodness spared us. That is why Jesus would go to the cross and bleed for us. It’s why He took our sins and punishment. Why forgive us over and over and over? Because God acts out of goodness and does what a loving heart dictates.
Why does He answer prayer? Because we are good? I don’t think so. Nobody ever got anything from God because they deserve it. It’s because it’s His loving nature, His goodness. Can you see why I say, What a God of Wonder?
If we as the people of God can began to understand and begin to believe and have faith again in El Shaddai, our Mighty Good God, then maybe, just maybe, others who don’t know Him like we do, will want to.
