YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL!
Acts 17:24-31
INTRODUCTION
A. HUMOR:
1. Two ropes walk into a restaurant to get something to eat . The waiter leans over to address the first rope and asks, "Are you one of them ropes?"
2. "Why yes," quavers the rope. "We don’t serve ropes here," growls the waiter, grabbing the rope, twirling him around his head, and throwing him out the door.
3. The second rope decides that he had best disguise himself, so he ruffles his threads and twists his two ends together.
4. Glaring, the waiter looks at the second rope and asks, "You one of them ropes?" "No!" was the indignant reply. "I’m a frayed knot!"
B. TEXT
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’[Epimenides] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’[Aratus]. 29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
C. THESIS
1. Today I’m asking the question, “Is Your God Too Small?” Many Christians are half-hearted because they don’t know the True God.
2. We’re going to see that the True God will incite our wonder, He’ll be a God we feel honored to serve, and that He’s big enough to meet any need we have.
3. The title of this message is, “Is Your God Too Small?”
I. A GREAT GOD INCITES OUR WONDER
A. STARVING FOR PERSPECTIVE
1. What drives people to go way out in the deserts of Arizona to see the Grand Canyon? They want to see something bigger than themselves! Why do they go to Niagara Falls? To see something majestic, mighty, staggering!
2. Bible translator J. B. Phillips wrote a book entitled “Your God Is Too Small.” In it he discusses how today we don’t have a God big enough for our modern needs.
3. “Our mental horizons have been expanded…but our ideas of God have remained largely static.” Our ‘God-in-a-box’ notion limits God to such a degree that we’re left inwardly dissatisfied or spiritually unmoved.
B. THE BIBLE’S GOD IS IMMENSE
1. The God of the Bible is a God described by words like “Almighty, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Infinite, Eternal, and Immortal,” to mention only a few.
2. But no words can adequately picture the immensity of God. He’s so big that we don’t even have the proper words to describe his bigness. He’s bigger than our biggest words and grander than our grandest concepts.
3. All around us are the signs of His POWER:
a. GOD’S VASTNESS -is seen in the physical universe which seems to have no limits and includes hundreds of billions of galaxies!
b. HIS POWER -- is mirrored in the great flaming orbs of the stars, in the power of the Sea and of the Wind (hurricanes, tornadoes).
c. HIS HOLINESS – is seen in the pristine purity of the highest, most remote mountain peak.
d. HIS ETERNITY – is seen in the measureless eons of time.
e. HIS TRUTH – is pictured in the brilliance of pure light, which exposes all defects.
4. WHAT OTHERS SAW:
a. Moses saw Him at the Burning Bush.
b. Isaiah saw Him at the Temple.
c. Ezekiel saw Him on the plains of Babylon.
d. Deborah the prophetess saw Him in prophetic vision.
e. John saw Him on the island of Patmos.
f. Paul saw Him on the Damascus road.
5. All these men/women did great works because of their revelation of God.
6.”Oh the depths of the wisdom of God.” Paul, who knew God better than most, said that it’s as if we stand on the edge of God’s vastness and can only stare into its great depth, beyond our fathoming.
7. At the ocean, we enjoy getting into it, as long as we can feel the sand under our feet, yet are afraid of being suspended over its great trenches.
8. LISTEN! In Leviticus 10:3, the Lord says: "By those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified." We want intimate relationship with the Lord, but God isn’t pleased to fellowship with people who don’t first respect and fear Him.
2nd Test of whether Your God is Too Small…
II. DOES GOD SERVE US OR DO WE SERVE GOD?
A. THE PROBLEM
1. J. B. Phillips pointed out another characteristic of God being too small: “To many people God has been captured, tamed, and trained to their liking.”
2. We’re in charge of God, NOT God in charge of us!
3. Do our words, actions and priorities reflect a general attitude of indifference toward God, rather than the reverence and honor?
a. We skip spending time with Him because of our
busy schedules...
b. We casually throw His Name around like any common word...
c. We blandly go through the motions Sunday after Sunday, comfortably "playing church"...
4. As a result we experience a stale, lackluster faith marked by boredom, frustration and detachment, rather than the awesome, life-changing fellowship God desires to have with each of us.
5. HAVE WE LOSE OUR freshness, the reality of spiritual things & the Word of God?
B. WHAT IS THE FEAR OF THE LORD?
1. The fear of the Lord is the connecter, the proper attitude in which to approach the Living God.
2. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” Prov. 9:10. It causes you to depart from evil; Prov. 16:6. It adds length to your life; Pr. 10:27. It’s a fountain of life; Prov. 14:27.
3. Lack of fear of God is deadly; “concerning…the wicked: there is no fear of God before his eyes” Ps. 36:1.
4. Contrast yourself with Moses & others;
a. Moses met God; "I exceedingly fear and quake" Hebrews 12:21.
b. Isaiah, "Woe is me! I am undone!"
c. Does your God make you fear and quake?
5. Based on this, how would you rate your "fear factor"? Do you stand in awe of your Creator, or have you grown indifferent to the greatness of the King of Kings?
C. DO YOU TREMBLE AT HIS WORD?
1. ILLUSTRATION.
a. There was once a servant of a King who was given an errand but didn't complete it as charged, because he got distracted by the buildings of the capital city and the people that he met.
b. He was called in before the King and told to carry a spoon with an egg in it all the way through the
city and back to the Palace. Two guards were told to accompany him with drawn swords and if he dropped the egg, they were to immediately cut off his head.
c. With great fear he made his way through the
city -- concentrating on the egg, fearing lest it should drop to the ground he immediately die. When he got back to the Palace, the King asked him, "What did you see?" "Nothing, your highness." "Who did you talk to on your errand?" He answered, "No one, your highness."
d. And the king said, "From now on, let all the errands I send you on be accomplished with such single-minded attention!" If an earthly king is worthy of such respect/ seriousness, how much more should we fear and obey the Living God?
2. “But on this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My Word” Isa. 66:2.
3rd Test of whether Your God is Too Small…
III. IS GOD BIG ENOUGH TO MEET YOUR NEEDS?
A. HUMOR
1. An ill-prepared college student was struggling through his final exam in economics. He happened to be taking the test just before Christmas.
2. In desperation he scrawled across the bottom of the paper, “Only God knows the answer to these questions. Merry Christmas!”
3. When he got the paper back, the teacher marked it: “God gets 100. You get 0. Happy New Year!”
B. GOD WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU
1. If your God is too small: you are worried about the future; You fret about making ends meet; you’re constantly anxious about your health.
2. Our English word “worry” is equivalent to the Greek word merimnao, which combines 2 words: merizo, meaning “to divide,” and nous, meaning “mind.”
3. Worry literally means “to divide the mind.” In a way it means that we are double-minded. James warned us about this in James 1:8, “a double-minded person [is] unstable in all they do.”
4. When we worry, we’re not trusting God, we’re confining God, making him smaller than he is, because we think he can’t do anything for us.
5. Matt. 6:25-34 tells us “There are two days in the week about which I never worry. One of these days is yesterday - and the other day is tomorrow.” [Robert Burdette].
C. PREVENIENT GRACE OF GOD
1. The term “prevenient grace of God” refers to the fact that God is already at work before I get to my problem. He’s working creatively, strategically and redemptively for my good and His glory.”
2. While I am struggling with the problems of today, God is at work providing solutions for the things I am going to face tomorrow.
3. While I’m in Tuesday, he’s clearing the road for me on Friday. That’s what Proverbs 3:6 means when it promises that “he will make your paths straight.”
4. God is already at work providing solutions for problems I don’t even know I have yet! Are you worried about next week? Forget it. He’s already there.
D. EXAMPLES:
1. When Jesus told Peter to go to the lake and catch a fish ( which would have a 4 drachma coin in it’s mouth) to pay the Temple tax, only an infinite mind would know the location Peter would select and coordinate the arrival of the one specific fish to bite his hook before all others.
2. A prophet’s widow was about to have her boys taken by the creditors and sold as slaves. She could see no way out; her God was too small to save her boys. But she met a man named Elisha whose God was bigger -- big enough to work a miracle and save her boys.
3. There were two sisters whose brother became deathly sick. Their God was not big enough to keep him from dying. But they met a Man whose name is Wonderful Counselor ... and who said, "I am the Resurrection!"
4. Paul said, ““How unsearchable his judgments!” (Rom. 11:33). Not only does God make plans we don’t know about -- but even if we did know about them, we couldn’t understand them because they’re so complex.
5. That explains why some things remain unexplainable forever. It’s not that God’s unwilling to explain, it’s that our little minds can’t begin to comprehend the infinite purposes of God.
6. The Infinite became finite. The Almighty became a tiny baby. The Deity was wrapped in diapers. Luther put this way: “He whom the worlds could not enwrap, yonder lies in Mary’s lap.”
7. No one but God himself would ever have dared to think of that, and its corollary: the Father’s Son died a miserable, humiliating, excruciating death on a Roman cross–the just dying for the unjust, the Sinless One bearing the sins of the world!
CONCLUSION
A. ILLUSTRATION
1. “During World War II, a soldier named Joel wrote his mother in New Jersey about the miraculous deliverance of his platoon.
2. ‘One of my best buddies, Tom, with his whole platoon was pinned down by German mortar and artillery fire. They were given the order to move, but couldn’t because the Germans had full view of them from a hill and were zeroing their fire in on them perfectly.
3. Tom, a God-fearing Christian, knew something had to be done to save his 50 men. He crawled from his foxhole and looked things over. Seeing no way out, he lay prostrate behind a tree and earnestly prayed God to help
them out of this situation.
4. Mother, I watched it myself … After he prayed, a fog rolled down between the two hills and covered his whole platoon. They escaped and reorganized behind the lines where there was a church building.
5. They all went in and knelt down to pray and thanked God for his help. Ma, if that wasn’t an answer to prayer, I don’t know what is. You can bet that Tom is respected by his buddies.”
[as quoted by Donald Campbell. Joshua: Leader Under Fire. (Wheaton; SP Publications, 1981) pp. 82-83. from “The Miracle of the Fog.” Good News Publisher]
B. ALTAR CALL
1. "Is Your God Too Small?" If you have a Great God, Mountains can be moved! Unbelief and little faith were disparaged by the Lord.
2. I would rather be numbered with the Centurion and the Syro-Phoenician woman whom the Lord marveled at and declared to have great faith.
3. Call for recognizing God as controlling, not part, but all of our lives. Prayer for the mountains to move, because we have a great God.
4. Salvation call.
[Some thoughts were derived from J. B. Phillips book entitled “Your God Is Too Small” and Ray Pritchard’s “Our Awesome God.”]
