Category: God

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God

Life Is Messy. Our Families Are Too. God Still Has A Plan For Us.

Though we can make things quite messy – including our lives and our family’s lives – I am thankful that God loves us through the messes we  make. 
photo of messy paint splatter everywhereFor example, I know that Abraham and Sarah were godly people. However, as we read their story in the Bible, we see that they still struggled to do what was right. Some of the errors they made: Abraham was fearful that the attractiveness of Sarah could get him killed as they travelled (he had more fear of man than he had trust in God). His fear led them to tell half-truths to several people (another word for that would be lying!). There was also impatience with God’s timing, which led Abraham to sleep with Hagar to help God out instead of waiting on Him. Then there was Sarah’s jealousy and mistreatment of Hagar. And yet, through it all, God was good to Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac.

That’s the amazing God we serve – still loving us in the midst of our messy mistakes and sins.

And we see this repeated in Abraham’s grandson Jacob, though it seems to get even worse. We find out that Jacob was a liar who deceived his brother and father, but his uncle Laban turned the tables on him, which landed him with two wives (which was not God’s plan for marriage). And his wife Leah finds herself married to a man who didn’t choose her. Leah was in this mess of a situation due to the lies of her father and herself. She was part of the lie which wed her to Jacob. Not only that, can you imagine the anger that this act would have provoked in Rachel, knowing that her older sister tricked the man she loved into this marriage. So add in family divisiveness. What a mess.
photo of an extremely cluttered and messy storage roomAnd yet, even though Jacob didn’t love Leah in the way that he loved Rachel, God still loved Leah and blessed her. And even though Jacob had also been a deceiver, God still loved Jacob.

The whole story is strange, and it is a bit difficult to understand God’s working through what seems such a dysfunctional family full of deceit and jealousy. However, even with all of the sinfulness in the family, God still loved them and had a plan for them. I’m thankful for this story!

Here’s why: I’m glad to know that God is so gracious and forgiving toward us. I’m so glad that He still has a plan to work through the messes that I make in my own life and within my own family.
Aren’t you glad He loves you and works through your messes too?

You don’t have to clean up your life to come to Jesus. But once you come to Jesus, He will begin cleaning you up. Come as you are, with all of your messiness. Turn your messy life over to Him. He’ll love you in the midst of it all, and He’ll begin to clean you up.photo of a clean and orderly grocery store reminding us that our messy lives can be cleaned up

Take a moment to thank God that even though you have been a mess and you have made some messes, that He is a God who loves, a God who forgives, and a God who redeems!

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God

The Love of God. God is Love.

Pastor D. L. Moody wanted everyone to hear the truth: God is Love.
portrait of D. L. MoodyBut he also knew that even though people may come to a worship service, not everyone is listening! Therefore, he shares:
“We built a church in Chicago a few years ago, and we were so anxious to make people believe that God is love, that we thought if we could not preach it into their hearts, we would burn it in! And so right over the pulpit we had the words put in gas jets, ” God is love,” and every night we had it there.”

R. A. Torrey worked with Moody in that church and became the pastor a few years before Moody’s death. Regarding the message of “God is Love,” he indicates:

Mr. Moody… was so anxious that everybody should always hear this one truth, and was so afraid that some preacher might come and forget to tell it, that he had it put on the gas jets right above the pulpit, to that the first thing you would see when you went in there on an evening was that text shining out in letters of fire.

One stormy night, before the time of the meeting, the door stood ajar. A man partly intoxicated saw it open, and thought he might go in and get warm. He did not know what sort of a place it was, but when he pushed the door open he saw the text blazing out, “God is love.” He pulled the door to, and walked away muttering to himself.

He said to himself, “God is love? No. God is not love. God does not love me. He does not love me, for I am a poor, miserable sinner. If God was love, he would love me. God is not love.”

But it kept on burning down into his soul, “God is love! God is love! God is love” After a while be retraced his steps, and took a seat in a corner. When Mr. Moody walked down after the meeting, he found the man weeping like a child. “What is the trouble?” he asked. “What was it in the sermon that touched you?”
“I didn’t hear a word of your sermon.”
“Well, what is the trouble?”
“That text up there.”

Moody himself indicates:
“I found him there weeping like a child; but as I unfolded the Scripture, and told him how God had loved him from his earliest childhood all along, the light of the gospel broke into his mind, and he went away rejoicing!”

Jesus is the clear evidence to us that God is Love. Jesus came to rescue us from our sin. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. The religious leaders were appalled at such behavior. To their complaints about who He associated with, Jesus explained:
“It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT SACRIFICE,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Brennan Manning indicates:

This story provides us with a revelation as bright as the evening star: Jesus comes for sinners, for those as outcast as tax collectors and for those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams. He comes for corporate executives, street people, superstars, farmers, hookers, addicts, IRS agents, AIDS victims, and even used car salesmen. Jesus not only talks with these people but dines with them—fully aware that His table fellowship with sinners will raise the eyebrows of religious bureaucrats who hold up the robes and insignia of their authority to justify their condemnation of the truth and their rejection of the gospel of grace. Are we really that different?

I hope I not only remember that God is Love toward me, a sinner, but also that I am to now share that love with others who are struggling with their own sin.

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God

What It Takes To Believe In Miracles

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Faith does not…spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith.”
–Fyodor Dostoevsky

God is in the business of miracles – including the amazing miracle of changing lives by transforming hearts and minds. And yet, we can refuse to believe in Him and His power, even if a miracle happens in front of our very eyes. The question is not whether a person can be shown a miracle large enough to overpower their lack of faith, but whether a person’s faith (even if it is as small as a mustard seed) will allow them to be open to experience God’s miracles.

May we have faith sufficient to see God’s hand move as he does amazing miracles all around us.
And in us.

What does God want to do in you today?
Will you be open to being transformed by the power of his miracle-working hands?

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God

God’s Love, Wrath, and Judgment

“God’s Love, Wrath, and Judgment”
  by brian rushing

Two of my recent posts have dealt with some of these words that we don’t like to think about in connection to God – specifically we don’t like the words wrath & judgment. Before I leave these two words, I want to share a few final thoughts that Dr. Packer provides that help us to realize something important about God’s key characteristic of love. Because of that love, there must also be wrath and judgment. A key characteristic of love is to always seek the very best for the object of love. Therefore, someone who loves another will have wrath toward anything or anyone who attempts to harm the one he loves. Someone who loves another will see malicious acts aimed at the one he loves as something to be judged as evil. Therefore, when we realize that God loves us with utmost intensity, we should also realize that it will require God to have wrath and judgment toward any people, things, behaviors, or attitudes that would cause us harm or problems.

It was not man…who took the initiative to make God friendly, nor was it Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, who took the initiative to turn his Father’s wrath against us into love. The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of his unkind Father by offering himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message — it is sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son and so in reality falls back into polytheism, asking us to believe in two different gods. But the Bible rules this out absolutely by insisting that it was God himself who took the initiative in quenching his own wrath against those whom, despite their [terrible behavior], he loved and had chosen to save.

God, in His Trinitarian nature, loves us supremely. There is not one person of the Trinity that loves us more than another. God – in all aspects of who He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – loves us more than we can ever understand. In regard to that love, He must judge…
a wooden judge's gavel symbolizing judgment and possibly wrath

The judge is a person identified with what is good and right. The modern idea that a judge should be cold and dispassionate has no place in the Bible. The biblical judge is expected to love justice and fair play and to loathe all ill-treatment of one person by another. An unjust judge, one who has no interest in seeing right triumph over wrong, is by biblical standards, a monstrosity. The Bible leaves us in no doubt that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity, and that the ideal of a judge wholly-identified with what is good and right is perfectly fulfilled in Him.

This loving God has determined to love what is good and right to provide us with good and perfect gifts – the chief gift being Himself. Therefore, He must judge those things that harm us or our relationship with Him as bad, wrong, immoral, evil. Our culture (and world) does not want anyone telling us how to behave or think, but God’s absolute love requires that there be an absolute truth – which requires wrath and judgment.

“To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God’s kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment.”

Let’s keep thinking deeply about who God is and what He requires!


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


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God

The Wrath of God Shows His Goodness

“The Wrath of God Shows His Goodness”
  by brian rushing

I recently mentioned Jesus as intensifying our understanding of God – including God’s judgment and wrath. We don’t like to think of the wrath of God. But I think J. I. Packer does a great job of helping us understand the importance of the concept – especially as it relates back to God’s goodness. He states:

The root cause of our unhappiness seems to be a disquieting suspicion that ideas of wrath are in one way or another unworthy of God.

…Would a God who took as much pleasure in evil as He did in good be a good God? Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in His world be morally perfect? Surely not. But it is precisely this adverse reaction to evil…that the Bible has in view when it speaks of God’s wrath. God’s wrath in the Bible is always judicial — that is, it is the wrath of the Judge, administering justice.
thunderstorm clouds symbolizing the wrath of God
God’s wrath in the Bible is something which people choose for themselves. Before hell is an experience inflicted by God, it is a state for which a person himself opts by retreating from the light which God shines in his heart to lead him to Himself. When John writes, “Whoever does not believe [in Jesus] stands condemned [judged] already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son,” he goes on to explain himself as follows, ”This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (In 3:18-19). He means just what he says: The decisive act of judgment upon the lost is the judgment which they pass upon themselves, by rejecting the light that comes to them in and through Jesus Christ.

The unbeliever has preferred to be by himself, without God, defying God, having God against him, and he shall have his preference. Nobody stands under the wrath of God except those who have chosen to do so. The essence of God’s action in wrath is to give men what they choose.

…Thus, God’s love, as the Bible views it, never leads him to foolish, impulsive, immoral actions in the way that its human counterpart too often leads us. And in the same way, God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil. God is only angry where anger is called for. Even among humans, there is such a thing as righteous indignation, though it is, perhaps, rarely found. But all God’s indignation is righteous.

Some of our ideas about God seem to be formed more by what the culture says God should be like and what we think we want God to be like than by what the Bible says. We must continue to think deeply, and most importantly, BIBLICALLY about God. If what God’s Word says and what we think are at odds, then we must trust the Bible to be the truth and realize that we are the ones who are wrong, even if we have not yet completely understood all the meaning and implications of His Word. His thoughts are much higher than our thoughts, and as we stand on His Word as truth, more so even than on our own thoughts, we will find ourselves in a more secure place than we ever thought possible.

        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)