Knowing God Pt. 7

"Were we imagining a God, then naturally we should ascribe to him only characteristics which we admired, and jealousy would not enter the picture. Nobody would imagine a jealous God. But we are not making up an idea of God by drawing on our imagination; we are seeking instead to listen to the words of Holy Scripture, in which God himself tells us the truth about himself."

"People have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word."

"People have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do; it is our task to try to introduce people to this fact about themselves and so make them self-distrustful and open to correction by the word of Christ."

To which I would add, "starting with our eye beams first."

Exo 34:14 For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

There is a hubbub going on today concerning Oprah Winfrey and her dingbat religion she is starting or supporting. If Christians were to use the Bible as our guide, we would not seek advice from an immoral woman. (It is a known truth that Oprah has a “partner” she is not married to and has confessed publicly to having an affair with a married man…) Proverbs 7:5,24-27 Now therefore, listen to me, my children; Pay attention to the words of my mouth: 25 Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways, Do not stray into her paths; 26 For she has cast down many wounded, And all who were slain by her were strong men. 27 Her house is the way to hell. Descending to the chambers of death.
Christian band Casting Crowns pleads,

“What if people prayed and Stopped asking Oprah what to do?” But I digress.

People get upset when you call sin what it is and also when you attempt to make any kind of judgment about anybody. Which is what I want to post about.

Oprah says she grew up in Baptist churches and bought into the church until she heard the preacher say that God was jealous. She was furious. She would not and could not worship a God who was not like the God she wanted. She would have no jealous God, even though the Bible calls him just that in many places. She would have no Bible telling her about God. She wanted a God of her own imagination. Jer 23:17 They say still unto them that despise me, The LORD hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you..

What does it mean that God is jealous? If you are like me, you don’t like posts longer than 100 words, so I will answer this question in another post.

There IS Free Will

"But they (punishments of hell: fire, worm dieth not, outer darkness, gnashing of teeth) are not arbitrary inflictions; they represent, rather, a conscious growing into the state in which one has chosen to be. 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, in all its implications:..God's readiness to respect human choice to this extent may appear disconcerting and even terrifying, but it is plain that his attitude here is supremely just."

It has always confused me why people would want to go to heaven where intimate fellowship with God is the defining characteristic of what makes heaven so great. A good many "christians" would prefer a heaven with no God, as long as the mansions, eternal life and perfect health were there, and let us not forget family.

Many people would even say they wanted God in heaven, but mostly because He is a God that they have created in their own mind, who thinks the world of them and is willing to make great sacrifices so that they can have, forgive me for this, "Their Best Life Now."

True Christians

"True Christians are people who acknowledge and live under the word of God. They submit without reserve to the word of God written in "the Book of truth" (Dan 10:21), believing the teaching, trusting the promises, following the commands. Their eyes are upon the God of the Bible as their Father and the Christ of the Bible as their Savior."

Knowing God Pt. 6 "Potter & the Clay"

"There is a lot of it (sloth) around today in Chrisitan circles; the symptoms are personal spiritual inertia combined with critical cycincism about the churches and supercilious resentment of other Christians' initiative and enterprise.

Behind this morbid and deadening condition often lies the wounded pride of one who thought he knew all about the ways of God in providence an then was made to learn by bitter and bewildering experience that he didn't...

The truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and our own lives."

Pg 106 Knowing God by JI Packer

Knowing God Pt. 5

"If our God is the same as the God of New Testament believers, how can we justify ourselves in resting content with an experience of communion with Him, and a level of Christian conduct, that falls so far below theirs? If God is the same, this is not an issue that any one of us can evade." pg 80

But, you say, "a lot ended with the Apostolic age and therefore has nothing to do with us. "

Let M.L. Jones answer your statement: "The Scriptures are also meant to apply to us today, and that if you confine all this to the Apostolic era you are leaving very little for us at the present time...The whole Scripture is for us. In the New Testament we have a picture of the church, and it is relevant to the church at all times and in all ages."

Knowing God Pt. 3

A lady in our church told me last night that her sister is being kicked out of her house and is going to live in her vehicle. I read in Knowing God today the following quote: "They are many, whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the submiddle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves."

Should we not have the mind of Christ who became poor for us?

Should not this mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus?

2nd Commandment

Exodus 20:4-5 "You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me."

Does this command prohibit pictures of Jesus, crucifixes, stained glass pictures of Jesus, Pictures of Him in Sunday School curriculum etc.?

Why or why not?

Let me note the severity of the reason why we shouldn't violate this command (vs 5) and thus say that we need to get this right.

Knowing God Pt. 2

"How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God." Knowing God pg 23

We must take the truths of God from Scripture and pray over them, and ponder them. When we rise up, when we lay down, as we eat, as we sit in the living room, and for me, one of the privileges of being a pastor is that I can sit in my office and meditate on the truths of God.

When we do not spend time in the word, and do not know the many truths about God revealed to us, it will be impossible to meditate on God in our normal everyday life. The more we know about God and the more we ponder who He is and what He has done and is doing, the more we will be blown away by how the world functions and how we see His hand in everything-leading us to prayer and praise. Worship.

Here is a thought for you to meditate on today.

"There was a man, sent from God whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all through Him might believe." John 1:6-7

As you ponder this, consider that God uses men to bear witness of Christ and so that other men will believe in Him. How is your witness? Is your life characterized by light or darkness? Things of God or things of the world? Pride or humility?