Who is God?

Psalm 46:10 says, "Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” What assurance there is in knowing who God is. For there is none like Him, there are no others that share his qualities and attributes. But, have you ever wondered, “Who is God?” This is essential for the Christian Religion, for if one worships a God he does not know, then he is probably worshiping an idea of God that he, himself, has created. This is not far from being an idol.

When searching Google for answers of who God is, you find that God is loving, caring, compassionate, graceful, and wants to be our friend. It cannot be denied that God does have these qualities, but to stop here is to merely glance at the moon and say, “It is white.” There is so much more to God then just love and kindness.

However, we often stop at this because other attributes are either not well known, so we have no desire to search for them, or controversial, in which case we have no desire to research them. Another factor that may stop us from searching after the attributes of God is that He cannot be fully known, meaning that we cannot fully comprehend Him. However, don’t let that stop you from learning who He is. Think of God as a Rainforest (However, this example doesn’t even begin to grasp the completely person of God). You search the Rainforest looking for new animals and different types of trees, but there is no possible way you can learn everything about everything. There is way too much to be known. Also, when one goes scuba diving, he knows that he will have to stop at some point, because the ocean is too big for one to completely comprehend everything that lives in it. As an astronomer looks through his telescope, he sees the galaxy. There is no way for him to completely understand how complex everything is, but he enjoys studying it and learning what he can.

There is no way to say God is 10 or 20 bigger than the ocean or the rainforest or the universe for God is outside of earthly scales. To say God is 1000x better is to put Him into a box where He can be no more better or bigger than 1000x. We must be satisfied by saying God is the greatest person, that the mind cannot even comprehend, but even in saying that, we are comparing God to all others, which does not give God full glory.

God is greater than the mind can comprehend. God is sovereign, meaning that He is all-powerful and able to do anything He desires without opposition. He is just and justifier, meaning that when we did not reach His perfection, He paid the price in our place, which to this day doesn’t fully make sense to me.

God is all knowing. He is life itself since all others have come from Him. He is timeless, for without that quality, He could not be the authority of creation, or even God.

This is just the surface – Forsake All

Coat of Honor

Exodus 20:12 says, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you.”

These words, “Honor your father and your mother” are found nine different times in the entire Bible. In Ephesians 6:2, it says that this commandment is the first with a promise, that if you do honor your parents, your days will be prolonged. Why is this true? Believe it or not, your parents have lived a longer time than you have and have seen a lot more things than you. If you honor them, you will do what they ask. If you do what they ask, then you heed wisdom. Heeding wisdom makes you flee from youthful temptations and youthful choices. The less dumb decisions you make, the longer you will live. It’s just common sense.

God has really been pressing this on my heart, but it is a really hard commandment for me to obey because sometimes, I feel like I know more than my parents. This past week has been hard for me in the sense of honoring my parents. It’s been a long and hard struggle for me. If you asked my parents, I’m pretty sure they’d tell you I am no where near perfecting this goal, but I pray that God would help me chase after this goal.

There is a lot of focus on the mother and father of the family. They are instructed to follow after God and teach their children to do likewise. I know most of you who read this are not yet adults, and I urge you to know your part in the family. Your part is to simply honor your father and mother.

It’s easier said than done, but done it must be – Forsake All

Like a Time Bomb

Matthew 24:14 says, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.”

What is the Gospel? If I gave you a minute to explain it, could you do it accurately? Sometimes I wonder if we get so caught up in living the Christian life that we forget the essence of why we live the Christian life. I can’t remember the last time I visited a church when they talked about the Gospel in depth. You always here the saving message preached at the end, just incase someone doesn’t really know what it is, but that has become the extent of our knowledge, the Gospel presentation at the end of the sermon.

The Gospel has come to the point where it is only used outside of the church. It’s only for the missionaries who go overseas to talk to people. Our argument for this lack of preaching is, “Everyone has heard the Gospel, but they need something else, something more.” I commend to you that if we preached the Gospel, there would be nothing else that person needs.

Even when we preach the Gospel, do we really get it right? Here is a “Gospel Presentation” that is used by many churches. It sounds like this…

           

            If you were to die today, do you know for sure if you would go to Heaven?

            If you arrived in Heaven and God asked you, "Why should I let you in?" - what 

            would you say?

            Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?

Is this what Jesus preached? Is this the true message of the Bible? The Gospel says simply that man is completely and utterly unable to receive salvation. We have been put under a curse that says we are the scum of the earth. However, this is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is this: God is good.

Proverbs 17:15 says, “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD.” It all comes down to this: How can a Holy God justify the wicked without being an abomination to Himself? How can He become the Just and the Justifier? This is the absolute beauty of the Gospel.

I want to pause and say something very important. If one has no idea he has cancer, will he still go to the doctor? If there is no way for him to see that he is dying inside, will he go to the doctor to get something he doesn’t know is happening looked at? When the doctor says, “What seems to be the problem?” does he respond, “Not really sure… In fact I have no earthly idea why I am here.”

One must understand that he has a killing disease that if he doesn’t get help, he will be destroyed. It’s like a time bomb placed on your back. You can think for the longest time that it’s not there, but until you accept the fact that it is going to blow you up, you can’t have it taken off by a friend.

Now understand this, Jesus steps out of Heaven, not losing his divinity, but stepping away from His glory. He becomes born as a human, but it’s a supernatural birth that does not fall under the curse of man. He takes our place on a cross for our sin. The time bomb, the cancer that you and I both have, he took on the cross to pay for our sin. He paid the price for His elect, meaning that He saved those whom he had chosen.

Understand that you did nothing to be saved. Some may say, accept Christ, and this we must do, but understand that we have no choice. God has pulled us out of the pit, and some say, “Well, I accepted the rope, so chose salvation.” The fact that you accepted the rope is a given, since the pit was death and the only sensible choice would be to accept the rope.

It is common sense to want to get out of death, and it is by the grace of God that we are saved. He becomes the just and the justifier by taking on and defeating sin. If He rids sin completely, then He is not an abomination.

Some people will hear this for the first time. Others will say, “I never knew that …” If we don’t preach the Gospel with the points of depravity and grace, then what do we call it? We say, “Do you want to have a relationship with Jesus?” but we have no idea what that means. Once one truly understands that he has been saved and set free from sin, his life will change dramatically. He will have a sense of urgency about spreading the Gospel.

Preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth, and when they say they have heard it, preach it again – Forsake All

Piano Lessons

Mark 6:45-46 says, “Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side to Bethsaida, while He Himself was sending the crowd away. 46 After bidding them farewell, He left for the mountain to pray.”

Prayer. Everyone knows it’s important, or at least has heard that it is. This may be different for you, but for me, it is so hard to pray. It’s like practicing the piano when I was younger. It was something I had to do or my mother would make me pay for the lesson. It is something I feel huge pressure forcing me to do it.

With prayer, it’s the same thing. I don’t really enjoy it, except for sometimes when I feel like I really get connected with Christ. It’s like those times when I get a tune right, or the right hand is doing exactly what I want it to on the keys. I guess the hard part is praying when you don’t, in a sense, get the notes right.

I’m not saying I am praying for the wrong things. In fact, one-way of looking at Philippians 4:6, which says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God,” there are no wrong things to be prayed for, but your heart can be in a wrong place. The verse says with thanksgiving.

Throughout the Psalms, you can see the waywardness of David’s heart. You can understand his emotion and his problems with the world. Why does he write all of this down? I believe so that we can know that we should bring everything to the Lord in prayer. If you look at David’s psalms, you will see that He always gives glory to God and says that He is the ruler of all or just names His greatness. This is a heart with thanksgiving.

One reason I write about this is because sometimes it’s hard to get alone and away to pray. Some people do it in the mornings, some in midday, some at night. People say you should pray in the morning to start your day off right. Some say the night because you can recap all the things that happened and praise God for the things you saw Him do. The truth is pray all the time, without ceasing.

The only man I ever met who has really taken this to heart, and you could see the effects of it, was a man named Joe. We were walking across campus at the college when he saw a lady with a cast. Soon after we passed her, he turned around and offered to pray for her arm. I was so tempted to leave and go on to our meeting that we were headed to, but I wanted to watch and see what was going to happen.

He prayed over it, and he showed the lady love by just talking and praying with her. She began to cry, her heart touched by this random act of kindness. I asked him later how he knew that he was supposed to pray for her. He said to me, “The Bible says pray without ceasing, and I just felt like that was the right thing to do.”

Now we are called to pray without ceasing, but that does not mean we are suppose to give our time that we could be spending in prayer to worthless things. Jesus was in complete communion with God, and He still went to be alone with Him on the mountain.

The last thing I want you to see prayer as is a legalist idea, something you must do. It then becomes much like learning the piano at a young age. However, it’s something you’re going to have to push through. Because I took piano at such a young age, I learned so much about the fundamentals of music. However, I majorly lacked in inspiration. I had no one to look up to and say, “I want to be like you.”

Praying should be something that we enjoy, that we just love doing. After piano lessons, I decided to move on with music and pursued drums, guitar, and then the piano again. I feel in love with music. In the same way, we should fall in love with praying. However, for some people, this could take years of “beginner’s lessons”, but for some it may only take a day.

Practice Practice Practice – Forsake All

Home Front

James 1:27 says, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

If you don’t know a lot about my family, you may still know that I have a lot of brothers and sisters. You may also know that four are from Ethiopia, and one is from China. My parents have a real heart for adoption, and because of that, my father has started an adoption group at our church called, “Pure Religion.”

I always thought the name was pretty cool. It makes me think, “Our religion is pure and yours isn’t because you don’t adopt kids.” However, in no way does that reflect pure religion at all. Even though it is still a cool title for a Bible Study, it means so much more than just having helped kids and even widows through adoption. For that, I thank my parents who truly have the desire to adopt and serve.

Our church, Faith Bible Church of the Woodlands, really pushes its congregation to go on Mission Trips every summer. There are maybe a dozen different trips that one can go on, and this year, I have been trying to figure our which trip I want to go on. My first trip that I attended was to the Dominican Republic, which I really considered this year. My second trip was to South Korea, where I also really enjoyed but there was no trip going there this year. My third was to Burundi, Africa, which once I again I really enjoyed.

So many different choices have shown themselves to me. However, I remember one day driving down into Conroe to shoot a video with a friend at a Jr. High School. If you know anything about downtown Conroe, it’s not the nicest place on earth. The houses are very close together and torn apart, people roam the streets with nowhere to go. In comparison to the Woodlands, which is but a ten-minute drive away, it is trashy and completely despised.

While my friend and I were shooting the video, we both noticed Conroe and thought to ourselves that there was a lot of work that could be done. I knew a ministry called Compassion International that had a little coffee-shop-like homeless ministry church. I had been there many times before, and today I went to go talk to the head director of it and talked about doing missions all summer long with them.

We talked about some ideas and really just laid the base down for what might happen this summer. However, I am super excited to maybe get the chance to make a difference just down the street. I understand that Africa and China and all the countries like that need to be reached, but how much more so the people that live across from us, or down the street.

Sometimes, I believe we get too focused on other countries, we forget what is going on here or what needs to be done. Maybe you’re thinking of doing a mission trip somewhere over the Atlantic or Pacific, but don’t be afraid to heed to the voice that says, “Just stay here and minister to those around you.” In fact, everyday should be considered a mission trip. You are called to go out to all the nations and preach the Gospel.

Going out to all the nations doesn’t mean you have to leave this one. – Forsake All

Forty Days and Nights

Matthew 4:1-4 says, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” 4 But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘MAN SHALL NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE, BUT ON EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD.’”

There are several times in the Bible where God uses forty days to prepare His follower for what He has planed. For Jesus, He spent forty days fasting to be strong enough not to fall into the temptation of Satan. Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai writing down the laws of God, and Exodus 34:28 says he did not eat bread or drink water.

Everywhere else you see the words, “forty days,” it usually has to do something with a waiting period that one goes through. Noah went through the waiting period of forty days with the flood. The spies spent forty days checking out Canaan, and in return for their disobedience, they spent forty years in the desert wandering.

I don’t know why forty or seven or three are important numbers in the Bible, but for some reason, God is working through them to show a point either of consistency or something else.

Going back to Jesus’ example, He fasted because He was going to be tempted. Now why would you do that? Think about it. If someone threatens to attack you, wouldn’t you want to build up as many defenses as possible and make your defenses impossible to break through?

That was exactly what He was doing. He knew He was going to go through spiritual warfare with the devil, so He relied on the most powerful being possible. When one fast, he says that food is not sufficient, but just the grace of God, and that He will uphold me with His right hand. God works through fasting because His strength shines through weaknesses. What better weakness to have then to fully rely on the will of God to sustain you?

Sometimes the modern day church begins to spread out the meaning of “fasting.” They say that one doesn’t have to fast from food, but rather a bad habit, or a time consuming action. When I was younger, they said I could fast from anything I wanted to, and so I decided to fast from computer games.

Don’t get me wrong, computer games waste my time, but what would happen when the fast was over? Do we just say, “Well, that was a nice break. Back to my computer games”? I remember that was exactly what happened after the fast. We all went back to things we were originally doing in the first place.

The whole idea of a fast is to build trust in God that He will sustain you. While He sustains you everyday, it becomes less evident when you go through your day feeding yourself and taking care of yourself. The idea is to rid yourself of a need and watch how God provides. Then you see God working in a way that says, “I am beyond all human necessity, for I am the only one you need.”

Build faith in God, not just because faith can move mountains, but because we are called to. – Forsake All