Insanity For Christ Part 1 Who Is God, Why Jesus
Calvary 1/6/2013 Isaiah 45:5-13 Luke 4:16-20
Today we are beginning a new series, Insanity For Christ, 49 Days To Transformation. The sermons are only one part of the series. If you want to find our who God is and what God is wanting to do in your life, you can if you’re willing to do the assignments and the bible studies that go along with the series. You will get far more out of it by doing it with one of our bible groups, but you can grow doing it by yourself. You don’t have to be a Christian to do the assignments or the bible study. But we all need to participate in the full 49 days. If you miss a Sunday, make sure you catch it on our website or on you smart phone.
You can go through the lessons as a family together if you can’t make it to one of the Bible study groups. If you look at the Black and White Card, you can see what the topics will be for each week, and what’s going to be the assignment. I’m guaranteeing you, you will not look at God and you will not look at yourself the same way if you do the 49 days. You will not be the same person. We will not be the same church. Now how many of you know your life would be better if the people around you were transformed by the power of God? Okay now somebody is saying that about you, so we all need some power outside of ourselves for changing?
We are calling this series Isanity for Christ, because Jesus will ask us to do things that may seem insane to others. So if you want to really know God, at times you might have to lose your mind. People have lost their minds over a lot of things, they fell in love, they got hooked on drugs, or they became famous or rich. We are losing our minds in order to find our purpose. Now God is not asking us to go crazy, God is inviting us to discover a life that has true meaning and purpose. As pastors we are inviting you to go with us on a journey to insanity, but it’s insanity for Christ. We are going to discover what it is to trust God with our minds.
Now the first thing is to discover “Who is God—Why Jesus.” Some of you may say well, I don’t really believe in God. That’s alright, God does not need for you to believe in Him for God to exist and to do what God does. The bible never attempts to prove that God exists. It simply starts out with the phrases, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There is a good chance that most of us do not believe in the god, that you may not believe does not exist.
Most of us started out with the wrong image of God. How many of you got a view of God in the cartoons? Well we watched cartoons and God was an old white man, with a long beard usually standing on a cloud or seated in a chair. Now God was either a mean guy waiting for you to mess up so that he could get you back for doing it. God even smiled when you got punished, because God got angry when you disobeyed and only loved you when you were good.
Or God was a grandfather with the best bank account in the world. You could ask for anything and get it. When you messed up, all you had to say was you were sorry at night, and you were free to do the same thing all over again the next day. The other familiar image of God is that it is God’s job to make sure your life goes exactly as you want it to go. God is like a genie in a bottle, that stays put until you need something and God must do it, or you threaten not to rob the bottle again. “God if you don’t do this, I’m never going to pray again.” You’re actually doing God a favor by calling upon him for help.
There is nothing in the Bible that tells us that God looks like any of these images. The bible does not give us any image to associate with a picture of God. It tells us things about God, but you can’t put them in a picture. God is Light. God is Love. God is Almighty. Does that mean God looks like a bright red valentine, with muscle arms sticking out? Of course not. If you are to know who God is, you have to let go of the image of what you think God looks like. The bible tells us that God is Spirit, so we cannot see God in a physical form. If we read the bible, we can get an understanding what God is like. Let me tell you five things that we learn about God from the teachings in the bible.
The first is that God is immutable. That simply means that God does not change. Everything that God has created will change, but God is not going to change. Our belief in God may change, but that does not change God. God will have the same nature tomorrow as God has today. People try all the time to change God to make God fit into what they like or what they want to do. The fact that God is holy is never going to change. The fact that we vote to accept a behavior that God rejects does not mean that God changes to accept the behavior. God is still God.
The reality of changes in our circumstances does not mean that God has changed. God did not lose His power, because things did not go our way. God is still love even after a disaster has entered our lives. Our saying, God I want nothing else to do with you, does not end God’s love for us.
The second thing is that God is eternal. God has no beginning and no end. That’s why the beginning was created after God was already here. Since God is eternal, God is going to know you while you are alive and God is going to know you after you die. God has created each of us to live for the rest of eternity. People wonder if there is life after death. God has told us, of course there is life after death.
God sent Jesus into the world and raised Him from the dead to prove that life exists after death, and that each one of us is going to be resurrected from the dead. The scriptures do not attempt to prove there is life after death, it simply shows you people who died showing up again after they were dead. Moses died a few thousand years before Jesus came into the world. But we see Moses talking to Jesus while Jesus is doing his ministry on earth. Right after Jesus was crucified, the earth shook and people who had died got up and walked out of their tombs. Read Matthew chapter 27.
The third thing we can learn about God is that God is omnipresent. That means that God is everywhere a t the same time. None of us are ever outside of the eyes of God. That means whenever anything happens to us or whenever we do whatever we do, God is right there. You and I are always in the presence of God. That’s why God must laugh and think we are insane to think it’s a really bad thing to curse in the church building, but quite acceptable to do it in the parking lot across the street.
We really show our insanity when we conceive a plan for how we are going to sin, and think that we are completely in charge of carrying out the plan. God knows our thoughts before we fully put them into being. In a way, we already know that God is omnipresent, because no matter where we are, when we get in a jam, we will call out to God.
The fourth thing we can learn about God is that God is omnipotent. That means that God is all powerful and never runs out of power. This is why the Scriptures refer to God as being God Almighty. God being all powerful does not equate into God using His power to always fix our problems in the way we want to fix them. There is a story in the bible in which three of God’s servants were about to be thrown into a fiery furnace if they did not bow down to worship the king’s golden statute. The guys were Shadrach, Meshack and Abedenego.
They told they king, “our God is able to deliver us from your hand, but even if He does not do it, we will not bow down to worship your God. One of the hardest things at time for us to accept is knowing that God could have done something about a particular situationt, but God chooses to allow regular events in life to take place. Some very good friends of Jesus once were upset and they told Jesus, “if you would have been here, our brother would not have died. We are all going to get angry because it appeared God did not do, what God could have easily done.
The fifth thing we can learn about God is that God is omniscient. That means that God knows everything. God knows everything about the universe. God knows everything about this church. God knows everything about you. God knows your strengths, your weaknesses, your plans, your desires, your successes, your failures, your likes and your dislikes. Not only does God know how many outfits you have, God even knows the number of hairs on your bed. But more importantly, God knows that you have a spirit living inside of you that is broken and needs to be in a right relationship with Him.
That spirit is what makes you wonder if there is a God. That spirit is what you makes you feel as though there has to be more to life than this. That spirit is what causes you to know, that there is a God somewhere out there calling for you. That spirit longs for a home than can only be found in God. You were created to be in a real relationship with God.
But God knows that your spirit can never come home without his help. God chose to come into this world in the form of human being in order to rescue our spirits that have been broken by our sinful nature or our nature that cause us to do things we know are wrong and often don’t want to do, but we give in to the temptation to do it. God knew that making New Year’s resolutions was not going to be enough for us to change.
We need to know that God was providing a way for us to come back home to God. That was the good news that needed to be preached. We needed to know that God knew the pain in all of our lives and that He was going to set us free. We needed to know that it did not matter who you were, what you had done, how long you had been in prison, or what you socio economic status, or whether you were young or old, male or female, or what racial ethnic group you were a part of, or whether you believed in God or didn’t believed in God, or believed in the wrong kind of a god , One Savior was going to take care of everybody’s needs.
God decided to come in a human form. That form was Jesus. As God, Jesus existed before creation. When Jesus was on earth, Jesus was God but chose to limit himself to some of the physical properties of a human being. Jesus was not omnipresent. He was just in Jerusalem when he was in Jerusalem. Jesus was not a separate God. Jesus was an extension of God. That is why refer to God the Father and God the Son. The Father and the Son are all part of the Same God. The Other part of God came into the world when Jesus left, because Jesus promised to send us The Holy Spirit who would live inside of us.
So the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit are all part of the same God. There is but one God. God has always been in fellowship with his three parts. Because in the very beginning in the first book of the bible, we find God saying, “Let Us Make man in our own images. There is one God who reveals Himself in three persons.
Now God is all knowing and all powerful and does not change. God decided that the only way for our sins to be paid for, was if he paid the bill. Our trying to be good enough was never going to work, because none of us can be good enough. There is not a single one of us here who claims perfection. If we do, then that shows our defect of pride. We are told in the Scriptures that God so loved the world, that God gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life.
Now the word believes means more than simply agreeing in your head that God sent Jesus Christ to die for you. Even the devil believes that God sent Jesus Christ to die for you. The word believe is stronger to the word trust or obey than it is agreeing to something on paper. There has to be some kind of action to verify our belief. If we honestly believed the roof over this sanctuary was going to collapse in five minutes, it would cause some of us to take action regardless of whether I continued to preach this sermon or not. The seriousness of the possible consequences will override your desire to be respectful and let me finish the message.
Believing that Jesus died for you, should coincide with the knowledge that you owe him your life. Now if you don’t accept what He did for you, you miss out on the benefit which means you will still have to find a way to pay for your sins because you are still going to give an account to God. The all knowing God says, that if you keep your life, what good will it do you, because in the end you still will died. Jesus said, what good will it do you to gain the whole world but then die and lose your soul. Remember, God looks at your life with eternity in view. How far out are you projecting how long you are going to live. Don’t forget you have been created for eternity. God is supreme. You and I are not in charge of our lives. Nor do we even have the right to challenge what God is doing in us. God uses us even when we do not know that we are being used.
This week our goal is going to be to see if we can see the hand of God at work in our lives during the next 49 days. Each day before you get out of bed, ask God this simple question, “ What plans do you have for us today.?’ Wait a moment to see if God responds right then because God might, but God may choose to speak to you throughout the day. Be ready to do what God tells you. It might look like God has a plan for you that looks insane. Go ahead and do it, because God is trying to live through you.
Next week we are going to look at Who You Are and Why Are You Here. So don’t miss out. You might be a lot more important than you think you are.
