Sermon Central
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How Big Is God Series
Contributed by Michael West on Mar 17, 2008 (message contributor)
Summary: Second in series that helps to understand the immensity and immenance of God by asking the question; How big God is compared to your circumstances?
Sunday March 16th, 2008 River of Life Ministries Pastor Michael West
Series: His majesty, His Names part two
Sermon: How big is God? Scripture: Isaiah 40:22-26
Turn to:
Psalm 8; Habakkuk 3:18-19 —Adonai—plural and comes from the singular form Adon which means Lord. Adonai is the substitution for YHWH which is considered to be too sacred to be spoken by man.
Adonai, the Lord My Great God. God the Master.
God our Majestic Lord and our total authority.
Majestic’s definition: impressive; greatly impressive in appearance - dignified: showing great dignity and grandeur.
Majesty, majestic splendor, greatness. The majesty of God, the divine nature of God. Showing means, the majesty and glory of God filled and surrounded Christ when He walked upon earth.
Early Christians knew that Jesus was the Savior of men because they saw the majesty and glory of God in His life and in His deeds. Jesus went to great pains to reveal the majesty and glory of the Father and He proved time and again that He was God’s Son.
Can we measure God? Do we understand what we are saying when we use His name, Lord? Can we really know our majestic God? More important, how much do you want? What do you really want in this life? In the end, what will matter most? Look at the warning given to us in Matthew 16:25-26
Paul sums it up for us in Philippians 3:8(MSG):
"Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant—dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ..."
Father, forgive us for losing sight. We have seen and looked upon things in this world contrary to Your wisdom and ways. Help us to re-focus, show us Who You are. Reveal to us oh Great and Mighty Shepherd the sweet wonders of Jesus, Your love, Your Majesty. Amen.
A French philosopher and mystic mathematician named Paschal said; “We are halfway between immensity and infinitesimally. In other words, there are worlds beyond our world, and beyond those.
If you look inward, you will see smaller worlds and in them little worlds, molecules all the way down to infinitesimal smallness. A very famous doctor named Dr. Suess, wrote a story similar to Paschal’s findings, it is titled “Horton Hears a Who” about a very small infinitesimal world, held in the trunk of an elephant who believed that a "person was a person no matter how small."
God has the attributes of immensity and immanence.
Immensity can be thought of this way: We think our sun is big, and has all the planets going around it, the truth is, it’s not that big in comparison to some other stars also called suns. These suns are so big, they could swallow up our sun. Some suns could hold millions of our suns inside them—and who in this world can comprehend that?
Lets not forget space. The distance between us and the moon is 250,000 miles, but from here to the sun, it’s a whopping 93 million miles. To make it easier, they start talking light years and that’s where I get lost real fast.
For instance let’s take 10 million light years. How far is that in laymen terms? Multiply 5 trillion, 860 billion, 484 million by 10 million and that equals...well, a major headache! The answer? The answer is, we are really small. Not the smallest, but that is why Paschal said he believed we were halfway between the biggest and the smallest. Therefore we have
the immensity of God.
Next is Immanence and in the nutshell, bottom line is, you don’t have to go the distance to find God. The fact is, He is here. He is above all things, beneath all things. God is above, not pushed up, beneath, not pressed down. He is outside and inside.
God cannot be fenced in.
Above means God presides over. Beneath means God sustains things. Outside, He embraces, inside He fills all things. We don’t just get a portion of God by way of the Holy Spirit or a little bit more here and there, we have all we need and it is all Him.
God never measured Himself out in portions.
God doesn’t travel to get anywhere. When we ask God to come and help, God doesn’t actually “come” to help us because there isn’t anywhere where God is not. That means He is immanent.
Jeremiah 23:23-24(MSG): "Am I not a God near at hand"—God’s Decree— "and not a God far off? Can anyone hide out in a corner where I can’t see him?"..."Am I not present everywhere, whether seen or unseen?..."
