Haritha

Our Perception Of God Determines Everything

Our Father; which art in heaven, how wondrous the world as seen through Ttiine eyes. The more we come to know Theey the more we begin to understand the creative world around us and above us.

Thou hast built the world to honor Thee in every possible way. Every aspect of the world reveals something of Thy character and nature. May I discover more of that perception today through Jesus Christ. Amen.

When our perception of God has been damaged or compromised, everything around us falls into confusion and turmoil. Nothing seems to make sense, and everything seems to be at odds with one another. This, as I have pointed out, is a result of man’s downfall in the Garden of Eden. The whole created world was affected by this.

“For we know,” Paul writes, “that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). It is not possible for us to know what this world was like prior to the curse of sin.

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

One day we shall experience that, but until then, we are laboring under this terrible curse affecting all humanity and all creation. By getting to know God, I begin to understand how things are supposed to be.

By nature, I would be considered by many a pessimist. I can look around and see everything that is wrong. When I begin to understand God, my pessimism begins to change to optimism.

My nature has been corrupted by depravity, but my new nature in Christ elevates me above the depravity level and introduces me to the glory level. I begin to see the world through divine eyes. The divine perspective, if you please, has affected everything in my life.

In my younger days, I had a deep appreciation for classical music. I enjoyed listening to it and could identify all the major classical musicians. I had great times debating who was the best classical musician and composer.

Those days are behind me now. It is not because I have grown older; it is because I have grown nearer to God. All of the beauty of that secular music and the brilliance of the composers began to fade in comparison to a simple hymn.

I readily admit most hymns cannot compare in brilliance to the great classical composers. Most hymns have flaws in the areas of composition and music. The hymn writers are not in the same class as the great composers of classical music. I get that.

However, as my relationship with God has deepened and I have gotten closer to God, something has changed within me. I no longer look at music in the same way. I am not looking for brilliance in music or composition anymore. My appreciation of hymnody has grown.

I think my attraction to hymns has to do with why and how that hymn came about. I know that the great hymn writers did not write to impress the listening audience, but out of a heart deeply worshiping God. The worship aspect has attracted me.

In the classical compositions, I was worshiping the composition. Now the great hymns of the church have brought me to the place of lifting myself into the presence of God. A hymn is not a hymn unless it lifts me into that rarefied atmosphere of adoring wonder and worship of God.

I may be able to appreciate secular music, but as I have grown in Christ, it does not have the same effect on me as it once did. My heart is stirred to levels of adoration that no secular piece of music can give me when I am reflecting upon one of the grand hymns of the church.

I believe that is why the Twenty-third Psalm is so beautiful— because it honors God. And I think that goes with the whole Bible itself. This book I hold in my hand is a shining, beautiful book.

It is lovely no matter whether it is bound in the cheapest of paper or in the most expensive leather, whether it is printed on plain paper or the finest Indian paper available; nevertheless, it is a beautiful book.

When it comes to the Bible, I have grown a little weary of the battle about translations: which translation is better, which is more accurate, which is more scholarly. I have in my library every translation of the Bible available today.

I love the Bible, and in spite of all of these translations—and many are wonder¬ful—I find myself gravitating back to the good old King James Version. This is not because it is any better as far as a translation is concerned, but there is something in this Bible that stirs my heart and lifts me above the intellectual realm into the realm of adoration.

If after reading and meditating on the Bible, I have not encountered the Living Word, I have truly read in vain. In my reading of God’s Word, I need to persist until I pierce the darkness and come into the light of His presence.

As I meditate on the Word of God, my heart is stirred, and my concept of the Bible is a direct result of my growing appreciation of God. The more I know God, the more I understand His character and nature. The more I delve into the attributes of God and the more I meditate upon His Word, the more I begin to appreciate everything around me.

My relationship with God through Jesus Christ has given me new glasses from which I can look upon the world in deep appreciation and see what God intends for me to see.

I think Christianity is the most beautiful thing in the world.

I think the Bible is the most beautiful book in the world. I think a good hymnbook is the most awesome, wonderful, beautiful thing in the world. And I think the face of an old saint is more beautiful than all the composite beauty of all the bathing beauties.

As we move toward God, all things become more beautiful, and as we move away from God, they become uglier. This is why theology is a beautiful thing. Theology is simply the study of God. It is the mind’s reasoning about God. It is the mind kneeling before God in meditative worship of God.

This kind of theology can be beautiful if it begins in God and ends in God. That is the secret. I know there are those so-called theologians who have spun theology into some technical compos¬ite of religious matters. Let them be as they are. My concept of theology is God.

I want to know God. The more I know God, the more my heart is filled with worship and adoration. As I grow nearer to God, I discover the beauty of all things pertaining to God. I believe worship is admiring the beauty associated with God.

If our theology is not full of beauty, it is simply because it is not full of God. Nothing about God is ugly. The closer we get to God, the more we appreciate what beauty is all about. When we begin moving away from God, we begin to experience the ugliness that is in the world.

This affects our concept of heaven and hell and even the earth. Some of the things being published today about heaven are so off-center with the Word of God, that I wonder where they come up with those ideas. Heaven is not a fictional place of fantasy and folklore; neither is hell.

Our Concept Of Heaven

Heaven is the place of supreme beauty because perfection is there. The perfect God, the God of unqualified beauty—He is there, and heaven is going to be beautiful. Our problem today is we are too satisfied with Earth.

After all, with a split-level house, a TV, and two cars, why would you want to go to heaven? There is no good reason for going to heaven if everything is so nice down here. Nobody chases you and comes at midnight and puts you in jail. Nobody comes and locks up your church and persecutes you. We have it too nice down here. We have it all fixed up.

Henry Ford Thomas Edison and others fixed it all up for us so we can be born in a hospital and go home, never get off the sidewalk and live our lifetime on concrete, and die in the hospital and be taken to Memorial Park, and packed away among the artificial green grass.

It is a beautiful place we live in, you know if you see it from above eye view. It is quite a beautiful place, this world; why should you want to go to heaven?

We sing about heaven an awful lot, not because we expect to get there ahead of the rest, but just because we think heaven must be a wonderful place if Jesus Christ is there. The beautiful One, the Lord of glory, the One altogether lovely—if He is there, it must be a wonderful place.

I am convinced that the average Christian needs to rethink their concept of heaven. Much of their idea of heaven has come from the world, the best things of the world are projected upward into a place called heaven. Nothing could be more discouraging if you think it through carefully.

Heaven is not the best the world has to offer. Heaven is the best God has to offer. The more we begin to know God and understand His character and nature, the more we will begin to understand what heaven is all about.

A lot of literature has been published concerning heaven and what people think it will be like. It is amazing that someone who will live a life of depravity here on earth expects to go to heaven when they die.

Their life is filled with the ugliness of the world, but somehow they believe they will go zooming off to heaven when they die. After all, everybody goes to heaven. At least that is what they are told.

I think we need to see what the Bible has to say about heaven and not what somebody out in the world has to say about it.

If a person, for example, was going on a vacation, they would get as much information about their vacation destination as possible. They would want to see brochures and maps and literature to understand a little bit about what to expect when they get there. I think the same needs to be true concerning heaven.

What Is Heaven All About?

If you could imagine the most beautiful thing here on earth, it has no comparison to the beauty of heaven. We need to understand that earth, this world about us, is under the curse of sin. Heaven will be absolutely free from all aspects of sin.

That is difficult for us who have groaned under the weight of depravity to appreciate.

As Christians, we need to cultivate a more heavenly mind. It is easy to get so caught up with the world around us that we fail to look and see the beauty of our Lord.

The hymn writer Samuel Stennett wrote of the essence of this in his hymn:

On Jordan’s stormy banks, I stand,
And cast a wistful eye
To Canada fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie.

Stennett understood how stormy this world really was and that there was nothing here for him. Can we appreciate the beauty of heaven? In the midst of all the “stormy banks” do we take the time to “cast a wistful eye” to that “fair and happy land”?

Ah, the beauty of heaven is beyond our ability to describe or even appreciate now.

I refuse to read a book written by someone who knows more about heaven than the Bible tells us. If we get our information about heaven from sources other than the Bible, we are not going to get a view of heaven as God has it. There is so much about heaven that we do not know.

For example, I do not know where heaven is. Sometimes people look up into the air as though heaven were above them. Perhaps it is—I do not know. Not knowing where heaven is is not as important as knowing that heaven is my destination.

The technology of our generation has advanced to such a point that we can send rockets up into the air for thousands of miles. Some wonder if maybe we are now getting closer to heaven.

I do not know where heaven is, but I do know that you cannot get there on the most sophisticated technological rocket man could ever create. Man does not have the capacity to build his own pathway into heaven. Remember the Tower of Babel? For one thing, he does not know where heaven is. For another thing, what would it take to get to heaven?

With all of man’s ingenuity, he has yet to build the doorway into heaven. “I am the way,” Jesus said to His disciples, The truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). If we are going to get into God’s heaven, it is going to be by Gods way.

For me, I want nothing at all to do with man’s heaven man’s idea of heaven, or man’s perception of heaven. I have seen what man has done here on earth, and I do not want any of it to get into heaven.

Heaven is God’s domain, and it has all about it the beauty of God’s nature. Heaven is a reflection of all the attributes of God and His nature and character. It is a place where God is most comfortable and a place where God’s people will find peace and tranquility.

What we see here on earth is nothing compared to what we will see in heaven. After all, what does the world really have to offer us? We are here for only a short time anyway. The best the world has to offer is temporary.

The world tries to tempt us with gadgets and products that will bring us satisfaction, but it does so only temporarily. What God has for us is something that will last for all eternity.

Our Concept Of Hell

Once we get a slight understanding—which is as much as we can do—of heaven, we need to turn our attention to hell. We do not like to talk about hell anymore. We would much rather talk about heaven. I know I would, but the truth of the matter is, there is indeed a hell to avoid. Our problem today is we do not have a realistic view of hell.

There is nothing beautiful about hell as there is about heaven. In hell, we find only monstrous moral deformity and depravity and monstrous ugliness. Some wonder about the fire of hell.

The Bible is clear concerning the fire in hell and the lake of fire. But just for a moment, forget about the fire. Hell has such an ugliness about it that it is reported by anyone who looks into it.

The Bible clearly declares hell was made for the devil and his demons. Hell is not a place for man. The man was created for heaven.

But when sin came into the world and tarnished the image of God within man, he became disqualified for heaven. The only place that could receive him following his death was hell.

When people say a man is lost, that lostness will never be more in view than when that person actually goes to hell. He will be in a place in which he is out of place. Nothing in hell will do anything for the person in hell.

Think for a moment of a place where there is no beauty, no perfection of wisdom, no understanding of God’s nature—a place of ugliness beyond anything we know here on earth. Think of the ugliest place on earth, the most morally depraved place on earth, and it is nothing compared to the ugliness of hell.

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, was a very passive Christian until he had a vision of hell. That vision so stirred him that he spent the rest of his life rescuing as many people as possible from that awful and terrible destination.

If we only understood what hell was all about, we would become the fiercest evangelists of our generation.

Our Concept Of The Earth

After we have seen the contrast between heaven and hell, we need to correct our perception of earth.

Heaven is a place of utter beauty, whereas hell is a place of utter depravity. Earth now falls halfway between heaven and hell. There are aspects of Earth that are simply beautiful. There are also aspects of the earth that are absolutely ugly.

To understand the contradiction here on earth, we need to get a good view of heaven and hell. We need to see that here on earth is the great battleground between heaven and hell. If I am not careful, I am tempted to believe that hell is winning.

It is easy to see the ugliness permeating through our world today. The depravity of man is raging in our generation like never before. The ability of man to be wicked, hateful, and murderous is a picture of earth’s ugliness.

We see what man is capable of and how sin rules the day, making this world a dreadful place to live. Regardless of what governments try to do, the sinful nature is on a rampage and will not cease until the end of time.

In contrast to this is the beauty of the earth. There are some things that reflect the beauty of our Creator. Redeemed men and women are reflecting into their communities the beauty of our Lord in a way that gives testimony to God’s grace. The beauty of godly living can be seen as a contrast to the depravity in our world today.

What is the responsibility of the church today? The first obligation that lies in current Christianity is to go back to God and get to know God as He is revealed in the Scriptures: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

He is terrible and wonderful and beautiful and lovely and just and severe and kind and holy and pure. You cannot joke with or fool with or pal around with God. He is the awesome God of our fathers whose almighty hand leads forth in beauty all the starry band.

The first duty of every minister of the gospel is to bring God back to the church—not the intellectual God of the academics, not the palsy God of the gospelers, not the chairman of the board, but the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures and who revealed himself supremely in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That God must be recaptured—that perception of God must be recaptured. We must bring God back again into our fellow¬ship, the triune God. We must cease to fool with little things, all the little things that we are doing, forgetting that we have one awful loss: the loss of our perception of a majestic God who is worthy to be worshiped.

God made us in His image and never meant for us to mirror anything less than himself. He never meant for us to have a homemade perception of God. There are two kinds of idolatry. It may be overt idolatry, where men make an idol and kneel before it.

That is at least honest. But there is another kind of idolatry, and it is the idolatry of the mind. It is thinking of the God you want and then worshiping what you think God should be.

If I wanted to worship a God that was not God, I would worship a buzzard or something else, like they do in some countries of the world, and be honest about it, instead of trying to reach up and pull the mighty God down to my own cheap perception of Him.

I think the schools ought to do something about it. I think the pulpits ought to do something about it. I think publishers ought to do something about it. I think our hymn writers ought to do something about it. Our musicians ought to do something about it.

We ought to get out of the wallow and look away to the stars, and walk out and listen for the awesome sweet voice that charmed Isaiah and David and all the saints down through the years.

Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven

Praise, my soul, the King of heaven;
To His feet thy tribute brings.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Evermore His praises sing:
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise the everlasting King

Praise Him for grace and favor
To our fathers in distress.
Praise Him still the same as ever
Slow to chide, and swift to bless.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Glorious in His faithfulness.

Featherlike, God tends and spares us;
Well, our feeble frame He knows.
Mother-like, God gently bears us,
Rescues us from all our foes.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Widely yet His mercy flows.

Angels, help us to adore Him;
Ye behold Him face to face;
Sun and moon, bow down before Him,
Dwellers are all in time and space.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise with us the God of grace. –Henry F. Lyte(1793-1847)

Our Perception Of God Determines Our Fellowship With God

My heart, O God, is drawn in ways beyond my comprehension. The more I know Thee, the more I love Thee; and the more I love Thee, the more I desire Thee. Create in me a pure heart, and make my heart the dwelling place of Thy presence, and let me never drift away from that aspect of my fellowship with Thee.

Draw me nearer, O God; draw me nearer to Thyself in the perfection of Thy revelation. Amen.

As I begin to understand the perfection of God and how He manifests it in my life, it brings me to the point of experiencing the manifest presence of God. This is the basis of my fellowship with God. God’s presence is all around us, but it is the manifest presence of God, that mysterium tremendum, that is the basis of my fellowship with Him.

“Search me, O God,” David the psalmist wrote, “and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

Whatever the cause, David wanted to be led by God “in the way everlasting.” In order to do that, some major changes had to take place in the heart of David, and David was willing to make those changes.

I talked about hell. Hell, basically, is for those who are unlike God. Moral dissimilarity creates hell, a moral dissimilarity to God. It is the supreme purpose of God to bring us into alignment with His character.

After all, we were created in the image of God, and whatever that means, there is something in us that relates to something in God, and our fellowship depends upon discovering that “something.”

Whatever in my life is unlike God and contrary to the holiness of God must be eliminated from my life. That is why David said, “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” David understood that he could not know his own heart, and if he could not know his own heart, how much less can people like you and me?

This is the work of God and must be unhindered by our lack of knowledge of what God is doing. The person who needs to know everything and understand everything will prohibit God from doing what only God can do.

Where does our fellowship with God begin? That question needs to be answered. It is all boiled down into one theological word: reconciliation. Because of our being out of sorts with God, we need to be reconciled with God on His terms.

We do not set the terms for this reconciliation. Many people like to set their own terms, hoping that God will meet them halfway. The problem is God will never meet us halfway. It is God’s way or no way.

And God’s way is personified for us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Our reconciliation through Jesus Christ is based upon three acts. These are acts that God has laid down to bring us into full reconciliation with Him.

Atonement is the first act. This was what Jesus Christ did on the cross for us. It was a work that only He could do, and the work that He did for us. Atonement was fully made there on the cross when Jesus died for us.

The second act would be justification. Again, Jesus Christ accomplished this on the cross. Some look at this as the legal aspect of our atonement. Jesus brought to us a finished work fully acceptable to God. Our responsibility is to accept it for ourselves

The last act would be regeneration. This is where we come into the picture. All that Jesus Christ did on the cross would have been of no use, no value unless it had an impact upon man’s nature.

What Jesus Christ did on the cross, which brought about our regeneration, was the only thing that could bring us back into full fellowship with God. This regeneration brings into us the divine nature.

The only thing that God can accept in us is His Son. And through the work of reconciliation, God has brought man to that point where he can have fellowship with God. Apart from this work, fellowship with God is not possible.

Often in a prayer meeting, someone will pray for God to “come near to us.” So many Christians have a serious problem along this line, believing that God is far away. Somehow, through some kind of means, they think we need to get God’s attention and draw Him to us. If we pray long enough, if we get enough people to pray, then we entice God to draw near to us.

This is to misunderstand the whole concept of the nearness of God. God is as close to you right now as He ever was and ever will be. This is, of course, one of the attributes of God, omnipresence, which simply means that God is present everywhere.

There is no place where God is not. God is as close to one thing as He is to another. And this is something hard for us to comprehend. We are trying to understand God and His attributes through our limited abilities. God has no limitation whatsoever about anything.

Keep in mind that no matter where you are or what you are doing, God is near. He does not have to be enticed or bribed to come near to us. He is already closer than we could ever imagine.

This problem of God’s nearness is especially true for those Christians who have a sense of what I will call “divine remote¬ness.” Somehow, they do not believe that God is where they are. Somehow or other, God is far removed from where they are.

Because they cannot feel the connection with God, they do not believe God is near. Therefore, they have to yell and scream and try to get God’s attention, as though He were off somewhere doing something else. For many who call themselves Christians, a sense of emptiness in their hearts dominates.

With Elijah in the Old Testament, it was only after all the other noise had spent itself that he was able to hear that still, small, most mighty voice of God speaking to him. Our trouble today is we cannot get still enough to hear that still, small voice.

In order to have fellowship with this God, that fellowship has to be on His terms and not ours. God has already outlined the terms of fellowship with Him, and none of these terms is negotiable. He is the One who puts down the principles for this fellowship, not us.

How many Christians are attempting to keep up a relationship with God that is not actually established upon the character and nature of God? For some reason, they have taken the relationships that they have with one another and projected them onto God. This will never do.

My relationship and fellowship with another brother or sister in the Lord depend upon my physical being there. It depends upon my actually seeing them and they’re seeing me, and my hearing them talk and they’re hearing me talk.

When they are not around, I do not know what they are saying, and they do not know what I am saying. In some ways, we have projected this onto God. If we cannot see God, then God cannot see us. If we cannot feel Him here, then He is not here.

And if He is not here, then He does not know or understand what my situation is. How many times have we tried to explain to God the difficulties we are in and how He can help us out?

How frustrating it is to try to get hold of God, and nothing seems to work. My prayer life seems to be empty. The heavens seem to have a brass ceiling that nothing can penetrate. This describes many Christians today whose perception of God is not really based upon what God has revealed to us about himself.

We have based our Christianity upon a misunderstanding of the Bible’s truth. We have head knowledge, but no heart knowledge, of what Christianity is all about. We can explain Christianity, but we are not able, to live it from our hearts.

The difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge is that the heart can actually experience God, the presence of God, while the head cannot.

As I think about this subject, one question begs to ask: How many Christians really have experienced God? How many have gotten beyond simply believing that God exists and experienced the presence of God?

It is one thing to know about God, but it is another thing to know God in personal experience. The great delight of our Father, which art in heaven, is for us to experience Him in a way that He deserves.

I am rather passionate about reading the Bible. I firmly believe in the importance of spending time alone with God in the written Word, and I encourage others to spend as much time in the Word of God as possible. I have discovered that when I spend time in the Word of God, I will experience the Living Word.

If I have not experienced the Living Word, I have not really read the Bible. The Bible is not a textbook so I can answer questions on a quiz somewhere. The Bible cannot be compared to any other book in the world.

When I come to the Bible, and when I spend time reading and meditating upon the Scriptures, I am entering a world where God is dominant and desires to reveal himself to the worshiping heart.

As I get into the Word of God, it begins to reveal God to me. And as that divine illumination takes place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I then begin to see God for who He really is—not some caricature somebody has drawn to explain God to me.

The great secret of the Christian life is to begin experiencing God as He desires me to experience Him. God’s greatest delight is to bring me into His presence.

I am afraid that for all practical purposes, we have only theological Christians in the church today, not deeply spiritual Christians. We have wonderful head knowledge of the Bible and can give “a reason to everyone who asks us about the hope within us,” but it does not go further than that.

As I get to know God, I begin to experience aspects of God that whet my appetite for more of God. I can never have enough of God. A growing yearning to be near God begins to develop, and I begin to recognize that God is within me, and I want to experience this God who is within me.

I yearn for a manifesta¬tion of the presence of God, a degree of fellowship with Him that goes beyond mere head knowledge. This is not something we can explain. If we could explain it to everybody’s satisfaction, it would not be God.

God is much more than we can explain or boil down to human understanding. God can be experienced only in the heart, which creates an atmosphere of praise worship, and adoration.

The prevailing condition among Christians today, as I see it, is that there is a sense of God’s absence among us. Many believe in God. Many worship God and even sing about Him. But it is almost as if He is not there. This has brought Christianity down below any other religion in the world.

Believe me when I say that Christianity is not like any other religion. Christianity begins with God and envelops the human heart that has been redeemed and comes back once again to the heart of God.

The apostle Paul makes this clear when he writes:

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Colossians 3:1-3

This is the posture of the Christian. We are seeking those things that are above. We are not being hindered by the world around us, but we are setting our affections on things above. We are looking up for our redemption, which is in Jesus Christ.

The reality of Jesus Christ is the basis of our daily fellowship with God. If we just acknowledge that there is a God somewhere that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that one day when we die, we are going to go to heaven, we have not really grasped the dynamics of fellowship with God.

My fellowship with God is much more than “one day I am going to die and go to heaven.” My fellowship with God is experiencing the manifest presence of God in my day-to-day living—not just a Sunday morning experience that cannot be replicated throughout the week. The dynamics of our worship is an everyday experience, or it is not true worship and we do not understand who God really is.

As our fellowship with God grows day by day, the Holy Spirit unfolds to us the reality of the Christian life. The qualities of Jesus Christ are becoming our qualities. What He is, we are becoming. I am not talking about His deity.

I am talking about the holiness of His perfection. Jesus Christ did not die on the cross merely so that one day we can go to heaven, which certainly is our hope; it is much deeper than that.

Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead on the third day, ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost to give us His character and His nature to be a testimony to the world around us.

Our testimony is not that we have cleaned up our life. Any religion can do that. Our testimony is that we are like Christ, and people around us will begin to experience Jesus Christ as they begin to understand us.

Now, what are those qualities of Jesus? As we peruse the Scriptures, these qualities of His perfection are unveiled to us. These qualities include holiness, unselfishness, love, kindness, forgiveness, zeal, humility, and heavenly-mindedness.

As we study the life of Jesus, we begin to see these qualities, and that these qualities are part of our Christian experience. Day by day, I am becoming more Christ-like in my life.

The more like Jesus Christ I become, the more intimate is my fellowship with Him. Those things in my life that are contrary to Him need to be crucified and put out of my life so that I may go on in the fullness of spiritual perfection.

A great many are disconcerted by the term spiritual perfection. They make excuses for themselves, saying that nobody is perfect. But there is Someone who is perfect. That perfect One is Jesus Christ.

As we pursue Him in daily fellowship and in the perfection of His character and nature, we begin to become more and more like Him. The more we become like Him, the more our fellowship with Him takes on the reality that Jesus Christ desires in all of us.

Out in the world, we cannot find anything that will help us in our fellowship with God. We must decisively turn our backs on the world and walk in the shadow of the cross. Whatever it costs us is worth the fellowship we enjoy this side of glory.

Draw Me Nearer

lam Thirty O Lordy I have heard Thy voice,
And it told Thy love to me;
But I long to rise in the arms of faith
And be closer drawn to Thee.

Refrain:

Draw me nearer; nearer blessed Lordy
To the cross where Thou hast died;
Draw me nearer; nearer; nearer blessed Lord,
To Thy precious bleeding side.

Consecrate me now to Thy service, Lord,
By the power of grace divine;
Let my soul look up with a steadfast hope,
And my will be lost in Thine.

Oh, the pure delight of a single hour
That before Thy throne I spend.
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God,
I commune as friend with friend!

There are depths of love that L cannot know
Till I cross the narrow sea;
There are heights of joy that I may not reach
Till L rest in peace with Thee. –Frances J. Crosby(1820-1915)

Our Perception Of God’s Perfection

I long for Thee, O God, in all Thy perfection. My mind cannot comprehend the wonders of Thy perfection, and I stagger trying to understand Thee. What my mind cannot grasp, my heart can in full wonder and adoration. Fill my heart with Thyself. The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this mind of mine. Amen.

God makes the greatest demand on our intelligence and imagination and powers of reason, requiring us to picture a mode of being we are not familiar with, a mode of being wholly beyond ourselves, a mode of being unlike anything we have ever known.

We must keep in mind one thing: All I say about God is still not God, because theology, at its finest moment, can do no more than tell us about God. To know about God and to know God are two absolutely different things. Most people confuse knowing about God with knowing God, and this, in my opinion, is at the core of many of our problems in the evangelical church today.

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Let me say that if you ever know God, you are going to have to enter in by the new birth, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, and by the revelation of the Spirit. There must be revelation and illumination.

You have to have the truth revealed to you, but until there is illumination of that truth, it does not do you any good. Only the Holy Spirit can make us know God. That is why when we speak of the Holy Spirit, we ought not to speak apologetically, and nobody ought to be ashamed to preach about the Holy Spirit or be afraid to talk about Him, for the reason that only He can make us know.

Theology can teach us about God, and that is what this book is all about.

One problem in describing God is that we use ourselves as a pattern, push that up into the heavens, and say that is what God is like. God is bigger than we are, of course. But He is one size and we are another size, so we begin to think of God in terms of our limitations.

When we try to describe God this way, we end up with a caricature of God, a God that is not worthy of our worship. Too many people are worshiping the God of their own imaginations.

If we are really going to understand God, we need to see Him in light of infinity. I mean by that, God is infinite in every aspect of himself. What I mean about the infinitude of God is that God knows no limit, and right there is where we stop.

The human mind can go a long way, but it cannot go all the way to limitlessness. But God is limitless, boundless, and has no end. This defies every definition we could ever come up with. There is no end to anything in God, and He has no bounds.

The vast ocean has a boundary, but God has no boundary. Whatever God is, He is without limit or bounds, and whatever God has, He has without limit or measure. These are words that can be used only about something created, and God is the Uncreated One.

When we come to describe God, we sometimes use words carelessly. We often say that something is unlimited. A company’s wealth is unlimited, an athlete has unlimited energy, and an artist takes unlimited pains to do his painting.

The danger of taking the word unlimited and pulling it down into our sphere is that we then associate it. God and His unlimitedness with our understanding of unlimited.

Take the word measureless, for example. Measureless is a word we can use only of God. Anytime you have some kind of measurement, it has to do with created things giving an account of themselves. But it cannot be applied to God.

In our description of God, we cannot use imperfections, because God does not have limitations or imperfections of any sort. God is in a category all by himself. Everything we describe by limitations is contingent and relative, whereas God is self-existent, an absolute.

Therefore, He is a boundless ocean; and none can bound Him, and none can fathom Him, and none can describe how far out He goes in infinite distance in all that He is.

The measure applies to created things and can never be associated with God. We have liquid measurements and measurements of energy and sound measurements. We have measures of light.

We say a bulb is so piany watts, and we have numbers for pluralities: ones, twos, fives, and some tens. We can even measure intelligence. We measure our brain and our ability to do things, but when we do that, we are imperfect, small, and limited—not infinite.

God cannot be measured and cannot be weighed, for He is not composed of matter. You cannot figure God in distance, for God fills all distance. You cannot measure God, for God has no extension in space. You cannot measure the energy of God the sound God makes the light He gives off, or anything else in their absolute pluralities. God is one—one God, we praise Thee.

None of these words or concepts can touch God or describe Him. They describe only imperfect things that God has made, not God himself. They are the way we see the work of God’s hands. It is His fingerprint in creation.

Look on the work of God’s hands and you will see it. You see a mountain or a man and you have size there. Size is a relative thing. A man weighing two hundred pounds is nothing compared to a mountain.

But with God, there are no sizes, no degrees, no measurements, and no pluralities, because God is just God.

Frederick Faber once wrote a hymn about the infinity of God (“The Greatness of God”)- Nobody ever sings it, but he wrote it and got it out of his system. I have read it and it has blessed me.

O Majesty unspeakable dread!
Wert Thou less mighty than Thou art,
Thou went O Lord! Too great for our belief
Too little for our heart.

I hear people say, “We have a big God.” I really do not like that, because I do not think we ought to pull God down to our level. I think God is too holy, too infinite, too high, too wonderful, too glorious to even think of Him like that.

If God were just a big God, He would be so big He would scare us, but He would be too little for us to worship. I could not worship a God who was just an oversized man. I could not even worship a God who was a huge man. If God were simply a huge man, then I could say, “He’s bigger than I am, but here I am.” This great God is infinite, and so I have no greatness apart from God.

But greatness, which is infinite makes room
For all things in its lap to lie;
We should be crushed by a magnificence
Short of infinity.

We share in what is infinite: ’tis ours,
For we and it alike are Thine;
What I enjoy, great God! by right of Thee
Is more than doubly mine.

Thus doth Thy grandeur make us grand ourselves;
‘Tis goodness bids us fear;
Thy greatness makes us brave as children are,
When those they love are near. –Frederick Faber(1814-1863)

God is infinite, and because God is infinite, you and I can be bold and brave in the universe, just the same as the little boy who is brave when his father is around.

How could I stand myself if I did not believe in the infinite God? How could I endure myself if I did not know that God is eternal? How could I endure the passing of my years if I did not know that I had been baptized into the heart of the One who knows no years, who is the Ancient of Days, who had no beginning and can have no end?

How could I accept my weakness if I did not know that I had been baptized into the heart of the One who has infinite strength? So this is our God, and this is the God we adore.

God is what He is without limit. He knows no extent, He knows no measure, and if there is a point where God is not, it would mean that God is not really who He says He is. There is a limit to great countries and a limit to great wealth, but there is no place where you can put a boundary and say, “God, do not overflow this.”

God speaks to the sea, and says, “This far, and no farther.” But who can speak to God and say, “This far and no farther”? Who dares tell God what He can do or cannot do?

If you are thinking of a limit, you are not thinking about God. But if you think and think and think, out and out, and up and up, and try to think as far out as God and then you break down—do not let it worry you.

Saint Augustine had his troubles with it. So did Paul David and Isaiah. No human being can think infinitude. Nobody can think it; you must believe it. You must believe it in your heart.

I cannot take you by the hand and lead you into the kingdom of God. I can only point you to the Lamb of God, and then it is between God and you. In the same way, I cannot by any means describe the infinitude of God. I can only point with wonder, amazement, and awestruck admiration and say, “Behold God.” After that, it is you and God.

What does all this mean to us? If God is infinite—and all theologians believe this, the Bible teaches it, and we sing about it—what does it mean to us now? Is it simply a lesson in theology that will be examined one day? No, not that. If this is true—and it is true—then certain things about God are true.

If God is infinite, then His love is infinite. There is a love closer than the love of a mother, and that is the love of God. A mother’s love goes so far, but “there is a limit to it. A mother can die and her love dies with her, but God cannot die, and because He cannot die, His love never dies.

Right here someone will say, “Did not Jesus die, and do we not sing, ‘When Christ the mighty Maker died, for man the creature s sin?”

Yes. The second person of the Trinity took upon himself the form of a man and died for our sins, but the eternal God remained alive and raised Him from the dead. Deity never died, but the man called Jesus, who was both God and man, died for our sins. No contradiction there.

No confusion at all. God cannot die. God is the immortal who has only immortality dwelling in light, which no man can approach. So the love of God is infinite. You can be certain of this.

The love of people is not infinite. It is an awful thing to fall in love and then fall back out of love. I always think how shocking it is when in a divorce situation a person will say, “I no longer love him.” She once did, but no longer. Love did not last.

We sometimes hear about mothers who forsake their children, so even the finest love that the world knows can fail. The love of a father, mother, sister, or wife has limits; but the love of God has none because God is infinite, and anything God has is limitless. There is one thing you can be sure about: There is no limit to the love of God.

Some believe in the complete salvation of the universe. They believe that when Christ died, He died for everyone, including the devil and demons. That is universalism, which I do not go along with. But as far as the love of God is concerned, the love of God is infinite enough to take in all of heaven and hell too. God, in His infinite planning,” planned that only those who repent and believe shall be saved.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind. –Frederick W. Faber(1814-1863)

Recently I was praying and thinking about how vast the grace of God is compared with our human sin. It is a peculiar contradiction. For example, if you do not think your sin is big, then the Lord cannot save you.

If you think your sin is bigger than God, then He cannot save you. You have to realize that to you, your sin is big; but God is infinite, and therefore God is bigger than all your sin. Where sin abounds, the grace of God does much more abound.

When God says “more,” referring to himself, we must extend our imagination into borderline infinity. When God says “much more” and puts a qualifying word behind it, what can you do but kneel and say, “My Lord and my God, how grace does much more abound”?

When you have your medicine that has no limit to cure a disease, which has a limit, you can be sure the patient is going to get well. When the infinite, limitless grace of God attacks the finite limit of sin in a man, that sin has no chance.

If we will only repent and turn from it, God will pulverize it and whirl it into immensity, where it can never be known again while eternity rolls on eternity.

That is what happened to my sin. That is what happens to the sin of everyone who believes. I am not making a fuss with the devil; I will let God handle him.

God is the only one who can. But I would like, in a sneaky way, to have the devil know that Jesus Christ our Lord is infinite, and His blood is infinite, and the purchase of His blood is infinite; and if all the sands of the seashore and all the stars in the sky were human beings, and if every corpuscle in the bloodstream of every human being in the world was a human being, and they had all sinned as bad as Judas did, still the grace of God, being infinite and limitless, would have no limit.

As Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf expressed:

Lord, I believe, were sinners more
Then sands upon the ocean shore,
For all Thou hast the ransom given,
Purchased for all peace, life, and heaven.

God could send a team of angels to count my sins, and in ten years or so, they could have them all added up and say, “Here’s the total,” and it would string clear across the room. The angel might say, “I guess he is doomed.”

But God would say, “No, look at My grace. It extends, not across the room, but from eternity past to eternity to come.” We sing of the infinite grace of our loving God, and it is proper and correct that we should.

This concept of infinitude also applies to the atonement, when Christ died for us.

When Jesus Christ died on the cross, it was enough. Personally, I am glad to have had enough of something. When Jesus died on the cross, it took Him only six hours. But because it was infinity dying, the man who died was the Deity who could not die. Bfit because God counted the infinity there, to Him it was enough.

I believe Jesus died for everyone, and when He died on the cross, He not only died for the elect, but He died for every human being who was ever born in the world or ever will be born. I believe He died for every baby who died at birth and for every man and woman who lived to be one hundred or more. I believe He died for all.

We can go around the world telling people that Jesus Christ died for them.

No man who has ever lived has been too much of a sinner to go beyond the infinite atonement of Jesus Christ. If every man were a sinner as bad as Judas Iscariot, the atonement of Jesus Christ would still cover him. If someone had only told Judas and he had repented, there might have been a Saint Judas today.

Another description we have in this regard has to do with the patience of Jesus—the infinite patience of Jesus, the patience of God, with the power to save. He has infinite power to save and break the power of canceled sin. Paul Rader used to say, “You name it, and God will break it.” He was so right.

Jesus, Thy Blood, And Righteousness

Lord, I believe, were sinners more
Then sands upon the ocean shore.
For all Thou hast the ransom given,
Purchased for all peace, life, and heaven.

Lord, I believe the price is paid
For every soul, the atonement made;
And every soul Thy grace may prove,
Loved with an everlasting love.

Jesus, be endless praise to Thee,
Whose boundless mercy hath for me,
For me, and all Thine hands have made,
An everlasting ransom was paid.

Ah, give to all Thy servants, Lord,
With the power to speak Thy quickening Word,
That sinners to Thy wounds may flee,
And find eternal life in Thee.

Thou God of power., Thou God of love,
Let the whole world Thy mercy prove,
Now let Thy Word oer all prevail;
Now take the spoils of death and hell. –Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf(1700-1760)

Our Perception Of God’s Grace

Our Father, our hearts hunger for the fullness of Thy nature. We do not deserve to be in Thy presence, but Thou hast made it possible for us to come boldly to the throne of grace. That grace is wonderful in us. Although I may not fully compre¬hend Thy grace, I can benefit from it today. Amen.

One compromised aspect of God has to do with His grace. If our perception of God is compromised, everything about our understanding of God is also compromised. I think this matter of grace is one of the most important perceptions of God to fall under this category of misconception.

If we do not understand God, we will never understand His grace and its full impact on our lives. This is reflected in our hymnology. I have a collection of hymnals, and whenever I am visiting somewhere, I like to look through their hymnal.

Recently I looked through a rather modern hymnal and found the hymn “Amazing Grace,” written by John Newton. Whenever we think of grace, this hymn always comes to mind. I noticed in this hymnal that they had made a significant change. I certainly am not a fan of those who try to change a hymn in order to satisfy their own taste.

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The first line of this hymn goes, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!” This is the familiar version of that hymn. However, in this modern, up-to-date hymnal, the first line was changed: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a one like me.” Quite a significant change, in my opinion.

Some people tend not to quite grasp the idea that we are or were at one time, a wretch. It simply does not go down very easily. We are willing to say that we are not perfect, that we missed the mark, or that we are not really up to par. But we are not ready to say that in ourselves we are nothing more than a wretch.

Some people believe that God’s grace enables Him to put up with certain conditions that are not quite up to His standard. We have a different discernment of what grace is all about.

Our British friends talk about the “gracious queen.” Or we might see a man who is very sympathetic, long-suffering, and generous, and we might look at him and say, “There’s a very gracious man.”

The problem is that we define grace from our standpoint. We believe the grace of God is that He tolerates sin because He loves us so much. That is the price of His love for us. This, however, is far from what the Bible teaches.

God’s grace is not something that we can use to manipulate God into some corner and get Him to do something we want Him to do against His will. God cannot be manipulated.

When we explore the concept of God’s grace, we cannot separate it from His other attributes. God does not lay aside one attribute in order to pick up another attribute. In God, there is a complete sense of oneness.

He is not like my watch that is put together, and all the parts synchronize and work together harmoniously. God’s grace is in complete conformity to every other attribute of God.

To understand this, I need to say that it is out of the goodness of God that grace comes. Mercy, as I have stated before, is God’s goodness confronting human guilt, and grace is God’s goodness confronting human demerit.

Prior to man’s fall in the Garden of Eden, God’s grace was not evident. Not that it was not there—it was just that there was no situation that brought that aspect of God’s character to light.

Once man fell into the cesspool of sin and became polluted, God’s grace came out like a shining contrast. Paul writes about this in Romans 5:20: “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Grace, like all God attributes, carries with it the “much more” aspect.

God was always gracious. He never has been less gracious than He is now, and He never will be more gracious than He is now. But until sin came into the world, God’s grace was not evident.

Now we can see this aspect of God, particularly in our own lives, when we realize what wretches we are in comparison to the holiness of God. Allow me to lay out some facts about grace that should encourage our hearts.

First, grace is God’s good pleasure.

Grace brings into favor one that has previously been in disfavor. It is the unchangeable grace of God, and it never ceases to be what it is. Throughout the Scriptures, grace and favor are inter-changeable words.

You will find the word favor occurring and you will find the word grace occurring, but if you look at it in the original languages, you will find they are the same word as originally given but translated as favor or grace, apparently at the whim of the translator.

Although there is three times as much material in the New

Testament about grace as there is in the Old Testament, there is four times as much about mercy in the Old Testament as there is in the New. It is virtually impossible to separate God’s grace from either the Old Testament or the New Testament. It permeates everything that has to do with God’s interaction with mankind.

The second fact about grace is that Christ is the only channel through which grace flows.

The Scriptures clearly declare, “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). Here we need to be careful that we do not misread this and find ourselves in a dismal swamp of misunderstanding.

Some people have taken this to mean that because it says the law was given by Moses but grace came by Jesus Christ, Moses knew only the law and Christ knows only grace.

This is to completely misunderstand grace. Grace was in the time of Moses, and the law was in the time of Christ. The Bible clearly declares that Christ came, born of a woman,
born under the law. In the Old Testament, it says that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Grace operated after the Ten Commandments were given, and grace operated before the Ten Commandments were given. Grace was operative back in the sixth chapter of Genesis, and Grace has been operating ever since. There is no ebb and flow of God’s grace. It is a steady stream.

How can it be otherwise? God must always act like himself and can never contradict any of His attributes.

When Scripture says that the law was given by Moses and grace and truth came by Jesus Christ, it does not mean that it came when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, because there is an awful lot said about grace before Jesus was born.

If the baby Jesus and Christ Jesus and the dying Lamb and the risen Lamb had brought grace into the world, then there would have been no grace before Mary’s baby was born in the manger in Bethlehem. Grace operated from the early days, and grace prevented God from slaying Adam and Eve when they sinned.

Noah found grace in God’s sight, and it was grace that saved the eight people from the flood. It was grace from the very beginning, all down through the years. Grace had no beginning, and it had no end.

So grace came by Jesus Christ, but grace did not come when Christ was born in Bethlehem. Grace had been in Jesus Christ from the beginning of the world. Christ was slain before the foundation of the world, as the Scriptures set forth for us, before the world was hurled into its orbit and populated by man. Grace had been in Jesus Christ and always was so.

Grace could not come by Moses because Moses was a sinner. Grace could not come by Abraham, for Abraham was a sinner. Grace could not come by David, for David was a sinner, a happy singing sinner, but a sinner nevertheless, and he needed grace himself.

God could not send grace through any of them. Grace could not come by Paul. Sometimes people almost make a god or a demi¬god out of the man Paul. He would be the last one in the world to allow this, and he objected to it whenever it came up.

Grace comes from Jesus Christ—always has and always will—and there is never any grace apart from Jesus Christ.

I should also include here what I will refer to as governmental grace.

This is grace that prevents God from destroying sinful men and women when they boast. The fact that sinful people can boast of their sin and continue in it is a demonstration of God’s grace. If God’s grace were not operative, that man or woman would be struck dead in their tracks.

God’s grace prevented Him from slaying the heinous and brutal dictators down through the years who were responsible for murdering millions of people. Sometimes we do not think of grace in this fashion.

If God did not operate by this governmental grace, very few people would be alive today. This grace saves countries like the United States from destruction. In that sense, grace is for everybody, and everybody profits by the grace of God.

That is a demonstration of the good favor of God, the kindness of God, the goodness of God, the long-suffering of God. Let me quickly point out this is not a saving grace. This grace keeps God from destroying the sinner.

Then, of course, there is a saving grace.

Saving grace is another matter, and it is a narrower matter and comes to us only through Jesus Christ. God’s grace keeps Him from destroying people, but on the other hand, the saving grace of God brings people into fellowship with Him.

This is the grace we think of—the amazing grace of God that saves a wretch like Rqe.

Grace is also the kindness of God’s heart.

As a young person, I used to hear people say about a person that he was a kindhearted man. Well, God is a kindhearted God. He is a God of goodwill and cordiality and is that way all through. God is what He is all the time, all the way through without any upsurge or downsurge.

You can look at God from any direction; He is always the same, and He is the same all the way through, always, toward all people, forever. You will never run into any meanness in God or resentment or ill will. God never fluctuates in His feelings as man fluctuates. We can be good-hearted one day and the next day mean as a cat. Not so with God.

Through the years, I have met good Christians, and they go to heaven by the same grace that gets me to heaven. I have noticed they were all right as long as everything was going their way.

They seemed to be very good and cordial, and then they shocked me by pouting. They were not all the same, all the way through, all the time. There was resentfulness and ill will, but there is none of this in God.

God has no present ill will toward anybody anywhere in the universe. No one can “get under God’s skin,” as we say about ourselves. We can put up with somebody for only so long, but then they get under our skin. This is not in the character of God at all.

Just as the holiness of God requires that heaven be empty of all iniquity, those who are iniquitous do not receive the favor of God through Jesus Christ. They must be cast out finally because they cannot be permitted to pollute heaven with their unholy presence. God will never allow anybody to compromise His holiness, and God’s grace goes on to affect each situation.

One final fact about grace is that God’s grace is infinite.

Everything God has and is, is infinite. Infinite means “boundless, without end.” This is hard to grasp for us who are so limited in what we do. God has no beginning and no end, and nothing in God has been created. We, who have been created, cannot fully comprehend the nature of uncreated.

I believe in God’s boundlessness and that there is no border anywhere in God. For man, it is a simple matter of going out and floating around the earth and coming down again on our rockets.

It is a nice engineering feat, and nice work if you can get it and do something adventurous and all that. But it does not shake my belief in the great God Almighty. You can get in that same little rocket, ride out until the stars are burned out, and still, you have not reached the boundaries of God Almighty. God contains all space all matter and all creation.

The Bible talks about God sitting on the circle of the earth: “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22). All creation is but dust in the balance and nothing before God.

Simply try to compare God’s grace with our needs. No matter what our need is, it does not measure against the amazing grace of God. God was always a gracious God, but until sin came into the world, it was never manifested and nobody knew it.

As we meditate on God’s grace, we are affected by the overwhelming plenitude of goodness and kindness on the part of God. If every mosquito in all the swamplands of the world were a sinner, every star in heaven a sinner, and every grain of sand by the seashore a sinner, the grace of God could swallow it all without effort, for where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound.

Philosophically, theologically, practically, and experientially, I am a believer in the grace of God. My life is a testimony of God’s amazing grace. God’s goodness and faithfulness are demonstrated in everyone’s life. The worse off you are, the more the favor of God will shine in your life.

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found;
Was blind, but now, I see.

Was grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
His grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my/ hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

And when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess within the veil
A life of joy and peace.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We have no fewer days to sing God’s praise
Then when we’d first begun. –John Newton (1725-1807)

Our Perception Of God’s Mercy

O Lord, Thou knowest that we are not worthy to come before Thy presence, before the mystery of which angels stand in wonder. Deal with us, not according to our deserts, but according to Thy infinite mercy, by the Holy Spirit, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Scriptures abound with the truth that God is a merciful God. Mercy is something that God is; it is a facet of His unitary being. As a diamond has many facets, so does God with regard to His attributes. God is one, and one facet of God’s character is mercy.

Both the Old and New Testaments declare the mercy of God. Sometimes we think there is more of God’s mercy in the New Testament. The odd thing is the Old Testament has more than four times as much to say about mercy as the New Testament— that is, it is oddly seen against a background of error, which we have been taught most of our lives.

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We have been taught that the Old Testament is a book of law, and the New Testament a book of grace. The Old Testament is a book of judgment, and the New Testament is a book of mercy.

If the God of the Old Testament is a God of thunder and judgment, in the New Testament He is a God of meekness and mercy. But the truth is, God is merciful and God’s mercy is perfect. His mercy is infinitely perfect.

It is impossible to separate the Old Testament from the New Testament. It takes the whole Bible to make the Word of God. Trying to isolate one part of the Bible from another part is to do great damage to the Word of God.

Trying to separate law from grace is a very dangerous thing and usually leads to heresy. There can be no law without grace, and no grace without law.

God’s infinite goodness is that God desires His creatures’ happiness. That desire in God, which has an irresistible urge to bestow blessedness, takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but does take pleasure in the pleasure of His people.

God suffers along with His friends and grieves over His foes. It is that in God which we call mercy that looks with compassion upon men and women who deserve judgment.

I deliberately use the words active and active, for I do not like the words passive and passivity and various forms of the word passive.

The mercy of God is not a passive thing, but active. God is compassionate, but He is actively compassionate.

Grieving over the sins of the world is not going to help the world very much. God is not that kind of a God. His mercy is active, not passive. He has pity upon mankind, but it is active pity. He stops in kindness to FJi’s inferiors.

We must be careful to understand that none of God’s attributes spring out of the need of man. All God’s attributes reveal His character in and of himself. Man, on the other hand, benefits from those attributes, and the great challenge of our lives is to connect with those attributes. The only way we can do that is through Jesus Christ.

Let me lay out a few truths concerning the mercy of God.

First of all, the mercy of God never had a beginning.

If you were to go down to the Mississippi River, you would see a river so wide you could not cross it without getting into a boat and paddling.

If you wanted to find the source, you would have to keep on paddling north until you got to a place where the river became a stream, where you could toss a pebble across, and where a cow could wade in and drink, way up in northern Minnesota. The Mississippi River has its beginnings there. The great broad river of the Mississippi has a source.

Never must we think of God’s mercy as being like that river, originating somewhere and then flowing out. It never began to be because it is an attribute of the uncreated God and therefore always was, and it has never been any more or less than it is now.

Sometimes we think that at one time, way back in the past, God was very wondrously merciful. He walked in the garden with Adam. He walked with Enoch, and then Enoch was no more because God took him.

When we read the Bible stories of God’s mercy, we say, “God must have been wonderfully merciful back there, but that was before the day of gas chambers and brutalities and all the stuff we have today. God is not as merciful anymore.”

To say that is to malign the name of God. Being infinitely merciful, God never can be any more merciful than He is now and never was any more merciful in the past. The God who told Noah to build the ark and save the race of humanity is the same God with whom we have to deal today.

God will never be any less merciful than He is now, because being infinite, He cannot cease to be infinite, and being perfect, He cannot have any imperfection. So the mercy of God is what God is because God is who He is.

God’s mercy cannot be affected by anything anyone does.

So many preachers and evangelists tell tearjerker stories, wanting the stream of mercy to flow out of the human eye, thinking that if we cry and beg, God will have mercy upon us. God will have mercy upon you if your heart is as hard as stone. If you were never to weep over your iniquity, God is still a merciful God.

He cannot be anything else but merciful, and though everybody in the world might turn atheist, every human being turn into a beast, and all the world turn into devils, it would not change the mercy of God in the slightest.

God would still be as merciful as He is now. If Christ were to die a hundred times on the cross, it would not make God any more merciful than He is now, because God is as merciful as mercy can be. Being God, He will never be less merciful.

Nothing can increase, diminish, or alter the quality of God’s mercy.

The cross did not increase the mercy of God. Let us remember we ought to be good, sound Bible readers, and we ought to have our theology right. Let us remember that the mercy of God did not begin at Calvary. The mercy of God led to Calvary.

It was because God was merciful that Christ died on the cross. Christ did not die on the cross in order to make God merciful; God was already merciful, which is why Christ died. It was the mercy of God that brought Jesus to earth.

And when He came down, He came down and died because He was already as merciful as it is possible to be. God is merciful and the source of all mercy, and the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, so that nothing can make Him any more merciful than He has always been.

Let us not imagine falsely that Jesus Christ our Lord is up before the throne of an angry-faced God, pleading for His people. He is pleading all right, and He is praying there, and He is making intercession for us, but the God to whom He is making intercession is just as merciful now, no more and no less than He was before His Son died on the cross.

The cross did not make the mercy of God any more merciful, or the quality of that mercy any more perfect, or the amount of that mercy any greater. Neither does the intercession of Christ make Him more merciful.

Notice that the mercy of God operates in a certain way.

Whenever there is inequity, whenever there is immorality of any kind, the justice of God confronts it. That which is not moral is immoral. We have one sin; we call that immorality. All sin is immorality in that it is not morality. Jealousy, as well as that snide expression about somebody, is immorality.

That trimming on your income tax report is immorality. Losing your temper and yelling at your husband is immorality. Everything we do that is wrong is immorality. Immorality is inequity, injustice—that which is not just, right, and level.

Judgment is God’s justice confronting moral inequity, whereas mercy, is God’s goodness confronting human guilt and suffering. We are all recipients of God’s mercy.

We think we are not, but we are. There is not an atheist in the world who is not the recipient of God’s mercy right now. We have so much, and we live in such a way that if justice had its way unrestrained, without mercy, God would rain fire from the Rio Grande to the Hudson Bay.

All men and women are recipients of the mercy of God, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and mercy postpones the execution, for God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

We need to notice one thing that distinguishes Christians from all other people and religions in the world: Mercy can be canceled or forgiven by the atonement when justice sees inequity. Death is a sentence meted out, but mercy brought Christ to the cross.

Justice and mercy see righteousness instead of iniquity, and when the just God looks down upon a sinner who has been covered by the atoning merits of Jesus’ blood, He sees not a sinner anymore, but a justified individual. That is the doctrine of justification by faith, the very foundation of redemption, and one of the great cornerstones of the church today.

When we see it like this, we wonder about one thing: Since God is perfect, self-contained, and self-sufficient, how can He suffer?—for God does suffer. He sent His Son to suffer, so I can only paraphrase the language of Frederick Faber: “How Thou canst suffer, O my God, and be the God Thou art, is darkness to my intellect but sunshine to my heart.”

I know that justice sentenced me to that. The soul that sinneth shall die, and I know that I should die and that hell should swallow me up. But I also know that Christ died on the cross for my sins. He went out there and in darkness did something I do not know. I am afraid of the man who is too smart about the atonement.

I am afraid of the man who can explain it too well, for surely it was the mystery of godliness. Surely what He did can never enter the mind of man or be fully understood. Surely what He did that awful, dark day, when it became as dark as a thousand midnights in the Cypress Swamp, we can never explain or understand intellectually.

Peter, who thought about this as much as you and I, lived with Jesus three years and saw Him go out and die on the cross, and saw Him after He had risen from the dead, said in an odd language, “Angels desire to look into these things.” The very angels in heaven desire to know about this.

I do not know about that atonement. I do not know what He did, but I know that whatever He did satisfied the heart of God forever. I know that whatever He did turned my iniquity into righteousness, turned my inequity into equity, and turned the sentence of death into a judgment of life.

I know it did that, so I can only stand before Him and say, “How Thou canst suffer, O my God, and be the God Thou art, is darkness to my intellect but sunshine to my heart.”

Do not ask your head about this. If you cannot think about it, get on your knees and say, “Thou knowest, O my Lord and my God.” Maybe someday in that bright tomorrow, maybe with clearer eyes and brighter vision, we will look upon the wonder of the atonement and know what it means.

Not all of the theologians who have ever lived can explain this. Together they can only stand before Him and say He gave Himself, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.

I do not understand the mystery of it. I know the joy and the sunshine of His effects upon me and those who know God.

The mercy of God is a moral and theological doctrine to me. The mercy of God is my life and my breath. Oh the mercy of God, that God is compassionate, that He stoops to have pity and mercy upon His people.

How approachable the mercy of God is, how accessible and how completely gracious God is, and how He has no pleasure in the death of anyone, particularly the wicked. He is the Father of mercies. He is very compassionate and full of tender mercy, and He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

This is the message we must tell the world. This is the witness we must give to the world. We need to go into the world and tell them who God really is.

We must go into the world and tell them that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and full of loving-kindness and that He sent His Son to die for their sins. There is a door open. It is the door of mercy, and it is open wide for us.

The Mercy Of God Is An Ocean Divine

The mercy of God is an ocean of divine,
A boundless and fathomless flood;
Launch out in the deep, cut away the shoreline,
And be lost in the fullness of God.

Refrain:

Launch out, into the deep,
Oh, let the shoreline go;
Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine,
Out where the full tides flow.

But many; alas! only stand on the shore,
And gaze on the pee a so wide;
They never have ventured to its depths to explore,
Or to launch on the fathomless tide.

Others just venture away from the land,
And linger so near to the shore
That the surf and the slime that beat over the strand
Dash o’er them in floods evermore.

Oh, let us launch out on this ocean so broad,
Where floods of salvation overflow;
Oh, let us be lost in the mercy of God,
Till the depths of His fullness, we know. –Albert B. Simpson(1843-1919)

Our Perception Of God’s Goodness

Out of Thy goodness, O God! Thou has reached down and blessed me beyond my comprehension. My praise to Theey O Gody fills my heart with joy in expectation of good things from Thee. May my life be a testimony of Thy goodness. Amen.

What kind of God is God? What is He really like? If God were to come and be visible and physically present among us, how would we find Him to be? Granted, we can never come before His unapproachable light and expect our earthly intelligence to grasp it. But if we could, what kind of God would we find Him to be?

That question is one of the most important that any of us could ask, and our answer really defines who we are. In the history of the world, no nation has ever risen above its religion, and no religion has ever risen above its perception of God.

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Religion is high or low base or pure, depending upon what the believers believe their God to be like. The history of Christianity will demonstrate that Christianity at any given time is weak or powerful, dependent upon what kind of God it perceives Him to be.

If I could find out what you really perceive God to be like, I could prophesy your future without much trouble, for you are always going to move in the direction of your perception of God.

The most important thing for us to do is to constantly work on our perception of God.

One of the perceptions we have of God is that He is good, and that out of His goodness flows mercy. God is kindhearted and of goodwill. In other words, God is kind and cordial, and we might even say good-natured with a benevolent intention.

God is not kindhearted a little bit; He is infinitely kindhearted. He is not gracious and cordial a little bit or a great deal; He is perfectly and infinitely gracious and good. Whatever God is, He is completely and enthusiastically.

God is not some absentee engineer running His universe by remote control. God is present in perpetual, continual eagerness, applying His holy designs with all the fervor of His rapturous love.

God, being who He is, cannot be indifferent. It is impossible for God to be indifferent. Either God loves with a boundless, unremitting energy, or God hates with a consuming fire. God said certain people were neither hot nor cold—that is, they were in between, half-asleep, lukewarm, so He would spew them out of His mouth.

God cannot be halfway on a question; either He loves with an infinite, boundless, overwhelming, and enthusiastic energy of love, or He hates with an uncompromising fire of holy hatred.

In thinking about this, let me say that no one has any right to say that God has an obligation toward someone. God has no obligation toward anyone. He has no obligation to anything. When we think of the creation of the world, God, out of His own goodness, willed it into being.

The good, enthusiastic, kind-hearted God willed to create everybody and everything, and make the heavens and the earth, and hang the stars in their place. He willed to do it. He did it out of His own goodness.

He did not owe anybody anything. He did not do it to perfect himself, because He was perfect to start with; and there was no start per se, because when we say that God started, then we make a creature out of Him. God is uncreated, timeless, and contains time within His heart.

Let me ask you this: Why, when we sin, are we not destroyed? You can write as many books on the subject as you want, but I can give it to you in one sentence: Because God in His goodness willed to spare us, and that is the only answer.

If you pay a man to lecture ten times, an hour each lecture, on why God spared humanity, he cannot tell you one thing more. God spared us and did not send us immediately to hell because He in His goodness willed to spare us.

Also, why did He suffer and die in agony when He did not need to do it? The answer is His goodness. He loved us, and by His mercy and goodness, He died for us.

Why does God answer prayer? Because of His goodness. Why does God forgive sin? Because of His goodness. It is because God is kindhearted and gracious and of benevolent intention with all the enthusiasm of an infinitely powerful God. That is why He hears us and forgives us.

To understand this means that you cannot go to God and argue your good points because you do not have any. You cannot go to God and argue, “Oh God, please bless us—because of thugs and so,” and think that God will listen to you.

You cannot argue God into doing something that would be contrary to His nature. If we learn that God does everything out of goodness, without any price and without any obligation, we will find God very easy to approach and find Him very wondrously near. Out of His goodness, God has ordained means to help us, and all those means are because of His goodness.

If you are baptized, it is not the water that has done you any good. God, out of His goodness, has ordained that if you will be baptized, you will be obeying His Word, and He will bless you for your obedience. So it is with everything.

“O God,” the psalmist says, “in Thy mercy, hear my prayer.” It is an act of God’s mercy to hear my prayer, even if it is the holiest prayer ever prayed. Nobody could reach God, except God in His goodness has willed us to be able to reach Him.

I think we can save people a lot of work if they can only grasp this about God. I believe our praying would rise and become effective, if we would see that the only claim we have is something that we do not personally have at all. It is the goodness of God. And, of course, the goodness of God was made possible for us through His atonement.

Jesus Christ is the kindest man who ever lived in the world, and God is the kindest God. Jesus was the God-Man. The love of God, the mind of God, and the heart of God are kinder than you can imagine. If you were to concentrate on the word kind for one hundred years, you would not be able to truly grasp how kind God is.

He is so high that the archangels veil their faces before Him, but He is so good-natured and kindly disposed that He would pat the head of a little child, forgive a harlot on the street, and be merciful to Israel, to the church, and to all of us. Every¬thing comes out of the goodness and mercy of God.

Another important truth we need to grasp is that God is not revolted by our wretchedness. God has no regrets about anything He has made. God is not revolted because of anything that we are or have done. When God created everything, He pronounced it good.’All the sin in the entire universe could never take away from God that which He has established and called good.

I have not always been a kind man. Sometimes I have been sharp-tongued toward people and may have offended people, but God is not like that at all. I could never have been a nurse because dirty things make me gag.

God never gagged at anything He created and has never been revolted by the humblest thing. There is nothing in your body or in your soul that turns God away from you. God is never revolted by you or disgusted by you, no matter how sinful, how impure, or how odd you may be; He never turns away, because God is good.

Out of God’s goodness flows His mercy. Again, let me state that mercy is an attribute of God; it is not something that God has—it is something God is. If mercy were something God had, He might use it up or leave it somewhere and forget it, but mercy is what God is. If anybody should ask what kind of God your

God is, simply reply, “Our God is good.” And should they say, “Tell me more,” say, “Our God is merciful.” He not only has mercy, but He is mercy. It is something God is, and it is as eternal as God.

God’s goodness is a source of mercy, and God is of infinite goodness—that is, He desires His creature’s happiness. God desires that you be joyful. He will allow you to suffer if that suffering will make you holy because He wants you to be holy.

The trouble with this is we try to get happy right away, after suffering, whereas God wants us to be holy in order that our happiness might last. Unholy happiness cannot last; it can only spring up like a dandelion and perish tomorrow.

So God takes us through many fires and many trials, and it is not so important that we be happy right now. He is thinking about our enjoyment forever. This is part of the goodness and mercy of God.

God has an irresistible urge to bless people. He wants to bless you and your family your business and your church.

God takes pleasure in the pleasure of His people. He suffers along with His friends, and He takes no pleasure in the suffering of His enemies.

Some of the monks of old used to beat their backs with whips and sleep in beds of spikes, thinking they could coax God into being more merciful. There is nothing you can do to increase God’s mercy. The mercy of God is as big as God, and God fills all space and overflows into a vacuity so that you cannot add anything to His grace and mercy.

Your coaxing cannot add anything to God’s mercy. You do not have to go to God and build a case for yourself, or throw up your hands and say, “God, be merciful unto me!” God will have mercy on you because God is merciful. That is the way God is. That is the way we can expect Him to be all the time—not part of the time, but all of the time.

God is the same good and merciful God at all times, without any change. If God could become less than himself and be imperfect, He would be no God at all. To be God and remain, God, He has to remain all that He is forever, and merciful is one thing that He is.

You can be sure you will never find God in a bad mood. You will never find God saying, “I am not going to be nice today. I am not going to bless them.”

Nothing that occurs or ever can occur can ever increase the mercy of God, diminish the mercy of God, or alter the quality of God’s mercy. William Shakespeare wrote:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Some people believe that when Jesus came and was born in a manger and the angels sang, God became merciful. But it was the mercy of God that sent Jesus to Bethlehem’s manger. Someone else says, “When Jesus died on the cross, then God became merciful.” No, a thousand times no.

He died on the cross because God was already merciful, and nothing Jesus did when He came into the world made God any more merciful than He already was.

It was the mercy of God and the goodness of God that brought Him, and when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, He did not become any more merciful. God had been kind and loving all the time.

The same God who is merciful is also just and holy, and holiness cannot possibly have any fellowship with unholiness.

Justice, when it confronts human iniquity, demands judgment, but when mercy confronts human guilt and suffering, it wants to be merciful and can be, because Christ died. Christ came, died, rose, and lived in order that mercy might flow down like a fountain.

The cross is God’s channel. Jesus Christ’s dying and rising is the way mercy flows. It is the direction mercy takes, so all the poor sinner needs to do is step into the framework of the cross and believe in His Son. Turn your back on iniquity, and you will find that the mercy of God will confront your guilt and suffering and pronounce you clean

All of us are recipients of the mercy of God.

Mercy cannot cancel sin until there has been atonement for sin, but there has been atonement. Jesus Christ died, and what He did was absolutely complete. You do not have to know all about the atonement. You only have to know that Jesus Christ came down to die for you, and because of what He did, the mercy of God can flow to you like a river.

In dying, Jesus suffered a long time. I say again, I do not know how the perfect God could suffer. But I can bow my head and say, “Oh, Lord God, thou knowest.”

Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,
And did my Sovereign die!
Would he devote that sacred head?
For sinners such as I?

Was it for crimes that I have done,
He groaned upon the tree.
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well, might the sun in darkness hide,
And shut its glories in,
When God, the mighty maker, died
For his own creatures’ sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While his dear cross appears;
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt my eyes to tears.

But drops of tears can never repay
The debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away;
His all that I can do. –Isaac Watts(1674-1748)

A High And Lofty Perception Of God

Thine, O Lord, is the beauty, the glory; the victory, and the majesty All that is in the heaven and earth is Thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord. Wherever L looks, L sees Thy finger¬prints, and my heart sings forth Thy praise. Amen.

Although they do not mean to do it necessarily theologians have a way of hiding the truth behind big words and chasing people away. I have a little tip: You can understand anything any theologian can understand. Do not let them fool you.

The doctor may write his prescription in Latin, hit the layman on the head, and make him feel as if he is up against something big when he sees those Latin words, which he cannot even read. Theologians do the same thing. They talk about the divine transcendence and everybody runs out, buys a novel, and says, Til read what I can understand.”

We can understand theology as presented to us in the Bible. We can understand what God says in the Bible about himself, although we may never plumb the depths of understanding it intellectually.

Take divine transcendence, for example. It means that God is above, high up, and above all things. Supposedly, that contradicts His immanence, which means God is in every place and God is here. God’s omnipresence will comfort you better than your own breath.

God is so high up that He cannot even be conceived. I need to explain now what I mean by “so high up” or “far above.” I do not mean distant, because God does not care anything about distance. God is not high up in the astronomical sense; He is not high up in the sense that He is a ray of light beyond Mars.

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It is important that we think of God as being in His right character, so infinitely beyond everything that you and I know that we cannot explain it. Physical magnitude does not mean anything to God.

Never suppose that God is at the top of the ascending curve of life. That is a great mistake. In some people’s circle of life, they start with one creature and move their way up a little bit to the birds, and then they go all the way up to beasts and then all the way up to man.

Then they think they are on their way up to the archangels and then the burning cherubim, and then at the top of that circle of life is God. That is no way to think of God at all.

Would you be shocked to know that God is just as high above archangels as He is above a caterpillar? The gap that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is of finite depth. How quickly we are to think that the angel has a grade of life that is far higher than the caterpillar that crawls in the room?

They are alike in that they are creatures. There was a time when they were not, and then they were. The archangel with his broad wings spread and the tiny caterpillar inching its way along are both creatures of God.

But God is not a creature. He does not belong in the creature category. We must think of God as separate from, high above, way beyond, and other than. He is God, and there is nothing like God in the entire universe. Only God is God.

When we think of God as being high above, the substance of God is wholly above, and God can never pass over and cease to be God, and nothing that is not God can ever pass over and become God.

The idea that Jesus was a man who became God is not true. Jesus was God and man united in one being. There was never such a thing as man becoming God, and there never can be such a thing as God becoming a creature. That would be to bring God down and falsify the majesty of the deity.

This is the great God, the One you and I are called to serve. All of the things that are said or taught about God are only a portion of God and a small part of His ways. We have what is called the rational element, which is the part you can get hold of with your finite mind.

People would like to pull God down and make Him small so that they could have a God their size—though a little bigger, so He could help them when they are in trouble. That is the kind of God that is in evangelical circles today.

The God of the average evangelical church is too small. He is not the God of the heavens and of creation, but He is a homemade, handmade God pulled down to our level. Our God today is like an old uncle whom we want to keep on good terms, and when the time comes, He will make us rich or help us in some way in a business deal. We want to be able to use God for our purposes.

Let me say clearly: I would not bow my knees to that kind of a God. The God that can get me on my knees has to be infinitely higher than I am. He must be so high and lofty and glorious that I could join the angels, seraphim, and cherubim to cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbath.”

He would have to be so mighty that He could put the world in His hand, and He would have to be bigger than the devil, greater and mightier than mountains, and grander than fire. He would have to be all that and much more to be a God I could worship.

The God whom I could think up with my head, I will never get down on my knees to worship—never.

I am an American, and I do not bow to people easily. I do not like the idea of classes, where some men are big shots and some are little shots, and the little shots get down on their knees before the big shots. That is not the way it should be in America, and that is not the way to do it as a Christian.

God made us all so that the humblest little child is just as valuable to God as a Christian with lots of money to write big checks and drive big cars. Let us keep ourselves as free as we can.

And remember, when it comes to God, we go down on our knees along with the mighty man and the potentate and the humble man. Let us not get big ideas about these important people and think that they are more important to God.

When we say, “I accept Jesus,” we are not doing Jesus any favor. Some evangelists make it out as though you will be doing Jesus a great favor if you come to Him. No, you do not do Jesus any favor when you give your heart to Him. And He does not lose anything when you refuse to give your heart to Him.

You hold off, and He loses nothing. Give, and He gains nothing. He already has the world without end. Multitudes of the redeemed and the four beasts at the altar and the living creatures all bow before Him and cry, “Holy, holy, holy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain.”

Let us not imagine we are doing Jesus a favor by testifying or witnessing. We are not doing Jesus a favor by giving our hearts to Him. Rather, He is doing us an infinite favor by accepting us and receiving us unto Himself. The mighty God looked at man and took upon Him flesh as man, and died and rose again.

Now we are set before this mighty Lord Jesus. So do not get too proud. It was Jesus who rose from the dead and said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and on earth,” and He is not going to, for one second, allow himself to be pawed and slobbered over by carnal men and women whose concept of love came from Hollywood.

I understand that certain Muslims who cannot read, if they see a paper lying on the ground and do not know what is written on it, put it up carefully on a shelf somewhere, where it is safe. They are afraid that the sacred name of Allah might be written on it.

They do not want to be guilty of trampling on that sacred name. They are more reverent than many Christians. They bow before Allah more than many Christians go before the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Do you know this awesome God? This God the philosophers have called the mysterium tremendum— the tremendous mystery, the awesome mystery. Before this mysterium tremendum,9 Jacob cried, “How dreadful is this place; this is the house of God.55 In the New Testament, Peter said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am unclean.55 Abraham said, “I am but dust and ashes.

The job was speechless before God. Job was an orator and probably would have made a good politician or an evangelist. He could open his mouth and words would flow out like water out of a flask. But when God revealed himself to him, Job laid his hands on his mouth and said, “O God, I cannot speak.

Many people are not getting anyplace with God because they have never met that kind of God. Their God is a self-made God and carries with Him no mystery or majesty. I will never bow my knee to a self-made or handmade God. I bow my knee to that mysterium tremendum—that awesome majesty we call our Father, which art in heaven.

I have been teaching and preaching since I was nineteen years old, and I must confess that the older I get, the dumber I get. I know so little. People come and ask me things that I could answer by pointing them out in the Bible. However, honesty compels me to confess that I do not know very much anymore.

Once I knew a lot, or thought I did, but as I spend time before this tremendous God, I become more and more aware that I do not know very much anymore. And really, I believe it ought to work this way.

Nobody who is proud will ever be acceptable to the awesome presence of the most holy God. The God who knows all that can be known in one easy, effortless act, and knows all power, all spirits, all minds, all matter, all relationships, all energy, all history, and all the future—compared to this God, I know very little.

None of us knows very much, and the man who thinks he knows the most is the man who, according to Paul, knows the least. If we would just admit how utterly ignorant we are, we would begin to get somewhere with God.

God is not interested in your head. He is not interested in how many degrees you have. After I received my honorary degree, I did not preach any better, nor did I pray any better.

Degrees do not mean anything, and yet some people imagine that if they do not have a degree, they cannot get anywhere. Some of the simplest people in the world know God far better than a person with a Ph.D. does. Pray with your heart, and God will hear you.

Some people will come to the altar and pray and then go away disappointed. The reason is they have a controversy with God. They are holding out on God, fighting Him. Do not be fooled by this.- God is still the awesome God that sent fire on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and turned the people into ashes. He is still that God.

If you have a dispute with God, keep in mind two things: One, you cannot win, and two, God cannot lose. If you are fight¬ing God at any point, you have no chance of winning. My advice is, simply, to quit fighting, surrender, and say, “God, here I am.”

Throw yourself into the hands of God. You cannot win as long as you are resisting God, and God cannot lose because He is sovereign and is working according to a plan He established before the foundation of the world.

When it is all over, the crown will be on the head of Jesus, and His bride will walk with Him into the presence of the Father, with great joy. God will win in the end.

All those who fight will lose. Either God will win over you now, to your everlasting blessedness, or God will win over you later, to your everlasting loss and sorrow and shame. Stop fighting God and you will win peacefully, for God loves you, and Jesus died for you, and the Holy Spirit is anxious to apply the blood and break every fetter in your life and set you free. He cannot do it, however, while you resist Him.

Not I, But Christ

Not I, but Christ, be honored, loved, exalted;
Not I, but Christy be seen be known be heard;
Not I, but Christy in every look and action,
Not I, but Christy in every thought and word.

Not I, but Christy to gently soothe in sorrow;
Not I, but Christy to wipe the falling tear;
Not I, but Christy to lift the weary burden!
Not I, but Christy to hush away all fear.

Not I, but Christy in lowly, silent labor;
Not I, but Christ, in humble, earnest toil;
Christ, only Christ! no show, no ostentation!
Christ, none but Christ, the gatherer of the spoil.

Christ, only Christ; ere long will fill my vision;
Glory excelling, soon, full soon, I’ll see—
Christ, only Christ, my every wish fulfilling—
Christ, only Christ, my All in all to be. –A. B. Simpson(1843-1919)

The Effect Of Our Perception Of God

Our hearts sing in praise and adoration as we experience Thy presence, O God, in our day-to-day living. It would be one thing to worship Thee one day, but to be able to worship Thee every day, and all day long, is the great joy of knowing Thee. Amen.

Somebody asked Charles Spurgeon once if he ever preached a sermon more than once. “Do you think,” he replied, “I would throw away the ax after I cut down the tree?” I know exactly how he felt, and I feel the same way.

You run the risk of repeating yourself if you teach for very long. I am of the nature that if what I am saying is helpful, not only do I want to repeat it, but also I give everyone permission to repeat it without giving me any credit. After all, it is the message that really matters.

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I think everybody ought to have the privilege of using any of the Lord’s weapons belonging to the Lord’s people, except their armor. Remember, Saul’s armor did not fit David, and I will never wear anybody’s armor except mine.

Let me outline a few things along this line of knowing God.

The first is that life is a serious thing, and this is a serious world in which we live.

I am encouraged that there are still among us enough seri¬ous-minded people who realize the seriousness of life and are honestly concerned about how they can meet and conquer life and death—about how they can salvage something out of the wreck of this world and how they can save their own souls out of a disaster.

“Save yourselves,” Peter cautioned, “from this untow¬ard generation.” If an apostle said this, I think I can whisper it today.

I think there are some who want to save their souls from this untoward generation—this coming crash and downfall of the world. In light of this, I would like to give them counsel, not from a perfect man, but from someone who has walked with God, who has loved and lived the Scriptures for quite a while, and who has no other motive except to do you good.

Nobody can get my ear or my respect if I know he has a hand extended. I do not think this is such a spiritual thing; I have no conscience about it at all. I plug my ears against the man who I suspect is just out to get something.

However, no man can talk too strictly to me if I know he loves me and does not want anything I have. And no man can be too eloquent for me to walk out on if I have a suspicion that he wants something I have.

If we are going to save ourselves from this untoward generation and salvage something out of the world, I think four things need to be put in focus in our everyday lives.

I am positively sure after many years of observation and prayer, that the basis of all our trouble today in religious circles is that our God is too small, that our God is not big enough. This cannot be repeated too many times.

I do not think we can make God big, because that is completely beyond our ability. We cannot have an imaginary God. We must see God as He has delighted to reveal himself, especially in the Word of God.

I believe that the most important verse in the Bible is—and this is a very hard thing to say because the Bible is such a magnificent book—“In the beginning God…”

This is the most important verse because that is where everything must begin. God is the fountain out of which everything springs, and He is the foundation upon which everything rests. God is all in all.

I am quite sure that if we would begin to see our God bigger, we would also begin to see people smaller. This is the day of the magnification of slick personalities, and as we magnify slick personalities, we are, in fact, minimizing God. We have church meetings in which we never see God at all. We see only the servants of God, which is a tragedy.

I am afraid that we have a lot of hero worship in the church of Christ today. We are magnifying the messenger and consequently minimizing the message. The message should be of such a nature that it overshadows the messenger.

God moves according to an eternal purpose, and He carries on after His plans. He does not need anybody to direct Him, correct Him, or qualify what He has to say. The most astounding and powerful phrase in all of Scripture is “Thus saith the Lord.” After that, nothing more needs to be said, God is enough.

The creeds have taught us that God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. With the contemplation of God’s majesty, all eloquence fades into the shadows. Mans’s eloquence cannot rise high enough to give praiseworthy enough to this One we refer to as the mysterium tremendum.

Man’s language can never be adequate enough to fully express the worthiness of our God. Many wordsmiths throughout the years have tried to honor God with language. Language can never fully express God in all His majestic wonderment. We try, and the hymn writers have done a great job of doing it, but even they fall short of the glory that belongs only to God.

Sometimes in our prayers, we get rather eloquent. I have discovered that when I am the most eloquent in my prayers, I am not getting very much accomplished. My eloquence sometimes gets in the way of really connecting with God.

I tell you, our feelings can never be boiled down to mere words. There is something about God that is so majestic and so awe-inspiring as to frustrate expression.

I have been an eager reader of Shakespeare, but even he lacks the ability to articulate the majesty of God in words and phrases that are worthy of God. No matter what we say, no matter how we say it, our God is bigger.

When I try to express my love for God, words get in the way, and sometimes I am even brought to a place of silence. It is in the silence that my appreciation of God raises itself in a worthy manner.

If I had the talent and ability of Shakespeare, of Francis Bacon, of Henry Thoreau, of John Milton—the list could go on and on—I could never adequately express to God what is worthy of Him. To know God in the fullness of His revelation is to feel a deep sense of inadequacy in our worship.

Those who are happy with their worship have probably never been in the presence of God. When I am on my face before God in worship, there is such a feeling of inadequacy as I come before this holy One. How can I come as imperfect and limited as I am and bring to the holy, unlimited One that which is worthy of Him?

Why is this? Why is it that I have difficulty expressing in my worship what is worthy and acceptable to God?

The basic reason is the flesh. God cannot accept anything of the flesh. No matter where you go in the Scriptures, you will find that the flesh is always contrary to God’s will. The flesh needs to be dealt with in our everyday lives. Nothing of the flesh is pleasing unto God.

The greatest expression of the flesh is entertainment. The world has honed this to absolute perfection. Entertainment has taken over in our culture today, and nothing can be done apart from it. The error that we make is this: We think we can obtain God. We believe that what we do and how we do it will bring a sense of pleasure to God.

What we need to understand is that God cannot be enter¬tained, especially by the flesh. Once we get this into our heads, we begin to look at our relationship with God a little differently. God is not going to entertain me, and God is not going to be entertained by me. This fact rules out a lot that passes for worship today.

Entertainment is simply the demonstration of the flesh at its finest moment. Because this is acceptable in the world, many think it is acceptable to God. Most of our church worship services are simply religious entertainment.

If it is entertainment, it is really not of God. Worship and entertainment are not synonymous, yet many in our evangelical churches today think they are. Sunday morning to some has become a time of religious musical entertainment, thinking that it is pleasing unto God.

The God of the Bible is of such a nature that He is worthy of that which is compatible with His nature. Entertainment is not compatible with the nature of God. If we are going to please God, we need to please Him on His terms. If we are going to worship God, we must worship Him on His terms.

Dealing with the flesh in the church today is probably the most difficult thing that we will ever do. If we can deal with the flesh elements in the church, we will release congregations to positions of worship acceptable unto God.

Although I am not dealing with the gifts of the Spirit in this book, I simply would point out that God can be served and worshiped only through the gifts of the Spirit. Mans’s talent falls far short of that which is pleasing unto God. The flesh cannot do the work of the ministry or the worship of God. Somehow we have lost this concept.

What are some people going to do if they get to heaven and find out there is not one bit of entertainment throughout all the golden streets? The Golden Streets are certainly not Broadway. Heaven is not a place of entertainment.

Heaven is a place of worship, and the object of the worship is God. The more I know about God, the more I will begin to understand what kind of worship is acceptable and what is not acceptable. This is why it is important for me to have a clear, precise perception of God as He truly is.

Once I understand God and the worship and the ministry that are acceptable to Him, I need to move on to one area, which is to magnify God in everything I do. Again, let me point out, that the flesh cannot magnify God.

I need to deal with the flesh so that I can magnify God in every aspect of life. If there is one aspect of my life where God is not magnified, there is no aspect of my life where He is worthily magnified.

Dealing with the flesh is a very serious matter because it brings me to the point of worthily magnifying God. What does it mean to magnify God?

To put it bluntly, it simply means to make God big in your life. The more you get to know God and understand His holi¬ness, the more you will begin to magnify God in your life, and then God will become the biggest thing in your life.

If something in your life is bigger than God, I can assure you that God is not in your life. The goal that I have as a Christian is to magnify God. The great discipline of the Christian life is to live in a way that magnifies God.

The word that is used in this regard is to mortify the flesh. That is simply to turn your back on the flesh and reckon your flesh to be dead.

“I am crucified with Christ,” Paul said, “nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

This is to put a death sentence on everything about my life. I cannot be one way on Sunday morning and different come Monday morning. I cannot be one way when I am around Chris¬tians and completely different when around other people.

Some claim to have mortified the flesh, but they still have the spirit of resentfulness, they still love money, and they still have a temper. Either mortify the flesh or the flesh will destroy you and your Christian testimony.

I must confess some of the most delightful meetings that I have been in have been where God is present in such awesome power that the people were afraid to move. At times, the presence of God was so thick in the assembly that nobody could even whisper. God was indeed in that place.

If more of our churches would experience this on a regular basis, the trend for entertainment would quickly disappear. There is no entertainment anywhere or by anyone that can compare with the manifest presence of God upon an assembly of believers.

As we mature in the Lord, we lose our desire for the toys of religion. They are no longer satisfied, and the only thing that really satisfies is God’s presence in our midst. It is not about a good show. It is not about being entertained and enthusiastically lifted up.

If I can be lifted up enthusiastically, I can come crashing down too. But when I am in the presence of God and He manifests himself to me, there is nothing artificial. I can never get over that experience, the experience of practicing the presence of God. Again, let me say, that we must deal with the flesh.

I have been accused many times of being radical, and I do not mind that at all. I think you have got to be a little bit radical if you are going to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, so I am not afraid of being radical. If you really want to see an increased experience in the presence of God, let me offer a few suggestions.

Go home and begin pulling the plug on all those things in your home that are simply there for entertainment. I am talking about your radio, your TV, and maybe even your telephone.

I know we need the telephone for a lot of reasons, but there are times when we need to cut ourselves off so completely from the world that all we have left is God. That is all right with me. I want to be in such a situation that all I have is God.

You do not need to know so much, and you do not need to have so many things. If your life is down to the basics, it will enable you to hold on to the faith once delivered to the saints, for as Brother Lawrence has said, “Practice the presence of God.”

One last thought along this line would be to cultivate a servant’s attitude!

David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep. I firmly believe that no man has any right to die until he has served his generation. As a Christian, when I die, I want to make sure that the world around me is in debt to me because of my service.

When John and Charles Wesley came into the world, they were in debt to their mother, to their father, to their nurse, and to everyone who served them. They did not die until they turned the tables on the world, and now the world and the church of God are in debt to John and Charles Wesley.

It is hardly possible to have a church service without singing one of Charles Wesley’s hymns.

Down the line, we could go to the Great Hall of Faith. One by one we could see those who have come into the world owing everybody everything, and then when they died, they reversed the tables, and now the whole world is indebted to them. Why?

Because they had a servant mentality. This is crucial, and it flows from a proper perception of who God is.

You cannot serve the last generation, because it is gone. In addition, you can only indirectly serve the next generation, but you can serve this present generation. Too many Christians are simply religious sponges; they absorb and absorb and absorb, and that is about all there is to their lives.

However, the Lord wants us to serve, to do things for people, to put people in debt to us. As we magnify God, crucify the old man, simplify our lives, and cultivate a servant attitude, we put this generation and generations to come in debt to us.

Revive Thy Work, O Lord

Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Thy mighty arm make bare;
Speak with the voice that wakes the dead,
And make Thy people hear.

Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Disturb this sleep of death;
Quicken the smoldering embers now
By Thine almighty breath.

Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Create soul-thirst for Thee;
And hungering for the bread of life
O may our spirits be.

Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Exalt Thy precious name;
And, by the Holy Ghost, our love
For Thee and Thine inflame.

Revive Thy work, O Lord,
Give Pentecostal showers;
The glory shall be all Thine own,
The blessing, Lord, be ours. –Albert Midlane(1825-1909)

Our Perception of God Navigates Our Prayer Life

O God, my greatest joy is the joy I find in that secret fellowship with Thee. Nothing else fills my heart with such excitement and enthusiasm as coming into Thy presence, knowing that I am welcome. May my life today be saturated with prayer and praise because of who I know Thee to be. Amen.

Yet I find it rather strange, when you get down to the practical aspects, that very few Christians really engage in the discipline of prayer to the extent that is available to them in their Christian experience.

It was George Mueller who observed that he had so much to do that he could not afford to spend less than four hours a day in prayer. There was a man who understood the place of prayer. We would say that we have so much to do we cannot afford to spend time in prayer.

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Compare our lives with the life of George Mueller, and see who really had the best idea of prayer.

When Jesus died on the cross, rose the third day from the grave, ascended into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of God the Father, He established for us access to the very ear of God. I am not sure if Christians realize the dynamics of this access.

We now have access to the ear of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a humbling concept to process as I ponder and meditate on my relationship with God.

My relationship with God is not arbitrary, nor is it ritualistic. Rather, it is a personal experience, and it is more than a monologue—it is a dialogue. I am afraid most Christians have not progressed to the dialogue aspect of their prayer life.

Our perception of God is what really establishes the perimeters, if you please, of our prayer life. We need to understand that prayer is not a meritorious act. We do not earn anything because of it. We pray because God hears, and God hears us because of Jesus. Because of Him, God the Father has a good heart toward His people.

The pagans pray to sticks and stones and all sorts of man-made things, without any merit in their prayers whatsoever. The impressive thing, and the most disappointing, is their utter commitment and discipline to this bogus prayer life. God hears us not because our prayer is good, but because God is good.

One dear brother used to cup his ear and say, “God stoops and cups His ear to hear me pray.” The dear brother was not far from the truth. Prayer is the means that God has of knowing that we are ready to receive what He wants us to have.

My perception of the goodness of God will guide me in my prayer. I need to, understand that I do not have to talk God into doing something that He may not want to do. Listen to some of the prayers at a prayer meeting, and you would think people believe they can talk God into something He does not want to do. This is absolutely not true.

God cannot be talked into doing something He does not want to do or that is against His character and nature and attri¬butes. I cannot convince God to do something because I want Him to do it. I am not in the position, nor is anyone else, to negotiate with God on my terms.

The more I begin to understand the goodness of God, the more I begin to understand my relationship with Him, and the more I begin to understand what prayer is all about. God’s good¬ness is the ground of our expectation when it comes to prayer. What can we really expect God to do?

The more I get to know what kind of God is, the more I will begin to understand what my expectation from Him is and what His expectation of me is. It goes both ways, you know. Most confusion in my prayer comes from my not fully understanding what God’s expectation of me is.

Remember, prayer is not trying to conform God to our situation, but rather our conforming to Him.

When I go to God, confess my sins, and trust Him to forgive me, by faith, I accept His forgiveness. I am expecting God to forgive me because I know that God is good and desires to forgive me because of Jesus’ sacrifice for me. Does the merit lie in my faith? Never.

It lies in the good God who forgives because He is gracious, kind, and ready to forgive.

So many Bible verses blossom and flower when we think of the goodness of God.

The goodness of God leads us to repentance, Paul says in Romans: “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?” (Romans 2:4).

David said in the Psalms, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever” (Psalm 23:6). As I begin to understand the goodness of God, I understand that He takes no pleasure in judgment.

He does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked. God does judge, though. I believe in the judgment day and that every man shall receive according to his deeds done in the body. I believe there shall be a resurrection of the just and the unjust, and there shall be a resurrection of man unto eternal life and of man unto damnation.

I believe that. Yet God takes no pleasure in judgment. David says that the Lord will rejoice over thee for good. God is delighted to shower our lives with His goodness.

When I was a young boy, I used to hear a little song:

In the Shadow of His Wings

In the shadow of His wings
There is rest, sweet rest;
There is rest from care and labor,
There is rest for friend and neighbor;
In the shadow of His wings
There is rest, sweet rest,
In the shadow of His wings
There is rest (sweet rest). -Jonathan B. Atchinson (1840-1882)

If only we could realize that God is that kind of God, we would never have a hangdog look and feel in our hearts. We would never need to go away with a deep sense of inferiority. There is quite a difference between real repentance and a feeling of inferiority that makes you feel “I am no good. There is no use to pray; I am just no good.”

Of course, you are no good. God is good, and because He is good, we can dare to take advantage of His goodness. God’s door is always open for any of His children who have done wrong, so they can come to the point of saying, “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Recently, as I spent a little time with the Lord each day, I was overwhelmed with how kind God has been to me. How utterly good He has been. If it were not for the grace of God, I would be roasting in hell or languishing in jail somewhere.

God’s goodness has surrounded me and pardoned me and forgiven me, and His loving-kindness has made my life reasonably decent, only because He is good, not because I am good.

I have a little book I have never been without for years. It is a little prayer book, which I wrote myself. I guess it is maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, and I carry it around wherever I go. I write my prayers, and I have a little understanding with God.

Because I, by nature and conduct, have been the worst man that ever lived, I want God to do more for me than for any man that ever lived. I have a right to ask that because where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound.

And if the goodness of God specializes in hard cases, and if the goodness of God can shine brighter against the dark sky, I will provide the dark sky. Shine on, O goodness of God.

When I was a young man, I used to ride the railroads—that is, I used to sneak on board and ride them for free. When I was converted, God began to convict me of that, and I wanted to make up for riding the train all those years without paying. I had been riding around at the expense of the railroad company, and I owed them something.

So I Wrote To The Traffic Manager And Said:

Dear Sir;

I have been converted to Jesus Christ and I am a Christian now, and I want to straighten out my life. A little while back I rode from here to there, from there to here, without paying, and I would like you to send me the bill. I want to pay up.

Not long after, I got a return letter on one of the official B and O pieces of stationery. I opened the letter and read:

Dear Sir;

Your letter has been received. We note that you have been converted and want to live a Christian life, and we want to compliment you on this new act. We compliment you on becoming a Christian.

Now, about what you owe us. Weather suppose you did not get very good service on our line when you traveled, and therefore we will just forget the whole thing.

Sincerely yours,
Traffic manager

I kept that letter for a long time. My conscience was clean and free. God was good to me. I could not pay the bill; I did not have enough money.

May I encourage you that God is a just holy and good God. I know God is severe with unbelief and sin, but God is good, infinitely good, always good. And if you need Him, God will always be there for you.

Sweet Hour Of Prayer

Sweet hour of prayer! Sweet hour of prayer!
That calls me from a world of care.
And bids me at my Father’s throne
Make all my wants and wishes known.

In seasons of distress and grief
My soul has often found relief
And oft escaped the tempter’s snare,
By thy return, sweet hour of prayer!

Sweet hour of prayer! Sweet hour of prayer!
The joys I feel, the bliss I share.
Of those whose anxious spirits burn
With strong desires for thy return!
With such, I hasten to the place
Where God my Savior shows His face,
And gladly take my station there,
And wait for thee, sweet hour of prayer!

Sweet hour of prayer! Sweet hour of prayer!
Thy wings shall my petition bear
To Him whose truth and faithfulness
Engage the waiting soul to bless.
And since He bids me seek His face.
Believe His Word and trust His grace,
Til cast on Him my every care,
And wait for thee, sweet hour of prayer!

Sweet hour of prayer! Sweet hour of prayer!
May I thy consolation share,
Still, from Mount Pisgah’s lofty height,
I view my home and take my flight.
This robe of flesh Til drop, and rise
To seize the everlasting prize,
And shout, while passing through the air,
“Farewell, farewell, sweet hour of prayer!” -William W.Walford(1772-1850)

Our Perception of God in Creation

All of creation, O Lord, sings of Thy praise. I look to the hills and think of Thee. The mountains show Thy majesty and strength. From the rivers, I see the flowing grace and goodness of Thy very nature. All creation joins in praise unto Thee, and so do I. Amen.

God’s fingerprints are all over creation. The more we delve into the mystery of creation, the more we begin to see God’s fingerprints. Not all scientific discoveries can eliminate it; they only strongly suggest that behind everything is a creator. To disavow a creator is to compromise intelligence. Nothing has appeared without something or someone behind it.

Who is this creator behind everything? is the question that really needs to be answered. This creator is the God who created all things, and He created everything with a purpose.
Nothing throughout all creation is meaningless or purposeless. I will never be able to understand the purpose until I understand who is behind all of this.

Unfortunately, we have left nature and creation to the scientists who are trying to unravel the mystery of our universe. It is my opinion that nature should automatically lead us to God, who is described to us in the Word of God as the Creator. If you have nature without the Word of God, you have a mysterious somebody, but no personal connection.

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I do not approach this as a scientist, but as one who is deeply in praise and worship of the creator. Everything in creation sings the praises of this mysterious creator. I cannot explain creation, but I can see through creation the marvelous fingerprints of a God who is magnificent, awesome, and wonderful.

All we do is take the best qualities in a man and project them upward, and then we have God. If we see a kind man, we say, “All right, then God must be kind,” and we project that kindness out of the heart of man up to God and say, “God is kind, and He is infinitely kind,” and then we preach and teach about it.

When critics say our concept of the heavenly Father is only a manufactured one, they say, in effect, “I know that God isn’t the way you say He is.” To answer that, ask, “All right, how did you find that out? You can only find it out by either discovery or revelation.

When did you discover God so that you can tell us what kind of God He is, if you did not discover Him, then you had a revelation. Will you please tell us where the revelation came from? What is the revelation?”

It presumes that the critic knows something about God that we do not know, the Bible doesn’t know, the prophets and apostles did not know, Jesus our Lord did not know, and church fathers and martyrs and reformers did not know.

People might also call you an anthropomorphic obscurantist, meaning you cover things up and keep them obscure. We do not believe that. We believe sinners cover things up and keep them obscure, and that the children of God do all things in the light.

The obscurantist is the one right now who is sitting somewhere drawing up a dirty contract, a crooked contract to cheat a widow out of her property. There is your obscure fellow. He is hiding in the darkness, but the children of the light come into the light.

When I say God is love, they say, “That’s what you would like to have God be like, and because you like to see love in people, you like to see love in God.” The whole thing is nonsense to me.

If God made man in His image, is it not reasonable to believe that the best things in a man would be the nearest to what God is? If you would like to see a mother showing tenderness over her baby, then where do you suppose she got that tenderness?

That love we have for each other, where did we get it? That pity we show for one another, where did we get it?

We got it all where we got our life. We got it from God, and though we are fallen and lost, this decency came from the heart of God.

“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” (Matthew 7:11).

So instead of running and hiding and admitting we are ignorant, we stand right up to these critics and name-callers and say, “Keep your long names. I believe in God and I believe God made me in His image, and I believe that every good there is in humanity came from God.”

God is not the goodness that humanity has projected upward. The man was made in the image of God, and any decency that may be left in our fallen nature came from the heart of God.

God is kind, and this is taught or implied throughout the entire Scriptures.

You studied the multiplication tables—2 x2 = 4, 2×3 = 6, 2×4 = 8, and so on—those are data, mathematical facts. They will remain the same for the rest of your life. Right on up through to the highest possible reaches of mathematics, it will still be true that 2×2 = 4.

Then there is this datum of truth: God is good. You can go out into the world and see accidents, polio, murders, and all the rest, and when it is all finished, it does not change the fact that God is good.

You can go down where men cheat each other and lie and misuse figures for their purposes and make 2 x 2 = 7 so they can fill their own pocketbook, but that does not change the fact that 2×2 = 4.

Therefore, you can see everywhere among men that they have fallen in evil ways. You can see cruelty and darkness, but it does not change the fact that God is good. That is the datum of truth. It is a foundation stone of all our beliefs about God.

It is necessary for human sanity to believe that God is good— that the God who is in the heavens above is not a malicious

God or an unkind God or a God who promotes evil, but a God who promotes good. To allow God to be any other kind of God would be to upset and completely change our moral standard for mankind.

It would mean turning heaven into hell and hell into heaven. It would mean that good could be bad and bad could be good, and God could be the devil and the devil could be God.

Many times we try to rest our faith on texts and promises. True faith can rest only on the character of God. I believe, and I have faith because I believe in the One in whom my faith is placed.

I believe in a God who is good, and I never worry that God, behind my back, will mistreat me. I never need to worry for fear God will catch me when my back is turned and do something malicious, for there is no malice in the heart of God, only love. There is only goodness in the heart of God; that is all. Therefore, I need not worry.

Oh, what a contrast between the Christ who walked among men and the evil men among whom He walked—the malicious, beard-pulling, whispering men and the calm, quiet, loving Jesus with a tender look on His face for every harlot at His feet, every babe on the lawn, every sick child, and every pain and sorrow in the world.

He walked among men with goodwill, and the men among whom He walked accused Him of His goodness and wished He were dead.

When they nailed him on a tree, they did not change His goodness. He did not turn on them and curse them. He said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” They could kill Him, but they could not destroy the goodness in His heart, His goodwill toward men.

I would like to point out something you may have overlooked. It is that God’s goodness is the grounds of our expectation. We evangelicals have gone overboard and thrown out some very wonderful treasures.

Our Puritan fathers and the old Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Baptists and Methodists used to preach about what they called natural theology and they did not hesitate. They were not liberals or modernists; they were the church fathers and taught what they called natural theology.

They said that God revealed himself in nature and that there was a theology that could be built just by looking around you. We all know that is true, but we are afraid to say that today; we are scared stiff.

We are afraid somebody will come along and beat us over the head with a Scofield Bible and say, “Now, wait a minute here—you’re a liberal.” No, no, my brother, I am no liberal. I hope I am liberal, but I am not liberal in theology, and I am not a modernist.

But I believe that God has, through His creation, declared certain things to be true of himself. I know the Psalms say so, and the prophets say so, and Paul says so. When I go along with an apostle of the New Testament, a prophet of the Old Testament, or a psalmist of both testaments, I feel that I am in pretty good company, and I am not too badly frightened.

I take great comfort in the fact that this is my Father’s world. When sin came into the world, it brought into creation an element contrary to the character and nature of God. The apostle Paul put it this way, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). Even nature is suffering because of the sin of man.

What this world of ours will be like when sin has been finally and eternally removed from all creation is something we can hardly think of. Let them think of us as they will, and let them call us what they will. Our hope is in the fact that this is our Father’s world, and He has this world’s best interest in mind that will stand throughout all eternity.

This is My Fathers World

This is my Father’s world,
And to my listening ears;
All nature sings and round me rings The music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world:
I rest in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world,
The birds their carols rise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world,
He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.

This is my Father’s world,
O let me ne’er forget
That though the wrong seems often so strong,
God is the Ruler yet.

This is my Father’s world,
The battle is not done.
Jesus, who died, shall be satisfied,
And earth and heaven be one. -Maltbie D. Babcock(1858-1901)