Knowing God Week 1 (12Sept2010)
The Lord started to give me a vision for this class in the Spring. And as I prayed and thought about it, I realized that I had to bring others on the journey that the Lord has brought me on.
Psalm 68:5 “A Father to the Fatherless.” – I think that God has taken care of me at the requests of my father, and because of His sovereign plan. My heart was always attuned to the things of God and I hungered for His Word. But it was on a mission trip to China in 2002, that the leader of the trip, Mike Douris dropped this book in my lap. And it changed my life (Pleasures of God).
I was exposed to statements like: “What is the chief end of man? A: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Piper said, The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. I want to remind you. God doesn’t change. And God is infinitely happy and He has great joy in Himself in His Trinitarian affections. God is not merely to be studied…but intimately worshipped.
Jesus said in John 4 to the woman at the well. You must worship God in Spirit and in Truth. I am looking for true worshippers.
Presupposition
1.) Holy Scripture is our only authority, because it is the inerrant Word of God. SOLA SCRIPTURA. Because God is our only final authority.
Ultimately, the backlash to Luther nailing the 95 thesis to the door at the Wittenberg Chapel on October 31, 1517 was a debate over authority. The Catholic Church argued at the Council of Trent almost thirty years later for two forms of authority: church councils/pope and Holy Scripture. Luther thought differently. Thus the catch phrase and one of the 5 Solas of the Reformation: Sola Scriptura. Scripture alone is our authority, because it is God's Word. Luther was famous for saying “One peasant armed with one verse of Scripture is more powerful than popes and councils without Scripture.” At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther is famous for saying:
Unless I am convicted by the testimony of Scripture or by evident reason – for I trust neither in popes nor in councils alone, since it is obvious that they have often erred and contradicted themselves – I am convicted by the Scripture which I have mentioned and my conscience is held captive by the Word of God. Therefore I cannot and will not recant, since it is difficult, unprofitable and dangerous indeed to do anything against one’s conscience, God help me. Amen.
A.W. Tozer –
The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.
With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, “Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper in this middle period of the twentieth century.
This loss of the concept of majesty has come just when the forces of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.
The only way to recoup our spiritual losses is to go back to the cause of them and make such corrections as the truth warrants. The decline of the knowledge of the holy has brought on our troubles. A rediscovery of the majesty of God will go a long way toward curing them. It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate. If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as He is.
Jonathan Edwards
The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God , is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here….These are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the ocean.
Henry Scougal
The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love..”
David said in Psalm 104:31-34 –
May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the LORD rejoice in his works, who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke! I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord.
The other day, GA and I went to a dock by our house and looked at the sunset. And it was incredible. But as we looked at the sunset our hearts turned to worship, because our affections were towards God, the maker of the sunset, and not the sunset itself. We gave glory to Him in worship and we were awed that God could make such beauty. It’s not bad to be stunned.
John Piper – Pleasure of God
One of the tragedies of growing up is that we get used to things. It has its good side of course, since irritations may cease to be irritations. But there is immense loss when we get used to the redness of the rising sun, and the roundness of the moon, and the whiteness of the snow, the wetness of rain the blueness of the sky, the buzzing of bumble bees, the stitching of crickets, the invisibility of wind, the unconscious constancy of heart and diaphragm, the weirdness of noses and ears, the number of the grains of sand on a thousand beaches, the never-ceasing crash crash of countless waves, and ten million kingly-clad flowers flourishing and withering in woods and mountain valleys where no one sees but God. I invite you…to look, as though it were the first time, not at the empty product of accumulated millennia of aimless evolutionary accidents (which no child ever dreamed of), but at the personal handiwork of an infinitely strong, creative, and exuberant Artist who made the earth and the sea and everything in them. I invite you to believe (like the children believe) “that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course you shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega.”
John 17:3 “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only ture God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Psalm 34:8 “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
C.S. Lewis – “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
J.I. Packer - “The conviction behind the book is that ignorance of God – ignorance both of his ways and of the practice of communion with Him – lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today.”
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