VIDEO A Big God

 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. — Isaiah 40:28

Your God Is Too Small proclaimed the title of a book some years ago by J. B. Phillips. I am sure that many would say, “Now just a minute. That may be true of some, but I worship the great triune Jehovah who is infinite in His wisdom, being, and power.” That is all very good in theory. It makes great theology, but how about in practice?

Is it not true that many Christians go about their daily lives as if they worshiped an emaciated midget? Their chief concern seems to be not to overtax His strength and bring about a complete physical breakdown. They pray something like this: “O God, if it is not too much trouble, if you can handle this, if this is not too much to ask, would you please grant this little request?”

Maybe their God is not small in size but instead small in heart. He is some sort of a withered, shriveled miser. They anxiously pray: “O God, I know I have bugged you often before, but just one more little favor if you don’t mind too much?”

We are told to come boldly before His throne. We are His dear children, and He delights in helping and in giving.

Question to ponder: What big and difficult request do you have for God?

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Sermon on Isaiah 40:27-31 | “Collective Weariness” by Pastor Colin Smith

Hacksaw Ridge (2016) Isaiah 40:28-31 (HD)

God’s Gentle Grace

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Ephesians 4:2

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, suggesting that, because God’s truth and glory is far “too bright” for vulnerable human beings to understand or receive all at once, it’s best for us to receive and share God’s grace and truth in “slant”—gentle, indirect—ways. For “the Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.”

The apostle Paul made a similar argument in Ephesians 4 when he urged believers to be “completely humble and gentle” and to “be patient, bearing with one another in love” (v. 2). The foundation for believers’ gentleness and grace with each other, Paul explained, is Christ’s gracious ways with us. In His incarnation (vv. 9–10), Jesus revealed Himself in the quiet, gentle ways people needed in order to trust and receive Him.

And He continues to reveal Himself in such gentle, loving ways—gifting and empowering His people in just the ways they need to continue to grow and mature—“so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature” (vv. 12–13). As we grow, we become less vulnerable to looking elsewhere for hope (v. 14) and more confident in following Jesus’ example of gentle love (vv. 15–16).

By:  Monica La Rose

Reflect & Pray

How have you experienced God’s grace and truth in gentle, indirect ways? How can His gentle ways help you relate to others?

Dear God, thank You for the gentle ways You reveal Your goodness, grace, and truth to me. Help me to find patience and rest as I trust in Your loving care.

Sunday Reflection: The Abundance in Being Different

From the friction of diversity comes the polish that makes us more accurate reflections of our Savior

To get the most out of this devotion, set aside time to read the scriptures referenced throughout.

The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” In other words, each of us is an individual, but we weren’t meant to be alone (Genesis 2:18). What’s more, we aren’t all meant to be carbon copies of one another.

When we try to make community according to our own preferences and perspectives, we inadvertently diminish the rich blessings God intends for us. Like a vine with meager fruit, we miss out on the full beauty and abundance of being in Christ. 

Consider the apostle John’s vision of God’s kingdom: “Behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all the tribes, peoples, and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). 

As believers, we live in that reality even now. Knowing that should affect the way we think about who belongs in our pews and around our kitchen tables. By demonstrating Jesus’ love to one another, especially when our differences collide, we become like Him—and more authentically ourselves.

Think about it

• How do you view Christians who aren’t like you? What needs to change?

Stand Fast

“By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth….For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.” (Psalm 33:6, 9)

Many is the modern-day evangelical who has attempted to harmonize the plain sense of the Scriptures with Big Bang cosmogony, concepts of stellar evolution, and a uniformitarian framework for Earth history. This exercise seldom results in a tempering of secular thought but rather results in a compromising reinterpretation of Scripture, making it say something it clearly does not say.

The Bible says that “the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3), that all things that now exist were simply called into existence at God’s spoken command.

Creation was a true miracle. It was not (as some insist) merely a godly oversight of cosmic processes acting on eternal matter, nor was it the gradual appearance and disappearance of matter in a steady-state transformation. Only a poor regard for Scripture, coupled with an overly high regard for current astronomical theory, could interpret Hebrews 11:3 as the explosion of a tiny, super-dense “cosmic egg” (that did not “appear,” i.e., too small to see), itself the result of a “quantum fluctuation in a vacuum” in a Big Bang that produced the entire universe.

Rather, as implied in the formula “Let there be…and there was” repeated many times in Genesis 1, and as described in our text and elsewhere, all things derive simply from His spoken word. Our response should not be to disbelieve and twist but to believe and praise. “Let all the earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him” (Psalm 33:8). JDM

Citizens of two Worlds

We should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world. —Titus 2:12

Our trouble springs from the fact that we who follow Christ inhabit at once two worlds—the spiritual and the natural. As children of Adam we live our lives on earth subject to the limitations of the flesh and the weaknesses and ills to which human nature is heir. Merely to live among men requires of us years of hard toil and much care and attention to the things of this world.

In sharp contrast to this is our life in the Spirit. There we enjoy another and higher kind of life—we are children of God; we possess heavenly status and enjoy intimate fellowship with Christ.

This tends to divide our total life into two departments. We come unconsciously to recognize two sets of actions [the sacred and the secular]….[But] the sacred-secular antithesis has no foundation in the New Testament….Paul’s exhortation to “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) is more than pious idealism….It opens before us the possibility of making every act of our lives contribute to the glory of God. POG109-110

[Christ] will not use us to establish His kingdom in the world until He occupies the throne of our entire being and becomes the King of our affections, our motives, our will and all our heart. NJ088

“We’ve Won a Holiday”

We have redemption in Him through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.—Ephesians 1:7

What is it in the heart of most men and women that rejects the idea of God’s free and generous offer of salvation? It is pride, the deadliest of all the deadly sins. Bernard Shaw, an example of a modern-day thinker, said: “Forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. We must pay our debts.” But we cannot pay our debts. As our spiritual fathers saw so clearly, the only language we can use in the presence of a God who demands so much and whose demands we are unable to meet is:

Just as I am without one plea

But that Thy blood was shed for me,

And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,

O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

In response to our coming, the free unmerited favor of God flows down to us, cancels our debt, imputes and imparts Christ’s righteousness to us. How can Christ’s righteousness be imputed and imparted to us? It’s His righteousness, not ours.

A simple illustration may help to illuminate this point. A dull little boy came home from school one day and said to his mother: “We’ve won a holiday.” The truth was, another boy had come top of the region in the examinations, and the head teacher decided to give the whole school a holiday. Yet the dull little lad said: “We’ve won a holiday.”

Grace is like that. God permits the righteousness of Jesus to cover us and then—as we open ourselves to it—to enter us. He did it, but we benefit from it. Isn’t grace really amazing?

Prayer

O Father, as I contemplate still further the “riches” of Your grace, once again I have to confess it’s truly amazing. No wonder men and women use that term to describe Your grace. No other adjective will do! Amen.

Further Study

Php 4:1-19; 1Tm 1:14; Tit 3:6

What has God promised?

What did Paul testify to Timothy?

While He Prayed

When all the people were baptized, Jesus also was baptized. As He was praying, heaven opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on Him in a physical appearance like a dove. And a voice came from heaven:

“You are My beloved Son.

I take delight in You!”—Luke 3:21–22

The greatest moments in a Christian’s life come through prayer. When Jesus prayed, heaven opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him. The Spirit came upon the disciples as they gathered to pray on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 1:14; 2:1). When the disciples prayed together after Pentecost, their gathering place was shaken, and they were emboldened to proclaim the gospel throughout the city (Acts 4:31).

Prayer is not a substitute for hard work—prayer is the work! God does things in and through our lives by prayer that He does in no other way. As we pray and as our attention is turned toward God, we become more receptive to aligning our lives with His will. God will not equip us with His power while we are racing off to our next appointment! His Spirit will not empower us if we are oblivious to what He is saying. He requires our complete attention before He will fill us with the powerful presence of His Spirit.

If you want to learn how to pray, use Jesus as your model. Jesus did not always receive what He asked for, but His prayers were always heard and always answered (Mark 14:36; Heb. 5:7). If you do not sense the Holy Spirit’s power in your life, you may not be spending adequate time in prayer. Perhaps you are pursuing your own agenda rather than seeking the Father’s will. You may have abandoned the place of prayer before God’s answer came. If you will commit yourself to spend sustained time in prayer, asking for God’s kingdom on earth, God will work in your life just as He did in the lives of Jesus and His disciples.