Crazy Love by Francis Chan: visit http://www.crazylovebook.com/
YouTube Video: Muslim Demographics and Excerpts from Vanguard American Jihadi
How Big is our God? How Great is our God? How Holy is He? Is my God too small to solve my problems? Is my God too small to be acknowledged with total reverence and awe?
Only when we contrast ourselves with God's awesome power and holiness can we be touched by our own insignificance. Creation declares the glory of God. Taking time to contemplate the diversity, creativity, and sophistication of the universe helps us to see the majesty of God.
Heavens declare the glory of God: Ps 19:1-4
We are without excuse: Romans 1:18f 18 “ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE HIM (1 Chron 28:9; Prove 3:6 Is 19:21; Jere 10:25; Hosea 6:3)
OR NOT – (John 12:42; Hosea 5:15; Romans 1:28; 2 John 1:7)
Revelation 3:16 “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit (hurl) you out of my mouth”
This is why we are called to worship Him. He is glorious, King of Kings, and the all powerful sovereign Lord.
We live in a world that ignores or merely tolerates the idea of God. But God will not be tolerated. He instructs us to fear, worship, and acknowledge Him in ALL our ways.
We are creatures of forgetfulness. We are plaque by spiritual amnesia. How many details we see of God's creativity and artwork, galaxies or detailed universe, sunset, and we still forget because we are like ants scurrying about in our own little worlds caring for nothing but our next task. In our world hundreds of things and events distract us from honoring and remembering to glorify the Great "I AM".
We need reminders to focus on God's love but instead we focus on what we don't have, what we need to buy to make us happier, or sexier, or more at peace. This dissatisfaction transfers over to our thinking about God because we already have everything we need because we don't remember who God is and that he is worthy to be praised at all times.
A. W. Tozer says, "what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."
Our worship is affected by how high or low we think of God. How BIG is our God? Our lives take on the image of the God we have chosen to hold in our mind and conceive in our heart or what we see God to be like.
How do we learn to KNOW God? Meditate on His Word, on His Creation, on His Power to change lives.
What is He like? What are His characteristics? Keeping His characteristics in our hearts will help to remind us of how awesome our God truly is.
God is holy. He is set apart and distinct from us. His perfect holiness (Holy, Holy, Holy) sets Him so far above us. God is timeless, all-knowing, all-powerful, all goodness, and limitless. We cannot comprehend Him or His Wisdom.
He is so far above us that we would have had little hope of approaching Him without the gift of His only beloved Son. He is compassionate and merciful. His creation was a gift to give us the ability to declare His glory so that we would seek to please Him. How foolish we have become to explore the universe to find "life on other planets" as if that would reveal more about us than Knowing our Creator.
We truly have left our first love when we celebrate the creation over the Creator, when we forsake the assembly worship to bask in His creation, when we sell our souls for money, prestige, career, entertainment, fun, or possessions. What does that look like?
We often live as if God was created for us, to do our bidding, to answer our requests, or to be on standby for our every desire. We often forget that God has the right to do as He pleases as sovereign Lord.
Daniel 4:35 35 "All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: “What have you done?”
God is not obligated to explain His every action to us. God does not owe us any explanation for anything He does. He cannot be contained in this world, nor can He be grasped by our understanding. Yet, He has given us what we can grasp and what we can understand in the form of His Son. Praise God for His infinite wisdom.
In Revelation John tries to describe what he sees around the Heavenly throne. I think it is a lot like describing the Columbia Space Shuttle take-off to an ant. We barely understand the glorious magnificence of the eternal realm.
It is a great blessing that our God is not evil, or petty, or spiteful. This might have been the case, but praise be to God, it is not the case. Our God is fair and just and even more, He is merciful. Praise be to God He is NOT like us! And we can thank God that there is only one standard. We cannot make our own...we would all have different standards in that case, and that would be chaotic. Praise God He has seen to giving us only one standard by which to live and that He revealed it to us so that we would not be in the dark about what pleases Him. And thanks be to God that He was detailed His standard in giving us His written Word and in the example of His Son so that we did not live in ignorance of His mercy.
Let us not neglect the fact that God is righteous and those who approach Him must also be righteous. He has no sin in Him and cannot tolerate sin. Light and darkness do not exist in the same arena. God and sin cannot co-exist. God hates sin.
Prov 8:13 13 "To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech."
We see how much God hated evil as exemplified by the death of His Son, the perfect sacrifice for sin.
It is very difficult for us to realize that our time on this earth is NOT all about us. We are not the center of the Universe. However, that WAS the first sin and has remained a part of our nature since Eve decided she wanted to be the center of her universe. She wanted to be in Control. She wanted to be as wise as God and to answer for herself. This is our struggle, our warfare against the natural man. We relate all things to ourselves instead of to God. We see to our own wishes, desires, and comfort instead of seeing the world as God sees it....lost and dying in sin needing ministers of God to point others to the Light.
Learning to appreciate God, loving Him, and making Him the center of our existence takes effort, submission, conscious planning, meditation, prayer, concentrated focus and courage. It should take up the quality hours of our every day. Our time on this earth is a vapor...and to waste it in pursuit of inane goals would be disastrous with eternal consequences. If we truly BELIEVE, the first and foremost condition of a Follower, we would BELIEVE 1 Corinthians 10:31..."whatever you do, do all to the glory of God", AND we would accomplish the second most important condition of a Follower, we would DO as we have been commanded. This is all that our lives are here on earth to do. But first we must "get over ourselves", deny self, and commit self.
The point of our lives is to point to Him.
Be thankful that we are weak. Being weak helps us to understand why we need to reach out to God. God has the strength we need to make it through this brief vapor of a life span.
Consider that since the world began there have been about 25 Billion folks who have lived on this earth. Within 50 to 100 years of your death no one will remember you and no one you know will still be alive. No one will care what career you had or what kind of home you lived in or what car you drove. Truly only the treasures we store in Heaven will matter. God has given you all this stuff so that you can show the world that even though you are materially blessed, you can still be totally committed to Him. Even in adversity and suffering, wecan show the world that our God brings peace and joy and contentment even when life is hard.
Francis Chan tells this story in his book, "Crazy Love" about a preacher giving a funeral address and deciding to bring the Gospel message into his sermon. He made the statement, "Are you ready? Any moment can be your last. You never know when God is going to take your life. At that moment there is nothing you can do about it. Are you ready?" Then he sat down, fell over and breathed his last. He could not be resuscitated. He died as he lived....proclaiming the Gospel. Thing is....you ALSO will die as you live.
Matthew 10:32-33. “Who acknowledge me before men, I will acknowledge before my Father. Who denies me before men, I will deny before the Father.” One moment this minister was acknowledging Jesus in front of those attending a funeral, the next moment he was being acknowledged by Christ before the Father in Heaven. We must live as if it is our last moment on earth.
LOVING RELATIONSHIP
Do you have children? Do you love them? Do you desire that they keep a relationship with you? Would you sacrifice for your children? Then you know a tiny percent of the desire God has for you to keep in relationship with Him. God loves us infinitely more than we will ever love our children. God is more worthy of trust and love than anyone else.
If we truly love God we will exchange a weekly or even a daily Bible study and prayer time, with a walking minute by minute relationship with Him. We are to love Him with all our heart, mind, and soul. This requires a constant attentiveness to His presence. Not that a "planned" Bible study is spiritually unhealthy, but it cannot replace the moment by moment walk in the Spirit. Has your child ever run up to hug you? This should be the same emotion we exhibit when we take time to reunite with God in fellowship. The motive must be love, not fear. The relationship must be continuous, not an hour or two a week.
The relationship we are to have with God must be the closest relationship in our life. He knew us before we even existed in our mother’s womb.( Jere 1:3-4.) He wants you to know that He has counted the hairs on your head. He wants you to be close to Him, above all relationships that you have built. God's love for His children is so powerful that He continuously monitors and manages even the air that we breath (consider the lily of the field). Because we cannot return this kind of love, we often don't see how we can maintain a relationship with God. He wants our hearts, mind, and soul.....and often we don't know how to approach this kind of intimacy.
REVERANT INTIMACY
Begin by understanding that God has been with us from the beginning, even before our beginning...and all He wants from us is to acknowledge Him in all our ways. IN ALL OUR WAYS ACKNOWLEDGE HIM. In doing this we will begin the journey He has planned for us. ACKNOWLEDGE HIM IN ALL OUR WAYS...and He will direct our paths. Go back to the beginning of time and realize that we must fight the urge to manage our own lives and let God do the managing. Give Him control and acknowledge Him, praise Him, share Him, glorify Him, be thankful to Him, trust Him, proclaim Him. Make Him the center of our life—He will accept no less.
Eph 2:10 10 "For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."
He designed me for a specific work... the work of God. Praise God for giving me purpose. Praise God, He will insure my success according His plan, not mine. Praise God, He accepts me back when I stray from my purpose. What a great love He has for His weak and puny children! How can I show God what He means to me?
DISCUSSION GROUPS
Make a “T” Chart: On one side write the words, “Passionate Follower” and on the other side write the words, “Lukewarm Fan”. On this chart indicate all the characteristics that might identify each group. Think about what each looks like, talks like, acts like, re-acts like. Think about Jesus’ words.
Video: Muslim Demographics - Our Red-Hot Passion for God MUST include proclaiming Him among the nations. Re-Hot Followers are not shy. They are not timid. They are bold!
Lukewarm Christian-based churches will loose souls to more passionate callings, if we do not "WAKE UP!". Some Muslim sects have discovered this. People are drawn to passionate causes. Make God your Passion!
Watch Video: American Jihadi: http://joyfullearning.org/FAN/jihadi.wmv
HOMEWORK CD: Listen to Crazy Love: Who is Lukewarm?
Self-Inventory: A Personal Reflection
In what areas of my life do I exhibit “lukewarmness” for God?
What areas of my life do I hold on to for myself?
In what ways have I shown God passionate sacrificial love?
What do I need MOST in my life?
What has God been calling me to turn over to Him?
What does the Spirit want me to become?
READ: Chapter 11 and 12
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