Is Your God
Too Small?
This is the full-text of a talk I have given to high school seniors preparing to go to college.
Life Decisions
Truth 1: You will build your future life on the "life-decisions" you make during college.
Practically from the moment you set foot on campus to the day you graduate, beer, cigarette and credit card companies will be after you. You will be amazed at how quickly and easily you can get a credit card, even if you are dirt poor. That doesn?t matter, they figure you?ll start making money soon, and they want to beat the other credit card companies to your interest producing debts. If you go to a place like Daytona Beach over Spring Break, the beer companies have tents set up on the beach giving away free beer. The cigarette companies host parties at hotel pool sides where they give away tons of cigarettes.
Why do they go to all this expense? Because their research shows that the brand of beer or cigarette you begin using in college is the brand you will probably use for the rest of your life. But brands of beer and cigarettes are small potatoes compared to the other, what I call “life-decisions” you’ll be making during your college years. You will be going through a natural developmental transition during which you will make the biggest of these life-decisions in 4 key areas:
- Your philosophy of life
- Your path of work
- Your sexuality
- Your family
Your philosophy of life is the set of guiding principles you use to make all other decisions. It involves your religious beliefs and how you express them. It involves the ethical framework of values and morals you live by. You also will determine to become more active or passive in your lifestyle.
Your field of work is more than just your career. It reflects the goals and priorities you develop for your life. Your jobs and even chosen career may change but these will merely be adjustments to better serve your life priorities.
Your sexuality involves how you relate to people of the opposite sex, to people of the same sex as well as to your own self.
The decisions you make about your family include how you will break away physically, financially and emotionally to become independent. College will be a time when you determine what of your family’s personal, political and religious beliefs you are going to keep or leave behind.
Just as there will be many different beer, cigarette and credit card companies competing for your brand loyalty there will be many different people and causes competing for influence in your life-decisions. When you set foot on campus you have to realize you are stepping onto a battlefield. It might be a bright balmy day. You’ll see everyone smiling and being friendly. The buildings look so safe and solid. All of this is an illusion. Karl Marx said that in this world “there is a battle for the hearts and minds and souls of men.” There is an enemy who wants to defeat you at every turn. He can’t take away your salvation but he can get you so disoriented that you are of no use to God’s side. The battle is not over flesh and blood, physical territory and bricks and mortar. It is in the unseen battlefield of your mind. The battle will in many ways be won or lost by the decisions you make during your college years. Between your freshman and senior years in college you will make decisions that effect the rest of your life unlike any decisions you’ve made so far.
My purpose in relating this is not to scare you into not going to college or cowering in the corner once you get there. God will give you the resources to win this battle if you want them. Right now most of you are probably committed Christians. You’ve gone to youth group meetings, heard countless Bible lessons and devotionals, you may even have taught some of them. Many of you have gone on mission trips to help people get started in helping themselves in Christ’s name. You’ve been to retreats and conferences where you’ve had “mountain-top experiences.”
That’s what my high school Christian experience was like. But when I went off to college it seemed like a switch flipped in me. All of a sudden I saw my faith as a “high school thing.” Part of this was because my closest Christian friends in high school didn’t go to college so they were still hangin’ out together and still involved in the youth groups. So, all of a sudden, I was alone in a new world. I thought I knew enough to get by. I thought my beliefs were OK. I didn’t need to learn or grow anymore. I wanted to enjoy my new freedom. This is one of the things that high school students look forward to most about going to college, isn’t it? Freedom. No curfews, no parents, no youth pastors checking up on you. Well, I began going to some parties with other students in my classes. They were probably the first parties I’d ever gone to that weren’t with a Christian group. I’m not trying to imply having a good time is bad. The problem was my motives.
A student in one of my classes, “Buddy,” was a very outspoken Christian. Like some kind of a modern day prophet he was obnoxious because he always smelled bad, his hair was always a mess, he wore thick glasses and shaved about once a week. He would share his faith with everyone kind of randomly but was getting around to a lot of other students. One evening, I sat down in the dining commons to eat dinner and then watched with dread as he set his eyes on me and made his way across the cafeteria to sit with me. He started talking about Christ and handed me some tracts. I didn’t really want to talk to him so I thought if I assured him I was already a Christian he’d go bug someone else. That was a big miscalculation. Everyday he would find me and talk to me. He could tell that I was holding back from letting Jesus be Lord of my life. He kept giving me more tracks and books. I was too nice to tell him to get lost and I sort of enjoyed debating things with him anyway. Eventually, I actually got tired of the shallow party scene and yearned for the close fellowship I had once had with God and His people and so I surrendered to Him.
Over the next three years I grew in my walk with Christ and helped other students become Christians and do the same. With God’s help I made all the right decisions that would lay the foundation for building the rest of my life on solid ground. I am so glad I did.
However, the sad truth is that if you are like most Christians graduating from high school you probably won’t be walking with the Lord by your senior year. You will have been led astray believing that being a committed, involved Christian was just a “high school thing.” You may become an agnostic or even an atheist because of all the intellectual challenges to your faith. Some of you are thinking, “Oh, that could never happen to me.” Believe me, it can. I spent 14 years in full-time ministry to college students on various campuses around the country. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. Chances are you know of students that were in your youth group that are no flunking out spiritually in college. But you don’t have to go down that path. It is all up to you.
I don’t want you to have a “mountain-top experience” at this conference. I won't come around a bop you on the head if you do, though. Instead, I hope you will to make a firm resolution to successfully climb the mountain ahead of you. College is the foothills and the rest of your life is the mountain. The goal of this conference is to help prepare you to make your life decisions in such a way that will help you grow stronger as a Christian and keep you growing for the rest of your life. If you stay with me this weekend you will see how Christianity is worth making it not only a “college thing” but also a “lifetime thing.” It is truth for a lifetime.
Now, let’s ask the question, “Why do so many students struggle with their faith in college?” Well, often it is a four step process involving the battlefield of the mind. First, you will hear so many intellectual challenges to Christianity you’ll become confused. You’ll begin to doubt that you really do have the truth and Christianity is just a bunch of bunk. Second, your affections will wonder. You might get a boyfriend or girlfriend and start having sex. You might get tired of suppressing homosexual feelings and begin feeling a sort of freedom as you begin to act them out. You might decide to pursue a career just because it promises to make you wealthy. You might get turned off by the Christians on your campus and feel you have more in common with non-Christians than Christians. Maybe you really like to drink and party. You can start to do any number of things that tempt you to want more freedom from God’s rules for living. Third, you begin to use the intellectual challenges to the truth of Christianity as convenient excuses to put Christianity at an arms length. They become intellectual smokescreens to obscure your view of reality. Fourth and finally, you are so far from where you started you believe that being a Christian was just a phase you went through when you were young and naïve.
I believe all this can be avoided if we affirm before going off to college that Christianity really is the truth that will provide a solid foundation on which to build your college life as well as your future families, careers and communities. Since you will build your future life, family, career and community on the “life-decisions” you make during college it is important those decisions be good ones.
Truth 2: You need a bigger God to get you through life.
Do you remember the cute little Taco Bell Chihuahua dog? Do you remember how he had set up a trap with a taco for bait to catch Godzilla? Then you see the enormous shadow cast by the beast. The dog looks into the camera and says, “I tink I need a bigger box.” This illustrates the situation many students face when going off to college. They learned some things about God, the Bible and the Christian life in Sunday School and then in youth group but their knowledge and faith is not big enough to deal with the really tough intellectual and social challenges of college. Their box is too small for the task. This is not necessarily the fault of Sunday School teachers, youth pastors and parents. There is only so much you can teach fidgety, hormone crazed teens, right?
This weekend I want to help you start building a bigger box. You can think of this box as a toolbox containing a lot of truth that you can apply to the various ideas you’ll be exposed to in college. These powerful truths will help you capture and defeat the Godzillas waiting to eat you up in college and life. But this is only a weekend and there are so many more resources we can’t get to. In about 10 minutes from now you’ll feel like your trying to sip water from Niagara Falls. Don’t let the amount of information discourage you. My goal is to encourage you that God and Christianity are big enough to get you through college and life with victory. This will be merely an introduction to a lot of things. At times it may be frustrating that we can’t spend more time on a certain issue. I’ll be available on breaks to talk more. In addition, to the notebook I’ll keep putting new resources on my web site to help you learn more. Feel free to call or email me or schedule a time to get together to talk face to face.
I want to help you start building a bigger box full of big truths to show you that God is bigger than any of our problems or the many threats to the truth of Christianity. Our success or failure as Christians is largely determined by how accurate our view of God is. If your view of God is like that of most people’s then your God is too small. To handle life’s difficulties you’ll need a bigger God than the one you learned about in Sunday School. I can guarantee you that you will encounter huge problems. Is your God big enough to handle them? At some point you will loose a friend or loved one to an accident or disease. One day you will say, “Good bye” to your parents at their grave site. You will have difficulties in the best of marriages. You will struggle in your career. You might lose a son or daughter to war or drugs.
I’m not a prophet so I can’t tell you what you will go through. But suffering and death, pain and sorrow, confusion and failure are as much a part of life as all the fun things. Aren’t I a happy little ray of sunshine? People generally come through those times either loving and trusting God more or being bitter and disappointed with Him. The outcome will depend on whether or not you have an accurate view of God. Is your God big enough to get you through those times?
This evening we’ll take a look at what God is like and what that means to us. When we talk about what God is like we look at what theologians call His attributes. You’ve probably heard most of them before but we’ll go through them tonight to make sure we’re talking about the same God. I hope the result will be that you see God as your greatest fan and the only One who is worthy of your complete trust. When you realize what God is truly like you will want Him to be the major factor in every life-decision you’ll make in the next few years. Life, during and after college, will be tough, so you'll need a big God to get you through it.
What God is really like: The Attributes of God
For the rest of this session we will learn about what God is like. We will learn about what theologians call the attributes of God.
Before we look directly at God’s attributes I want to briefly mention an article I have included in the notebook that deals with the question of God’s very existence. You may not struggle with this right now but at some point in your life you may. At college, in particular, you will hear what seem to be sophisticated, convincing reasons to believe there is no God. You may have a room-mate, classmate, friend or professor that believes there is no God. The article gives some sound reasons for believing in God that can help you and others.
Now back to God’s attributes. The main message I hope you’ll be able to take with you from this talk and this conference is this: God’s attributes show us He is perfect in every way and only He can ultimately fulfill us. I’ve picked out 12 attributes that will help us find out what He is really like and what it means to us personally. However, we only have time to cover 7 of them tonight.
The five that I won’t cover tonight are God’s self-existence, eternity, transcendence, omnipotence and infinity are called His non-personal attributes. This is because something can exhibit these kinds of qualities without being personal, that is, having intelligence, love, justice and so on. I wish we could look at these but there simply isn't enough time. I have an article on the web site that elaborates on those.
Tonight, in the time we have I want to focus on God’s personal attributes. God is a personal being not an impersonal force. After the article on personal attributes you can find an article describing these non-personal attributes. Even though they are considered non-personal you’ll discover we can apply them to our personal relationship with God in very important ways.
Truth 1: God is perfectly holy, good and righteous. God’s intentions toward us are perfectly good.
This is how I will state all of them. First, it is a truth about God, not an opinion. Second, I’ll state the attribute, and third, I will state how it is significant in our relationship with God. Again, the first attribute is that God is perfectly holy, good and righteous. The significance to us is that God’s intentions toward us are perfectly good. Although they technically refer to slightly different things I’m putting holiness, goodness and righteous together for sake of time for together they all speak of His moral perfection.
Revelations 4:8 links His holiness with His eternity:
"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and who is to come."
The man-made gods in primitive religions are immoral just like the people who created them. Every culture creates gods in their mythology. The best known examples to us are the gods of Greek and Roman civilization. Again, they are immoral and fickle. Sometimes they do good things to people; sometimes that do evil things to people. They are selfish and vain. They are mischievous. They can not be trusted. But these are false gods made in the image of morally imperfect men and women.
By stark contrast, God is perfectly good. God’s goodness is the most perfect goodness possible. He can not improve. He can not get any better. He is perfectly moral. There is not one shade of evil or immorality in Him. His very nature is pure good so He is the ultimate source of all good. If He didn’t exist there would be no good at all. Naturalistic chance processes can not produce moral good, only other naturalistic chance processes. Trees, rocks, clouds, thunderstorms and mountains can not produce moral good. A beautiful mountain of fall leaves can not be morally good to you. Neither can a hurricane be morally bad to you. Moral good can only come from outside of the natural universe. Good can only come from a person who is capable of being morally good.
God is perfectly righteous. He is not even capable of thinking any evil thoughts. He is not capable of any wrong doing. The true God is worthy of our complete trust. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to create a god that is a mixture of good and bad like me. I want to worship and follow the one true God who is completely trustworthy to act good toward me.
There was terrible destruction done on Sept 11, 2001 but have you noticed all the good that has come out of it? About 3000 people died but the lives of millions of people have been improved. I’m not saying that is a justification for the loss of life and property. What I am saying is that no matter how big the evil that people can do God always responds by bringing about a greater good. It turned a self-centered, selfish, materialistic society into a nation of people who are giving unprecedented help to victims of terror as well as to the poor and needy. Many people have repented from sins and are living for God. Couples who were planning to divorce chose to stay together, especially for their children’s sake. Fathers decided to spend more time with their children. Our military destroyed a regime of tyranny in Afghanistan that treated people like animals and was bent on the destruction of freedom around the world. And that effort continues. God’s goodness inspires us to be good.
We will deal with the problem of evil later but for now let’s apply God’s holiness, goodness and righteousness to tragedy. Whenever something bad happens, whether it be a terrorist bombing, an earthquake, a serious illness or death, we can be sure of at least one thing. God did not have any evil intentions at all by permitting it to happen. We don’t have any right to say things like, “God must be out to get me.” or “How can God be good if He allows this to happen to people.”
These accusations are wrong because God is the ultimate source of all good. There is no limit to God’s goodness toward us. Even when bad things happen to good people we can with confidence say, “Because God is good, He will bring good out of what others intended for evil."
Will you let God’s goodness permeate your own being? Let’s take a moment to reflect this truth back to God by praising Him. Silently between you and God tell Him something like, “God, you are perfectly holy, good and righteous. Your intentions toward me are perfectly good.”
Truth 2: God is perfectly loving. God cares about us.
God’s love is the most perfect love possible. It is unconditional, with no strings attached. He loves you with the most perfect love possible. God is the ultimate source of love. If He didn’t exist there would be no love because love comes from His very nature. He cannot not love. It is the essence of His nature and character. Naturalistic chance processes can not produce love, only other naturalistic chance processes. Trees, rocks, clouds, thunderstorms and mountains can not produce love. They can not love you. Love can only come from outside of the natural universe. Love can only come from a person who is capable of loving. God is the ultimate lover. His love is perfectly unselfish. All of God’s motives come from His great love for us.
I want you to just close your eyes and picture yourself at the foot of the cross with Jesus looking down on you. Don’t look away because you don’t want to deal with His pain and suffering. He is dying for you. He wants you to look Him in the eye. Now, as you look into Jesus’ eyes, see His love radiating from His face and meditate on each one of these verses:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. (1 John 3:16)
love comes from God….God is love. This is how God showed His love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:7 - 10)
How great a love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God! (1 John 3:1)
There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:18)
God is love. (1 John 4:16)
Now take a minute to talk to Him about His love for you and your love for Him.
You can open your eyes now. My friends, God loves you more than you can imagine. He will always love you. He will love you through the good times. He will love you through the bad times. He will love you when you turn your back on Him. He will love you when you come back to Him. He will still love you when you don’t feel love toward Him because He has committed Himself to loving you and that will never change. God is perfectly loving. God cares about you.
Truth 3: God is omniscient (all-knowing). God knows everything about us.
God knows everything. He knows every fact in every library and laboratory in the world. No scientist will ever discover something about which God would say, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I didn’t know that!” He knows everything that you don’t know. He knows everything you will never know. He knows what goes on behind closed doors in governments, boardrooms and bedrooms. God knows everything you know about yourself. He knows everything you don’t know about yourself. He knows every single one of your thoughts. God knows every single one of your feelings. God knows every single one of your dreams. God sees what you see with your eyes. Guys, God knows what your eyes are looking at when you are looking too long at a girl. God knows what music we are listening to and what we are watching on TV and why. God knows what movies we watch and why. You can’t hide anything from God.
Does it make you feel uncomfortable to know that God knows all your dirty little secrets? If it makes you feel uncomfortable, then you don’t understand God. Remember, God loves you with the most perfect love possible. And what about when we cry out to Him for help? Will He say, “This is news to me. I didn’t know you were having such a hard time. Sit down and tell me all about it, and then I’ll ask around to get more information on your problem so I can figure out how to help you.” That’s absurd isn’t it? A perfect God has perfect knowledge of everything there is to know. When we come to Him He already knows everything about us and our situation and how to handle it the most perfect way possible.
Along with God’s perfect knowledge comes His perfect wisdom. Motivated by His perfect love for us, constrained to acting in only the most perfectly moral way toward us and using His perfect knowledge, God knows what is the perfect best for us. He knows the perfectly best ways to provide for our needs and protect us from the dangers of acting on our own imperfect knowledge and wisdom. When He says, “Don’t have sex outside of marriage,” He is not trying to ruin our fun just to be mean. In His perfect love, goodness, knowledge and wisdom He set up marriage as the best way to meet our needs and protect us from hurting ourselves and others. The rest of His rules for living are given for these same reasons: to provide for our needs and to protect us from the harmful consequences of trying to meet our needs in our own ways.
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 reads:
Lord, you have searched me and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.
You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
you works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.
There is something else I want you to know about God’s knowledge and wisdom. Now would be a good time to deal with the old question, “Can God make a rock so big that He Himself can not lift it.” The problem with this question is that it is a meaningless question. It is like asking,” What does the color red smell like?” or “What does a square circle look like?” The question is irrelevant. You can’t mix the categories of color and smell. You may ask what a red rose smells like because the rose produces a scent that can be detected by your nose. It is not the property of redness that produces the scent. The definitions of a square and a circle are mutually exclusive therefore it is not possible to have a square circle. In the same way, the rock question mixes the categories of finite and infinite. God is infinite but a rock, no matter how big it is will always be finite. It will always be finite because it is a created thing. So the question asks God to create a rock that is both finite and infinite at the same time which is impossible and nonsensical. God is constrained by His perfect rationality to do only that which is logically possible.
One of the clearest of the Christian thinkers of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis put it the best when he said, “[God’s] omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense.”
But isn’t God infinite, which means He has no limits? Yes, and in this case, He has no limits to His sensibility. To impose nonsense and irrational behavior on Him would be to impose limits on His perfectly rational nature. God is perfectly logical and rational. God is the source of all logic and rationality. It is not possible for God to act illogically or irrationally. It would be inconsistent with His perfect character. God constrains Himself to act only in a way that is consistent with His character. God is the ultimate logical and rational being. Therefore, if He acted illogically or irrationally He would cease to be God, which He cannot do. He would be a god that we have created in our own imaginations whose character we can change at our whim.
Now, let’s turn to you personally. Think silently for a moment about something you are struggling to figure out. It might be how to meet a particular need in your life, be it a financial need, a social need, a physical need, the need to make a decision or whatever. It might be one of God’s rules you are struggling with. You know God says it is wrong but you don’t understand why it is wrong.
Now, I’d like to pray for us.
Our perfect Father, you are the one true and only God. You have always existed and will always exist. You love us with the most perfect love possible. Your intentions toward us are the most perfectly good intentions possible. You know everything there is to know about our lives. Your wisdom is the most perfect wisdom there is. You know what is best for us. Because of all this we want to follow your ways. We trust you to meet our needs in the best way possible, for that is exactly what you want to do. We want to follow your rules for living because only then will we have our needs met in the best way possible and only then will we be under your powerful protection. Show us a little more each day how wonderful You are so that we can surrender and entrust every aspect of our lives to you. Answer these prayers in such a way at to glorify Jesus’ name. Amen.
God is omniscient (all-knowing). God knows everything about us.
Truth 4: God is perfectly just. God will make everything right in the end.
God is perfectly just. He is perfectly fair and impartial. As with all His other attributes, it is not that God thought up and perfected the best theory of justice. His very nature is perfectly just and so He is the ultimate source of all justice. Everyone in every culture appeals to an ideal of right and wrong outside of themselves and their culture. Everyone in every culture demands justice. Again, God is the ultimate source of justice. If He didn’t exist there would be no justice. Naturalistic chance processes can not produce justice, only other naturalistic chance processes. Trees, rocks, clouds, thunderstorms and mountains can not produce concepts of right and wrong and fairness. Earthquakes and tornadoes don’t choose where to strike based on who’s been naughty or nice. Justice can only come from outside of the natural universe. Ultimate standards of right and wrong and fairness can only come from a person who is capable of knowing right from wrong and being fair. God is the ultimately perfect judge because He has perfect knowledge about every situation. He is perfectly good Himself. He has perfect wisdom and He loves all people involved with the same perfect love. There can not be a more perfectly fair judge that God because He knows everything there is to know about the case, has the most perfect wisdom about it and loves all people with a perfect, unconditional love. He is simply not capable of making a wrong judgment.
Now, if you ask most people on your college campus what they think God is like, they will say they think God is all loving and He does not judge and condemn people. He accepts us all and will let us into heaven if we are pretty good people. He wants us to have fun and experience love. Therefore, sex between two consenting adults of the opposite or even of the same sex is alright as long as it expresses love. The problem with this view is that perfect justice and perfect love come together. I would not love my children with the best love if I let them do bad things that were dangerous to them and others. The reason we put a criminal behind bars is to protect other people from being harmed, protect him from retaliation and hope that he will decide to correct his life and serve rather than hurt his fellow man. You can’t have perfect love without perfect justice and you can’t have perfect justice without perfect love.
So when we want God to look the other direction while we sin we want Him to withhold His love from us at the same time. And when we accept God’s loving plan for our lives must accept His discipline. And if we are the victim of injustice or witness injustice done to others, we can be confident that God will make everything right in the end.
Take a moment to think about your life, perhaps about an injustice you’ve suffered and affirm God’s perfect justice. Say something like, “God, you are perfectly just. I trust you to make everything right in the end.”
Truth 5: God is immutable. God’s character, as well as His thoughts and actions toward us will never change.
Immutable means that God does not change. Malachi 3:6 quotes God as saying, “I the Lord do not change.” James (1:17) tells us that “our Heavenly Father does not change like shifting shadows.” This means that God’s character doesn’t change. He will never become less loving. His mental abilities will not diminish with age. He will never change His mind about being perfectly good. He will never decide to play favorites. He will always be perfectly fair and just. He will never stop loving us with less than a perfect love. Now don’t confuse this with God changing His mind about something. There were times in Scripture when God changed His mind about impending judgment because His people changed their mind about sin and repented. God can change His mind but not His very nature and character.
I don’t know about you but that’s the God I have in mind when I think of what the ultimate true God should be like. I don’t have to worry that He will stop loving me, or worry He doesn’t have my best in mind. I don’t have to worry about Him changing His justice so that He might take away my salvation on some whim.
Take a moment to thank God that He is immutable and that His thoughts and actions toward you will never change.
Truth 6: God is perfectly balanced. All of God’s plans and actions in our lives are perfect.
Although this is not an attribute you will typically hear about it is a very important one. If God were more merciful and loving than He was just, what would happen? Then His justice wouldn’t be perfect and neither would His love and mercy. They both have to be evenly balanced for God to be God. In a similar way, what if God was more loving than all-knowing and wise? Then He might do something in our life that is motivated by love but is not the best thing for us. And so it is with all of God’s attributes. They are all perfect because they are each effected and balanced perfectly by each other. God is the ultimate balanced person. A perfect God cannot be any other way.
We can learn the right balance for our own values, motivations, plans and actions by thinking about how the personal attributes of God are perfectly balanced and follow God’s example.
Will you take about a half a minute to thank God that He is perfectly balanced and that all of His plans and actions in your life are perfect?
Truth 7: God is omnipresent. He is always with us.
God is always present, everywhere, at all times. In fact, He is right here, right now. He is closer to you than the person next to you is. He is all around you. He is inside of you. He fills the blank spaces between the nucleus and electrons of every atom in your body. But He is not you and you are not Him. You and He are two different things. You are probably familiar with King David’s Psalm 139:7-15 which teaches this truth in beautiful and potent poetic form.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
Since God is not bound by physical time and space He can be all places at all times. And because of His limitless intellectual capabilities He can interact with all of us as individuals at all times. At times, it may feel like He has left us alone to suffer by ourselves or to find our way through a decision or tough time and that is where faith comes in. We know that He is there because of what the Scriptures teach us and we must put our faith in that fact instead of how we feel at the time. By faith, we acknowledge He is always there, comforting and guiding us regardless of how we feel.
Now when we want the assurance of God’s being with us comforting us, guiding us, and helping us we have no qualms about Him being there. But there are times when His presence is unsettling. David asks, “Where can I flee from your presence?” Now why would anyone want to flee from God’s presence? Well I know I wish God wasn’t around sometimes so I could sin and He not know about it. Then I could get away with it without feeling guilty and have to confess and tell God I’ll try to not do it again and even apologize or make restitution to other people. All of that is a hassle and is so hard on my ego. You’re not like that are you? David continues,
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
You see, when you wake up in the morning, God is sitting right there beside you. When you are taking a shower He is in there with you. That need not embarrass you; He created you. When you’re eating breakfast He is sitting at the table with you. When you are walking across campus, He is walking next to you. When you are sitting in class, He is sitting next to you. God’s presence is inextricably linked to His omniscience so He sees everything you see through your eyes. He hears and smells everything you hear and smell. He feels everything you touch.
That means when you arrive at a bar or a party or your boyfriend or girlfriend’s bedroom doorway God, is standing there with you. If you go in, He will go in with you. We can’t ask Him to wait outside until we have our thrill and come back out to His presence. That is “dissing” God. After someone disses us we often make a resolution, “I am not going to treat other people that way. I’m not going to diss people.” Why not make that same resolution to not diss God?
Neither can we make God go away by just shutting Him out of our mind, pretending He isn’t there. That’s like a game we play with little kids. We cover our eyes and say, “Your not there because I can’t see you." Why should I dishonor God in these ways? He has done so much for me. He only wants what is best for me. He wants me to follow His rules so He can provide for me and protect me. How can I say, “God, I only want you around when I want you around. I don’t want you around when I am doing something you don’t want me to do. I only want you around when I need your help and guidance but the rest of the time I want you to leave me alone.” That is ungrateful arrogance. He is the God of the universe not a genie in a bottle that we make appear and disappear so we can use and abuse Him for our gain.
These are grave insults to the God who died an indescribably painful and humiliating death on the cross to pay for our sins because He loves us with an infinite and perfect love so that we wouldn’t have to spend eternity outside of His presence. In addition, because of His infinite knowledge and wisdom He knows the dangers of sin better than we do. So to consciously sin is like saying to God, “I know better than You do, God. You’re just plain wrong about sex before marriage. You’re just plain wrong about getting drunk. You’re just plain wrong about pornography. You’re just plain wrong about seducing this guy. And God goes, “Riiiiiight.”
When we are looking for ways to gratify ourselves or meet our needs a part from God’s perfect plan we feel like we are locked up in prison constantly trying to escape our confines. We want to be freed up to live our lives our way. The majority of college students spend a considerable amount of brain power trying to deny that God exists or has anything meaningful to say or do with our lives just so they can escape the constraints on their freedoms. Professors who are trying to do the same are busily at work teaching and publishing papers about how we have a right to this or that freedom.
Here is the irony though. No matter how much we try to play mental games to pretend God is not there and His ways are old fashioned and obsolete we never truly experience freedom. Otherwise, we wouldn’t keep trying would we? We are constantly swimming against the tide. Constantly, pushing the lead toboggan up a gravel hill. Constantly running against the wind. We never experience the consistent feeling of freedom we so desperately seek.
But when we stop trying to attain freedom through our own rebellious efforts and start obeying God we experience a freedom greater than we ever imagined possible. We are swimming with the current, riding the lead toboggan down a slippery slope, running with the wind at our back. The feeling is so wonderful I can’t describe it adequately with words. It took me a long time to finally give in but now I could never go back. It would be like voluntarily walking back into prison and going back to the futile attempts to attain my freedom. How most people live their lives is just as absurd.
I’ve taught myself a habit. When I am tempted to flee from God’s presence and want to succumb to temptation I choose to begin praising God. Through praising Him I remind myself of how perfect His love is, how perfect His wisdom is, how perfectly good His intentions for my life are, and so on. After a short while, I don’t want to follow through on that temptation any more than I would want to throw myself into a cactus.
Summary and Conclusion
I have presented to you, tonight, the one, true, living, active perfect God, Creator and Sustainer of the universe, Creator and Sustainer of you and me. He is bigger, more amazing and more wonderful than we can even imaging. He knows everything about us, our past, our present, our future. He loves us with the most perfect love possible. His intentions toward us are the most perfectly good and perfectly wise intentions possible. He knows the best ways to protect and provide for us. His justice is the most perfect justice possible. We are always in His presence. He never changes. He never leaves or forsakes us. Isn’t this the God each of us wants to know and have constant fellowship with? Is this the God that we want to trust and included in every area of our lives? Isn’t this the God we want to spend eternity with? Isn’t this the God you want to make the major factor in all of your life-decisions during college? Build your life on this God and all of His truth. They are the solid rock on which to build your future life, family, career and community.
Copyright 2005. Gary C. Burger and New Media Ministries. This article may be reproduced and distributed freely as long as it is done so in its entirety. If quoted it must be properly cited as a reference.
