Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked,
for the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being snared.
Proverbs 3:25-26 NIV
One key factor to our personal worship is boundless confidence in the character of God. I believe this is the foundation of much of our worship today. We must have respect in God’s character, in the being of God, and our worship rises or falls dependent upon the idea that the church has of God.
It seems that from one generation to the next our idea of God changes. God does not change, but somehow our ideas of God and our confidence in God changes to the effect that the God we worship today is less than the God our fathers worshipped.
The evangelical concept of God is very low today. The God of the evangelical church is so small that we can put Him in our pocket or put Him up on the dashboard of our cars to keep from having accidents. So our God today is not much bigger than St. Christopher. The God of popular Christianity cannot be worshipped because He can’t be respected. He cannot be respected because He is not big enough.
I refuse to worship any God but the God of the Bible.
Precious secret, I have found it,
Precious Jesus, Thou art mine;
Prove in me Thy boundless fullness;
Live in me Thy life divine.
A B Simpson (1843-1919)
Thou, O God art bigger than my mind could ever comprehend.
The beauty of Thy wondrous fullness fills my heart with gratitude that
is all but inexpressible. This I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised;
And His greatness is unsearchable.
4 One generation shall praise Your works to another,
And shall declare Your mighty acts.
Psalm 145:3-4
The sovereign God of our fathers that we sing about is incomparable to that which we call God today. We have lost the sense of who God really is and have replaced our fathers’ God with an artificial God that only soothes our conscience in a temporary fashion.
This new God is the God of convenience and entertainment. All this God is interested in is making one happy and feeling good about oneself. If I am not good, I do not want to feel good about myself. I want to feel about myself as God feels about me.
I am all for getting back to believing that our God is bigger than we will ever need. If I cannot respect someone, I certainly cannot worship Him. The God of the Bible is such a God I can respect. With my open Bible before me, and prostrate on the ground before God, I begin to experience this God that is big enough for me, and that settles it!
Faith of our fathers, living still
In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene’er we hear that glorious Word!
Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863)
Dear God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the scientist,
philosopher or psychologist. Thou art the God I worship today
in the beauty of Thy holiness. Amen.
Sometimes our faith seems to slip, when we encounter things that we do not understand, for example, cancer, corona virus, loss of job, troubled relationships). We seem to lose sight of who is in control, from the grandeur of the galaxies to the spectacular minutia of things unseen. This is our God. He created all that is by His will and for His glory. We may not be able to understand all that is, what is happening, how it is happening, why it is happening…but our GOD is in control, bringing His perfect plan to completion! Praise Him for His marvelous power and grace toward those who believe in Jesus Christ!
Pastor Dale