The Sermon I Actually Did Give

I occasionally tend to pontificate in this space on matters of faith. It's pretty safe; I have close to a self-selected audience, and they (you) are not likely to call me out even if I say something stupid or obviously false. However, not long ago, I was asked to do it for real: stand up in front of my actual home congregation and deliver an actual sermon. What follows is substantially the message I gave, edited a bit for differences in audience and medium.

If you've read this space with any consistency, it won’t surprise you to know that music speaks to me as much as, or even more than, the spoken word. In fact, I’ve always had a secret dream to do an entire worship service with songs: songs for the prayers, the Scripture, the affirmation of faith, and the sermon itself. I thought that might come off just a tiny bit presumptuous and self-centered, so instead I based the service I did and the accompanying message around the Bible’s songbook – the Psalms. The "official" Scripture passage I used was Psalm 139:1-18.

Many of the Psalms are hymns of praise to God, so they’re a great inspiration for meditating on God’s greatness. I once learned a mnemonic device that helps me pray: ACTS, which stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. And although it can be tempting to skip straight to Supplication and start asking God for stuff… and it’s relatively easy to thank Him for what He’s done… I don’t think it’s any accident that this form of prayer, like worship itself, starts with Adoration.

Adoration means praising God for who He is – for His nature and not specifically what He’s done. So this piece highlights just a few of the attributes I understand to be part of God’s nature. As always, you're encouraged to enjoy the home version of our game: come up with your own list.

Many years ago, J.B. Phillips – who may be better-known as the writer of the Phillips translation of Scripture – wrote a book called, “Your God Is Too Small”. His theory is that a lot of us get a picture of God in childhood and never really grow out of it. Do you know anyone who sees God as a smiling old white-haired man – content to let the kids go play but not really invested in their lives? How about the severe, irritable God who peers out the window of heaven waiting for someone to do something wrong so he can lower the boom? Or the gentle, mild-mannered God who really just loves everyone and can’t bear to hold them accountable for anything?

Phillips’ point is that it’s hard to be passionate about worshiping a God like that. For God to be relevant in our lives, He has to be big enough that we want to respect and honor Him. It always strikes me that that’s the original meaning of “awesome”: not just “really cool”, but “inspiring a sense of awe.” “Wonderful” means “full of wonders.” One of my favorite quotes comes from Voltaire: “If God created man in His own image, then man has more than returned the favor.” Life is hard, and death is hard, and God will be no help to us if we confine Him to the limits of our own imaginations.

In fact, when I’m afraid of the future, it comforts me to remember that God is entirely outside of time and space. Talk about beyond the limits of your imagination…but David understood this. He says in verse 8, “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there,” and in verse 11, “darkness is as light to you.” I think that speaks to the way that God is unrestricted by time and space.

Think back to the story of Moses in front of Pharaoh. Moses is about to face the Pharaoh and tell him, “Let my people go!” So he says to God, “If I get up in front of him, he’s going to ask me who sent me – what do I say then?” Do you remember the answer? “Just tell him I Am sent you.” What does that mean? Some of what it means to me is that God is always present tense. As verse 5 says, “You hem me in, behind and before.” So I don’t have to worry about what lies ahead; not only will God be with me when I get there, but He’s already there. He already exists in that future time: it’s all present-tense to Him.

Now if you want the perfect example of good-news/bad-news, take a look at verse 1: “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.” I can’t help but think sometimes that this would be a great place for a smaller God. A God who was too small to know me completely or to be with me always would certainly come in handy once in awhile. There are plenty of times I really wish God didn’t know what I was doing or what’s going on in my head, and I think that’s why some people have such a small God. He’s a lot less threatening.

Of course, what David is trying to convey is that God, as vast and awesome as He is, knows each of us personally, individually. Sports Illustrated has a feature every week called “Pop Culture Grid” where they ask professional athletes some semi-serious questions. We’re supposed to “play along at home” to see how well their answers match ours. One recent question was, “Who’s the most famous person in your cell?” A professional basketball player said, “Michael Jordan” – which surprised me, since he wasn’t very good; an NFL defensive back said, “My mama.” David’s really trying to tell us that we can be in regular touch with the most famous Person there ever was, and He wants to take all of our calls. Remember the Israelites were surrounded by other nations that worshiped remote gods, even inanimate objects – those people knew they had no shot of having a personal relationship with a chunk of stone or a block of wood. They spent their lives making sacrifices to try to avoid being struck down, so this was not just a theoretical concept for them.

Even a lot of people who believe God doesn’t really care about us can affirm Him as Creator – that would be kind of the Toymaker brand of small God. He builds us, he winds us up, he lets us go; after that, whatever happens, happens. But listen again: is that who this sounds like? "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; your works are wonderful, I know that full well."

That’s not an assembly-line God; that’s a God who has His hand in our lives from before we were born. I don’t think any of us would get up on a Sunday morning and go to church if we didn’t believe that, but what do His blueprints for us look like?

Genesis, of course, says that He created man in His own image – “male and female created He them,” as it says in the King James Version. You will note immediately that this means, among other things, that God is not “He” at all, since he created female in His own image. I have used “He” throughout this piece and much of my writing, and I hope that has not posed an obstacle to anyone. When the English language develops a pronoun that works in this situation, I’ll use it!

More importantly, although we’re obviously not identical to God, being created in His image means that we have some portion of His qualities wired into us: the ability to love; the potential for wisdom; the capacity to forgive. I can find myself excusing my faults by saying, “That’s just the way I am. I was born this way – do you expect me to change?” Well, I was born with all that image-of-God in me too… so I don’t have much excuse not to show it.

There’s been a lot of debate recently – I’ve been reading about it in Newsweek – about whether belief in God makes any sense. Bestselling books have been written about why believers are sinply deluded. Now scientists have discovered that there’s a part of the human brain that induces people to search for God, to seek something higher than themselves to worship. The conclusion they draw from this is that’s why people believe in God, because they’re biologically more or less forced to. I think a better conclusion might be that God made us that way – He designed us to want to seek Him.

I came to a realization about giving not long ago. It’s not obvious from observing a 5- and 8-year-old around the house, but God has wired us to be givers. When you get down to it, it doesn’t make much sense that giving money to the church should be satisfying, or that tithing should be more satisfying (try it and see!). But God has made us in such a way that when we give, we feel pleasure in our souls.

My son has a bedtime ritual with me in which he asks me questions. It’s always “Who made…?” It could be “Who made my curtains?” or “Who made roads?” or “Who made Legos?” Sometimes he asks, “Who made the moon and the stars?” And he knows the answer already, but then I have the holy privilege of telling him, “God made the moon & the stars, and the sun, and everything in our world. He made them beautiful, and you know why? Because He knew it would make us happy.” Because He built us so that it would make us happy.

When I think about the way God made us, though, I keep coming back to a C.S. Lewis quote:

A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything
else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the
fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to
feed on. There is no other.

A friend told me a story about getting stranded on the road. She was driving along and the car sputtered, and jerked, and then just died. She was mystified because she had just stopped at the gas station. In fact, she had the pump to herself, kind of off to the side; she’d had some trouble getting the nozzle into the tank but by golly she made it go….

As it turned out, the reason it was so hard to fit the nozzle – and the reason the car died – was that she had used the diesel pump. And a gasoline engine doesn’t run real well on diesel; in fact, it won’t run at all until you apply several hundred dollars to it.

Just like C.S. Lewis said, God made us to run on Himself. We can try to fill that God-shaped hole with a lot of things: sports, drugs, relationships, career, even church. But the engine will never run as smoothly and powerfully as it was designed to unless we give it the fuel it was created to be filled with.

I’ve said this before: we’re all theologians. After all, theology is the study of who God is. Everything we think and do and say every day bears witness to who we believe God to be and whether we feel He’s worthy to take a central role in our lives. My prayer is that each of us will be tuned in to God’s presence and work in our lives, and worship Him for who He is.