Boy, General William Booth would be proud of these guys.
Being a former sousaphone player, I'm always partial to a good tuba, and John, you do a
good job on that thing.
Oh, no.
My lips are far out of shape for that.
We have things to pray about as a church.
As I told you this morning in the second service, our elders have approved a tentative plan
that would see us begin a new building a year from this summer.
Of course, it takes a few months to get into a building, and so we're going to have to
make some adjustments, the good kind of adjustments, in our ministry so that we can continue to
grow.
This morning our facilities were just about filled in both services.
We had just a little bit over 800 apparently in worship today, and we anticipate that that
will increase up until the time college is out, and then it's always an interesting
summer when our college students leave us.
But we're going to pray that many of them will get jobs in the Twin Cities this summer.
We are going to have to expand to three services, it would appear, somewhere down the road rather
soon, at least for the duration of the spring.
So you pray that God will give us wisdom to know how we can be innovative and so we can
house what God wants to do in our midst.
We praise the Lord for this, and we praise the Lord for you being here tonight, and I
praise the Lord that I'm here tonight.
It's good to see you.
I look down here in the front and see Mr. and Mrs. Kenny King from over at the other
church, and they're always right down in that very spot when I preach over there, so
I'm a little confused as to where I am this evening, but I look around and see all of
you and I know where I am.
You're such good-looking people, with some exceptions, but for the most part—yes, sure,
that's who I was talking about—but for the most part, very good-looking congregation.
I was thinking about Dick and came across a poem this week about some monkeys, and I
thought I'd read it to you tonight.
We've been talking on Sunday evenings about what God is like, and tonight we're going
to talk about the personality of God.
We've been talking at previous times about the fact that God created us, and this is
a poem that talks about three monkeys.
Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree discussing things as they're said to be.
Said one to the others, Now listen, you two, there's a certain rumor that can't be
true, that humans descended from our noble race.
The very idea is a shocking disgrace.
Never did a monkey desert his wife, starved her babies, and ruined her life.
And you've never known a mother monk to leave her babies with others debunked, or
pass them on from one to another till they scarcely know who is their mother.
And another thing you'll never see—a monk build a fence around a coconut tree, and let
the coconuts all go to waste, forbidding any other monks to taste.
Why if I put a fence around a tree, starvation would force you to steal from me.
Here's another thing a monk won't do—go out at night and get in a stew, making Whoopi,
disgracing his life, then reel home madly and beat up his wife.
They call this all pleasure and make a big fuss.
They've descended from something, but not from us.
I concur with the monkey.
How good God is to us, and tonight we want to talk about the fact that God is a personality.
There are various concepts and views about God's existence.
Of course, the atheist says that there is no God.
He can't arrive at that conclusion intellectually, but he arrives at it emotionally and volitionally,
willfully.
The agnostic says, well, we can't know whether there's a God or not.
The pantheist says that everything around us is God, and God is everything around us.
The deist says that God is a supreme being, but he is impersonal, and somewhere at the
other side of the universe looking after things.
He's not really very interested in what's going on in the world.
The theist declares that God is a personal God who is separate and above His creation.
Of course, it is this latter view which the Bible reveals.
It is that God is the Creator, and He is above and separate from the creation that He has
called into existence.
The Bible does not reveal God in the neuter as if He were only a force, a feeling, a principle,
or some cosmic energy, but the Bible uses personal pronouns to speak about God, indicating
that God in fact is a personality.
Not in the mere human sense as we think of persons and personalities, but God is in fact
a personality.
Some view God as rather cold and calculating.
They see God as only fate, that man is helpless and hopeless, they would seem to say, but
not so according to the Bible.
God is loving and kind as well as just and holy, and He is willing to aid man, to be
with man, to save man.
There are a number of reasons why we believe in a personal God, and I'd like for us to
think about some of those tonight.
Why we believe in a God who exhibits personality.
Personality is usually thought of as constituted by emotions, intellect, and will.
You are a person because you have those faculties.
You are able to feel, you are able to think, and you are able to decide.
Now we talk about a dog having a good personality.
I don't think I've ever met one yet that really did, but we talk about a dog with a
good personality.
Our poodle is not a personality.
In fact, well they should call her a puddle, but that poodle is an interesting dog, but
she doesn't have personality in the sense we're talking about here.
We human beings are personalities because we have feelers, and choosers, and thinkers.
Now God is a personality because He has the same faculties.
Not on a mere human level, His faculties are perfect to an infinite degree.
His ability to feel, to decide, and to know are vastly different from our own.
One of the reasons that we believe that God is a personal God is because the Bible says
that He has feelings.
I'd like for you to open your Bible with me and look at some of the feelings that God
has.
Humans call this the sensibility of God, rather than using the mere human term emotions, but
it's the same thought.
Turn to Genesis 6 and verse 6.
We have here the record of what man was like in those days before the Flood.
The population of the world had grown numerically and it had declined morally.
In Genesis 6, verse 5, it says, the Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had
become and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
Look at verse 6, the Lord was grieved that He had made man on the earth and his heart
was filled with pain.
It's difficult for us to identify with this kind of grief and pain because it's talking
about the grief and the inward pain of one who is infinitely perfect.
Here we see that God is not just an impersonal force, but He is a being who can be grieved
and who can feel pain within as God does here as He sees the wickedness of man.
Again, in Ephesians chapter 4, we are commanded, grieve not the Holy Spirit by whom you are
sealed unto the day of redemption.
I'm glad for that verse being balanced the way it is.
There are some people who say that we can grieve away the Holy Spirit and thus lose
our salvation, but clearly in that verse it says that we are not to grieve the Holy Spirit
by whom we are sealed unto the day of salvation.
Though the Holy Spirit is a seal guaranteeing our salvation, nonetheless He can be grieved
as God.
I wonder if the thing that caused Peter to repent in tears after his denial of our Lord
was not a look at the Savior's face there in that courtyard and seeing within the eyes
of our Lord the love and the grief that our Savior felt for Peter.
Peter felt that he would not deny the Lord.
He said, though all others forsake you, I'll never forsake you.
And Jesus said, before the cock crows three times, you'll deny me.
And he did.
The Lord knew Peter.
The Lord knows us.
And when we fail the Lord, His heart is grieved with our own in our failure.
And then let's quote together that very familiar verse that even the smallest children here
tonight probably have begun to memorize, John 3.16.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
There it says that God loves.
God loves.
A force does not love.
A personal God does.
And God loves all the world, and He loves you tonight.
His heart is filled with concern and care for you because He loves.
He's a person, infinitely majestic in His perfection, but He is a person who loves.
And then turn to Genesis, or rather to Proverbs, chapter 6, and we notice another of the sensibilities
of God.
Proverbs chapter 6, verse 16.
The writer says, There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to Him.
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked
schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies,
and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.
It says here that there are some things that God hates.
He finds them detestable.
His holy nature revolts against these things.
There are some things that God hates with a perfect sinless hatred.
And then turn back to Deuteronomy chapter 6, and we notice another of the sensibilities
of our glorious God.
In writing to the Israelites, and speaking to them rather, and then having it recorded
later, Moses says these words, verse 15, For the Lord your God who is among you is a jealous
God, and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the
land.
The verse comes on the end of a warning to them not to serve other gods, false gods.
Why?
Because he is a jealous God who has anger, righteous anger within him.
A force doesn't get angry.
Cosmic energy is not jealous, but God is a jealous God, and he can be angry against sin.
That anger, that perfect anger is expressed by Jesus when he went into the temple and
saw it being misused.
It had become a den of thieves instead of the house of God, and he drove out those people
who were disgracing the temple of the Lord.
He drove them out with a perfect anger.
He was jealous for the house of his father.
God has emotions.
God has sensibility.
These include his holiness, his justice, his love, his goodness, his truth, all of these
things.
We know that God is a personal God because he has these characteristics.
And then I want you to notice too that God not only has emotions, but he has intelligence.
And really the proper way to say it is that God is omniscient.
God has all intelligence or all knowledge resident within himself.
Let's turn to three passages and just read them without much comment.
Psalm 147 verse 5.
In describing our Lord's intelligence, it says, Great is our Lord, and mighty in power,
his understanding has no limit.
I think all of us would confess tonight that there is a quick limit to our understanding
of things.
Even the smartest among us is not able to comprehend all things.
There is so much knowledge being poured out into the world these days that no man can
absorb it all.
But God not only is aware of everything that man is just discovering, but God knows everything
man hasn't the foggiest idea about yet.
There is no limit to his understanding.
And then look at Isaiah chapter 40 verse 28.
Isaiah 40 verse 28.
Prophet says, 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.
There are some people who refuse to believe in God because they cannot understand him.
If we could understand God, he wouldn't be a God worth trusting in.
If our finite, weak minds could encompass God and comprehend him, he would not be very
bigwitty.
One of the most marvelous things about our God is that he cannot be comprehended by us.
His understanding no one can fathom.
And then to Acts chapter 15 verse 18, Acts 15, 18, where it says, Known unto God are
all his works from the beginning of the age.
God knows everything he's ever done.
We are just discovering.
We are still probing.
We are just observing in our most advanced science.
But God knows how he's done everything.
Every work he has ever accomplished is completely known to him.
God knows all time.
He knows the past.
He knows the present.
He knows the future.
We don't.
He knows all of that because he stands back from time and sees it completed in his eternity.
God knows all possibilities.
God knows what would have happened if what did happen had not happened.
Don't ask me to repeat it.
God knows every possibility.
What if you had made a different decision ten years ago to take that other job or to
marry that other person or to do any one of a thousand things perhaps, or you came to
a crossroad and made a certain decision.
God knows the end result of every possible decision you might have ever made.
He knows it.
He knows all possibilities.
This is very practical because it means that all of us are forever within his observation.
He knows us.
I am reminded of Hagar.
Do you remember her?
A rather sad person, I think, on the pages of the Old Testament.
She was the handmaid of what very famous first lady?
Right, Sarah.
God had promised Abraham a son, and when Sarah was unable to produce that son naturally,
she suggested that according to the custom of that day, that Abraham have a child by
Hagar, her handmaid.
She felt that she could build a family through this maiden of hers.
And so that happened.
She conceived and brought forth a son.
His name was Ishmael.
He was named Ishmael by the angel of the Lord, by the way.
That was a name that God chose for him.
The name means God hears, and here's how the name came about.
After she was with child, Hagar began to despise Sarah and to mock her because she had been
unable to conceive.
And that got under Sarah's skin.
And she finally went to Abraham and said, now look what you've done.
Does that sound familiar?
And then Abraham said, well, you worry about it.
She's your handmaid.
Does that sound familiar?
And so Sarah did.
She so mistreated Hagar that Hagar took off and ran.
She got out into the middle of the wilderness.
Thought she was all alone.
Thought she was going to die.
And the angel of the Lord, in other words, the Son of God, before he was born, a pre-incarnate
appearance of God the Son, the angel of the Lord came to that desert and spoke with her
and said, where did you come from and where are you going?
And she began to relate her story.
And the angel of the Lord blessed her and gave the name Ishmael to her son and said,
he's going to be a wild donkey of a man.
That's quite a blessing, isn't it?
Pretty descriptive, though, of his descendants.
Wild people, nomadic people.
And she called the name of that place, there was a well there, and she called it the well
of the one who hears and sees me.
And her statement to the angel of the Lord was, thou God seest me.
Some of you boys and girls have memorized that in your programs here at the church.
Maybe your parents have taught it to you.
Thou God seest me.
Why is he able to see Hagar, this good for nothing handmaid out in the middle of the
desert?
Because God sees everything.
There's nothing that is not known to God.
A sparrow does not fall but that God knows it.
I think I told you before about the first sparrow I shot when I was about 12 years old
with a BB gun.
I remember pointing that gun up into the tree outside our house and watching that BB fly
up, as you can do with one of those things, and I saw the bird fall.
And I remember the sick feeling that came over me as I saw a living creature fall dead
because of my stupidity as a young boy.
And immediately the verse came to my mind that God just saw that sparrow fall.
God knows it.
You see a little bird.
God knows how many hairs in your head.
You know what that proves?
God can subtract as well as add.
God is a good mathematician.
You see God knows everything.
His intelligence no one can fathom.
It's impossible.
Let's go on.
What else can God do?
God can choose.
He can will to do things.
He has volition.
Dr. Schaeffer says in his theology, he puts into effect all he has designed.
In other words, God can only design something with his perfect intelligence, but then he
can will it to be carried out.
Now you and I can scheme some pretty clever things and then find ourselves short of the
capacity to carry out our plans, but not so with God.
He can do whatever he wants to do.
Turn to Psalm 115 and look at verse 3 as we see this.
Psalm 115 verse 3.
Our God is in heaven.
Let's back up and read the first and second verses too.
Psalm 115.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory because of your love and
faithfulness.
Why do the nations say, where is their God?
Of course, that's what the nations said about Israel.
All of the other nations had their gods neatly housed away in these little buildings and
they could go and pat their God on the leg and bow down to him and burn sacrifices before
him.
They could see the God that they had made out of wood and stone.
And they would say to Israel, now where is your God?
Well, the answer is our God is in heaven.
He does whatever pleases him.
Now when God does something, he never does anything that contradicts his own character.
God can do anything, but he cannot sin, for example.
He will not sin because that's a contradiction of his holiness.
But other than contradicting himself, God can do anything he well pleases.
He has the power to bring it about.
Let's look at one more place in Isaiah 46 and verse 10 as we see a similar thought.
By the way, if you would just like a good devotional exercise sometime, go to Isaiah
and read chapters 40 up through about 48 in one sitting and just see how God has revealed
to you in these pages.
Revelation of the person of God through Isaiah.
But here in Isaiah 46 verse 10, it says, I make known the end from the beginning, God
speaking, from ancient times what is still to come.
I say my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please, and he will.
Now because God has volition, we know that he is personal, not just a force.
Now beyond these faculties that constitute personality, we know that God is a person
for a couple of other reasons.
Number one, he has power.
He has power to do intelligent things like create.
Go back and read about creation in those first chapters of Genesis and marvel at what it
says.
And never does the Bible argue for God's existence.
It merely proclaims it, in the beginning, God.
How profound is that?
In the beginning, God created.
The word means that he brought into being that which did not exist before.
He created something out of nothing.
Now we have capacity to create by making new things out of elements that already exist.
We can take a piece of wood and fashion it into a new shape, or we can take chemicals
and combine them and come up with a new substance.
But God alone can call into existence what never existed before, and he did that.
And then he not only created it, but he proclaimed it to be good.
He could make that judgment about it, and it was good.
Then he reasoned Adam's need for a helpmate.
He knew that.
When man sinned, God knew it and came in search of man.
God pronounced judgment upon sin.
And then he graciously provided salvation through the shedding of the blood of an animal
and clothed these two naked human beings.
All of that reveals not just an impersonal force, but a God who cares, a God who loves,
a God who has power to do whatever he pleases.
A personal God, if you please.
There are many other things that God has power to do.
But let me mention a fifth reason why we know he is a personal God.
It is because of the names that he chooses to reveal himself.
God does not call himself the force.
That's not his name.
God calls himself by personal names.
For example, the name Elohim.
It's used 2,570 times in the Bible.
It's the first name that God uses to express himself to man, Elohim.
And it means the Almighty.
It reveals him as one who is powerful, as Elohim he created.
But then the name that probably is more meaningful to us is the name that we pronounce Jehovah,
the actual pronunciation of it is not known.
It may be closer to Yahweh, but it's a name that is used approximately 6,000 times in
the Bible.
It is the name that God uses when he makes a covenant with his people.
When God appeared to Moses down on the top of Mount Sinai, Moses was concerned as to
what he should tell the people, who sent me?
And God said, when they ask you that, you tell them that I am has sent you.
That's this name, Jehovah.
In our English Bibles, it's usually put down as capital L, capital O, capital R, capital
D, Lord, to distinguish it from capital L, O, R, D, which is another name for God.
It is the name that means he is the self-existent one.
It is the name that means he is free, that he is purposeful, that he is a self-sufficient
personality.
This idea that God created man because he is lonely could be best described by that
old theological term we talked about a long time ago, baloney.
God is not lonely.
He did not create man because he sat up there and wondered, now who am I going to talk to
today?
God is self-sufficient.
He needs no one.
But because of his nature, he also relates to the creation that he made.
That's what he wants to do.
It helps us to understand what the Bible is all about.
Folks, it's important for us to understand that the theme of the Bible is not the salvation
of man.
Did you know that?
That is not the theme of the Bible.
The theme of the Bible is the glory of God.
There's a difference there.
God's priority is not saving man.
God's priority is glorifying himself.
And one of the ways in which he does that is to save man.
God needs no one, but he chooses to love us and to be related to us.
God uses that name Jehovah in union with a number of other words that help us to understand
what he's like.
For example, he calls himself Jehovah Jireh.
You've heard that, haven't you?
In fact, I think we heard it tonight.
Did you use that dick?
I think we did, or somebody said the Lord provides, and that's what the name means.
Can anybody tell me the incident in the Old Testament where this name Jehovah Jireh is
first revealed?
What incident, John?
It's exactly right.
In Genesis chapter 22, when God provided the ram for Abraham to sacrifice, when he saw
that in his heart he'd already sacrificed Isaac.
Jehovah Jireh, the Lord will provide.
Then there's the name Jehovah Rafa, which means I am the Lord that heals you.
It's a name that was revealed after the children of Israel had crossed over the Red Sea, and
they came to the bitter waters of Merah, and the waters were healed.
And there God revealed himself as the one who heals.
A couple of chapters later in Exodus, he reveals himself as Jehovah Nisi.
God revealed that name when he gave his people victory over the Amalekites.
It is a name that reveals that he is the God who is the banner of his people, the God who
leads his people in victory.
He calls himself Jehovah Shalom.
You don't have to work very hard at figuring that out, do you?
God is peace.
It was the name that he revealed to Gideon and judges.
Jehovah Sidgenu in Jeremiah 23, the Lord my righteousness, and then Jehovah Shama in Ezekiel
chapter 48.
Ezekiel closes his book, chapters 40 through 48, with a fantastic description of the Jerusalem
in the kingdom age to come.
And the best thing about the whole place is the last phrase in the whole book which says
Jehovah Shama, which means the Lord is there.
The Lord is present there.
That's what makes heaven heaven.
It's not the pearly gates and the streets of gold that those things would be interesting
to look at.
The thing that makes heaven heaven is the fact that that's where our Lord is.
He's a personal God, and he revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.
Now there are some practical things that we want to comment about and then we'll be done.
First, because God is a personal God, there is no other God like him.
He is unique.
The world has many religions, but Christianity is not one of them, because Christianity is
not in the world or from the world, rather.
It is from God.
The other religions of the world create their philosophies, they set up their gods, they
are man-made.
The biblical Christianity comes the reverse direction.
It is from God down to man.
It is the truth.
One of my favorite, I think one of the funniest stories in the Old Testament is when the ark
of the Lord was captured by the Philistines.
Do you remember that?
It's a riot.
Go back and read it sometime in 1 Samuel chapter 5.
The Philistines thought they had really pulled a good one.
They got the ark of the Lord, which was the symbol of God's presence among his people.
And they with great ceremony brought this ark of God and they put it down in a certain
city in the temple of Dagon, who was their deity.
And they thought, we have now won.
The victory is ours.
And they all went to bed and had a good night's rest.
And they got up in the morning and went out in the temple and there was Dagon, flat on
his face, before the ark of the Lord.
And then one of the funniest phrases, it says they picked up their god and they put him
back on his pedestal.
Can you imagine picking up your god and putting him back on the pedestal?
And everything was fine that day.
They went to bed, got up the next morning and they went out and here was Dagon again,
flat on his face, and this time he had gone to pieces.
He was all cut up.
He was in pieces.
God had chopped him because that false god was in the presence of the true god of the
universe.
And I tell you, the Philistines did everything they could to get rid of that ark.
They didn't want it anymore.
You go to Mount Carmel with the prophet Elijah and see the victory that God gives over Baal.
And then, folks, how dare us put other little gods into our lives and allow this great god
that we serve, the only true god of the universe, to take second or third or fourth or tenth
place.
God forgive us.
I shall have no other gods before me.
And we have this practical aspect that we are made in the image of God, not physically
of course because God has no body, but we also have personality.
And our personalities, even after the fall, have essential aspects to them.
Sin has affected us in every way, but we still have the ability to feel and to think and
to choose.
One of the marvelous things is that God by the Holy Spirit now lives in us.
We have new life.
And what is he doing?
He's changing us in our personality.
He's giving us a new will, a new mind that's being renewed after the likeness of Himself.
He's giving us a new will to choose to do the right things.
God is renewing us in His image.
That's a marvelous thing.
How's He doing in your life?
Dick sang this morning that song that is an old one, but a beautiful one, Jesus revealed
in me.
That's what God wants to do this week.
He wants to reveal Himself in you by the way you think, the way you choose, the way you
feel.
And then finally, we are related to God as a personal creator.
We speak about Him as being our personal Savior, and He is.
He is our personal guide through life.
He is our personal friend.
He calls Himself that.
And He's our personal judge too, because every one of us will give account of Himself
to God.
God is a personal God.
And as a personal God, He cares about you.
He loves you.
He knows your concerns.
He knows your heartaches tonight.
He's aware of the questions you have in your mind.
And He wants to show Himself real and powerful on your behalf.
But He can only do that if we take time to listen to Him.
Are you?
If you want to know another person, you have to spend time with them.
That's the way you get to know your husband or your wife, your children, everybody.
The only way we can get to know God is by spending time with Him.
And some of us have to confess tonight that we haven't spent very much time with the
Lord.
We spend more time with Dan Rather in CBS News than we spend with the God of the universe.
We spend more time with our girlfriend or our boyfriend than we do in the presence of
God.
If we want to know God, this great personal God has revealed Himself, we have to be with
Him.
Now, God is not off running somewhere looking after other things.
God is right there with you tonight.
He'll be with you as you sleep.
He'll be with you in the morning when you wake.
He's just waiting for you to say something to Him.
If you've been ignoring God, then will you say something to Him right now?
And will you commit yourself to spend a little bit more time with Him this week, reading
His Word, understanding what He's like, praying, talking to Him?
Will you allow this great personal God to be real to you?
I hope you will.
I want to do that.
Let's pray.
Lord, so easily we get caught up in the busy activities of life and we miss the things
that are most important.
Forgive us.
I pray, Father, that we will learn, each one of us, how much You love us, how much You
care for us, and how much You want to speak with us and hear us as we speak with You.
Some of us tonight have confessed with shame that recently we have been ignoring You.
It may be that even other gods have come into our lives.
We do right now forsake them.
We confess our discourteous and even blasphemous silence.
We acknowledge Your presence.
We express our love.
Thank You for being so good and wonderful to us.
May each of us know You better next Lord's Day because we will have spent more time with
You this week.
In Jesus' name I pray, amen.