God is Good Psalm 100 September 23, 2012 Travis Collins

Transcription

1 God is Good Psalm 100 September 23, 2012 Travis Collins God is good. Seems a little silly to devote an entire sermon to that topic, right? It s just about the first thing we teach children about God. Many of us remember the little chorus, God is so good He s so good to me. And do you remember that popular blessing of the food? We teach children to say the blessing at the family table. I m going to say the first line; you say the second: God is great God is good. In some church traditions the slogan is popular, God is good all the time; All the time God is good! But it s not sinking in for some of us. Some of us have told ourselves that God is, in fact, not good. Why might some of us reach that conclusion? Well, follow with me the life of a young lady who grew up in church The first picture of God she remembers is that God is good and loving. She believed it. Then when she was in middle school a good friend in her youth group at church died with leukemia. And she wondered how a good and loving God could allow that. Then when she was in college history class she studied the Crusades in which Christians not only fought Muslim soldiers over what we call the Holy Land but also committed awful atrocities against women and children. She studied the Inquisition in the Middle Ages during which Christian leaders tortured and killed those who disagreed with their theology. And she wondered how a good and loving God could allow people to commit such atrocities in His name. She was about to give up on the notion that God is good. But then then she married a Christian guy a guy she met at InterVarsity Fellowship, a Christian student organization on campus. This guy had a strong faith. Granted, at times she thought maybe he was a bit over the top. He talked an awful lot about men as the head of the house and that kind of thing. He seemed a bit obsessed with that. But he was a good guy. He didn t party like the other guys and his hair was always neat and he wore khakis and button downs and her Christian parents loved him. They had a big church wedding and though her faith once had faltered she soon was the leader of the young women s ministry at her church and gung ho about Jesus. After three years and a baby girl later, however, she found out her clean-cut, Christian husband was not only a deacon-in-training; he was also an adulterer. He was having an affair with a woman in their church. One of her main helpers in the women s ministry. He told his wife he 1

2 didn t want to be married anymore and went to live with the woman he d been messing around with (who d also left her husband). That was too much. This time the young lady who had believed God is good as a child was done with that idea. Her experiences had shaped her view of God s nature. Follow with me another story He grew up in a church where God was viewed as the rule enforcer in the sky. There were lots of descriptions of God as judge, and lots of stories from the Old Testament about God s judgment. Hell was a popular topic, and when the grownups at church, including the preacher, talked about Hell they didn t appear to have broken hearts. Rather, at his church it seemed as if those going to Hell deserved it; it was as if Hell was good enough for em. By the time he was in high school he had begun to meet some really nice people who weren t churchgoers at all. They seemed, in fact, more kind than the folks at his church. And the Sunday they recognized the high school seniors was the last time he ever sat foot in that church. The idea that God is good didn t jive with the image of God he d learned at church. I tell those two stories, both of which are fairly typical, to remind us that our experiences largely shape our image of God. The kind of church we grew up in. Our families. The number of hurts we ve experienced. The depth of hurts we ve experienced. Even our image of spiritual leaders. Maybe you grew up in a Baptist church and your favorite pastor was discovered to be immoral. Maybe you went to a Catholic school and the nuns were mean. Our experiences tend to shape our image of God the narrative, or story we tell ourselves about God. Truth is, a lot of people don t really believe God is good. We know we re supposed to believe God is good but we ve told ourselves that He really is not. Rather, to many He seems angry, mean, vindictive, harsh and cruel. The authors of Soul Repair, Jeff Van Vonderen and Dale and Juanita Ryan, make some really interesting observations about what they call the gods-who-are-not-god. They believe, and I think they re right, that a lot of spiritual problems result from a wrong understanding of God. The authors identified some distorted images of God that we have constructed out of our experiences of resentment, disappointment, fear, pain and shame. Here are three of the distorted images of God, according to the authors... The abusive god. This is a picture that some have of God as a tyrant, an angry being who gets mad at us easily and who forgives us only begrudgingly. This is the image that my friend, John Luckett, had of God until he was an adult. Having grown up in an abusive home, John saw God as just waiting for John do something wrong so that God could strike him. Of course that is opposite to God as He is portrayed in Scripture-He Who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love (Psalm 103:8). John didn't get it until he read Philip Yancey's book, 2

3 What's So Amazing About Grace, and came to understand the depth and width of God's unconditional, undeserved, unlimited love. The abandoning god. This view of God leaves us in fear of God leaving us over the slightest mis-step on our part. The authors wrote of a lady named Juanita who, in counseling, confessed that when she thought of God she pictured herself as a child in a large crowd of people holding God's hand...and then feeling the panic of having God let go of her hand and disappear into the crowd. Of course that distorted image of God results in anxiety and the constant pressure of being good enough to keep God from abandoning us. This is completely contrary to the promise of God quoted in both the book of Joshua and the book of Hebrews: I will never leave you nor forsake you. The god of impossible expectations. This is the image of one who is never pleased with us, no matter what we do or how good we are. It wouldn't be surprising if one who has this image of god grew up in a home with a father who had impossible expectations-the father who, if you brought home five "A+s" and one "A" would wonder why all five weren't "A+s." The person who believes in a god of impossible expectations is afraid to say no to any request for service at church and is always discouraged because he or she doesn't pray enough or give enough or read the Bible enough or do good deeds enough...and might end up very, very tired. The problem with all those distorted images of God is that they result in us relating to Him out of fear and shame. Any image of God besides the good and beautiful God of love and grace revealed in Jesus is an inaccurate and unhealthy image of God. Now, I need to say something really important: We don t have the right to re-define God. Inventing a new image of God to suit our needs or tastes is not our right. It is absolutely wrong to downplay His wrath and judgment. To dismiss the idea of Hell, for example, because it offends our sensitivities is not our right. Or to say all roads lead to God because to say otherwise is politically incorrect is not our right. To call the bloody death of Jesus cruel and unusual and thus unnecessary for forgiveness is not our right. Those things, the Bible says, are true. However we have a responsibility to make sure our image of God conforms to the dominant image of God in the Bible. And the biblical depiction of God is that God is good. If you want to know what God is like, look to Jesus. In Jesus God revealed Himself. He who has seen me has seen the Father, Jesus said. And he declared, I and the Father are one. One of the life transforming things we re going to see about God in the next few weeks is that His nature is not harsh, vengeful and merciless. God s nature is the nature of Jesus. Jesus is God in the flesh. If you want to know how God sees you, look at Jesus who loved with an unconditional, undeserved, unlimited love. And though he did not wink at sin, he stretched forth his hands and died for sinners. 3

4 How we view God is not just a Sunday School or small group question. It s more than an academic exercise. How we view God will determine how we look at the world outside His family. If we think He is harsh then we will be mad at people who don t think and act like we do. If we think He is loving we will look at the world with affection and not anger. How we view God will determine how we respond when bad things happen. If we think He s unkind we will blame Him. If we think He s good then we will ask Him for strength and peace. How we view God will determine how we respond when we stumble and fall. If we think He s soft, then we will take lightly what the Bible calls sin. If we think He s heartless, then we will wallow in our own muck and shame. But if we see Him as willing to forgive, we will embrace His grace. Remember Jim Baker? Jim Baker was a highly successful T.V. minister who ended up in a moral scandal, going to prison, and losing everything. I want you to hear the words of his son, Jay: As I was growing up, I never thought of God as God of love and grace. Instead he was an eye. The eye in the sky That s the kind of God I grew up with. Even though I was raised in the home of one of the most famous pastors in the country, I didn t know anything about grace or God s accepting love. To me, God was keeping a giant in-the-sky scorecard, so I d better live up to his standards or get hit on the head with his big ol bat. I d better do everything just right, or I was dead meat. Then his father was sent to prison and Jay became a rebel. Kicked out of school at age seventeen because of his behavior. Already a drunk. Then a friend named Donnie and his family took Jay in. Jay wrote, Donnie and his family didn t judge me. They didn t have to I was depressed and overwhelmed enough by my own condemnation. I was eaten up by guilt and couldn t enjoy life Donnie began to talk with Jay about grace God s unconditional, undeserved, unlimited love. Donnie really emphasized such passages in the Bible as Ephesians 2:8&9 where the Bible says, By grace are you saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by words, or else we would boast. The idea of grace was revolutionizing to Jay Bakker. It was the grand aha! he wrote. I had always wished God were more accessible and not just a cosmic traffic copy waiting to ticket me. Then I discovered the shocking secret: God loves me just the way I am That s what enabled me to stop drinking. When I was 20 years old, I started going to a 12-step program i What freed Jay Baker from what enslaved him was not fear or shame but a willingness to embrace God s grace. Oh, and do you remember that young lady and that young man I talked about at the beginning? Let me finish their stories. Remember that young lady who learned God is good then her friend died and she read about the Crusades and the Inquisition, then her clean-cut, Christian husband ran off with another woman 4

5 in the church? She later returned to church, not because she wanted to, but because she thought her little girl would benefit from it. It took years, but gradually she began to entertain the idea that God s nature is good. It was in a Christmas Eve service, when a child read the Christmas story and concluded with John 3:16 God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that she chose to believe what she d learned as a child God is good. And that young man who grew up hearing about God as judge he started dating a young lady who did not call herself a Christian. That didn t matter to him. She was sweeter than most of the Christians he d know. Soon they were married. After a couple of years in an apartment they moved into their first house. Their new next door neighbors welcomed them to the neighborhood and invited them to church. Church wasn t really something they d planned on, but the neighbors seemed nice enough, so they went. At this church they heard about grace, God s unconditional, undeserved, unlimited love. When people inside the church talked about people outside the church it was always with affection, not anger and suspicion. This young man began to think that the image of God he d grown up with was perhaps a sincerebut-distorted depiction of God s nature. He began to believe God is really good. Within a year he and his wife counted themselves as faithful Christ-followers and he regretted all the years he had thought of God as angry and mean. Today we celebrate the good and beautiful God. He Who is the mighty good God. The God Who looks like Jesus. The God of grace unconditional, undeserved, unlimited love. i In Stories of Emergence 5