IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY FAITHFUL GOD SERIES

Transcription

1 Good morning, Life Fellowship. It is good to see you all this morning. We have some exciting news to share with you. We want you to meet some of your new staff team. I first want to welcome Justin Lucas and his bride, Kristen, and their little one. Justin will be serving as our Student Pastor here at Life Fellowship. So let s give them a welcome. They are both graduates of Liberty University and they have had several years in student ministries. We are just really excited to be able to serve together with them. We want you to know that you will be getting a chance to hear from Justin as he will be teaching in my stead in a few weeks, as we are going to be starting a series called, My Tribe. We will be talking about adoption, parenting and marriage. So it will be an opportunity for Justin to share how he wants to partner with the parents, as well as the students, and to talk about what student ministries looks like. Also I want to bring out Brad and Kristen Milks. Brad is our Small Groups Discipleship Pastor. We have been talking about our Women s Ministries and looking for a new director. And as I was meeting with Brad I found myself going, You know what? I wonder if Kristen might be interested in this? I initiated that because of what I have personally seen in her as well as what I have heard about her. She is also a graduate of Liberty University with a master s degree and as a licensed counselor. She is a very, very wise young lady. She grew up in a pastor s home. And together Brad and Kristen are both passionate about ministry. Brad asked me when I announced this to the church to do him one favor and that was to mention that they have four kids. So this is a part time role for Kristen as she does have a limited amount of hours. When Pam was here she was doing assimilation and involved in leadership things and a lot was going on there. So now this will be a very focused role. If you are interested in serving, she is going to be building out her team, in particular those of you with administrative gifts, so be sure to talk with Kristen. Welcome abroad team! We are so glad to have you. With that, we are going to say a prayer together as a church family that the Lord will use them in great ways and then we will jump into today s message. Father, thank you so much for allowing us to be able to see you at work in bringing these wonderful team mates together. May you use Justin and Kristen in great ways in the Student Ministry. I pray, Father, that you will give Justin great vision there and a great sense of chemistry with his team. May he just be totally fulfilled in this role. I thank you for his bride, a gifted photographer and creative artist. Please use her ascetic touch in her creative gifting s as a compliment in great ways to her husband in Student Ministries, and as a gifted vocalist as well. We pray that you will use the two of them to make a big difference as they love the students of Life Fellowship. Page 1 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

2 God, we pray for Kristen with the Women s Ministries. May you just use her wisdom and her grace in such ways that the Women s Ministries will just feel a sense of unity and a sense of peace. I am just thankful for how you have brought this couple whom you have called into the ministry together. Just use Brad here in Life Groups and Kristen in Women s Ministries and may you just be glorified through the work here at Life Fellowship. We love you and we praise you. In Jesus name. Amen. Now from new staff to Sherlock Holmes we go. Perhaps you have heard the story about Sherlock Holmes and Watson. One night they were out camping together and enjoying a good bonfire. They were melting marshmallows, eating some good food and cutting up. Finally they were tired and ready to hit the sack. So they climbed into their tent and went to sleep. Several hours later Sherlock said, Hey Watson, wake up. Watson, wake up. Watson sat up rubbing his eyes and Sherlock said, Hey Watson, what do you see? Watson said, Man, I see a world and a universe with infinite possibilities. I see the mystery of the future written large in the stars. I see this world and I am a part of this great place. Sherlock said, Watson, someone stole our tent, bro. So it is not that big of a deal here what I am getting at. You see sometimes there are these mysteries that aren t that hard to solve and yet other times there are mysteries that are left to be unsolved. Like, there are some things we can never wrap our minds around and there are some things that we can. And sometimes we just miss the plain sense right in front of us, like Sherlock and Watson s tent. Today I invite you to turn to Romans Chapter 11 as we are going to look in the Scriptures and we are going to see that Paul does not want his audience to be ignorant about a mystery. He does not want them to miss it. He doesn t want them to start rubbing their eyes and then coming up with all these grand new ideas; rather he just wants them to realize what God has revealed in Jesus. So as we have been walking through the book of Romans, remember how we are doing it. The series title is called, The Gospel of God, as a whole. But we are teaching the book in five different series. We started the first series off with The Problem of Guilt, Chapters 1 through 3. Then we went into Romans Chapters 4 and 5 and did Sola Fide, by faith alone. And then we went to the series in Chapters 6 through 8 called Transformed. And right now we are dealing with Faithful God, where we are seeing that He has been faithful, and will be faithful to keep His gospel promises in particular as it relate to the Jews. After this series we will take a break and we will do this three part series called, My Tribe, and then we will pick back up in Romans Chapters 12 through 16 in a series called, Livin It. And that is where it is going to really get to the brass tacks of how then does the gospel get fleshed out in our daily life. Page 2 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

3 Now Romans Chapter 9 in this Faithful God component is about Israel s past. Romans Chapter 10 and the first part of Chapter 11 is about Israel s present. And then last week as we covered the remaining balance of Chapter 11 and today is about Israel s future. So Chapter 9 is Israel s past, Chapter 10 and the first part of Chapter 11 is Israel s present, and the rest of Chapter 11 is Israel s future. We are going to wrap up this high theology that we have gotten into in these three chapters. So I invite you to turn in your Bibles to Romans Chapter 11 and look at verse 25 where Paul says this: Lest you be wise in your own sight, (speaking to the Gentiles), I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers. Paul says he does not want them to unaware of this mystery. He is speaking to the Gentiles, those who are non-jews, to not be ignorant of a mystery. What mystery? Well, the mystery that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ. The Jews missed this mystery. They didn t get it. They ended up idolizing the Law. They became moral behaviorists, trying to keep the Law, trying to perform the Law. They believed that they could earn God s favor through their good meritorious works, unlike the Gentiles who realized that was not the case. They realized that we need grace. Now interestingly enough, they each had a different modus operandi. The Jews were operating according to the written Law that was given to them. When they left Egypt after 400 years of being in slavery and they made their way into the wilderness of Sinai they were given the Law to abide by. And they were to fashion their lives accordingly. As we have talked about in times past, in the Old Testament they were still saved by faith in God and trusting in His future promises, but they lost sight of that. In an attempt to keep God s Law, thinking they could figure out ways to do it perfectly, or aspiring to it at least, that God would then give them sort of a free pass to be right with Him, because of all their good deeds. Now they also had the moral law written on their hearts, but they really got obsessed with this written Law on tablets that were given to Moses. And some of the accompanying commands that came along, there were about 613 when all was said and done. So when you think about the Gentiles, the non-jews, they did not have the external written Law that they were seeking to align their lives to; rather they had the moral law etched on their hearts. That is to say they had a sense of right and wrong, this conscience, and they felt licked by guilt when they fell short of this moral ideal that they believed that they were to live by. So you have these two groups - the Jews who are the moral behaviorists and they are seeking to please God and appease Him and believing that they can do great things. Page 3 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

4 They are not seeing their guilt because they are not seeing their sin because they are focused on their perfection. And then you have the non-jews, the Gentiles, who are living not to this external moral law but this internal conscience, and it weighs them down with sin and guilt and shame. And when the gospel comes on the scene, their heart dances to its tune because they are ready and ripe for it. They haven t bought into this behaviorist mentality. Paul says though to the Gentiles, who are being saved now, that he does not want them to be wise in their own eyes. He does not want them to get puffed up with pride. And what he is doing is he is getting at this idea of a reversed pride. At one time, and even still, the Jews were prideful thinking that they were better than the Gentiles because they were God s chosen nation. And they would look down on the Gentiles. They were puffed up in their self-righteousness and were wise in their own eyes. They were so wise in their own eyes that they did not recognize the Messiah when He came. They did not recognize their need for the grace of God. And as a result of being wise in their own eyes, they missed it. The Gentiles ended up believing in the grace of God to save them, but now some of them are getting wise in their own eyes. And Paul tells them not to become wise in their own eyes because even though they had been capable of seeing their need of grace that did not make them better than the Jews. So Paul tells them to watch out for reverse pride. Pride is a sneaky little feature that works its way into our lives and we have to be careful of that. Thomas Aquinas, the 13 th century philosopher and theologian, talked about these four ways of pride, each ascending or I should say descending into more debauchery. The first form of pride that Aquinas talked about was in believing that you have an excellence when you don t. So this belief that you have an excellence when you don t is kind of like on American Idol when someone comes on and they believe that have this excellence of vocal skills and they don t. And even after they are told they don t have it, they reject the judges great advice, believing that they have an excellence that they clearly do not. A second form of pride that Aquinas warns against is to believe that you have an excellence and in fact you do, but you have this excellence and you believe that it is selfattained. So that is the person then who has these vocal talents and they go on American Idol and they get the gold buzzer and they are puffed up thinking it is all about them. They think that they have it in and of themselves, while the truth is they have parents that have helped them with vocal lessons, they have had vocal coaches, and they have had other vocalists who have helped them learn their strengths and their weaknesses. So they Page 4 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

5 are where they are not exclusively because of what they did on their own. In fact that kind of pride is difficult to look at. Though I love the Panthers, I have to admit it can be hard for me to cheer for the Panthers sometimes, because of the pride and the arrogance of an individual on their team. It is amazing how one person s pride can create the collective reach where everything stings. Thankfully there are some good humble individuals, but nothing is worse than someone who is just wrought in their own pride, thinking that they have just arrived, that they are so great, and they want to tell everyone else how wonderful they are. I think we would be far better off spending our time talking about our weaknesses and how flawed we are than how great we are. A third type of pride that Aquinas then warns against is thinking that you have an excellence when you do and that excellence is because of your own efforts, but then because you are good in and of yourself. So it kind of ups the ante then. There is a person that does have an excellence and then they think that excellence is because they have done all the self-effort toward it, and they are fully responsible for it. And they are good. But this is the danger then of the Jews. They believed that they were good in and of themselves. And that God saw how good they were, and how great they were, and He chose them. They lost sight of the fact that it wasn t about their goodness but about God s grace in spite of their goodness. They missed it. Finally Aquinas then helps us to understand a fourth feature of pride which is the most abominable. And this would be thinking you have an excellence when you do, and thinking that it is because you think you have accomplished it on your own, and because you are good, and then reveling in it so much that you do not want others to share in it. And you are glad to see that they don t, feeling better than others. And this is the tax collector and the Pharisee. When the Pharisee says, God, I thank you I am not like him. I fast twice a week, I tithe, I do these good things. And that caused him to think he was good because he does these good things, and that God looks down on him because he is good, and then he is glad that he has the antithetical example of himself so that he can pontificate in his pride. And you can see how egregious that is in that moment. So there are four styles from Aquinas. And the danger then in Romans Chapter 11 is not to get haughty. We aren t to think that this excellency that we may have of grace is because of something that we have done or because we are good. And we are not to get to a point where we hope that others can t experience it; rather we are to want that for others. So be careful thinking we have an excellence that we don t, thinking we have an excellence when we do but thinking we got there on our own, and thinking that Page 5 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

6 we have an excellency when we do, thinking we got there on our own because we are good, or thinking it is because we are good and glad others don t have it. Watch out for that kind of pride that can creep into our lives. Now let s think about the warnings in the Scripture. Verse 25 says, Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers, a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. So as it relates to pride, which is certainly a form of hardening of the heart, Muhammad Ali, the great example of humility - right - said this: I am the greatest. Not only do I knock them out, I pick the round. Now contrast that as we juxtapose a statement by G. K. Chesterton who said this: If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride. Pride is something we all have to be careful of in our lives. And when our hearts get hard, all of a sudden pride can take shape. But notice the type of hardening mentioned here. It is a partial hardening; it is not a hardening in full. So it is a partial hardening of the Jews, but it doesn t mean that God won t keep His promise to see them saved. But during this season where they rejected the gospel because their hearts were prideful and hard, they couldn t see their need for grace, but the Gentiles did. Verse 26 says, And in this way all Israel will be saved. Now this doesn t mean all - like every single individual - we have to be careful that we are not hyper literal. Otherwise we will end up taking a verse like this and becoming Universalists, and just saying that everybody is going to be saved. When in fact there will be people who do indeed reject God. All is used there like if I went to a party and after coming home my wife asked me who was there? And I replied, Everyone was there. Well, everyone wasn t there because my wife wasn t there. So we have to understand the way that the language then is being used and it is just saying that God s collective promise to save the chosen nation of Israel will be accommodated for. All Israel will be saved, as it is written, The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will banish ungodliness from Jacob, and this will be my covenant with them, when I take away their sins. And you can go over to Isaiah Chapters 59 and 60, or in Zechariah Chapter 12 and verse 13, if you want to see some of the sourcing whereby Paul is drawing Old Testament references from here. Verse 28 says, As regards the gospel, they (the Jews) are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. So in other words, they end up rejecting the gospel and it becomes for the sake of the Gentiles. They are ripe and ready and they receive the gospel. But God is not one to forfeit honest promises and so in regards to the forefathers, meaning the patriarchal promise to Page 6 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

7 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that is kicked off in Genesis Chapter 12 and verses 1 through 3 that the nations would be blessed through the Jews, God will keep that. God will honor that. Now the Jews were supposed to be a light to the nations. They weren t supposed to be exclusive in their faith; rather they were supposed to spread it to the Gentiles, and they didn t. Ideally, they would have, and the gospel still would have gone to the Gentiles, but since it did not at that time, God uses it to help the gospel to get to the Gentile nations. What ends up happening then is it makes it very difficult for the Jews to get away from pride because to embrace the gospel is to recognize that they aren t nearly as moral as they thought they were. In fact they are in desperate need of God to save them. Let s pick up in verse 30. For just as you were at one time disobedient to God (the Gentiles at one time are disobedient) but now have received mercy because of their disobedience. Now it is not meaning that they were saved because they were sinful. No, it is just the fact that lots of attention got focused on spreading the gospel to the Gentiles because the Jews rejected it. Verse 31 says, So they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that He may have mercy on all, meaning both Jews and Gentiles, all people groups alike. God has consigned disobedience to people. What is that all about? Is God forcing us to sin? By no means! What He is getting at there is that God has consigned all people to recognize their disobedience so that they will realize their need for saving grace. So in recognizing then that we have been disobedient it paves the way for us to recognize our need for mercy. But if we do not recognize we have been disobedient, we will not realize we need grace. John Hare, the great philosopher from Yale University, wrote a book called, The Moral Gap. I have referred to it at different junctures in this series, but I think it is worth revisiting. In his book, The Moral Gap, what Hare is arguing is that there is a great chasm between God and mankind. There is a moral gap. We are closed off from God in our own righteousness. We have all been disobedient. And what we end up doing then is we will often not look to God. He is the one we are to look to because He is holy, He is the standard by which we are held accountable, but what we often do is we end up feeling better about ourselves by looking at the tax collectors of the world. By finding those who are just worse off that we are. And then if we can find people who are worse off then surely God is proud of us for where we are. And it makes us feel better about ourselves like we must be in great Page 7 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

8 standing with God. So okay, God, check it out. You can showcase me as your moral example. You can feature me in this troubled world. But the fact of the matter is we are all in trouble. We are all hosed. There is a gap between us and God. So as a result what we need to do is look at God. If we could get back to focusing on the holiness of God, if we could get back to focusing on His excellency and His holy nature, what then that would do is it would serve up an evaluative measurement for us whereby we could see how great the chasm is between the righteousness of God and ourselves. But when we don t have a good study in the holiness of God and we don t take time to think about how virtuous He is then Hare says we begin to do certain things to deal with the moral gap. What we begin to do is we try to attain the standard and live up to the standard by puffing ourselves up. We start to puff up ourselves to think of ourselves as more moral than we really are. But the truth of the matter is we are all so much unlike God in that He is eternal and He has never sinned and we are temporal beings and we have sinned often. We are well acquainted with it. Another feature that Hare would talk about that we will do is maybe we won t puff ourselves up and feel better about ourselves, and believe that we can scale this insurmountable moral mountain, but we instead reduce the standard down to make it more pliable, to make it more palatable. So we try to customize the standard then. Basically we give God a moral facelift and situate Him to always be pleased with us. And what happens is we make God in our own image and instead of being created in His image, His holy righteous image, and be conformed to His standard, what we do is we flip it. And now we make Him in our image and we think about what we are capable about morally and then we bring Him down to that. So we deceive ourselves that He is really proud about our virtuous life. Another alternate Hare talks about that we might get into is we might just erase the standard all together. What sin? And so think about the culture we live in today. We live in a culture that basically would say, What sin? Folks, this is not the culture where kids feel bad about chewing bubble gum in the classroom anymore. This is the culture that when there is a divorce they throw a divorce party to celebrate. This is a culture that says that it is good to tell a lie because if telling the truth would hurt somebody then it is best to tell a lie. This is a culture that doesn t believe that marriage is just between a man and a woman, that there is no moral standard as it relates to sexual ethics, that everything is wide open. This is a culture that is slouching toward Gomorrah and celebrating it. And if we are not careful, in the name of tolerance we won t speak up for truth because we don t want to feel like we are judgmental. And I totally get the predicament Page 8 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

9 we are in. It also raises the question of how then do you tell someone that the grace of God is there to forgive them for their sins when they have a culture saying What sin? in erasing these different things. How then do we contextualize this missional endeavor that we have been called to partake in? How do we share the gospel? Well, I think that people do still experience guilt, but it can be stuffed away and numbed over time. People can anesthetize their guilt through drugs, through denial, and by looking for people who will give them approval in their lifestyle, by finding yes people. There are all these things that happen. But at the end of the day we have to go back and realize that there is a standard. And by and large in cultures we realize if we were to take a baby out of his mother s arms and put a spear through it that there is something morally wrong about that, that it is very wrong, that murder is wrong. And we might argue about some of the nuance distinctives of morality, but we can always paint the picture that is egregious and would show people our desperate need for a saving God to work in our lives. Jesus came on the scene and what does He do with the moral gap? He closes it because He fulfills the moral law that the Jews in the Old Testament were trying to keep. And He becomes the one who truly is the moral exemplar, dying on the cross for our sins, rising from the dead, and offering grace to all of us. As we continue on Paul now shifts from theology and breaks out in doxology. In verse 33 he says, Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! Interestingly enough here Paul is saying that God is a mysterious God, but He reveals mysteries that we are not to be ignorant of like in verse 25. So there are some things that we can know, there are some things that we can apprehend, but we can t comprehend all things. Paul says now, How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways. He is a mysterious God and we will never get our minds around who He is. And folks, if we are trying to believe that we can wrap our minds around who God is, or knowing everything about this universe, if we think that we can tell the stories of the stars and grasp such mysteries, we can t do it because we are finite. Because we are finite we can never grasp the infinite, so it is a lot better for us then as finite creatures to embrace the infinite and celebrate mystery then it is to try to stuff the infinite into our finite box and experience all kinds of contradictions that trouble us. God has not given us an invitation to go on a quest for omniscience; rather He has given us an invitation to follow Him by faith trusting in the things that He has revealed, and believing that He can be trusted in the things we cannot know. So we are not to try and take an infinite God and put Him into a finite systematic box. Page 9 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

10 I am happy to announce that my pursuit of omniscience officially came to an end a few years ago. You guys know that I ended up in a horrific crisis of doubt as I was swimming in the waters of all kinds of different philosophers. And I came to a place when writing Doubting toward Faith, that I realized that doubt is not a Christian problem, it is a human problem. In the absence of certainty there will always be room for doubt. The question is which world view best closes the doubt gap. And this is where Christianity really begins to walk. As a Christian I still have many questions, but now having studied these different faiths, I know that to walk out of Christianity and to assume another faith, say Faith X, is to assume another set of unforeseen doubts. So doubts are everywhere because we are finite, but I can tell you this: Christianity closes this doubt gap. I am still left with many questions, but I know if I were an Atheist I would have many questions. And I also would have many questions if I were a finite Goddess, a Pantheist, a therapeutic Deist, a Muslim or a Polytheist. I have studied the different faiths, the different philosophies of the world, and at times it was confusing going through that journey, but to embrace mystery knowing that nothing competes with grace is the best news in the church that needs to get out in the street. So maybe you have doubts, folks, but you need to understand that we can t solve every mystery, and that is not what we are to do because we can t do that with anything. Know that if you struggle with some questions that there is God that can be celebrated in mystery. And you are welcome with your questions. My study guy was just informed recently, after we did a U-Version study that Britt put together from my book, Doubting toward Faith, and literally if you want to know what people are wondering what to do with their doubts, we had over a hundred thousand people download our study on doubt. People are starving for answers to their angst. Christianity doesn t promise to remove mystery, but it does promise the presence of God in the midst of it. Paul then begins praising God and His judgments when he writes, How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! Verse 34 says, For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor? There is no one but God. God never had to go and see a counselor, He has never had to show up and do some DBT to get His frontal lobe strengthened. No, that is not God; God has never forgotten anything. Has it ever dawned on you folks that nothing has ever dawned on God? Verse 36 says, For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen. Now we are in doxology and doxology comes from doxa and logia and it means words of praise. So what happened was Paul s theology turned to doxology as he wraps up this beautiful passage in Romans Chapters 9 through 11. Page 10 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

11 Let s kind of ask some questions now as we start to get practical with one another. I have three questions. First - is your heart softening to God the more you walk with Him or is it slowly hardening? If it is hardening, ask God to show you the reasons why and then begin to deal with that. Ask Him to give you a pliable heart. Second - where in your life do you need to trust God by remembering His promises? And how can remembering the promises of God help in whatever it is you might be going through? God made a promise that He would save the Jews and that they would get the gospel in full at a certain time. That time has not come yet. But He also made a promise that the Messiah would come hundreds of years before He did, and He did come. And in the same way that He came His first time based on the promises, He will come and fulfill the promises at His second coming. Third - being that God saved us by His gracious mercy, what role then should grace play in our relationship to others? Think of the difference this could make for us inter-personally if we realized that God s grace is what saves us. Maybe you wonder how you can begin to offer grace like that. The way that we begin to take a grace posture to someone who has pained us is we spend time thinking about the posture Jesus took toward us on the cross, and the posture He took toward the person who hurt us. And then we go out drawing on gospel strength and we dispense that type of love to others. Now let me share with you some takeaways as we wrap up. I gave you three questions and now here are some takeaways. First - even though it may appear at times that God has forgotten His promises, He will faithfully come through. If you are out there stuck wondering where God is, what is going on, you need to realize that God has not abandoned you. Even Jesus wondered when He said, God, why have you forsaken me? when He was on the cross. There can be dark nights of the soul when you may have felt you were abandoned by God, but in the end there is only one set of footprints that got us through, and that was His. Second - what separates humanity from God is not His lack of mercy and grace but rather our hardness of heart. We have to be careful that our hearts don t get hard. As believers when we look at the Scriptures we need to be careful that we don t buy into this moral relativism of our culture today. There might be parts of Scripture that are hard to digest, believe me I get that, there are parts that I read and I may really struggle, but that is not for me to reduce the standard; rather it is for me to ask God what it is about my heart that is resisting this. Is it because the culture has told me one thing? Why is it? And I will have to do some heart work to get in alignment with God. Third - no matter how far we have fallen God s grace is deep enough to reach us and give us a fresh start. That is good news, folks. No matter how far we have fallen, no matter how off track we are, the grace of God can reach out and bring us in and give us a Page 11 of 12 pages 10/22/2017

12 fresh start. His mercies are new every morning. In fact His mercies are new every moment that we look to Him. Fourth - all good theology is suitable for doxology and our doxology should be rooted in good sound theology. So some of the music that is coming out today, those Christian artists have a responsibility to also be good theologians. But good theologians need to make sure that they offer God doxology, that they praise Him with their words. The great 19 th century preacher, Charles Spurgeon, said this: A child of God should be a visible beatitude for joy and happiness, and a living doxology for gratitude and adoration. Pastor and theologian, Sam Storms, wrote this: The ultimate goal of theology isn t knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung. Theology leaks in lyrical praise to an infinite, majestic, gracious, matchless God. And finally, let s put a bow on it by saying let us praise God for the things that we can and cannot know by rejoicing and trusting in the fact that He knows all. So we step back and we started this high theological treatise in Chapter 9 and we made our way through Chapter 11 and we end in an anthem of praise. Let s pray. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for this series. We thank you for Jesus who loves us, cares for us, and is ready to show us grace. May we turn to you, may we love you, and may we honor you for your great name s sake. In Jesus name. Amen. The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases. Page 12 of 12 pages 10/22/2017