Lance Sawyer First Baptist Church Muskogee, Oklahoma Sermon Transcription June 3, 2012 The Two Books of God Romans 1:19-23 I want to start my message today with a little informal survey. In order to participate in this survey you ve got to be 35 years or older. Okay, because I don t want to do anything in this survey that would influence people in a wayward direction. I want to know if you re 35 years or older. Raise your hand where I can see it if you ever skipped school. Alright, teenagers, do not look behind you. Alright, about half of the people here are school skippers. Now this next one -- you re going to be more bashful about this, because I want to know, when you were a kid or a teenager did you ever, without your parents knowing it, skip church? I mean, they brought you to church and they thought you were in church sitting with your friends and you were off somewhere else. Raise your hand if you ever skipped church. Eric Fletcher [church s minister to students] skipped church. Not recently, was it? Okay. Well, I skipped church a time or two but it wasn t because I was off doing anything bad. I just couldn t help it and the reason I couldn t help it was because I was seeking after God, and I had to skip church in order to find Him. When I was like 16, I went to the most boring church east of the Mississippi River. I m talking about it was deader than a hammer, from the time it started right on through the sermon, and honestly I didn t get anything out of it. I tried, I just couldn t get into any part of that service. It would always, always, always leave me cold, and when I got a little older, I switched churches and I found a church that was very much alive, and when I went there I did connect with God, but in my home church, if I d been counting on that for my relationship with God, I would have been in trouble. I remember the closer I got to 16, the more restless I got in church, and one day after Sunday School I just said, I cannot go in there one more day. I can t do it, and I walked out of the building. I didn t know where I was going but I wound up back behind the buildings and walked around exploring on a dead-end street behind a couple of houses, and came to a locked gate. Of course it said, No Trespassing, but there was no little sign underneath that said, This means you, so I realized that it wasn t talking about me so I just walked on through the gate and went for a stroll all the while church was going on in the sanctuary.
As I walked, I actually didn t feel guilty because I was actually seeking God. I d learned a lot about Him in Sunday School -- had some great teachers -- but today I said, God, I just really want to see if I can find You. I want to see if You re out in this world or do You just stay in church all the time. I hope not, because You re awfully quiet if You stay in that church all the time. You re pretty inactive if You stay in that church. You are a boring God if You stay in that church all the time. So I got to walking and talking with the Lord, and I did then what I still do today. I sang. I sang hymns to God. How Great Thou Art is one of them. I d sing and I would quote Scriptures and I began walking and talking with God, and it s like He just walked up beside me, walked along with me. We went through fields, down through a little patch of woods, and sat down by still waters, a pond with still waters, and I realized that He had led me there and there He restored my soul and for the rest of that time -- that hour He walked with me and He talked with me. I was back in time for church to end, and I put my shoes back on, and I d rolled my britches legs back down and I had my Sunday shirt on, and I went on about my business. Nobody but me and God knew I had missed that service, but I had been to a very important service and I had met God. Now I don t recommend that on a weekly basis, but it did teach me something that is still with me. It taught me that God is not just in the church. Now this is a place you re supposed to meet Him. This is a church. Church is where you learn about Him. You learn things about God in church that you re not going to learn out in nature. It s only when you start putting the two together, the truths of God that you learn through the church from the Scriptures. When you take that and put it with what you re observing in the creation that s when it really starts coming together for you. I ll never forget the first time God s Word that He wrote through the prophets and His word that He wrote through His servant nature came to me. I was sitting on my grandmother s back porch. Early one morning I was doing my devotion. It was a spring morning. I could smell the honeysuckle. It was one of those crisp, clear mornings and there was this kitten playing on the doorsteps in front of me. You know how kittens do -- flipping over and over. Gray cat with blue eyes, and she was so full of life and just having such a good time. She was just enjoying being a cat. God made her a cat and she was glad of it. As I watched that cat playing, a Scripture came to my mind from the book of Psalms. It s one now inscribed on the wall of our Fellowship Hall downstairs. Oh taste and see that the Lord is good. You read in the Word that God is good. In His creation you taste it and you see it. So it s not like you really have to choose between what God does in church and what God does in creation. Those things are meant to go together. It s when 2
they go together that the spiritual world and God and your relationship with Him can really begin to take off. Our Scripture for today from Romans says that it s always been possible to know God. It s always been possible for people everywhere, at every time, to know God through the natural world. I want to read this verse to you. Romans 1:20. Let this really sink in. Think about the implications of this. For ever since the world was created people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made they can clearly see His invisible qualities. Do you see that? You can learn about the invisible God by paying attention to the visible things that He s made. His invisible qualities, His eternal power, and His divine nature so you have no excuse for not knowing God. A long time ago, back in the second century, there was a church father named Tertullian. Tertullian was one of the very first people who began talking about the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity actually developed a little later, but Tertullian was the very first person who actually wrote that word in his writings - -the Trinity. Tertullian also wrote about how we can experience God in creation. Listen to what he said about the way creation and the Scripture are related to one another. He s talking about the writings of Moses, and it s always been assumed that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Listen to this, Tertullian, second century, he said, It was not the pen of Moses that brought in the knowledge of God. The majority of people who ever lived never heard of Moses, let alone the books of Moses, but they knew the God of Moses. How is that? Well, Tertullian said, Nature is the teacher and the soul is the pupil. Do you hear that? Nature is the teacher, the soul is the pupil. One flower, one feather, one seashell can teach you at least one or two little things about God. If that s true with one flower, one seashell, one feather, how much more true is that when you look up into the sky in a clear night and you survey all the worlds that His hands have made? I will always remember the very first time I ever really paid attention to the stars. Have you really done that lately? I remember I was 14 years old. It was January, coldest night of the year. I didn t even need to be outside, but there s something about extra-cold weather that makes the sky extra crisp and bright. I remember I walked out into my grandmother s yard and I kept going until I was out in the middle of the field, and I was looking up at the stars and I was so mesmerized by what I saw that I began to sing How Great Thou Art. When I consider all the world Your hands have made, that I stood out there in the cold for like three hours -- three hours I stood out there. I was shivering. I was about to freeze my hiney off, and yet I didn t go in the house because I had discovered something that was affecting me really deeply inside my soul, something so big that entered into my little heart. I was sick for several days after that, but it was worth it because of what I discovered. From then on, I 3
started paying attention to the things like the moon and the phases of the moon, and I got to where I would ride my horse at night. I d ride my horse when the moon was shining bright and I d hum a tune to the rising moon. I d sing songs and I d quote Scriptures, and God and I would ride along together through the moonlight, and I came to know Him in a very personal way. I didn t gain a lot of very specific information about what God was like or what He expected. Creation doesn t actually do that for you. It simply makes you aware that He s there. If you re really in tune it makes you aware of how close He is. But it s when you take that and you pair it with the Scriptures which tell you the details of God -- what He s like -- what He expects from you -- that s when things really begin coming together, but people haven t always had that. Have you ever thought about people who lived in the times of the Old Testament, especially early on in the Old Testament, the first 12 chapters or so, the first 20 chapters for that matter? There was no Bible. There was no Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. That was a long way away yet. There was no Bible. There was no church. There was no temple, at least not a temple for God. There were temples in Egypt and Babylon but no formal religion organized around the worship around the one God. There were no preachers. There were no missionaries unless you count people like Enoch, whom the Bible says walked with God. Then you read on a little later and you hear the same thing about Noah. Noah was a just man in his generation and he walked with God. What did Noah and Enoch have to go on? Really just two things, their observance of God of their Creator s world, and they obviously developed the ability to hear His voice and to detect what He was saying from what everybody else was saying. You ve got Enoch. You ve got Noah, walking with God, and the next thing you know here comes Abraham, and Abraham is even more amazing because we know more details about Abraham. We don t know any details about how Enoch grew up or how Moses was raised, what his family taught him. But we do know more about Abraham. You know Abraham was born in, roughly, what is now Iraq, and Abraham s father and his whole family were moon worshipers. They were not worshipers of the one God that Abraham discovered. How do you think he discovered God? How do you think Abraham even knew God existed? Well, part of the answer is creation, but some of it is that other people had already discovered that God for themselves. Here s what I mean by that. In Abraham s story that starts in Genesis 12, you watch Abraham traveling all over the place. He traveled down into Egypt. He went into the land of the Philistines. He went all over the land of Canaan, and in all those travels he only met one other person who worshiped the most high God, and that was -- some of you know -- the king of Salem, Melchizedek. That was the only other person Abraham met who worshiped the same God he did, 4
but -- here s a big old but for you -- everybody Abraham ran into knew about that one God. Very significant. The Philistines knew about Him. The Egyptians knew about Him. The Canaanites knew about Him. Abraham s family up in Iraq knew about Him. They knew about Him, they just didn t worship Him. You see? And that is what Paul is talking about in Romans 1:21. Listen to this. Yes they knew God but they would not worship Him as God. The problem wasn t that people before the Bible was written didn t know God existed. They knew. It s just for the most part they did not worship Him and they did not follow Him. They knew God, but they would not worship Him as God or give Him thanks, and they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result their minds became dark and confused. Did you know a lot of people have an understanding of religion and religious history that there was sort of a resolution of belief in God and that originally everybody in the world, all the people were nature worshipers and ancestor worshipers, and gradually they moved up to polytheism, the worship of many gods, and finally they developed to the point of believing in one God. But recent research among anthropologists, especially at Baylor University, is finding that evidence that the belief in one God actually goes back to the beginnings of human history. It actually worked in a completely different way than that. Early on there was a belief in one God, but it degenerated into things like nature worship, ancestor worship and worshiping a huge pantheon of many gods, and that s the way Paul presents it here. They knew God from the beginning, but didn t worship Him as God. Their foolish hearts were dark and they began to worship created things rather than the Creator. It says that s when their hearts were darkened. What is meant by your heart? That s a word that comes up in the Bible a whole lot. Your heart. Here s the simplest way I know to explain it. Your heart is the seat of your emotions. That s where your feelings are and your heart is at least one part of you that can allow you to connect with God. Your heart is the place that was made for the Holy Spirit to dwell in. If the Holy Spirit s not dwelling there, your heart s going to be empty and it s going to be full of darkness. But if you do invite the Holy Spirit there and you listen to Him and your spiritual life grows, your life is increasingly filled with light. So it s when people suppress the ideas of God, when they don t want anything to do with Him, that s when their heart gets darkened. That kind of brings me to a question I want to ask you, and this is something I know you ve all heard. This is a question I know you ve all heard and you probably wondered about. How can God judge people who ve never heard the gospel? Is that really fair? How can God judge a person who lives in some land where there are no churches, there are no Bibles available? How can God judge them? Well, I hope in light of what I ve said so far that you ve got a clue 5
already. People who don t yet have a Bible are in some ways like people who lived before the time of Moses when there was no Scripture. They have access to the knowledge of God. They may have not done much with it, but the Scripture says they know about God. They know that He s there. They know that He expects something from them, but they re not quite sure what that is, and that s why Paul says that everybody is accountable to God in some way or another. Now here s what the Scripture also teaches. We don t all have the same amount of knowledge. A whole lot more has been revealed to you because you spent time in church and you live in a place where information about God is readily available, and most people have ten or twelve Bibles at the house, and if you don t have one, there re people who ll give you one for free. Some of us have a lot more opportunity than others to know God, but everybody has some opportunity. Do you know what Jesus said about that? I want you to listen to His words from Luke 12. Luke 12:47-48, A servant who knows what the master wants but isn t prepared. Now the servant who knows what his master wants, that d be you and me. That s those of us who have a Bible. A servant who knows what the master wants but isn t prepared and doesn t carry out those instructions will be severely punished, but someone who does not know and then does something wrong will be punished only lightly. I want you to pay attention to that. It didn t say those who don t know won t be punished or that they re not accountable. It says they ll be punished in a lighter way. That s important to pay attention to. When someone has been given much, much will be required in return, and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required. How much knowledge of God do you have? How much knowledge of God does the person in China have, a person in Afghanistan have? How much knowledge of God does a person in Venezuela have? Well, it varies from place to place. But I want to say one thing that may surprise you but yet is totally true. Do you know that virtually everybody in our world today, even those two billion people who don t have a full explanation of the gospel yet, even those people -- listen, for the most part, they have more revealed knowledge about God than Abraham had when he set out to follow God. Abraham knew almost nothing other than there is this one God. I don t even know what His name is because that had not yet been revealed and I feel Him calling me. I sense His presence when I look around me in the world and He s calling me and I hear Him saying to me, Follow, follow, follow. Abraham set out and followed, and the more he followed, the more he found, and the more he found of God, the more he had to share with the rest of us. I m saying almost everybody has almost as much as Abraham. Look at what Abraham did with the little that he had. 6
That sheds some light on a false teaching that I want to expose. There s an idea out there. Maybe you ve heard this -- maybe you ve thought this. It s this idea that says people in non-christian lands are living in complete ignorance of God. That is, if they re living in a place where there aren t a lot of churches and Bibles, they are living in complete ignorance of God, a whole bunch of them are living in complete ignorance of God, and because they re living in complete ignorance of God, then they re not accountable to God. They re sort of like babies or mentally handicapped people. God s going to just automatically excuse one of them because, after all, they don t know any better. Well, there is a little bit of truth to that. Sure enough as Jesus said, The more you re given, the more is expected. But that s really not a very accurate way of looking at those people to think that, Okay, they know absolutely nothing about God so they re totally excused. Well, if that s the case we d be doing them a disservice to go tell them about Christ, wouldn t we? I mean, because if they re totally living in this blissful ignorance, and they re going to go to Heaven anyway, if we go tell them about Jesus, they might reject Him and then they d go to Hell. I read about this one village chief who met a missionary for the first time. A missionary came to his village to tell him about Jesus. He explained something like I just explained to you and said, Now that you know, now you re accountable. And the chief said, You mean -- am I understanding this right? Before you got here we were ignorant and so we were automatically going to Heaven. Now some of us might reject what you say and now we re going to Hell? Why did you come? We d have been better off if you hadn t. Well if it worked that way, they would be better off. Only that s really not the way it works. Here s the way it really works. In every culture there s a certain amount of knowledge about God. Now that doesn t mean every single individual knows it, but there s a certain amount there for them to get started with. So what s the purpose of missions? Why would we want to send a missionary to a faraway place? Ultimately you send missionaries to faraway places for the same reason you send missionaries across North America. You start churches in faraway places for the same reason you start churches here. Do you know what that is? Because no matter where you go, there are people who know very little about God and what He wants from them, and there are people who have very false ideas of what God is like, and those false ideas are kind of a barrier to them. They need as much light as possible. I mean, every time I preach a sermon, every time I have a conversation with a person about their relationship with God, I m trying to give them as much to work with as possible, because the more you have to work with, the better decisions you can make. The more we can reveal to people here and everywhere else about God, the more likely it is that they ll understand, that ll it get through. But there are people on your street who really 7
don t know enough about God to really have a relationship with Him. They may believe in Him but they don t know how to find Him, and that s where mission work comes in -- local missions and foreign missions. Do you know what you really do in any kind of ministry? You take what God has revealed to you and you share it with other people. I m constantly sharing with other people what God has revealed to me. But do you know what else I m constantly doing? I m constantly looking for other people that can do the same for me. I m constantly looking for somebody who s got a better prayer life than I do because I want to know how they are doing it. What techniques are you using? How do you pray? I want to learn from that because it will help me, and I ll listen to anybody who s connecting with Him, no matter what church they re from. I can learn something from them. I m also constantly looking for anybody who has discovered an insight on God that I ve not yet seen, because I realize I don t know it all, and if anybody knows something about God and how to relate to Him that I have not yet seen, I want to hear it. So we share with one another. Mission work, ministry work, here, Oklahoma or Okinawa -- it s about sharing with others what God has given you. But I want to give you a big caution that you re not expecting. There are plenty of people in churches who don t have any business sharing with others what they have of God because there are plenty of people in churches whose hearts are filled not with the Holy Spirit, but with things like resentment, cynicism, sarcasm, and just a really sick outlook on life. If that s what you ve got, don t go on the mission trip to Mexico this year. Don t go to China. They don t need that! They ve got enough of that already. I m saying, it s only when you and I are really connecting with God and He s really transforming us, that s when we ve got something to share with the person down the street and the person on the other side of the world. Otherwise we re doing them a disservice to go and mess with them. Listen to what Jesus said about that. Matthew 23:15. He was talking to a group of religious people who supposedly had all the answers, answers that nobody else had, but they were full of hypocrisy. They were full of greed, jealousy and all this kind of stuff. Listen to what He said. This is Matthew 23:15, Hypocrites, you cross land and sea to make one convert and then you turn that person into twice the child of Hell that you yourselves are. Boy, didn t Jesus tell it the way it was? He s not saying, Don t go across the sea and do mission work. He s saying, You better do your work right here first. Then you ve got something to share. Then you can share with others what God has done for you and then you correct false ideas of God. Because there are false of ideas of God, but remember, remember what I talked about last Sunday. The folks in Afghanistan are not the only people with false ideas about God. There are people right here 8
in this building who have false ideas of God, who have distorted impressions of what He s like. Just a quick example, much of the world has heard the idea that God is the Father. Even the Greek philosophers talked about that before Jesus came along. God is like the Father of the universe. Of course, but what kind of Father is He? Well, if you had an abusive father, what conclusion are you likely to draw about what God is like? Or even if you had a mother who just abandoned you, she was totally absent from your life. How is that likely to distort your understanding of who God is? You re likely to feel that He s distant and wonder if He s even there, because your mother wasn t there. I m saying, everybody s got false ideas of God that need to be corrected. Jesus came to correct those. Colossians 1, He s the image of the Invisible God. He came to show you that God the Father is one who loves you enough that He knows how many hairs are on your head. He s a Father who wants to forgive you. He s a Father who wants to communicate with you in a very close way every single day. That s the God that Jesus came to represent. Jesus came on a mission trip to this planet and He said, That which I have seen with My Father, I ve come to share with you. The question is, have you received what Jesus came to share? Have you begun developing the relationship with God that Jesus said was possible? That is what you can begin doing today. Your sins can be forgiven. If your life s a mess, He can start cleaning it up today. That God loves you and that God wants to change your life starting now. 9