Sometimes it seems that one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of the Christian life is knowing God’s will. How can we recognize God’s way? And what should we do when God is silent?

<p>Sometimes it seems that one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of the Christian life is knowing God’s will. How can we recognize God’s way? And what should we do when God is silent?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Pikeville SDA Church

Delighting in the Almighty

Michael Dant

1. The Great Cosmic Equation

So I am so thankful for the opportunity to share with you guys this morning and also this afternoon and next Sabbath we're going to be continuing our seminar.

We are going to be embarking on a 2 weekend seminar entitled Delighting in the Almighty, a practical guide to primitive godliness.

And I hope that you can make it to all the presentations.

This afternoon we're going to be starting at 1.30 or so after the potluck and then next Sabbath we'll be having the church service again and then the afternoon presentation as well.

If you come in the afternoon, I have a workbook for you.

If you just can't make it for some reason And if you really try hard, you might be able to talk me into giving you a free workbook anyway.

I hope that if you have not planned to stay for the potluck, that you plan to stay anyway, even if you didn't bring any food.

And then right after the potluck, We're going to come back over and share together.

And I want to talk this afternoon about how we can enjoy God.

I mean, when you think about it, as a Christian, shouldn't that be 1 of the most important questions that we ask ourselves?

So that's what we're gonna be doing this afternoon.

Let's begin with the word of prayer before we get started here.

Heavenly Father God thank you so much for the privilege that we have of being here with you.

Thank you, Heavenly Father, that you are in this place, that you are filling this place with your Holy Spirit.

We plead for you to come in to our hearts and to our minds.

We need you to teach us in our mind and the knowledge that we have but we also need you to teach our hearts to long after you.

We pray for these blessings and we thank you for them in Jesus' name.

You know, there's a lot of things about the Christian life that don't seem to make a lot of sense on the surface.

Have you ever wondered, for example, questions like this, Why must we ask God for his blessings?

Doesn't God want to eagerly lavish his goodness upon us?

Why should we have to ask him for blessings?

Doesn't God know their needs better than we do?

Doesn't God love them more than we possibly can?

Why should we have to intercede for others?

Here of course is the proverbial, why do bad things happen to good people?

All of these questions are important for us to answer in order for us to understand God better and how the Christian life works.

And so I would like to explore an aspect of the Great Controversy that can help us understand these questions and many other questions that we find in the Christian life.

The Great Controversy is a wonderful blessing.

It is so great to be able to understand what's happening, how Lucifer fell, how God is doing everything he can to heal the breach that he made in the universe.

And understanding that fact helps us to understand so much about the Bible.

So this morning I would like to concentrate on 1 little aspect of the Great Controversy, an aspect that I like to call the Great Cosmic Equation.

You know, in order to understand the Great Cosmic Equation better, we have to first understand or recognize that there is an astonishing paradox in the universe in which we live.

The almighty God of the universe, the King of Eternity, does not always get what he wants.

God does not always get what He wants, right?

If God got what He wanted, there would be no sorrow, suffering, and pain.

If God got what He wanted, everybody would be overflowing with love and joy and peace, filled with the Holy Spirit and saved for eternity.

If God got what he wanted, the earth would be like, well, like heaven, right?

But as we look around in the world that we live, we can see that God does not always get what he wants.

In fact, sometimes it seems like he seldom does.

In a recent year in the United States, there were 15, 696 cases of murder.

There were 90, 185 cases of reported rape and 327, 374 burglaries.

My friends, we can have confidence that none of these tragic incidences were God's will.

In fact, during that exact same year in heaven, there were no murders, no rapes, and no burglaries.

The staggering reality of the world in which we live is that the Almighty God does not always or even often get His way.

Instead, God cries out things like this, what more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it.

Why when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?

Can't you just see in this passage the Almighty God say what more can I do?

How does an almighty God not get what he wants?

Who or what stands in God's way and says, no you can't have that?

Obviously nobody and nothing can get in God's way.

Why would he refuse to lavish his goodness on everyone?

Well, the answer comes back, of course, to our free will.

It's a wonderful blessing, but God will never force us to receive any of his blessings.

God will never force his goodness upon us.

Even if it is good and He knows it, God will not violate our free will no matter how good His will is.

So, this disparity between what God wants and what God gets, I like to call the great cosmic equation.

In other words, there is some kind of formula, unseen complex formula in our world that determines what God gets to do versus what he wants to do.

A lot of times we don't understand why God does the things he does.

A lot of times we don't understand why he doesn't act when we think he should.

Somehow God has taken our free will, our collective free will, and our individual free will, and he decides what he can do and stay within the bounds of that free will.

And you can believe that the devil is always watching his toe.

And that toe better never cross that line because if it does he's going to cry foul.

And yet God will never, has never crossed that will, that line, that boundary that is created by our free will, our freedom of choice.

So the Great Cosmic equation is much too complex for us to understand.

It's invisible, but there is some basic concepts about the Great Cosmic Equation that we can understand.

It's more like this, in a very simplistic terms, this is what it would look like.

2. How Can I Enjoy God?

On October 14, 1989, Dick Hoyt ran 26.2 miles.

He swam 2.4 miles, and he bicycled 112 miles to complete the Hawaiian Ironman triathlon competition.

And now, for most of us, that would be an incredible feat.

But what really made this amazing was that Dick did it with his 126-pound son in tow.

His son, Rick, was born with spastic quadriplegia and cerebral palsy.

For the first 11 years, Rick was not able to communicate with the world outside of himself.

At the age of 11, his parents took him to Tufts University in Boston and they invented a computer program for him, which of course is my favorite part of the story, a computer program that allowed him to communicate for the first time.

It would show letters on the screen and whenever the next letter he was building in a sentence came along, he would bump his head against the sensor and it would lock that letter in and then he would go to the next letter.

At the age of 15, Rick asked his dad if they could run together in a charity run for an injured lacrosse player and his dad said, well, maybe, I don't know.

His dad described himself as portly at that time and so he said we can try but I don't know if we'll be able to succeed or not.

They ran the entire 5 mile race together.

And afterwards, Rick carefully spelled out a sentence that changed his father's life.

He said, Dad, when I'm running, it feels like I'm not handicapped anymore.

Can you imagine the effect that statement had on his dad?

From that time on, his dad began to look for opportunities to give him that same experience, That same feeling.

In fact, they have run over a thousand races together since that time.

Why does he put himself through all of that training, all of that time, all that effort, all that pain, all that expense, why does he do it?

He does it to see the smile on his son's face.

Such love is 1 of the most powerful forces in all of the world.

It was love like that that allowed Jacob to work for Rachel, remember that?

7 long years, and what does the Bible record?

The Bible says, they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.

Love transforms the should do or the must do into the Get to.

Yes, God has commanded us to do these things, and we should do them.

But, what does He want us to, how does He want us to obey?

No wonder then that God wants us to love Him, right?

All your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, with all your strength.

And this is why, because love transforms our whole experience.

No wonder then that the first fruit of the Spirit is love and the second fruit is joy.

No wonder then that this is 1 of the most important questions that you and I as Christians can ask ourselves.

How can I love Him and enjoy Him to the fullest?

My friends, for the first 30 years after my baptism I did not have that experience.

It took me 30 years after my baptism to fall in love with Jesus.

And it was because I had a fundamental misunderstanding of some basic aspects of the Christian life and how they worked.

So we're going to look a little bit at how that works this afternoon.

If Christ be in us the hope of glory, we shall discover such matchless charms in him that the soul will be enamored.

But a profession without that deep love is what?

Mere talk, dry formality, and heavy drudgery.

The difference, the transformational difference that love brings?

My friends, the devil would have us believe that the Christian life is a self-denying, self-sacrificing drudgery.

The Christian life is 1 of self-denying, self-sacrificing joy.

But it is a love relationship that makes it joyful, and that's what we need.

If we love Jesus, we shall love to live for him, to present our thank offerings to him, to labor for him, the very labor will be light.

For his sake we shall covet pain and toil and sacrifice.

We shall sympathize with his longing for the salvation of men.

We shall feel the same tender craving for souls that he has felt.

If we love Jesus, if we only love Jesus, You know, this love that God asks us to have for him is not a common love.

It is a soul-pervading, self-sacrificing, all-or-nothing love in which Jesus is the core around which our whole life revolves.

I, as you might imagine from a computer background, I'm not about this whole touchy-feely thing.

I'm not talking about a constant feeling of ecstasy in terms of loving God.

In fact, 1 of my favorite definitions for joy is a calm delight.

Wouldn't you just love to have a calm delight in the Almighty God all the time, no matter what the circumstances?

Okay, so yes, we do want that, but now, Where does that love come from?

You know what's interesting about this command to love God with all of our heart and mind and soul and strength?

What's interesting about this command is that it is a command that we cannot possibly obey.

We don't have any knob in our life like a burner on a stove that we can turn up our love for God.

So how do we get this love for God, this passionate love for God?

Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

Now we have a little bit of a problem because here we have God demanding that we love Him with all of our heart and mind and soul and strength, longing that we will love Him with all of our heart and mind and soul and strength, and He's the source of that love.

My love for God for most of my life was tepid at best.

Even though I was a fourth generation Seventh-day Adventist, even though I grew up in a good Seventh-day Adventist Christian home, even though I had wonderful church families and good Christian schools, my love for God never blossomed.

1 of the reasons why I know that is because I never really enjoyed prayer.

You know, prayer is talking to Jesus as a friend.

It's talking to our Almighty Father in Heaven.

I found it difficult to pray for any length of time.

3. Enjoying God to the Fullest

Thank you so much again, Heavenly Father, that we have the privilege of being taught by you.

Thank you that you are our teacher today, that you are working hard on each 1 of our hearts to convict us, to convert us, to revive us and reform us.

The key to love is the surrender of self.

If I want to love God with all of my heart and mind and soul and strength, I must give God all of my heart and mind and soul and strength.

Okay, that sounds good in theory, but I want to bring this down to a very practical level.

How does that work in practical day-to-day terms?

In order to answer that question, I would like to ask you a question.

A question I once heard from the pulpit, and when I heard this question at first, I said, oh, that's easy.

But you know, the more I thought about this question, the more I realized it wasn't as easy as I thought it was.

In fact, I recognized I had no answer for it.

If salvation is a free gift of God and does not come by works, then why does God require obedience?

We know very clearly that we are saved by what?

Obedience is not about earning, deserving, or meriting salvation.

And you know, a lot of people when they look at this question, the first response is, well, that's easy.

It's a love response for the salvation we've already received, right?

That is an excellent answer, just not to this question.

You see, that answers the question, what is my motivation for obeying?

And yes, love is the only true motivation for obeying God.

But that's not what this question is asking.

This question is asking why should we obey?

In other words, what is the purpose of obedience?

If it's not for deserving, meriting salvation, which we know it's not for that, Then what is it for?

You know, we as Seventh-day Adventists have a love-hate relationship with obedience.

And well, we should, because legalism tries to earn something that has already been freely given, and in the process of trying to earn it, we lose out on it entirely.

So it's an insidious evil that we must constantly fight against.

And on the other hand, we also know that we must obey God.

In fact, We still keep all 10 of the 10 Commandments.

The problem comes when somebody begins to obey God too carefully.

He won't even eat, you know, fill in the blank.

That gal, she needs to get a life, she doesn't even watch, fill in the blank.

When a person starts to obey God too carefully, we start getting a little bit nervous.

My friends, is it legalism to obey God as carefully as you can.

You know, you don't have to be a theologian to recognize that the Bible is a very demanding book.

You can hardly read a page of scripture without being commanded to do 1 thing after the other.

Here, let me give you some examples, just in case you hadn't noticed.

Love your enemies, be content with your wages, endure hardship, be patient toward all people, flee hurtful lusts, be glad in persecution, do all to the glory of God, give cheerfully, keep yourself pure, deny yourself, page after page after page, command after command after command.

A lot of times we think of the Old Testament as being the demanding part of Scripture, but these are all New Testament commands.

In fact, I can show you a website that has 1, 050 New Testament commands.

If salvation is a free gift of God, it does not come by works, which we know is true, then why does God require obedience?

Obviously, obedience is important to God.

And to find out the answer to this question, perhaps 1 of the best places to go is to the ancient people of Israel, perhaps 1 of the most commanded people in all of history.

Here is a group of people that God led out of slavery, and the first thing he does is takes him to Mount Sinai and he gives him the 10 Commandments.

He loads on the sanctuary services with all of its rites and rituals.

He piles on all the Levitical do's and don'ts that fill up the books of Numbers and Leviticus and make it difficult to read even today.

If obedience is not about earning, deserving, or meriting salvation, then what is it for?

Does God just enjoy bossing people around?

Is that what the purpose of obedience is?

God just demanding, I want you to do this and I said it so you do it?

No, obviously God has a good reason for everything He's done.

And the answer of course is that God did not do it to His people, He did it, what?

Bible says all these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the Lord your God.

I would encourage you to read Deuteronomy 28 sometime.

The first half of the chapter is all about the blessings that God is longing to bestow on His people.

And the second half of the chapter 28 is about the curses that come when we don't obey Him.

Let me give you kind of a bird's eye view of some of these blessings.

You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.

The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land, and the young of your livestock.

Your basket and your needing trough will be blessed.

You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.

The Lord will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you.

They will come at you from 1 direction, but flee from you in 7.

Series

Delighting in the Almighty

8. Black, White, Gray and Vinegar

Transcript

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