Cannonball

I've been meaning to write this post for awhile, but never got around to it. A couple months ago I heard a really great sermon at my church and it kind of correlated with a lot of things God has been teaching me over the past several years.

The sermon was about the glory of God and the pastor started out with a quote by A.W. Tozer: "the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is that of God." Then he mentioned how people have tried to understand God and tried to figure out which characteristic of God are the most important. Does God's love trump everything else? or his grace? or his holiness? What about his justice and wrath- how does that fit in? In an effort to understand God, we may end up putting him in a box. When we try to make God into who we want him to be, we make him an idol- and we are truly worshipping ourselves!

What it all comes down to is this: We can't try to make God who we want Him to be... We must get to know who He is!

I didn't understand this for a long time. I think I was always trying to make God fit into my idea of God. I didn't accept reformed theology for a long time because it didn't fit in with what I knew of God. But the more Bible verses I read and the more I get to know who God really is, I find that my ideas about him were so wrong! We can't comprehend him. We can't ever fully understand all the aspects of his nature. But we can know Him. We can learn a little bit more about Him each day. God wants to reveal himself to us, if only we will let him!

The pastor talked about how the weight of God's presence changes everything. Now that is God as a reality, not just a concept! When God enters your life, it should be like a cannonball- he displaces everything else out. God may have to ruin us so he can build us into something better. It may be hard to see what's going on during the ruining, but God's plans are so much greater than what we could imagine. We can't always see his purpose, but we can always draw closer to Him. As we get to know Him better, we may realize we had so many misperceptions- and that the actual God is so much more amazing than the one we created!