Did you get a kick out of Bill? I hope so. The fact is, many of us have been Bill before. When life is going well and according to plan, then God enters and seems to make you uncomfortable – God becomes “meddling.” But when times are hard and things “hurt” we want compassion. It seems often times, we want God to work according to our own timelines and our own fashions. Yet what we see in Scripture is that God is who He is and we are subject to Him, not the other way around.
As men, we desperately need to know who God is and what He is like, not what we want Him to be. In a day when all “truth” is being cast off as oppressive and the fashion is to form your own reality – we need a stable God who we can rely on. We need his story to liberate us from ourselves, our culture, and our sin. We need the Gospel not only of redemption, but of Truth, of Freedom so that we can truly enjoy God and bring the Light of who He is into a dark and soiled world.
Such truth impacts how we live. Dever basically asks us the question early on, “how important is truth to you?” On page 58 he asks “How relevant are your own beliefs to your daily life? When you last sat in church, how much did you examine the words of the prayers…the songs…. Does it really matter to you if what you said or sang in church was true?
Ultimately at the heart of this chapter is that a healthy church not only needs expositional preaching, it needs preaching that is in line with what the Bible actually tells us about God. The whole Bible, 66 books in their entirety are really about God. With multiple authors, spanning over thousands of years, one story remains central, God exists, He Creates, He loves His creation, He interacts with that creation, He is faithful to His promises, He is Holy, separate and Sovereign over creation, and He is loving enough to provide for His creation. God is the great hero of the Bible, and His Son Jesus Christ bridges the gap between our sin and His holiness for us to be able to experience Him. Amazing. This God is the one that we worship, the one that we need a greater and greater experience of so that we can live in a greater unity with Him appreciating and loving Him back for all that He has already done for us in Jesus Christ.
Questions to reflect on and possibly answer:
How do you respond God’s initiation in Creation and Salvation?
How do you feel? Think? React?
Have you tried to make attempts to please God to earn His favor? How so?
Did this help – or did you just find yourself more frustrated?
Do you truly rely on Jesus’ death as payment for your sin?
How do you respond to a faithful God? What do you think would happen if God was unfaithful? What about if He was as faithful as you are in your life?
How did your group interact with this chapter?
