Does God want us to know him?

Jeremiah 31: 31 – 35

Rev Peter R Green, Sunday 10 Feb, 2008

WE WILL never discover God unless he chooses to reveal himself. This is a matter in which he is in charge. It is less a matter of finding God than it is of being found by him.

Right now, review your mental images of what it is like to become involved with God. Understand your viewpoint. Because what we picture in our minds is what we act on.

It’s like arranging to meet a good friend, perhaps someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Before you meet, you anticipate what that meeting might be like. If you are friends who talk about certain things, you will start planning the things you might talk about today. If it's someone you are on hugging terms with, you think about that hug.

This is natural human behaviour.

But if you think that something is going to happen, and it becomes clear that it won't go that way, then you have to adjust your mind to reflect that reality.

Sadly, many people find they can’t adjust their thinking when it comes to God.

Here are a few ideas people might have about getting to know God.

Have you ever looked for God, but couldn’t find him, and wondered if he really exists?

I’m sure many of us have had that experience. When you’re stressed, when you’re worried, when you need support, and can’t find much support around — unless God comes to your aid — that’s when it happens.

A number of years ago I had a dreadful day when I felt I couldn’t go on, and all day, God seemed not to be there, seemed unconcerned.

That evening someone who rarely came to our place turned up at the doorstep with a bottle of wine and said, “I thought you might need to be encouraged today, and know that God is concerned for you.”

It was one of those saving moments of life. God did care!

If so many people who weren’t looking for God have come to know him, maybe he is extremely findable!

But, of course, many people still refuse to believe that God can be found. For some, it is a matter of having had church attendance forced on them when maybe even family and friends don’t go, for some it might just be that church doesn’t fit in with their culture.

Think of the contrast between, say, a traditional Anglican Prayer Book service and a traditional Australian Sunday barbecue! Unless you had been trained in Prayer Booki from an early age, it’s a foreign language! And even our more relaxed Baptist services are pretty hard going for some people.

Even the way we talk can make a difference.

I was on a train once and thanked a chap who had been helpful to myself and other passengers. He said, “You use your voice professionally. Are you a teacher or a public speaker of some kind?”

I told him I am a preacher, and he said, “Your way of speaking gave it away.”

And that happens. My speech, my way of dress, my behaviour, my interests all betray me as someone different from the Australian cultural norm. My educational background gives me a different outlook from the average Australian. Demographers would classify me as one of the Socially Aware group, and that puts me out of spet even with the majority of Baptists!

We have to take very seriously the cultural factors which turn people away from the churches where they could hear the gospel! If Paul was prepared to become all things to all people so that by all means he might win some, can we do any less?

But we are talking about God revealing himself to us. Have you ever had an experience where it seemed to you that God was communicating himself to you, or was very near?

I was first challenged by this possibility when I heard the story of one of our school scripture teachers, Rev “Dickie” Barton. He had been in the Army in the First World War, and he told us how he was reading his Bible and praying in the trenches one morning. Suddenly he said it was almost like a voice commanding him, “Get down!”

  He dropped to the ground and almost at the same time, a bullet slammed into the trench timbers where he had just been standing.

  He told us, “God can speak to you, and he will if you listen!”

When the church faced a financial crisis related to an inappropriate missionary giving program, God spoke:

“Acts 1: 8.”

It says

When the Holy Spirit comes on you, you shall receive power and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and to the farthest ends of the earth.

This verse says that there are priorities in missions. You start where you are with what you have, and you move outwards as God directs.

It was an answer which helped put our finances back on track.

Have you ever had an experience like that, where it seemed that an answer to a troubling question came “from nowhere”?

Or have you ever experienced a rebuke from God? He spoke to me once about praying for someone else to change, when my motive was just so that I would not find that person so difficult to work alongside.

My point is that God wants to communicate with us. He loves to communicate with us.

In Jeremiah, we read of a plan that God put in place right from the beginning. He wants people to know him personally. God is supremely about relationship, because God is love, and you can’t have love without relationship.

“I will put my law in their minds
  and write it on their hearts.
 I will be their God,
  and they will be my people.

 ^31:34 No longer will a man teach his neighbour,
  or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’|
 because they will all know me,
  from the least of them to the greatest,”
    declares the LORD.

There are many other similar passages.

Look at what this passage tells us about God’s attitude to us!

He wants us not just to follow rules because they are there, not just to go through the motions, but to share the desires and the thoughts of God himself. He wants us to be his very own people. He wants us to know himself so intimately that we won’t need to ask other people what God is like, because we will all know him ourselves.

Are God’s messages likely always to be encouraging and uplifting? Can you think of a situation where they might not be?

I like the way the Pentecostals encourage prophecy, but so often what passes for prophecy appears so banal and so mindlessly comforting that I wonder what spirit it really came from. I have seen real prophecy and it is scary even when you are out of its firing line, because these are the words of God.

Read Ezekiel 7:23ff:

“Prepare chains, because the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of violence. ²⁴ I will bring the most wicked of the nations to take possession of their houses; I will put an end to the pride of the mighty, and their sanctuaries will be desecrated. ²⁵ When terror comes, they will seek peace, but there will be none. ²⁶ Calamity upon calamity will come, and rumor upon rumour. They will try to get a vision from the prophet; the teaching of the law by the priest will be lost, as will the counsel of the elders. ²⁷ The king will mourn, the prince will be clothed with despair, and the hands of the people of the land will tremble. I will deal with them according to their conduct, and by their own standards I will judge them. Then they will know that I am the LORD.”

If God can say that kind of thing to his people, what does it tell us about him?

This is not a God who pats people on the head and says, “There, there, it will be alright.”

Our God is a consuming fire for those who constantly reject his love. So when his people need correction and rebuke, you can hardly imagine him saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it!” Yet that is pretty much what you hear in some churches where prophecy is encouraged.

There is a book with the title, Nice Guys Wreck Lives. There is another with the title, Caring Enough to Confront.

They are books I probably should have read many years ago. Being nice but spineless means that you will let people go about being nasty and never pull them up. Refusing to confront means that you let people go to hell their own way. That’s not caring.

Our God is a passionate God. Our God cares enough to confront. Our God is a loving God, though he is not always a nice God. He wants the best for us, and, if it takes an occasional whack to pull us into line, he will do it.

Our God is a God of love.

But there is another passage I want to leave with you all today. It’s one of my favourites. It says,

^{Romans 5:8} God demonstrates his love to us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Look at it.

^{Romans 5:8} God demonstrates his love to us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

What does God know about us?

Doesn’t it say that he knows we are sinners? God does not want anyone to perish; as we read in John 3:16,

God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Despite our sin, despite our rebellion, God has reached out to us. He knows us, but he doesn’t let that stop him.

Isn’t that the supreme demonstration of his love? Any religion can tell you that God is creator. Any religion can tell you about his omnipresence, his omniscience, his omnipotency. He is everywhere, he knows everything, he has the power to do everything. But only the Gospel tells you in clear terms about his never–ending love for sinners.

And we know about that love for sinners because of a very simple test:

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. This is how God commends his love to us. He demonstrates it. He appeals to us to take his love seriously and to pay attention to its quality.

Paul sets it out very clearly,

 ^{ROM 5:6} You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die.

Perhaps you have seen something like this when some young person is on trial for a dreadful crime, a murder, embezzlement and fraud, whatever it might be. Everyone is saying, “Throw the book at him!” But one person, perhaps his mother, perhaps his wife or girlfriend, is saying, “I know how bad the crime is, and I don’t in any way condone it, but, whatever he has done, I love him and I will stick by him whatever the outcome!”

That’s the kind of love we are talking about. A love which says, “I know all about what you have done, but I still love you, and I am still on your side, and I will give everything so that you can live and not die.”

Paul contrasts this with our own attitudes. You get righteous people — people who keep the rules and make the right choices. But that is rarely enough to persuade anyone to walk to the gallows in that person’s place. Occasionally you will find someone who is genuinely good — good hearted, kind, someone who does what is right because he or she knows that doing wrong will hurt you. For a person like that, you will occasionally find someone who will take the full blast of the executioner’s bullet. But what about the pickpocket on the street? What about the prostitute in the alley, or the drunk in the gutter? What about the corporate criminal and the wife–beater and even the paedophile?

Such people may disgust and horrify us. But Christ died for them. God has reached out to them. And God has reached out to you and me, for no other reason than that he chooses to love us.

Some religions say that God is so remote that he has no interest in our day–to–day lives. Some others say that he is so close that he is equally part of everything, both the good and the bad, and has no concern about changing anything at all. A few even tell you there is no God, or if there is a God we can know nothing about him.

But there is one God who reveals himself. There is one God who speaks to us. There is one God who has given us his written word. There is one God who has revealed himself in a Son, in Jesus the Lord.

He says,

“I will put my law in their minds
  and write it on their hearts.
 I will be their God,
  and they will be my people.

  ^31:34 No longer will a man teach his neighbour,
  or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’
 because they will all know me,
  from the least of them to the greatest,”
    declares the LORD.

This is the God who in these latter days has spoken to us in a Son — revealed himself in human form, so that we can grasp his reality and know him.

Over the next few weeks, we will get to know this God far better.

But you can know him right now — if you repent and turn to him in faith.

Let’s pray...  AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)