The Real God - Seeking God, Part 1

What comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. Now pause for just a moment.

Think about that. What comes into your mind, your mental picture of God, is the most important thing about you. Did you know that how you think about God will determine every other aspect of your life? Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge is an international discipleship ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram. I'm Dave Druey, and in this program, Chip begins a new series called The Real God, how he longs for you to see him. Over the next several programs, he'll explore seven attributes of God's character that give us a fresh perspective on who he really is, as nature, the Bible, and Jesus reveal him. Getting an accurate view of God changes everything, but it takes some time and understanding, so I'm glad you're with us.

And if you miss a program along the way, an easy way to catch up is with the Chip Ingram app. Well, let's get started. Here's Chip with his message, Seeking God. There's a quote by A.W.

Tozer that changed the course of my life many, many years ago. What comes to your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. He'll go on to say, by a secret law of the soul, whatever your mental image is, you will gravitate toward it. How you view yourself, how you pray, how you relate to others, how you perceive the future. Every relationship, every decision will be rooted in how do you mentally perceive God.

And here's what you need to know. All of us are off. We're fallen people. You have a distorted picture of God. I have a distorted picture of God.

The question is how distorted. Your mental image of God is a montage, a montage of early experiences, family of origin issues, some religious training, an experiment that someone said this is what he's like, or a religious group, or difficult times, or pain, or a parent, or someone close to you that has died. All these different things over the years have brought you to today. And today, when you bow your head, or when you think about God, you have a picture. It's so unconscious. The reason I had you start is I wanted you. For some of you, you thought, I don't know what the picture is, right?

I'm guessing some of you bowed your head and go, well, he's God. I don't know that I really think about who I'm talking to. That, by the way, is a problem.

But it impacts everything. Let me give you some very quick examples from my life that might help connect the dots. I did not grow up as a Christian. I did not grow up in a church that taught the Bible. But I remember vividly thinking that my view of God, by the time I was about 16 or 17, was that he was like a cosmic cop, and there was some big powerful person in the sky somewhere that had a blue suit, and his arms are crossed, and a toe tapping, and he had a badge and a big club. And basically, if it was fun, it was wrong, and the whole goal was to catch me doing something wrong, which was not hard to do, and it was basically, you've messed up again, Ingram.

You've messed up again. So my view of God was longing to pray, and the song we sang about delight and beauty. That wasn't my God.

My God was, you don't measure up, and you need to get with the program. And then that got compounded because, despite a father that really loved me, he went through World War II. He lost his dad when he was 13.

He was a.50 caliber machine gunner. He spent time, Guam, Iwo Jima, saw all of his friends killed, became an alcoholic, very functioning, really cared about me, and in his hair, the, you didn't say, I love you, and no one hugged you, and the way you loved your son was you wanted him to be successful. So I was setting goals by the time I was nine years old. I had three jobs by the time I was 12.

I lent my money, $3,000, to my parents at 6% interest when I was 13 years old, and I collected. And by the time I was 12, I knew I wanted to do this in basketball, this in baseball, have a girlfriend that looked like this, get a scholarship, and get A's. And I worked like crazy because what I found is the only way you could please my dad was you had to succeed, and affirmation's not love, but it's the next best thing growing up. And no matter what I did, the bar always went up, the bar, so I got a God in the back of my mind because our parents, and we as parents and grandparents, we're impacting our kids and grandchildren with a view of God by who we are. And so I had a God, so I trusted Christ by God's grace, introduced to the Bible, and a group of athletes loved me and cared for me, and a bricklayer began to disciple me, but deep-seated was this God who was always waiting for you to mess up, and this God who no matter how much, so do you pray 15 minutes, 17, a half hour?

What if I'm praying a half hour and God wants 31 minutes? And then pretty soon the group I was with really was into Scripture memory, so is it a verse a day? Is it 100 verses? Is it 500 verses? What about a chapter? I know some guys that are memorizing books.

I don't have many books down. I became this neurotic, workaholic Christian trapped in a performance trap because that's my view of God. You know, I probably needed to go to like a 12-step Christian recovery program, you know? All that was rooted deeply in some family of origin issues growing up, and I didn't know. You know, when you grow up in a family you think is normal, right? So we're all dysfunctional.

It's just how much? And I don't think it's all bad. It's a fallen world. But then I get married and my wife begins to speak to some things and I realize down behind all of that, if down deep in your heart you don't view a God who apart from anything you've ever done looks at you and says, you are precious. I delight in you. Because of what Jesus has done, you are my son. You are my daughter. You are precious. I want to be with you.

I affirm you. If that's not your God, then you'll create all kind of different things to try and stay quote on His good side or perform. And so if you don't think God really likes you just for who you are and you don't like yourself for who you are, when your wife starts saying some things that she doesn't think is so good about who you are, I was very defensive. So, you know, some marriage counseling and some time where little by little by little a guy gave me a tiny book called The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W.

Tozer and I'll never forget. It's just thin little chapters. I've read, literally I've read a portion of that book for the last 35 years.

The first 10 or 15 years, a chapter a week. And I would read these little chapters on the goodness of God. It was like God finds holy pleasure in the happiness of His people. Tozer would write that what would happen if we could all but believe that we live under a friendly sky and that God, though exalted in majesty and power, is eager to be friends with us? He's cordial, kind, benevolent, loving, eager to share hearts. Those were like foreign thoughts.

For some, it's on the whole other end. You think God's, you know, like grandma. You know, all He wants to do is give you dessert all the time.

That's what my wife does. Sort of. In the sense of God's white, hot, unapproachable holiness. And so we have Christians that don't see that yes, God is pure and loving, but He is absolutely above. No, He's holy. He's a consuming fire that His commands are for our benefit, but you don't mess with a holy God.

You don't look at His commandments as options. You bow in reverence. You meet anyone in scripture that encounters God, they're face down. There's no casual, this isn't my buddy upstairs, this isn't, you know, pointing everything's okay and, you know, high-fiving Jesus and Jesus is my homeboy t-shirt. This isn't the God of jewelry and stickers on the back of cars.

This is the name that's too holy even to utter that the scribes and the Pharisees would just write the four letters of His name of Yahweh, wouldn't even pronounce it out loud and then go ceremony and wash before they would continue to copy the scriptures. So all of us are off, but the most important journey you'll ever have on your life that's never too late is to pause at certain seasons and say, God, I want to see you as you are. The real God, not the God that I've made up in my mind, not the God that's being passed around in Christian circles, the real God, the God of the Bible, how He longs for you to see Him.

That's what we're going to study. And the first session here is to ask the question, is your God too small? And if you'll open your notes, we're going to begin by some ground rules because if you don't get these ground rules, I will assure you, you will never see God accurately. There are three common mistakes that we make when we think about God. Three things that you have to know that are facts to know Him accurately.

And then there's one really, really big question that I can't answer for you, you have to answer for yourself. But to see God, the real God with 20-20 vision, and here's the difference, we are not here to learn more about God. There's a night and day difference between the knowledge about a person and the knowledge of a person.

I mean, you can take a movie star or dignitaries or, you know, the President of the United States, we know a lot about people. You can Wikipedia and know a lot about people like that. We're talking about a knowledge of them, a relationship, a heart knowledge, a connection from the heart, knowing God by way of intimate connection and relationship, not knowing facts about them, not simply ideas that float around in your mind, but a connection with Him. So three facts you need to know for this to happen is one is that God is not like you.

Shocking, isn't it? God is not like you. But our tendency is to take sort of the best that we can think of, the kindest person, the best person, the most holy person, and then somehow we blow it up by 10 or blow it up by 100 or blow it up by a million and think, well, God somehow, someway is a lot like a bigger, better, more pure, perfect vision of this. Here's what I want you to know.

It's not true. There is all created things, even the angels, and that is a category. And then there's another category, and that's God. Completely different category, completely other. That's the concept of the word holy. It means He's separate.

He's a cut above. He's not like us, but every religion and even we Bible followers, we want to make God like us because we want to manage Him. We want to control Him. Listen to what Isaiah would write when it comes to God because this is not a new problem. Isaiah 40, verse 25. To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like Him, says the Holy One.

Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these, who brings out their hosts by number, calling them all by name. By the greatness of His might and because He is strong in power, not one is missing. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, my cause is hidden from the Lord? It's disregarded by my God. Do you not know?

Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He doesn't grow faint or weary. His understanding is unsearchable or beyond what we can fathom. He's just completely different, but that's helpful. That's why when the Ten Commandments, you know, no other gods, no images, no pictures, nothing that can reduce Him, nothing that can get Him in a smaller box.

See, we've got a box and we want a God that we can know and feel comfortable with. It's the great lines by C.S. Lewis, you know, in the conversations where Aslan, and he says, you know, the little girl says, Aslan, are you tame? He says, no, I'm not tame. I'm loving and I'm compassionate, but I'm not tame. God's not tame.

He's not on call. He's the creator. We're the creatures. I put in your notes a great passage for me as Romans chapter 11. When the Apostle Paul was talking about the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man and the crescendo of that great book of Romans, he ends up with a doxology. Oh, the depth of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How he talks about, oh, the depth and the power and the richness of His wisdom and His knowledge.

It's beyond finding out. He says, who has known the mind of the Lord that they should be His counselor? No one. Who has ever first given to God that God would owe Him?

No one. And then he says this amazing thing, for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory.

Have you ever thought about that? Everything in all the world is from Him and through Him and to Him. And to Him be the glory or the weight. And so what I want you to know is that God is not like you. And He's not like me. And so there's this category, this awesomeness, this purity that we want to grasp.

The second is related to it. Left to ourselves, we tend to reduce God to manageable terms. I want a God that I can see, I want a God that I can control, I want a God that I can tame and manipulate. And that's not the God of the Bible. Every world religion, you know, the old totems, right? Or the moon or the stars or the image of a God is a lion or some animal and it was the strength of the bear. If you go to anthropology all over the world and you see what people worship, you get some concept whether it's a strength or some power in the moon or the stars and we take something and we get it where we can see it and we actually as human beings will bow down to things that our own hands create. And Isaiah would later reprove his people and say, you worship gods that you have made yourselves. They have ears that they can't hear, they have hands but they can't feel, they have feet and they can't walk. And he was contrasting them to the real God. But we all do that.

We just reduce him. Exodus 32, 1 to 6 is the first and most graphic story. Remember the story of when the people were delivered out of Egypt? And just try to not make it a Bible story and try and imagine what it would have been like. You know, for ten generations you've heard about this invisible God who made some promises to some people that lived a long time ago and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and some guy named Joseph and you've heard the stories passed on carefully but you're a slave and life is hard and I mean it's been 400 years and then this Moses guy shows up and then there's these wild things happening that happen to the Egyptians that don't happen to you and since you've lived there you know that every one of these plagues is an attack on one of the Egyptian gods. And so one by one that God, this God, this God, the hail God, and the last God was the Egyptians believed that Pharaoh was God and so his son would be the next God. And so the last plague was the first born children. And you didn't get it.

You know, what's his blood over the doorpost? Oh, it was a bunch of weird stuff and pretty soon it's the middle of the night and everyone's saying get out of here and get out of here now and here's gold and here's silver and take your kids and you know you and a couple million people and then there's this fire hovering over you and then there's this wall of water and you remember that night and the wall of water is up like 40, 50, 60 feet and it's dry land and it's like you know your kid's thinking you're going camping out and this is a weird experience and then the water comes back and I mean you know this is like you've seen power, power, power, power, right? And then you're 60 days in. You're just 60 days in and you know it doesn't feel quite like a camping trip anymore. And you're in the middle of nowhere in wilderness. Wilderness is like desert type and you know where are we going to get water, where are we going to get food, where are we going to live and you know it's 60 days and pretty soon Moses said because God said we're coming to this mountain, it's Mount Sinai and you get there and you know he disappears for a while and you know then it's like okay you know you guys are supposed to come out and you come out to the mountain and you purify yourself and just a bunch of weird stuff, what do you mean? Do you wash your clothes, don't have any sex for a couple days and then they mark off this boundary and if anyone crosses the boundary, you have to die and then you come out that morning, Exodus 19 by the way is where we're at and you come out that morning and everyone's standing and then pretty soon you hear this ram's horn.

I think it's louder. It's really, really sweet and part of you wants to listen, part of you is like oh. And then you hear a voice and it's God's voice and you tremble and the earth starts to shake and you're face down and you look up and smoke is billowing out and there's fire and you're going oh my gosh and you're just petrified and then Moses speaks and you hear his voice again and you're Moses, Moses, no more, you just talk to him, he can't take it and that's God and whew, right? This is a you are there moment and then after all of it, now get this and then Moses says that God, okay, I'm going to go up, he wants me to come and he's going to give me commands, you know what he wants? He wants to do a cutting, it's a covenant and because of your background, you understand a covenant has to do with blood.

A covenant has to do that we'll make a commitment to God that we're saying that we would die before we break the covenant and he's saying the same thing and he's going to give us the agreement of the covenant, what it is we're going to agree to, I'm going to go up and get that. Moses goes up and then we're people, right? Have you seen him? I don't know, when's he coming back?

I don't know. It's been going a long time. Kids are getting restless, this isn't a camping trip.

Is he coming back at all? Aaron, we need a God, I mean people are getting restless, it's getting a little uptight here, we need a solution. Okay, peer pressure is very powerful. Why don't you all take off an earring, bring it to me and he fashions a calf and they put a golden calf and from their Egyptian background, the bull, the calf, power, fertility, we'll call him Yahweh because we don't want to get in trouble, right? Syncretism, it always works. So we'll call it Yahweh and then tomorrow we'll bring your sacrifices and instead they brought their sacrifices and then they begin to express their worship in the King James' revelry. It's like a really hot weekend in Vegas. And you need to understand all the worship the ancient world built into all the fertility gods, it was sexuality in all kind of immoral ways. And God looks down and sees what's happening and says, Moses, we've got a problem. Now here's the question I want to ask you. How in the world could you have that kind of experience with God, see those kind of miracles, that kind of power, actually hear his voice, see the earth shake and then demand that you had to have something you could see?

I want to tell you, it's human nature. And before we get like, I don't know, as an early Christian, I remember reading through the Bible and stuff like this, I'm thinking, man, these people are nuts. Or the disciples, you know, like Jesus would heal someone and then they're uptight about not having bread. I was young and never read the Bible and I thought, man, I wish I was there.

I wouldn't have those kind of problems. I do have a confession I need to make, that so far it's sort of a sign of spiritual growth. I've never come home after a long day of work and say, honey, just stay right here. I put a little statue in the back room, I'm going to go pray to it.

I've never done that. Just want you to know, I've never worshiped. But I've worshiped a lot of idols that I've created in my head. Idols like success, family, kids, education, prosperity, money, comfort, self-fulfillment. See, we don't worship idols. They actually used God, made a picture, worshiped it in a way that they could actually get, quote, what they wanted in the way they thought that would satisfy them with total disregard for the real God.

And I'd like to suggest that we do the same thing. You've been listening to the first part of Chip's message, Seeking God, from his series, The Real God. He'll be back with his application, but before he is, let me give you a quick sketch of this series overall. In The Real God, Chip looks at seven key attributes of God's character and explains that none of them is ever diminished or overshadowed by the others, which means that God is 100% love, 100% just, and 100% merciful. Kind of mind-bending when you think about it that way, and why it becomes a lifelong adventure to get to know him for who he really is. A great way to learn how these attributes of God work together is to do this study with a small group of friends. So, for a limited time, the small group resources for The Real God are discounted, because we want to do everything we can to help you get a clear, accurate view of God. To place your order, or to get more information on The Real God, go to livingontheedge.org, tap Special Offers on the Chip Ingram app, or give us a call at 888-333-6003. Chip, as you think about how people are doing, I mean, we hear from hundreds and hundreds of people, why do you think this series, The Real God, is so important? Dave, I have to tell you, if someone said, I can only listen to one series at Living on the Edge, what would it be?

I would say it's this series. Everything, everything in our life rises and falls with our view of God. If we have a warped perception of God, then it warps our relationships, it warps our decisions, it warps everything. And we all have a warped perception of God. You know, some out of family background think he's, you know, like a bad cop whose arms is crossed, and other people think he's like Santa Claus, and every time they don't get what they want, and just if they don't believe hard enough and everything doesn't go their way, then God let them down. Having a high, accurate, holy view of God, where you grasp his power and his love and his compassion, is the key to cultivating a relationship that's deep and meaningful and authentic.

And so I invite the Living on the Edge family, and even invite you, as part of our family, to ask a friend. You have to listen to this series, as we will actually cover seven attributes of God, and then we'll talk about what practical impact they have in how we live each and every day. Well, to help you make getting to know God your number one priority, and to encourage you to do this study with a small group of friends, we've temporarily discounted the small group resources for the real God. Doing this series together will get you to a deeper level of understanding as you process and talk about these key attributes of who God really is, included in each discounted workbook is a unique code to unlock the online videos.

Get the workbooks, use your codes, and you're good to go. To take advantage of this limited-time offer, just go to livingontheedge.org or tap Special Offers on the Chip Ingram app. For more information, give us a call at 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003.

Well, now here's Chip with his application. What's the deal, God? Hey, what's wrong? I'm kind of upset. How come you're not coming through for me?

I don't like your timing. And all those kind of thoughts are built around a false view of God. So much of this world's culture has crept into my thinking, like I'm God, and He's the one who's supposed to make my life work out instead of remembering He's God, and my privilege is to get to be rightly related to Him through Christ, and then my goal is to walk in a way that pleases Him.

How about you? How do you view God? How do you see Him? Have you unconsciously, I don't mean in some terrible, selfish way, but have you unconsciously begun to view God as a self-help genie?

Is He the one who's going to make everything work out your way? Or do you see Him as the High Holy Sovereign of the universe, to whom apart from Christ you absolutely have no hope, yet in Christ you are the center of His attention and He loves you? Think about it, will you? Just before we close, I want to say thanks to those of you who are giving regularly to the ministry of Living on the Edge. You're making a huge difference helping other Christians live like Christians. If you're enjoying the benefits of Living on the Edge, but aren't yet on the team, would you do that today? You can set up a recurring donation by calling us at 888-333-6003, tapping the donate button on the app, or visiting us online at LivingOnTheEdge.org. And thanks for doing whatever the Lord leads you to do. Well, for all of us here, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.