Waiting to Be Wanted

No matter how much you know about God, there's infinitely more for you to learn about Him. So we effectively, at the outset of our study of God, immediately live with this tension. We pursue to know Him, and at the same time, we know that we'll never know everything about Him because everything about Him can't be revealed. Part of the thrill of eternity is to have infinite amount of time to study the infinity of God as He teaches us. As Christians, it's our desire to know God and to know Him well.

Helping you do that is at the very heart of our ministry. But studying God's Word comes with an interesting paradox. That's because the more we know, the more we realize that there's so much we don't know.

But that's okay. God has revealed some things about Himself, and He wants us to know those things. And then we have eternity with Him to know Him face to face. This is wisdom for the heart. Today, Stephen begins a series from Acts 17 called, Introducing God.

The message you're about to hear is called, Waiting to be Wanted. On January 7, 1855, a young pastor stood to preach to his congregation in Southwark, England, and he began by saying, The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy which can ever engage the attention of a child of God is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of God. It is a subject so vast that all our pride is drowned in its infinity, and all our thoughts are lost in its immensity. So preached Charles Spurgeon in London 150 years ago when he was remarkably barely 20 years old. If you read his writings, one of the constant challenges that would come from him to his generation was related to the nearly universal lack of a desire to know and study God.

Five years after Spurgeon died, another boy was born. This young man would become a preacher as well this time in America. His name was Iden Wilson Tozer, now you know why he went after A.W.

A.W. Tozer became known for his persistent warnings directed at the church for her doctrinal weakness and her shallowness. The Knowledge of the Holy, just a little hardback book, I think it's about 80 pages. He writes this opening statement, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. To answer the question, what is God like? The answer to that question will predict the spiritual future of that person, and it will predict the future of the church based on their answer. Who is God?

And what is he like? Who we think God is determines how we walk with him, why we obey him, how we talk to him, what we expect of him, it governs everything. All of this in volumes more really is bound up in this question, who is God? And as I studied and prayed about this, this is really as far as I got, and I knew we'd be out of time by the time we get through with this.

So let me ask and answer three questions. Number one, what exactly is the study of God? Now the 10 cent term for that is theology. You'd know that if you spent $250 an hour going through seminary like some of us had to pay to find that out.

You're finding it out tonight for free. The Greek term thea, God, and logia, for reasoning or arguing or explaining. You put that together and you have then theology is the logical reasonable discussion of God, who God is. What's he like? What are his attributes, his person, his nature?

In a rather unusual positive statement by Tozer, and there aren't many by the way. He was rather caustic and prickly, but he was used by God to challenge the church. His work, The Pursuit of God, these words, and that's the second book by the way. The Pursuit of God, a little longer.

These words, in this hour of all but universal darkness, he wrote this 60 years ago. One cheering gleam appears within the fold of conservative Christianity. There is an increasing number of people whose lives are marked by a growing hunger after God himself. They are eager for spiritual realities. They are thirsty for God, and they will not be satisfied until they have drunk deep at the fountain of living water. I read that because this study is really for those who are thirsty for God.

Question number two, what can I study to know God better? One resource is creation, the natural world, which is why the psalmist is constantly inviting us to look around, to look up at the stars and the sun, moon, planets, the beauty of the world and the stars in the sky. You write in Psalm 8, 1, oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth who is displayed.

You have displayed. You have exposed your splendor to the world above the heavens. In Psalm 19, he writes this, the heavens are telling the glory of God. They're describing his glory, the work of his hands declaring that day to day pours speech. Day after day pours forth speech, and night after night reveals knowledge. I love the paraphrase of the message by Eugene Peterson on that phrase.

He says it this way, Madame Day holds classes every morning and Professor Knight lectures each evening. The older I get, the more I marvel and enjoy the creative handiwork of God. Look around, God has given us this natural world that points to him. In fact, Romans 1 gives us the interesting truth that even if someone never hears the gospel of Jesus Christ, even without hearing the gospel, they are still guilty of rejecting God and without excuse, Paul says, because they had nature.

And what did they do? They suppressed the truth that was obvious. And they said it must have just happened by chance, rather than all of the order and the beauty and the creativity must come from someone who ordered it, someone who's creative. And if they hadn't worked so hard to suppress the truth of creativity and complexity and color, they would have been able, Paul says, to put together the fact that there is a creator with some amazing, powerful attributes. And that's without the scriptures.

And speaking of, that's the other resource then for study. Beyond creation, by far the most significant is revelation. Creation opens the door to observation, revelation opens the door to inspiration. All scripture is given by inspiration, 2 Timothy 3.16, inspiration, theopneustos, the very breath of God. This is God's breath, so to speak. Well, what does God's word breathe about God?

Who is God and what is he like? Ultimately, that drives you then to the scriptures where God discloses the truth about himself that you would never observe in nature. And of course, with that, the redemptive truth of Christ. But keep in mind, beloved, that the scriptures aren't comprehensive. There is much more about God than we have revealed in these 66 books. So we effectively, at the outset of our study of God, immediately live with this tension. We pursue to know him, and at the same time, we know that we'll never know everything about him because everything about him can't be revealed. Part of the thrill of eternity is to have an infinite amount of time to study the infinity of God as he teaches us. But right now, we have trouble.

We have problems, obviously. You can't reduce down everything about God. Our finite minds can't grasp it anyway. Infinity can't be reduced to a paragraph.

It can't be reduced to a set of volumes. Even if they were as large as that 30 set of encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which I bought as a seminary student, and when my wife came home from work, I was studying and she said, what have you done? And I said, well, it's only $39 a month for 300 years, but never mind that. All of the knowledge, look, honey, I mean, it's all here.

I got it all. Even that would only begin, it'd be a drop in the bucket to reveal the truth of God. You remember what John the Apostle said? He said in that classic text in John 21, he said, look, if you could fill up the entire world with books, you still wouldn't have enough space to describe what Jesus did and said in only three and a half years.

You'd have to fill up the world with books to describe three and a half years. How in the world can you describe God then? The only thing we can do and what I trust we will do is get a little sip, a little taste, but I'm convinced that even the littlest sip of sovereignty and his glory and his grace, his nature, his attributes will boggle our minds. God hasn't told us everything about himself we'd like to know, but he has revealed everything we need to know so that we can enter into a relationship with him and walk with him and know how to talk to him and know what he expects of us and know how to serve him and worship him.

And let me add this, anybody who thinks they know who God is and their knowledge of God is different from that which is revealed in this book is tragically deceived. I have begun reading a recently published biography of the Wright brothers. I read one a few years ago and I'm captivated by these very creative, very brilliant young men. They invented things that allowed them to invent the airplane. The biography contains, it's rather lengthy, it contains letters, they wrote it, it contains pictures, it contains descriptions, personal interests and a detailed timeline of their creative invention. After finishing that book, and I'll be finished in a few weeks or so, but if I finish that book, can you imagine me saying to someone, even with what little you know about them, you know what those guys, they were amazing, absolutely amazing violinists and they hated flying machines.

We'd wonder what biography I read. If you do read their biography, you'll discover they do not play the violin and they love talking about flying machines. In fact, when they were little boys watching the birds fly, they marveled at them. They measured the distance at how quickly they flew from point A to point B and they measured the weight and the distance and the speed and their kids figuring all this out.

They couldn't play the violin. It doesn't matter what we might think God is like. The question is, what does his word say he's like? And this is the prayer of the apostle Paul for the early believers in Colossae. He writes this in Colossians 1, 9 through 10. We have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will, that you might be increasing in the knowledge of God. Hey, Paul, what are you praying about for this church here today? What would you pray? What he prayed for those believers in Colossae. I'm praying that you will increase in the knowledge of God. Who is God?

What is he like? Do we really know? I read this past year the announcement of Chester Nez who had passed away. It struck my attention.

I tucked it away. Chester was the last living member of a team of Navajo tribesmen who came to be called the Navajo code talkers. Chester Nez was one of the original 29 Navajo recruited by the U.S. military to create an unbreakable code used only by the allies that the enemy forces could not figure out. Navajo is a complex unwritten language without an alphabet.

That would be hard to break, wouldn't it? Well, only a handful of non-Navajo people could even speak it. So these men were recruited to come up with a code that couldn't be broken by enemy intelligence.

From 1942 to 1945, these code talkers, they were called, participated in every single major operation the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific region. Philip Johnson, the son of a missionary to the Navajo, came up with the idea to use these men to communicate in a way no one else would understand and the code was never broken. Listen, how in the world can an infinite creator with a language unlike ours and a nature so different communicate with a finite creature? Well, God has effectively revealed the code here. The Bible is God's own communication with mankind about who He is and what He's like.

It isn't comprehensive, but it is definitive. It isn't exhaustive, but it is adequate to reveal enough of who He is and what He is like so that we can love Him and walk with Him and talk with Him and even come to know Him better. Here's another question, number three. What are the benefits of studying God?

Well, I know we'd all say, well, we're not supposed to ask questions like that. It's just beneficial. Well, what are the benefits? Well, let me give you five of them.

Let me give you five. First, wisdom. And I'll touch down into Proverbs 9 and verse 10. The fear of the Lord, Solomon writes, is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. So Solomon is effectively telling us that God will show us how to live a wise life. So we're told then that knowledge, biblical knowledge, isn't so much related to an IQ.

There are people who got A's on their report cards, but they live life going from one failure to another. It's not that they don't have enough information. It isn't that they don't have enough education. It's just that they don't have wisdom. Wisdom enables someone to apply the knowledge they have in making the right decision in life. And you can't get that kind of wisdom apart from knowing God. So wisdom would be one.

Closely associated with this idea is another benefit. We'll call it, in a word, direction, direction. To put it another way, God allows you to maintain this sense of direction when you need it as you pursue not so much that direction, but you pursue Him. The apostle Peter writes it this way in 2 Peter 1, grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God, seeing that in His divine power, He's granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His glory.

J.I. Packer illustrated this idea by imagining how terrible and unfair it would be to helicopter into the Amazonian jungle, pick up a tribesman who's never been out of the jungle before, and fly him to London, England, and set him down in the middle of that city, and then tell him, fend for yourself, try to do the best you can. Packer goes on to apply it, we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is, and who happens to run it. Disregard the study of God and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life, blindfolded as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This is, he writes, the perfect way to waste your life. Have you ever met anybody and you've thought, that person has no direction?

What's the solution? A map? No. A course?

No. The knowledge and the pursuit of God. Another benefit is fruitful living, Paul wrote in Colossians 1, 9, and 10, that he was constantly praying for these believers that the church would be filled with the knowledge of his will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

Those are coupled together, related together. One of the evidences of gaining an understanding of God is bearing fruit in good works. And they can see that you have direction and wisdom. Secondly, fruit always reflects the character of the tree of which it is a part. So when you bear spiritual fruit, you are bearing witness to the character and the nature of the Holy Spirit, God the Spirit, who is transforming your life. That comes from growing in the knowledge of God.

Here's another byproduct, courage. Those three Hebrew men responded to Nebuchadnezzar's command, you remember in Daniel's biography, refused to bow to the idol that Nebuchadnezzar had created, and he said, everybody now bows when the music starts. And they said, no, we're not going to.

Daniel more than likely was out of town, he isn't even entering into the picture. Their lives are now literally at stake. They stopped the music, assumed they hadn't gotten the message right, and the king was going to give them another chance and bow down or be thrown into the fiery furnace. Have you ever thought about the fact that they responded out of their knowledge of the attributes of God? Daniel 3, 16 says, finds them responding to the king, oh, Nebuchadnezzar, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire.

Now wait a second. They had never seen God deliver anybody from the fiery furnace. They were about to be the first ones thrown in. They had never been threatened to die by means of fire. They had never personally experienced God delivering them from a fire. Here they are saying, God can do this. They applied what they knew about God's sovereign power to their particular situation. They knew that God was more powerful than this king and that fire. But they also understood something more about the attributes of God. Because they went on to say in their saying, understood evidently his divine prerogative and his divine right and his sovereign rule and his ability to decide what he wants to do without ever giving them an explanation. And so they add to that and they say, but if he doesn't, we're still going to follow him because he's a true living God and he has a right to do whatever he wants to do and you're still following an idol.

It came out of their understanding of the attributes of God, courage in making the right decision. So you see, the question is not, do we really need to know God better? The question is, how can we afford not to grow in understanding him better? One more.

Well, this could of course go on much longer. But one more byproduct from the study of God is a sense of security. David writes in Psalm 46, God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake, he's describing the worst possible cosmic disturbance as you can imagine. And then later in that Psalm, be still and know that I am God. Taste and see that the Lord is good. That's an invitation, Psalm 43 verse 8. God invites us to get to know him.

He's the one that says, taste, stop, study me. Now, maybe you're convinced that you'd like to know God better, but you're not too sure he wants the same and you're not really sure how he feels about it. I mean, who are we after all? Imagine you walk up to the White House and you knock on the door and they answer the door and you say to them, you know what, I'm here because I'd like to get to know the president. Well, the question isn't, do you want to get to know the president? The question is, does the president of the United States want to get to know you?

And you'd better hope the answer is yes at that moment. The question is, does God want to get to know us? And does God want us to get to know him?

Well, here's the stunning truth of this study before us. It isn't just that you might want to get to know God better or become a better friend of God or more aware of his power or his presence, his attributes. God wants you and invites you to do just that.

God waits to be wanted. Jesus is praying in John 7 to the Father and he's saying, Father, I long for them to know you like I do, what security there is in knowing that the one we want to get to know is waiting for us to want to know him and he, by the way, knows us fully. So in this strange paradox, the one we are going to pursue together in our study already holds us in his hand. And that reality that God holds us in his hands is good news for all Christians. As we continue to study God and get to know him, we're doing it knowing that he knows and loves us fully and he desires to be known by us. That's what we'll be working to do over the next seven lessons.

This is Wisdom for the Heart. Today's message was lesson one in an eight-part series called Introducing God. This series serves as a backdrop for knowing God as fully as possible. This lesson was called Waiting to be Wanted. Our Bible teacher, Stephen Davey, makes the complete archive of his teaching ministry available free of charge on our website.

That includes this lesson. So if you joined us late, you can go to wisdomonline.org and hear this message in its entirety. I want to share with you a note that came in from a listener recently. Dinah from Virginia said, How I praise God for you.

I listen five days a week unless providentially hindered. I feel fed from your spiritual messages and miss them when I'm unable to listen. I teach an adult Sunday school class and I use your illustrations and insights. Please continue to preach God's Word with faithfulness.

I wanted you to hear from Dinah because if you're a teacher or even if you want to study God's Word for yourself, the complete manuscript of each of Stephen's lessons is posted online. Thanks so much for being with us today. We'll be back next time to continue through this series. Join us here on Wisdom for the Heart. We'll be back next time.