God's Creation: God's Works

Praise the Lord. I will extol the Lord with all my heart in the council of the upright and in the assembly. Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them. Glorious and majestic are His deeds, and His righteousness endures forever. He has caused His wonders to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and compassionate. He provides food for those who fear Him; He remembers His covenant forever. – Psalm 111:1-5

He has shown His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations. The works of His hands are faithful and just; all His precepts are trustworthy. They are established for ever and ever, enacted in faithfulness and uprightness. He provided redemption for His people; he ordained His covenant forever—holy and awesome is His name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow His precepts have good understanding. To Him belongs eternal praise. – Psalm 111:6-10

Welcome! Today we continue our series called Sound Doctrine and look at God’s works. Obviously this is quite a huge topic. I think we can broadly classify God’s works into three categories: God’s works of creation, God’s work of upholding His creation, and God’s works in dealing with man and creation, most notably His work of redemption accomplished through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We could spend forever on these topics, and we will talk about redemption in detail later in this series. For this reason, I am going to primarily focus on the first of these topics, God’s works of creation.  I will also touch on the second topic, God’s work of upholding His creation, although we will really deal with it more next week when we talk about God’s sovereignty.

God's Nature: Threeness in Oneness

Aloneness.  I can’t imagine anyone who’s never dealt with aloneness.  It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, married or single, a teenager or elderly.  It’s one of the things we all have in common.

When I was a teenager I felt really alone.  I went to school, worked each week at an assisted living facility, ran a small lawn care business, worked around our family’s farm, spent time with my family, and went fishing, hunting, and camping, mostly by myself.  As I did all these things I had a nagging feeling, just wishing some guy from the church would just call me and spend some time with me.  

After a while, I did invite myself into a friendship with a couple guys in the church. We began to spend time with each other outside of the Thursday night men’s prayer meeting.  On Monday nights we spent time building unity through a very time honored tradition in the mountains of North Carolina. We watched the completely real sport of professional wrestling.  Some of you might call it “wrestling” but it is more accurately pronounced “wrastling.”  It may have seem silly from the outside looking in but it was important to me.

Throughout the whole Bible we see that God has provided solutions to this need that all of us have.  He’s provided a relationship with Him, a relationship with others in the church, marriage, and friendships in general.  But a friendship with God is foundational to all the other relationships.  In 1 John 1:3-4 it says, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.”  God is giving us an invitation to be in fellowship with Himself and with the other believers.

God's Nature: Like Us

 

How many of you were excited when you saw that we would be doing a series on doctrine? To some people, doctrine sounds like a boring and impractical subject – the kind of thing that theologians sit around and debate academically. However, as Carl said at the beginning, it ought to be intensely practical and indeed vital to our Christian life: What do we actually believe and why? And what difference should it make to the way we live our lives day by day? How do we apply what the Bible teaches us? And how do we answer people who question our core beliefs?

So I actually love talking about doctrine. It can be a controversial subject, as you probably know. Devout and well-meaning believers have disagreed over several points of doctrine that are not clearly explained in the Bible. But these are not central to our understanding of who God is, what salvation means, and how we should live as followers of Jesus. We don’t need to be afraid of the areas where true Christians disagree. I really like the quote from Mark Twain: “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.”