The Graphic Gospel (1): God as Creator

G O D  A S
C R E A T O R

Because God is the Lord of all
and
Creator of all
and
He has given us all things.
We owe Him all things.

In the beginning,
God created the heavens
and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 ESV

So God created man
in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Genesis 1 : 27 ESV

For thus says the Lord,
who created the heavens
(he is God!), who formed the earth
and made it (he established it;
he did not create it empty,
he formed it to be inhabited!):
“I am the Lord,
and there is no other.”
Isaiah 45:18 ESV

Taking the Truth to Heart

God is your Lord,
your Creator,
and your Giver of
all good things.
He has given you life.
He formed you
in your mother’s womb
and numbered each of your days.

His eyes were upon you
as you were being
knit together,
when you were being made
in secret, intricately woven in the
depths of the earth.
God saw your unformed substance;
in His book
were written
each of your days.

Consider the life
He has given to you.

Thank Him.

Praise Him.

Wonderful and
awesome are His works.

Are you giving your Creator,
your Lord, your God,
your all?

Are you worshiping Him each day?

Is He your Lord and your King
and your everything?

Close in Prayer:

Lord,
please have mercy on me.
I am weak.
I am but dust and
to dust I shall return.
Please grant me the grace to be able
to comprehend all you have given,
and grant me the grace to respond
by giving you all things in return…
including my life.

In Jesus’ name I pray.

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Unbelief

by Susan Sampson

At the beginning of our study Beyond Belief on page 15 it says, “John wants us to have a sure confidence in the Lord, a certainty about His love and His salvation. Such a confidence will enable us to encounter the unexpected with faith, joy, and love and to overcome and not be overcome.”

In Chapter Two, “Light”, we learn how doubt was cast in the minds and hearts of Adam and Eve by the serpent and they fell prey to it. They questioned if what God said was true.

In our final lecture Laurie said the enemy works to impugn the self-revelation of God! The enemy desires that we would be overwhelmed with our weakness and be self-focused so that we won’t be able to hold onto the truth.

This is right where I have continued to fall prey to the lies and deception of the enemy. Unbelief.

1 John 5:9-11 says, “If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.”

I will never forget a meeting I had years ago with a precious Thistlebend sister. I can’t remember what we were discussing about God’s Word, but I will never forget what she said to me. She said matter of factly, “Well He said it, so I believe it.” She has the faith of a child and it is beautiful.

I’ve been slowly working my way through an amazing book I got as a gift for my birthday this year called Pierced For Our Transgressions – Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution by Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach. I love books on doctrine because they strengthen my weak faith.

Just this week I read page 116 where the authors ask, “Will we humbly accept God’s self-disclosure, his word about himself? Or will we reject him in favor of idols?” On the next page they go on to say, “The most obvious opposite of ‘believe’ would be ‘not believe’. But here, (John 3:36) the contrasting idea is not unbelief but rejection, even ‘disobedience’. Failure to believe in Jesus is not merely a mental error akin to thinking that 2+2=5; it is ethically unjustified, an act of rebellion.” And in the next paragraph they write, “Thus to disbelieve what Jesus says about himself is an attack on the Father. Jesus insists his words come from the Father (John 14:10; 17:8, 14), the Father commands us to listen to the Son (Mark 9:7), and refusal to believe the words of the Son makes the Father out to be a liar (1 John 5:10). It is a denial of his truthfulness. The echoes of Genesis 3 are hard to miss.”

Greg Gilbert was the guest speaker at our recent Gallery Benefit. The Lord used him to speak so powerfully about the gospel. He talked about the definition of sin being “missing the mark.” And he used a powerful image as he held back an invisible bow and arrow that he shot to show what it means to “miss the mark”. But then he explained that sin is so much more. And he turned around and this time he purposefully aimed and released the invisible arrow right at God! It was a powerful picture. Sin is rebellion against the King of kings. Against our King. Against our Father. And against Jesus the One who bled and died for us.

Once again I have to come back to the statement from last week, “God’s Word is the final word.” It is truth. Absolute truth. Unchanging, eternal, fully trustworthy. It is His testimony about himself. It is His self-revelation. I must repent of my unbelief and humbly accept my Father’s words as true and rest in them by faith. As Greg told us at the benefit, we can and must “rely” on them. This is what it means to have faith.

In Chapter 20 of John’s gospel he tells us the purpose of his writing: “…but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

“And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20). This is God’s Word. And though it sounds too good to be true, and beyond belief, it is in fact true and we must, by God’s grace through faith, believe it, live it, and rest in it.

 

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Standing on the Precipice

My Dear Precious Children,

Even though I am not quite old enough to be your mother (haha), I love you all as if you were my flesh and blood. Several years ago as we faced an ever lengthening adoption process, a dear friend shared that she believed God had given me spiritually adopted children to love and care for while we waited for God to answer our prayers for a child from Ethiopia. And what an amazing gift each of you are to me. The love I feel for you is not my own, but truly comes from the heart of our Heavenly Father and I want you to know it is wide, long, high and deep.

So, as we finish this Beyond Belief study I feel compelled to share what the Lord keeps impressing upon my heart as I pray for you. It is no accident you were in this study this semester. He has a very special call and purpose for each of you. Seriously, not just a “you are going to do a few nice things for Jesus” call. I mean He is asking you to lay down your lives for Him…completely…and to count the cost and in losing your life for Him and for the gospel you are going to find purpose, meaning, and most importantly come face-to-face with Jesus himself.

He did not rescue you from the dominion of darkness and set you apart in order to just live a nice, happy, “good girl” Christian life. That is what it looks like to simply have beliefs, not live BEYOND them. Our beliefs are the starting point, the foundation. But they must be executed and put into practice by faith in order for them to actually be valuable and useful for the kingdom of heaven. Jesus said in Matthew 7:24, 26: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”

So we stand on this precipice with God’s kingdom stretched out before us in all of its splendor and glory. Behind us is the world, with a beauty and allure of its own. Jesus stands before us, with the tender, most gentle words of love, light, and truth, calling us His beloved children and asking us to step toward Him in faith, by His grace, trusting in His limitless love.

But we often hesitate at this point of our faith journey because of the awareness that taking a step toward Jesus and His kingdom could mean death. The death of our dreams, our hopes, the assurance of a comfortable life, or of a predetermined outcome.

However, the reality that I believe Jesus was trying to communicate to us in the parable of the wise and foolish builder is that, things are not as they appear. We can keep standing on what appears to be the solid ground of our self-constructed earthly kingdom, “believing” in Jesus as a mental practice but never actually doing what He says or living like He has commanded. But one day, either the trials of this life or the end of our time on earth will arrive and reveal where we truly stand. We may sadly discover that the seemingly solid footing of this world is actually shifting sand and we will be left disillusioned, broken and at worst, eternally separated from the One who loved us most.

Or (this is SO E X C I T I N G), we can take the step off the cliff of our kingdom and this world and fall into His loving arms. The death we are so terrified of actually brings freedom from the entanglements of the world and the anxieties and fears that plague us. As we follow Jesus, in humble trust and obedience, like the saints who have gone before us, we discover the ground under our feet is firm, solid, immovable. We gain an eternal life in Jesus that stands unwavering in the midst of the storms of life and even physical death.

So, as you stand on the precipice between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of heaven, considering the call to follow Jesus beyond merely belief, I beg you to head the exhortation found in Hebrews 12:

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” (Heb. 12:25-29)

Do not believe Satan’s lie that Jesus’ commands are harsh or burdensome. This falsehood is refuted in 1 John 5:3. Trust instead that ALL His ways are loving and perfect, even when they seem so strange from our human perspective. “And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:38-39). As we cry out to Him for the grace to lay down our lives by faith, we will find ourselves dancing on the firm Rock of Jesus and leaving the shifting sand of merely mental belief forever.

And the most amazing, beautiful thing about living beyond belief is that Jesus is glorified and we come to enjoy Him fully. I leave you with the stories of those who have gone before you in this journey of faith. May they inspire and encourage you to press on and step off the cliff. I love you dearly and am praying for you to trust the perfect love of your Savior that casts out all fear.

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Heb. 11:32-34; 13-16)

All My Love from Your Fellow Sojourner,

Angie

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