Paul Washer - What is Our Greatest Need?

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I believe one of the greatest needs in Christianity today is to have a greater understanding of God.

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And I not only believe it's one of the great contemporary needs, I know from Scripture and church history that it has always been the great need of God's people.

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If we look at Jeremiah chapter 9 verse 23, it says, Thus says the Lord, Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, let not a mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the

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Lord, who exercise lovingkindness, justice, righteousness on the earth, for I delight in these things, declares the

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Lord. Here in this text we see what is the greatest knowledge that a person can possess.

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It is knowledge of the person of God, who he is, his attributes, his excellencies, his characteristics.

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And I believe that is why the Behold Your God series is so very, very important, because it is seeking to meet the greatest need of the church.

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So many times the church has gone wrong by trying to fix symptoms and not fixing the cause.

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For example, I really appreciate teaching. On marriage or teaching on evangelism or teaching on the promotion, getting people involved in missions.

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But literally all those things are symptoms. The cause is a lack of the knowledge of God.

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My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. Where there is no revelation, the people perish.

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So many times people think that that's talking about where there are no dreams or signs and wonders, the people, but that's not what it's saying in the context.

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It's it's saying where there is no revelation of God's law, of the knowledge of God, of who he is, the people run unrestrained.

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And that's what we're seeing in evangelicalism today, a mass of confusion. And people running unrestrained with a very maybe the morality is slightly different from that of the world.

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What do we need to fix the problem? We need what is always needed, whether there's a problem or not, and that is to grow in the knowledge of God.

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Now, let me give you an example. I've often done this.

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And it's always resulted poorly. I will ask somebody who maybe maybe, you know, has their

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Ph .D. for that matter. And I'll say in your Christian life before you went to Bible college, how much time did you dedicate to studying the attributes of God, who

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God is and his works? And they say, well, I never really concentrated on that. I mean, I read the

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Bible, but I never really studied that. Well, did you study other things?

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Yes, I did. Did you study that? No. How many sermons in your church did you hear on the attributes of God?

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How many years did your pastor spend in a series or something on the attributes of God? So I can't recall anything specific.

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But when you went to Bible college, how many years of those three years of training were dedicated to the knowledge of God, who he is?

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Well, I had one semester of systematic theology. And in that we looked at the attributes of God for a couple of weeks.

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Well, when you went on to get your master's, how much time did you actually spend investigating what the

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Bible teaches about the doctrine of God? Well, that wasn't my area of study in my master's.

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Well, you went on to get your Ph .D., I understand. Yes, I did. Well, how much time was dedicated, devoted to the attributes of God?

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Who is he? Who is this God? And then ask them now that you're a pastor. How many years and I like to use the word years because it's so shocking.

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How many years have you dedicated to teaching your people the attributes of God? And they say, well, we really haven't done that.

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Now, do you see the problem? I mean, we're Christian. We're supposed to be about God.

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But if you sat down and asked most people, write out to me the most prominent attributes of God, write out to me maybe some verses that explain that, explain it yourself in a brief paragraph, they would not be able to.

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I mean, it's almost it's unbelievable, isn't it? And that's why the

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Behold Your God series and other things that may come forth from it. Other films are so very important because they're putting the emphasis back to where any reasonable person, especially any biblical person, would see that the emphasis needs to be who is

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God. That's our starting point. We can't understand ourselves, sin, redemption, anything unless we first understand who is

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God. And that's why I so heartily recommend this series on Behold Your God.

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And I look forward to hopefully it being expanded over the years to include more and more biblical truth regarding who is