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God has revealed Himself to humanity through His Son. God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ 2 ,000 years ago. And we learn about God in a very special way through Jesus. The second way that God reveals Himself is through creation.
There's an old hymn that says, this is my Father's world. There's a line in there that says, in the rustling grass I hear Him pass. He speaks to me everywhere. Now this does not mean that God is the creation.
This is a false teaching known as pantheism. Rather, what the Bible teaches is that God is distinct from His creation, but His glory is displayed through everything that He has made. So we run into God everywhere, all the time.
And the Lord desires for us to enjoy Him as we live in this world. So not just the Bible does He want us to meet Him. He wants to meet us in His world as well. And so what I want to accomplish here in this sermon is to show you that you know God more than just from the pages of the Bible.
You know Him from the things He has made. So what this sermon is calling you to do is to enjoy God by taking pleasure in His gifts. I'm not going to tell you to turn to a specific place in the Bible because I'm going to be jumping all over the place.
But you can listen and follow along. And actually, what I'm preaching on here is what I wrote about in this month's pastor's page in the newsletter. Is the newsletter here today? It is. OK, it's in the back.
So you can read more on this in the newsletter to kind of be a summary to what I am preaching on here. So a big question that's important to ponder, and maybe you have pondered it, is how do we enjoy God's gifts without making two opposite errors?
When it comes to God's gifts, people can land on two extremes. These extremes are two different types of idolatry. One is the idolatry of indulgence. This is when we turn God's gifts into God's. The other extreme is self-made religion.
This is where God's gifts are not enjoyed because we think it is godly to refuse them. So we set up our own rules. So we will look at these two dangers, and we're going to look at how the Bible tells us we should view God's gifts.
We will answer the question, how do we avoid leaning toward these two extremes and enjoy God's gifts with a clear conscience as He has designed us to do? So the first extreme we must avoid is treating God's gifts as God's.
Treating God's gifts as God's. So this is one side of the ditch. If we have a picture of a road here, there's two ditches we want to avoid. We want to stay on the road. This ditch is the idolatry of indulgence.
The first commandment the Lord gave to Israel in the Ten Commandments says, you shall have no other gods before me. Then the second commandment is very similar to the first commandment. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them for I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God. So we see here that God wants people to give allegiance to Him alone and nothing else. You will notice that when God listed in the second commandment, everything He listed there is creaturely.
People are tempted to worship that which is created. What is fascinating about the human heart is that we were created to worship. Everyone worships something. Even atheists worship. In Old Testament times, the nations surrounding Israel worshiped false gods that typically resembled something creaturely.
People worshiped the sun, the moon, animals, the seas, and they worshiped these objects as they believed these objects themselves were gods or ruled over by a god. And this not only happened in the Old Testament, but it also happened during New Testament times as well.
The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1, 22 through 25, regarding sinful humanity, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
Amen. So down through history, people have worshiped the creation and not the creator. Another way to put this is people have worshiped God's gifts and not Him. So really there's two options. Everyone worships.
The question is, are you going to worship rightly? And you do that by worshiping the one true God. And you do it wrongly by worshiping something else. As we think about it, think about how beautiful God's creation is.
The sun, the moon, and stars are majestic. The diversity of animals is breathtaking. That's why we love to go to the zoo. Look at all these different kinds of animals that God has created. The scenery of our world blows you away as you look at it.
Some theologians have defined sin simply as idolatry. You want something more than God. And this is a pretty good definition. You put something else in the place that only belongs to God. God must be your highest affection and not something else.
Idolatry happens when you go out of bounds. When you love something too much, but you don't love the Lord. Sometimes when people think of idolatry, we think of only bad things. People who are addicted to hard liquor, cigarettes, pornography, gambling, being attracted to things that are vulgar.
Vulgar music. People who worship an image of a false God. This is idolatry, yes. And none of these harmful things will be in heaven one day. These are products of the fall. But what about good things?
What is frightening is that even good things can be idolatrous. The created world is good. Genesis 1 says that everything that God created was just as he wanted it to be. And we will explain how we should approach these things a little bit later.
But people can love the moon so much without loving God. People can love looking through a telescope so much, but forget about the one who created outer space. I have a good friend of mine. He loves studying astronomy, but he's not a believer.
So he's missing the point of astronomy by loving something that's meant to point to God. People can love hunting deeply, but neglect their family, church, and ultimately God. People can love sports or shopping so much that they spend all their time doing these things, but never read their Bible.
And this last one might be the most convicting. We can prioritize family so much that there's no room for God. I was listening to a talk show where they were talking about what are you most thankful for?
This was back in November around Thanksgiving time. And he said, well, I know I'm supposed to say I'm most thankful for family. And as he said that, I'm thinking, he doesn't understand what Thanksgiving's all about.
You should be most thankful for God. And yes, you should be thankful for family, but you should be most thankful for your family. You should be most thankful for God. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus touched on giving allegiance to God's gifts over God.
He warned in Matthew chapter six, verses 19 through 24, that whatever you treasure reveals your heart. And he closes this section by saying, no one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and money. Or you can insert anything into that, where it says money. It could be anything. A disciple of Christ cannot be divided. Where is your devotion? Is it with God or something else?
Many people say they believe in God, but their elevated devotion to other things nullifies their words. One error we must avoid is loving God's gifts without loving God. This is the idolatry of indulgence.
So this is one ditch that we can fall into as we think about the place of God's gifts in our life. And the encouraging part's kind of come a little bit later here. The other ditch we should avoid is refusing to enjoy God's gifts.
So this is the other end of the spectrum. Refusing to enjoy God's gifts we must avoid. So let's look at this extreme example before we get to what the Bible says about how we should approach God's gifts.
The extreme example is working hard to avoid good things that he has given to us. And Paul condemns this in the New Testament. In Colossians chapter two, Paul's talking to Christians and he's asking them why they are submitting to human regulations that eliminate enjoyment of God's gifts.
In Colossians chapter two, verses 20 through 23, he says, if Christ you died to the elementary spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations? Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.
Referring to things that all perish as they are used according to human precepts and teachings, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
So you see, they're trying to avoid idolatry of indulgence, and so they go way, they overreact, and they go way to the other side. They say, I don't want to enjoy anything. And they think this is holiness when it's not.
Paul also goes after a similar group of people in 1 Timothy 4, one through three. I read this already, but now the spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods God created to be received by those who believe and know the truth.
You notice that line there at the end? It's worth noting this. God's gifts are primarily for God's people. You see that? The world doesn't want you to think that way, but God wants us to experience these gifts.
And we'll look at this 1 Timothy passage in greater detail a little later, but the focus of these two passages is self-made religion. They are running from indulgence with the goal of pursuing godliness by setting up their own rules.
And in reality, what they are doing is refusing to enjoy God's gifts as He designed to do. So this is on the extreme side. People in the medieval period of church history, including monks, maybe you see those weird haircuts that they had, they locked themselves in monasteries to keep themselves from the world.
And they thought the world is corrupt, so let's lock ourselves in so that we won't be tempted by the world. Now the problem with this is that man's biggest problem is not outside of them. Man's biggest problem is inside you.
It's your sinful flesh, your sinful nature. And so what these people found is that locking themselves away didn't accomplish what they desired. And in fact, the seven deadly sins, that was written in the medieval years, it was written because of this, because they locked themselves away.
And the person who wrote this, I think it was a Catholic priest, he observed that people were still sinning even though they locked themselves away from the world, which is quite a thing to see. An unregenerate person will sin no matter what their environment is.
Now flown-blown self-made religion is an extreme case. And my guess is most of you, if not all, are not ascetics. Establishing your own rules of religion to avoid the enjoyment of God's gifts. But you may have ascetic tendencies.
God has given us things to enjoy and you may refuse those things and think it is holy. The irony of the ascetic lifestyle is those taking part in it are committing idolatry themselves. They are devoting themselves to something that God never intended.
Paul even calls these people as those who are following the teachings of demons. Those are strong words. Think about what happened in the Garden of Eden to get a little bit of understanding of why he calls this the teachings of demons.
The Lord gave Adam and Eve permission to eat from any tree in the garden. They had so much freedom to enjoy God's gifts. Yet Satan painted God as being stingy and boring by the prohibition to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Think about this. There's thousands of trees in the Garden of Eden. They can eat from any of those. But there's one tree he said, you can't cross this line. You can't go out of bounds. You can't do that.
And Satan says, he tempts them. He says, why not? It's gonna be fun. You should go after that tree. And we all know what history, how it happened historically, that they fell into sin. And this is what Satan does.
We must understand this. He tries to make God look like one who never wants to have fun. And he tries to make it seem that God's path is not the path of joy. So ascetics are playing right into the hands of the devil.
And they themselves are ironically committing idolatry, the very thing they're trying to avoid. Only it's not the idolatry of indulgence, but rather the idolatry of false religion, of a self-made religion.
So we must avoid an ascetic lifestyle where we set up our own rules, refusing to enjoy God's gifts, thinking that somehow this is godliness when it's not. I think especially as conservative Christians, this can be a ditch that we can fall in.
What's interesting about this is that depending on who you're preaching this to, there's probably both groups in the congregation. Some congregations maybe are more tempted towards one than the other.
And you have to examine yourselves to see which ditch you might be more tempted to fall into. But we must recognize that as a conservative church, we can set up rules. We don't want to do that. We want to enjoy everything that God has for us as He's told us in Scripture.
So once you come to Christ, you still fight sin on a daily basis. And our hearts may lead us down one of these two paths and we must avoid that. So now we're going to address what is the biblical solution?
The biblical solution is you enjoy His gifts according to His design. You enjoy His gifts according to His design. I will explain what I mean by that. God is a great giver of gifts and we can fail to see this, especially if we listen to what Satan wants us to believe.
In an effort to avoid the idolatry of indulgence, you might feel bad truly enjoying a pizza or spending an entire day with your grandchildren or watching an entire football game. And in the back of your head, you might be saying, I know I should be pursuing God by reading the Bible, praying, and attending church activities.
And if we see the things I just mentioned as holy, but the other things are not, then we have a false understanding of what it means to fully enjoy the Lord in this life. So don't get me wrong on this.
All Christians should be reading their Bible daily, praying daily, and attending church weekly, and not just Sundays, but try to take advantage of the other opportunities that our church and other churches offer.
And these are essential to growing in your walk with the Lord and knowing Him as you read Scripture and as you pray and as you meet with God's people regularly to encourage one another. And in fact, if you're not meeting the Lord in these places, then you probably are committing the idolatry of indulgence.
Okay, so I want to stress that, that these are means of grace that God has given us and they are essential. But we don't just meet God there. That's the point I'm making. We meet Him in other places as well.
And if God is truly first in your heart, then you should enjoy His gifts. God is the center of every aspect of your life. God created the world to display Himself. In Genesis 1, God says that everything that He created is good.
Psalm 19 .1 says that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Romans 1 .20 says, for His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.
So in one sense, God is in His creation, as I mentioned in the intro, not like pantheism, right? Like He is the creation, but His glory is displayed in His creation. His fingerprints are on everything.
I mean, think about the day we're experiencing right now. You hear the wind howling, the snow falling, the snow blowing, the sun, hopefully the sun comes out later, and shines on the snow and it sparkles.
God's revealing Himself to you. And are you enjoying Him as He does that? And we get to enjoy God in a special way here in the North. We enjoy the snow of winter, the rejuvenation of the spring, the beauty of the summer, the leaves in the fall.
We get to see lots of ways that God displays His glory as we live here. And we should take advantage of that and truly enjoy Him in His world. And I've heard it described this way, when you read a poem or a novel or see a painting, you learn much about the writer or artist.
A poem or novel or painting is a creation of the author or artist. It's the same way in creation. You learn much about God. He is the author and artist of all that He has made. God's creation is God's gift to humanity.
Think about how wonderful the world and the universe is. Think about the splendor, as I just mentioned, of a nice, fresh coat of snow. And we could get annoyed by it, but snow could be dirt. God could send dirt from the sky if He wanted to.
He doesn't. He sends the beautiful, sparkly snow. Think about the beauty of a newborn child. Brianne and I are going to have one of these Isaiahs coming very soon. Or the majesty of the stars at night.
Or the joy of fellowship with other believers. Or the strong tie of companionship between husband and wife. Or the tastiness of a nice steak dinner. What wonderful gifts these are from God. Matthew 7 -11 says that God loves giving good gifts to His children.
And He does. We should not shy away from God's gifts because His gifts help us enjoy Him better. If you only read your Bible, or only pray, or only go to church, you will do well to a certain extent. These are essential.
But God wants you to do more. He wants you to enjoy Him in the created world. That's why studying 15 hours a day in the Bible, probably not a good idea. Now, studying a couple hours, that's a great idea.
But 15 hours? I think one of the weaknesses of some of the great people from church history is I don't think they enjoyed the creation as much as they should have. Because they spent so much time studying.
And we're grateful. We benefit from their labors, right? The great things they saw about the Lord. But we don't just want to spend our time locked up. In fact, I was reading, John Piper did a biography on David Brainerd.
And he said one of the great weaknesses of his life is that he didn't enjoy the world that he lived in. He saw it as an arid wilderness. And we have to be sympathetic to David Brainerd. This was a man who lived in the 18th century.
He was very sick most of his life. So he had a very gloomy outlook on this world. He suffered from tuberculosis. He spit up blood. He suffered greatly. And that led him to see the world as a wilderness and not for the beauty that was everywhere.
And we don't want to make that same mistake. We want to see the world for what it is. To see how wonderful God is in it. So do you enjoy God as you enjoy His gifts? And you might be asking, what about those passages of Scripture that tell us to have our focus on God and God alone?
There's several of those in the Bible. Psalm 73 25 says, Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire beside you. Colossians 3 1 says, Set your minds on the things that are above and not the things of the earth.
We may ask the question, in passages like these, is Scripture contradicting itself? By on the one hand, telling us to enjoy God's gifts. But on the other hand, telling us to focus on God alone. And let me answer this apparent contradiction in the key word there is apparent by appealing to Scripture.
The Bible has no contradictions. And we'll see that here. Jesus says in Matthew 22 37, that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.
So if we stop here we think, okay, I'm to love God. And if I'm going to love God with all that I have, how can I love anything else? In the next verse, Jesus answers the question. He says in Matthew 22 39, the second greatest commandment is like it.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So think about this. The Lord just told us that we need to love Him with everything we have. And then he says, love other people like you would want to be treated yourself.
That's the golden rule. Now, if we're logically thinking through this, right? One way we love God is by loving His gifts. So included in loving God with all of our might is loving the things that He loves, loving the things that He created, loving the things that display His glory.
People are God's gifts. So one of the ways you love God with every fiber of your being is by loving His gifts, whether it be people or anything else in creation. You love the very things He created that say something about Him.
And it's important to note here, we can love things too much to the point where the proportion is wrong. You should love your family more than you love the snow outside, for example, right? One has a higher place than another.
We need to love God most of all, but we need to love those things in our life because these are God's gifts to us. The clear teaching of Scripture is that God wants us to enjoy His gifts. Let me give you a few verses that promote the enjoyment of His gifts.
I read 1 Timothy 4 earlier that condemned the teaching of demons that prohibited people from enjoying the gifts of God. What Paul wrote is that these ascetic people were forbidding marriage and requiring abstinence from foods.
So they were forbidding people from enjoying God's gifts. And for those of you who are married, we know that marriage is a wonderful gift from God. The companionship is wonderful. The physical intimacy is a gift from God.
Being able to love one another deeply over the long haul is a gift from the Lord. And we also know how wonderful food is and drink is. Hamburgers, ice cream, pumpkin pie. The joy of eating all the varieties of fruit and vegetables that God has given us.
Drinking ice cold water, coffee, your favorite soda. The Bible even endorses drinking wine. There's an appropriate time to drink wine as well. And these joy takers in 1 Timothy 4 were not only avoiding these pleasures of life but they were also preventing others from enjoying them as well.
And this is something that we must see here. And Paul calls this the teaching of demons. And what Paul writes in verses three through five of 1 Timothy 4 is that God created these to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.
For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. So what this means is that we should enjoy God's gifts.
Enjoying Him as we take pleasure in them and being full of thankfulness as well. That's God's design in His gifts. Everything in creation shows us something about God. His power, His beauty, His majesty, His wisdom, His goodness.
We just have to have eyes to see them and love Him more as we see these things. In Psalm 119 verse 103, the psalmist writes, how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. And the context of this passage is that God's wisdom is sweet.
Psalm 348 says, taste and see that the Lord is good. So why does God give us food? There are multiple reasons He gives us food. One of them is that we need strength for the day. But the great thing about food is that it's meant to enjoy.
I remember sitting in a history class in high school and my teacher explained that in the late 1800s, people thought that food would one day just be pills. Because it gives you the energy you need, the nourishment you need to live your life.
But whoever said this missed the point of food. Food, yes, food is there to strengthen you, but it's there for so much more. It's meant to enjoy. And if we just had pills, that's not very enjoyable. Right, you can get vitamin D through having a pill, or you can get vitamin D through milk, or orange juice, or peanuts, or something some other way.
And I would rather have orange juice than a pill, right, to get vitamin D. That's God's design. We get what we need, but we also enjoy it. That's God's goodness. We taste and see that he is good. And how wonderful he is.
So if we do not enjoy God's gifts fully, but have a sense of false guilt, that we might be committing idolatry through indulgence, we actually get less of God. So if we fall on the side of the ditch of self-made religion, right, we make our own rules, thinking of this as holiness, we're getting less of God by doing that.
Here's an excellent quote from C .S. Lewis, commenting on how creation points to God. He said, "'This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent "'of the orchard where it grew. "'This sweet air whispers of the country "'from whence it blows.
"'It is a message. "'We know we are being touched by a finger "'of that right hand at which there are pleasures "'forevermore,'' which is Psalm 1611. "'There need be no question of thanks or praise "'as a separate event, something done afterwards.
"'To experience the tiny theophany,'' which is God's revelation of himself, "'is itself to adore. "'Gratitude exclaims very properly "'how good of God to give me this. "'Adoration says, what must be the quality "'of that being whose far-off and momentary "'flashes of light are like this?
"'One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.'". So he says that in a very sophisticated way, I understand that. But his point is, creation is a message. And it's a message that comes from the orchard of heaven.
Where there are pleasures forevermore. And one's mind, when you experience, he calls them these shafts of glory all over the earth. These are beams of light that point back to its source. So the source being God.
So we must understand that the creation is a flash, they're flashes of light that points back to our creator. "'God desires to show himself to you "'in the things that have been made. "'Everything in creation is to be enjoyed "'and everything points to him.'".
Now as I encourage you, as scripture has shown us, to enjoy God's gifts and therefore enjoy him and experience more of him, I do need to caution you here as we close. We need wisdom on this. The book that greatly influenced my understanding about this whole topic is Joe Rigney's book, Things of Earth, Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts.
In this book, he talks about testing yourself to see if you are truly enjoying God or committing idolatry of indulgence by just enjoying his gifts. So in other words, turning his gifts into God's. And this is where you have to ask yourself, am I delighting in the Lord?
Are you hungry to read scripture? Are you spending regular time in prayer? Are you enjoying meeting God as you meet his people in corporate worship? What's interesting is that if you start enjoying God and his creation, that shouldn't make you want to read the Bible.
Or if you're reading the Bible and enjoying it, that should make you enjoy his creation more. So they both feed each other. And it's neat how that works. But you can see the warning here. You can see how people can take this urging to enjoy God's gifts the wrong way.
Some people enjoy the outdoors and family on Sunday and never go to church. That's missing the point. This is idolatry. So this sermon is not giving you a license to go just enjoy life and we'll never see you again.
I hope you didn't get that out of this. But what you need to do is to test yourself and ask questions to see if God is truly first in your heart. And if you have concerns about him not being first in your heart, then it's good to take a break from those things to make sure that he alone is number one.
And obviously you have to have wisdom in this, right? Because if family is your idol, you can't just take a break from your family. But you do need to set aside time to spend time with the Lord and make sure that he is first in your heart.
And let me maybe give a little bit of an illustration of this. I used to be addicted to sports to the point where it was an idolatry of indulgence. I'm confident I was committing that type of idolatry.
And in my early to mid-twenties, I really started to go deep with the Lord and I became disinterested in sports. I didn't really care. I didn't follow my teams anywhere. Probably a good thing because my teams, they always hurt me anyways.
But anyway, true story. But anyway, so I kind of got weaned off of it. But then as I grew in my walk with the Lord, I thought, well, this is actually a good gift from God. So maybe I can enjoy sports without it being an idol and actually enjoy God as I'm enjoying it.
And this is a constant struggle for me, but we have to have wisdom in this, right? And it's meant to bring enjoyment of him and we should not reject his gifts if he's gonna use it in our life for us to see his goodness more and more.
So I close by asking you the question, do you enjoy God's gifts the way he designed you to? Is he first in your heart? And the challenge is that you would experience more of him as you enjoy his gifts.
And my hope and prayer is that this sermon is liberating to you in your understanding of God's design in your gifts. As I've thought through this more, it's really been helpful in my own life and my hope and my prayer is that it'll be helpful in yours as well.
So as I mentioned, I wrote on this in the pastor's page, so you can read that as well. And if you're wondering the passage of scripture that I used, I'd be glad to give you them. Hopefully maybe you wrote them down too.
But everything we preach, right, we want it to be rooted in scripture. And I hope you see here that this is biblical. This is what the Bible teaches us about his gifts. And this is the way that God desires for us to live our life toward him.
So let's pray as we close. Father in heaven, thank you for everything. You have blessed us abundantly. And I pray, Lord, that as a church, we would not fall into one of these two ditches, that we would not commit the idolatry of indulgence and that we would not commit the idolatry of setting up our own rules, thinking that this is somehow holiness.
And that we'd have wisdom about when it is that we're crossing one of these lines. Help us to have, the term that I've heard used is a rhythm in our life with Bible reading, prayer, spending time with other believers.
And then the rhythm of the things outside of that, that you would always be our focus, that you would always be on our mind. And that we do everything according to your design. And I pray for this, Lord.
Give us wisdom in this endeavor. And may we know you more through every avenue that you have made for us to know more of you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.