Wednesday, March 29, 2023 PM

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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just a profitable lesson that you might, by your Holy Spirit, convict these young hearts of sin and their need for a

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Savior and draw them to yourself that they might be saved. Father, we thank you for Michael's service.

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I'm reminded just to continue to pray for Lori and I know she misses working with the kids but you just might continue to heal her and help her to regain her strength that she might be able to get back with them as soon as possible.

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Father, we thank you, we love you, and we ask your blessing on our study this evening. It's in Jesus name we pray, amen.

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Alright, so we are continuing with the study of the attributes of God.

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So we started back in 2022 with kind of an introduction and thus far we've gone through two attributes of God.

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The first one being, anybody remember? His what? You are, that's the second one, but you're not wrong.

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Yeah, I know. We'll watch the live stream. So thank you

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Bill for getting the second one right. The first one being

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God's self -existence.

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Okay, we used the phrase or word self -existence. We use the word independence. The fancy word we use there was a seity, that he exists in and of himself.

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So there you go. Both of those are, when we talk about the attributes of God, there are two modifiers to the word attributes of there when we're talking about God's perfections, his characteristics.

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What are those? Communicable and incommunicable.

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So we are still going to be in the incommunicable, incommunicable attributes of God.

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These are attributes which God alone holds, that he does not share with us in any way.

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There are attributes that are communicable, that he does share in part to his creation.

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So tonight we're going to be looking at the spirituality of God. So if you're taking notes, the spirituality of God and the spirituality that we're talking about here, that we're looking at as it relates to God is not the same in the sense as when we talk about our own spirituality.

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This is a unique spirituality about God in that we mean is that God is a spirit being.

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God is a spirit being. He has no physical body and then because of that statement and that fact, we can assert some other facts.

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Therefore he is invisible. Therefore he is infinite. Before we jump in, just a couple of remarks and I'm going to try and reiterate that this as we go through future studies on attributes.

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But many of us in this room, what I'm saying here probably is not new to you as far as you're hearing of it.

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You've heard that God is unchangeable. You've heard that God is love.

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You've heard that God is justice and all the way down the line. So understand that as we go through these, there may be some new things that you hear.

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But I think for us the importance of this study is more for the purpose of meditation of the deep thoughts of God.

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Theologian and pastor A .W. Tozer says, the weightiest word in any language, in any language spoken in all the world, is its word for God.

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What a fearful thing it is when we take God lightly as opposed to weighty.

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A careful study of theology always takes into account the gravity of its subject, namely in this case,

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God. And the danger in taking God lightly is first and foremost just the affront that is to God's character, his perfections, his holiness, on down the line.

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But I think a secondary danger by us taking God lightly is that we become a very light people.

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What does scripture say about people who take God lightly? They are tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine that comes along and blows them to whatever the culture has as the truth of the day.

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By taking God seriously, understanding that this is the most serious deep thought and study we could have in our lives now and in our lives to come, that causes us to be sober minded and really colors our view of everything else.

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I had the thought when I was writing this down, it's like when I'm carrying my wife's

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Christmas dishes. So I have to explain this a little bit. When Holly and I got married,

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I feel like it's, was it a wedding present or was it our first Christmas?

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So I don't even know what the brand is, but we got like a decorative plate that you put up on a stand to look at and it was the two of us.

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It was this nice couple in a nice snowy scene on with a Christmas tree in the background and it just is very beautiful.

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But since then, for a few years after that, she got a set of kind of matching

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Christmas dishes and we added to those over the course of I don't know how many years, six or seven or eight years.

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So they all end up going in one cardboard box and as you can imagine, we continue to add to this cardboard box.

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And we live in a small house, so the only place where it can really go is in the attic.

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And these are one of her most precious things in all the earth. So I love her very much and I am tasked,

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I'm not joking, it's got to be at least a thousand pounds once you load them all in. To be able to get up and down the ladder and be able to get these dishes inside, all the while thinking, oh

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Lord, please help me not do anything wrong to these dishes.

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Drop them, trip over the concrete steps, going through the sliding glass door, watch out for the

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Christmas tree box that's still laying where it was before. And we've gone through, oh, 15, 16 years of marriage, me doing that.

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Well, finally, I don't know why, I figured out and I had to do some convincing.

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I'm like, I love you so much, I want these dishes to be protected. Can we find some place in the house where we can keep these so that I'm not literally straining every muscle in my body, both with nerves and with the weight of this thing?

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And we did and it's over our refrigerator now and I can rest so much easier at Christmastime.

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But that's what I thought of that when I was like, I'm carrying this box of something that is extremely precious to somebody that I love.

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That's the way we need to treat our study of God. So let's jump into God's spirituality by looking at three words in particular.

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Number one, God is immaterial. God is immaterial.

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He is spirit without a material body. It certainly does not mean what we might think when we hear the word immaterial.

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It does not mean what is often the first definition of the word when you look in the dictionary. It does not mean that he is unimportant or irrelevant, not pertinent, of no essential consequence.

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That's a definition of immaterial but that's not what we're talking about here. In contrast, his immateriality, and I had to look up to see if that was really a word, and it is, his immateriality displays his very importance.

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We might also say that God is an incorporeal being, coming from the root corpus.

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If you have your Bibles, open to the book of John and you're gonna find that we have a few references from the book of John tonight.

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John chapter 4 verse 24, God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

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This is God speaking to the woman at the well and he's telling her

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God is spirit. He is without physical composition, unlike us.

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We can't measure his height. We can't place him on a scale to find out his weight.

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He has no body parts. God is spirit. So what then do we do with Bible passages that may contradict that fact?

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They might speak of the hands of the Lord. In Psalm 19 verse 1, or the eyes of the

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Lord. 2nd Chronicles 16 verse 9, or the arm of the

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Lord. Isaiah 59 1. How can we reconcile

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God as a spirit without any body parts? He has no physical body with the use of those physical body parts in referring to him.

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The fact is these are figures of speech. A longer word we might use is their anthropomorphic expressions that are meant to help reveal

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God to us in ways that we can understand in our finite existence.

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When we say, or God says, that his eyes roam to and fro, that's in 2nd

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Chronicles 16 9 that I said earlier. What is he telling us when he says his eyes roam to and fro?

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He's aware of everything all the time. What was that, Red? He's everywhere.

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What do we do? Diane said it. He's aware of everything that's going on all the time.

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He sees. He knows. He can even see through what may be to us on the surface something.

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He can see through to the truth of the matter there. There are a couple other illustrations in Scripture.

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Isaiah 40 verse 5, Isaiah chapter 40 verse 5 speaks of the glory of the

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Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together for the mouth of the

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Lord has spoken. What is a mouth? In this case, God has a mouth, but what is that illustrating for us?

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He communicates to us. Authority would be another one. What about Hosea chapter 11 verse 8?

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How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah?

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How can I set you like Zeboim? My heart, there's a bonus one, my heart churns within me.

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My sympathy is stirred. What about a heart?

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What does that say to us about God when he says his heart? He's compassionate.

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He loves. The center of what he cares about.

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Yep, I would agree. His emotions are perfect. Lastly, Romans chapter 11,

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Romans chapter 11 verse 34. For who has known what the mind of the

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Lord or who has become his counselor? What would the mind be illustrating about God?

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Wisdom, exactly. His creativity.

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Yeah. All knowing. We're going to get to that more in depth in a few weeks,

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I'm sure. His all knowing, his omniscience. Okay, so in summary, when we talk about using these body parts as illustrations or expressions of him, the purpose behind this is for God's condescension to us.

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And this is condescension in the best way. We can condescend to people and oftentimes it's taken, maybe rightly so, as an offense.

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Because you're talking down to somebody, but really they're on your same level.

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We're nowhere near God's level. I mean, it's like a parent or a teacher talking to a kindergarten or even more so a baby.

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You know what kind of words you use and language you use when you use baby talk. Okay, that's what we're talking about here when we're talking about these figures of speech about God.

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Again, looking a little bit more at his immateriality. Have you ever been alone, even alone physically in a place or have you ever felt alone?

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I think we could all probably say yes to that answer. I remember, it's been almost 20 years ago, my first real job,

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I guess, after I got out of college, was working at Great Plains Coca -Cola here in the city.

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And now they're, I think, Southwest Beverages or something like that. But I ended up getting on with their

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IT help desk. And they're a 24 -7 shop, so they always have somebody staffing in there.

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And I ended up getting put on the shift that started work from 4am and then going to 4pm.

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So it was 12 hour shifts, three to four days a week. So to get there by 4am,

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I had to wake up at least at 3am. And we lived over in Midwest City at the time.

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And I don't know if mom or dad ever knew when I got up or if they were just sleeping like a rock.

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But getting my car and getting out on the highway and Great Plains is over or at least it was off of May Avenue.

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And I would have to drive over I -40. And this is before the nice I -40 that we have is the whole crosstown.

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And at 3am in the morning, there might be some trucks out on the road. But it felt lonely and even more so through some other experiences

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I had there at Coke. But God brought that first CD I think of casting crowns to me and they had a had a song on there called the voice of truth.

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When you know you're doubting yourself or can I do this?

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You feel alone because of God's immateriality. You're not alone in that.

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If you look at Hebrews chapter 13 verse 5,

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Hebrews 13 verse 5, let your conduct be without covetousness.

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Be content with such things as you have. For he himself has said, and this is a promise of God, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

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Even going into verse 6. So we may boldly say the Lord is my helper. I will not fear what can man do to me.

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The only way that this verse is possible and true for each of us in this room is because God is immaterial.

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We're all Lord willing going to leave this church tonight and we're going to go home with our families to our homes.

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God will be with us until we meet again just like the song says. He is with us wherever we go all the time.

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Word number two, God is invisible. This is because he is immaterial.

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So you can kind of see how things link to each other. We can see a bodily form with our eyes, but we cannot see a spirit being.

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Again, this is kind of like, well, yeah, duh. But it's good to meditate on those things because of the implications of those things when we think through them.

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Therefore, what does it say in 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 verse 7? Does anybody know that off the top of their head?

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For we walk by faith and not by sight.

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Okay, we walk by faith and not by sight.

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Back in John chapter 1 verse 18, no one has seen

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God at any time. I'm pretty sure that means what it says it means.

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No one has seen God with their physical eyes at any time because God is invisible.

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Turn over to John a little bit, a few pages over John chapter 6 verse 46.

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Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God.

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He has seen the Father. So now we're getting into the point where we're talking about the incarnation and the

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Trinity and all of that. But before we jump into that, we might ask the question, well, what about Moses?

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And Moses saying, show me your glory, Lord, in Exodus chapter 33. What he saw was not

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God. It was the radiance of the glory of God.

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It was light manifested. God's glory manifested as light and he didn't even see it in its full brilliance at all.

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But it was that light that both revealed God, but also obscured

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God. And we'll see that in a few other verses. Colossians chapter 1 verse 15, speaking about Jesus Christ.

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He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

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Jesus Christ is the manifested image of God. First Timothy chapter 1 verse 17.

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Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor, glory forever and ever.

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Amen. I handed out a song. You might notice the similarity there.

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God is invisible. It says it right there after immortal. Turn over a few chapters in Timothy still.

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First Timothy chapter 6 verse 16, kind of in the middle of the verse.

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I'll back up just a touch into the second half of verse 15.

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He who is the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords.

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Verse 16, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power.

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Amen. Because we cannot see

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God, we're entirely dependent on what scripture says about him. We can use general revelation,

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I'm sorry, general revelation in creation to learn more about him. So what might be some aspects in creation that God reveals himself?

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I'll start us off. God's grace is seen in the rain that he sends on the just and the unjust.

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Right. God is a God of order. One more example.

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Living in Oklahoma, or I even think about the people in recent days in Mississippi, the storms that went through there, tornadoes,

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God's power, his wrath are seen there in his creation.

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He holds it all together. He holds it all together. It's also kind of like when we visit someone's house, we can kind of learn a little bit about them with actually meeting them.

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We got home from church on Sunday. I think we flipped on the TV as we're kind of eating lunch together and they had

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Orchard House, Louisa May Alcott's house in the Boston area.

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It's a place that we visit or the CHA seniors visit when they go on their senior trip.

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But when you visit that house, you learn a lot about the Alcott family and the history of their family over the years.

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And Louisa May's, I mean, her becoming famous for writing Little Women and those sisters and all that's tied up in that.

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You don't learn about them personally and perfectly, but just by seeing what they surrounded themselves with, you learn a little bit more about them.

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This is what makes Jesus Christ's incarnation so amazing. If a child wants to know what God looks like, point him to Jesus Christ.

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Let's turn to John again, chapter one, verse 14.

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And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the

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Father, full of grace and truth. A few verses down in verse 18.

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Again, I said this earlier, no one has seen God at any time. The only begotten son who is in the bosom of the

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Father, he has declared him. Skip ahead just a little bit to John chapter 14.

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And I'm going to read verses one through 10. Jesus is saying this as he's with the disciples at the

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Last Supper. He says to them, let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.

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In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

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And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself. That where I am, there you may be also.

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And where I go, you know, and the way you know. Thomas said to him,

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Lord, we do not know where you are going and how can we know the way? Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth and the life.

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No one comes to the Father except through me. Verse seven, if you had known me, you would have known my

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Father also. And from now on, you know him and have seen him. Philip said to him,

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Lord, show us the Father and it is sufficient for us. I can just imagine if Jesus had a deadpan look, it would probably be right here because he's just like, are you not listening to what

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I'm saying? Jesus said to him, have I been with you so long and yet you have not known me,

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Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. So how can you say, show us the

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Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?

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Lastly, turn to Hebrews chapter one, verse three, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.

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He is the brightness, he is the radiance of God's glory and the express image of his person, namely

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God. Lastly, our third word, God is infinite.

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As a spirit, he's free of any and all limitations present in the time and space of his creation.

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He is infinite in his being and everywhere he is, he is full in his being.

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Job chapter five, verse nine, Job chapter five, verse nine, who does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number.

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There's the infinity of God. Can we truly worship a

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God that we can completely and fully comprehend? I don't believe that we can.

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He's not worthy of our worship if we can fully comprehend him. Turn to Job, same book,

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Job chapter nine, verse 10. He does great things, past finding out.

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Yes, wonders without number. As I was studying this, again, one of the helpful books in my study has been

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A .W. Pink's The Attributes of God. And Pink, very last chapter, so in a way

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I'm kind of skipping way ahead, but the chapter is called The Contemplation of God. But it speaks about God's infinity as it relates to our contemplation, our meditation, our study of him.

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And he quotes, I think he's a Puritan, John Dick. This is what

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Dick says, the saints in heaven will see God with the eye of the mind, for he will be always invisible to the bodily eye.

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They will see him more clearly than they could see him by reason and faith. And more extensively than all his works and dispensations had hitherto revealed him.

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But their minds will not be so enlarged as to be capable of contemplating at once or in detail the whole excellence of his nature.

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To comprehend infinite perfection, they must become infinite themselves. Even in heaven, their knowledge will be partial.

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But at the same time, their happiness will be complete because their knowledge will be perfect in this sense that it will be adequate to the capacity of the subject, although it will not exhaust the fullness of the object.

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We believe that it will be progressive and that as their views expand, their blessedness will increase.

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But it will never reach a limit beyond which there is nothing to be discovered. And when ages after ages have passed away, he will still be the incomprehensible

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God. And I come away with that. And I think that he, because of that fact, he is the only

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God that is worthy of our worship. So that's what I want to end with tonight.

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We have some song sheets there in front of you. And I've asked Lisa if she would kind of accompany us as we close tonight with the hymn

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Immortal Invisible. This has been around a while, but we've already seen these words in scripture tonight.

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Now let's sing them together. Immortal, invisible,

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God only wise. In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.

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Most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days.

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Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

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Unresting, unhastening, and silent as light.

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Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might.

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Thy justice like mountains high soaring above.

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Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

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To all life thou givest, to both great and small.

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In all life thou livest, the true life of all.

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We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree.

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And wither and perish, but not changeth thee.

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Great Father of glory, pure Father of light.

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Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight.

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All praise we would render, O help us to see.

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Tis only the splendor of light, hideth thee.

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Amen. Amen. All right, I'm going to have Brian come and he's going to take some prayer requests for us.