Sermon Notes from 5/30/09

I preached a True Love Waits sermon last night.

The text I used was Proverbs 7. In this text Solomon, the writer of Proverbs, perceives a situation from his window of a young man being successfully seduced by an adulteress.

There are a couple key factors that doomed this young man and led to his fall into sexual immorality. First he lacked sense. To put in short, the young man was not a godly man; he did not desire to follow God. Second the adulteress was wily of heart. This means that in her heart she wanted to deceive her victim into believing what they were doing was okay.

She gave him four reasons/excuses as to why he should go home with her.
1. She was right with God. This is an outright lie.
2. She prepared her bed with great feeling linens from Egypt (Egyptian Cotton I presume) and great smelling perfumes. This is not a lie but a very enticing offer.
3. She appeals to his desire for sex. She says, “let us take our fill of love until morning”. That’s a pretty heavy come-on.
4. She says her husband is gone and will not be back for a while. aka: this is a total freebee, and no one will know.This woman is a liar and deceiver.

I tried to put a twist on the passage by symbolizing the adulteress with our world and our culture. Our culture seduces and deceives our young people every day. Millions fall into sexually immorality and most don’t know that God hates it. That is because ultimately Satan is behind this deception and he loves it. He loves it when unwed people engage in sexual activity.

The best way to fight this deception (any deception) is with the Truth. Having God’s word in our hearts and mind and confessing Jesus as Savior is the only way to fight this deception successfully. If we do not have Jesus in our life we will ultimately fall to Satan’s deceptive ways. We will become one of his many victims.

How long has it been. . .

since you were put in your place? Think. How long? Year, three months, three days, how long?

For me it’s been about ten hours. In my Systematic Theology class today my professor lectured on the attributes of God. The first one he spoke of, and actually the only one he got to today, was God’s self-sufficiency. What is God’s self-sufficiency you might ask?

Definition - God possesses within himself intrinsically and eternally every quality in infinite measure.

This definition speaks to a quality of God we’ve come to know as transcendence. It means that God is totally separate from all created things. That makes sense right? God created every thing. He was there before it and he still exists apart from it. God doesn’t need creation to be God. God is God whether we’re here or not.

“Every quality in infinite measure”. God is all powerful and all knowing. God is enormous. He is huge and smart. Bigger than we’ll ever know and smarter than we’ll ever know. If thinking that stuff doesn’t put you in your place then maybe this will.

Isaiah 40:12-17. In 12-14 we see some awesome pictures of how powerful God is, in that he can measure all the waters of the world in the hollow of his hand, and how wise God is, in that he has never consulted anyone or been taught by anyone or had to learn any piece of information.

In 15 God starts an assault on our pride and our stance before him. It says, “Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust.” The nations, all the people to ever walk the earth, are like “a” drop from a bucket. If you were camping and you needed to put the camp fire out before you went to sleep and while you were carrying the bucket, which was full to the very top, you only spilled one drop, how much would you say you spilt when you got to the fire? You would say “wow, I didn’t spilling anything”, which would indeed be impressive. A drop is pretty much nothing. It gets worse in 17 Isaiah says, “all the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.”

Ouch, that is a direct assault on the human ego. Now that is getting put in your place. We are so infinitely small compared to God. We are nothing, literally nothing, next to him. Humanity and all of creation do not add one bit of richness or fullness to who God is. God gains nothing by our existence. That is directly the opposite of how most of us live our lives on a daily basis. We walk and talk like we are something, like we are entitled to respect and acknowledgement. Its time to get put in our place, we are nothing next to God.

Lucky for us, that while we are nothing and so insignificant God chooses to love us and take care of us to the point that he even died for us. While he is so big and so smart he chooses to get involved in our lives on a personal level. That ought to wow us. That ought to make us humble before him, and it only will once you see him for who he rightfully is, he is God. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and he is worthy of all our praise, adoration, worship, and submissiveness.

The Gift

Laura Brocco has a gift. Self proclaimed and apparently true.

She’s been claiming to be able to predict who’s going to win a sporting event.

So this weekend I put her to the test. She said she didn’t like being backed into a corner to pick the games, but I just had to see if this self proclaimed gift was legit.

It is.

13-5 in the picks for college games this weekend. Including Hawaii as an upset over Fresno St. Now keep in mind, she doesn’t even know the top 25. It was purely just the gift taking over and predicting the winners.

She’s also picked the NFL games this weekend so we’ll see how that goes.

I’m impressed Laura Brocco.