Rediscovering God's Sovereignty and Awe in Faith

"The last few weeks we've had some conversations about the first sermons, the first church, and they've all been about the fact that God had done something absolutely dramatic, and an invitation to be part of that, with the acknowledgement that it was going to create quite a bit of division and controversy. Here we are thousands of years later, and we still have lots of division and controversy about these questions." [00:01:47] (38 seconds)


"Some of the most ruthless, awful human beings ever to have power loved Nietzsche. And they were collectively all, in addition to being savage butchers, they were also morons, because Nietzsche was so much more than God is... God is dead. It was not a celebration of this fact. It was almost more of a lament." [00:03:03] (35 seconds)


"And I encourage people, you've got to read this stuff. Don't just take the Coles Notes versions. Go and read what he said. Let me just offer you this. This is what he said. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Then he goes on to say, how shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" [00:03:38] (28 seconds)


"And for most of my years in ministry, that's what I've tried to do. But there's an underlying unease about that. Because for me, God is so much more than just, you know, a comforting presence. God is so much more than what I think the church has reduced God to, which is really in many ways a glorified therapist." [00:06:40] (27 seconds)


"but then i kind of discovered how to make you know a nice well my mom kind of showed me how to make a nice cheese sauce and lately i've been saying well okay we we've got the church is is kind of promoting a macaroni and cheese theology but we've we're starting to add in a little what i would call a kind of garlic bread of humanism right we're just we're making we're rounding out the comfort food by by , bringing in very humanistic ideas and in invariably we've humanized god and we certainly have humanized jesus to the point where what do we do when we encounter a piece of scripture like we're just read because you can't just push it aside i've seen that happen too often we can't just dilute it down and diminish it what is paul saying" [00:08:09] (63 seconds)


"Where do I really, why do I struggle with these things? Well, when I see an earthquake that takes, what, almost 25 ,000 lives and counting this week, that's when you got to start to, and I got no easy answers for you folks, but what do you do with that? Shortly, we will pray for a compassionate, strong response to the global community, to the devastation in Asia Minor, in contemporary Turkey and Syria." [00:13:43] (41 seconds)


"That is a function of, if we believe, and I hope we do, that God is, as Paul says in Acts 17, the creator of all that we can physically define as the human realm. Creation of all that we know, and earthquakes, and tornadoes, and floods, and droughts, and hurricanes are all a function of that. Setting aside all the contemporary debate right now about whether those things are getting worse or not, but just the function of, then what do you do about that? Well, I believe it is a function of God's sovereignty." [00:14:32] (42 seconds)


"And I believe that we need to rediscover the spirit of the first church. Because what the first church is saying, where is the awe? Where is the awe in your life about God? Have you taken God, diminished him down to nothing more than an agent of comfort?" [00:15:14] (27 seconds)


"How do you settle that, rectify that, with the reality of what happens in our world? Not easy questions. I don't have any answers. I'm not going to leave you any today. I'm just going to ask you a question. I asked you to consider that question I asked earlier. Have we, have we as a church killed God again?" [00:15:39] (21 seconds)