God relates to us in many ways. And sometimes it's difficult to understand how He can be a father and a master, how He can be our Redeemer and our Savior and our Creator, but still our Lord. But one of the things that the Word says is that we have become friends of God. And that's quite a unique concept to understand.
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Christianity is really unique in the extent and the depth of the relationship that we have with God. So we are looking at this thing called being a friend of God through the lens and the eyes of different characters in the Bible.
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They're oftentimes very ordinary people that God uses in amazing ways. So last week, where's Jason? He spoke on Moses. And Jason's job was really, really difficult because there is so much about Moses. Moses, you can spend a whole year just looking every Sunday at the life of Moses. My job this morning is equally difficult for the opposite reason. I'm talking about Enoch. Who's heard of a guy called Enoch?
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What I found amazing is there's so much life in the Word of God. You can take one verse, and God can just unpack just revelation upon revelation, because He's so intentional. He doesn't waste words. Everything that He says has a purpose.
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What is consistent throughout Scripture is that God warns people, and then he's immensely slow to anger and abounding in love. And God gives us chance after chance after chance to repent and come back to him. So, there's an amazing thing that we can learn from God about how kind and how gracious he is. That his righteousness demands justice, but his heart is that people would turn towards him.
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He's not mentioned for his great works. He's not the guy who parted the Red Sea. He's not the guy who killed Goliath. He's the guy who is remembered because of the relationship that he had with Christ. I bet that he did some amazing things. You can't walk with God and not do amazing things. But I think God is making a point here, and he's saying to us, this man is remembered not for what he did, but for who he was and how he related to me.
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Enoch walked faithfully with God. Two times it says that, just to emphasize how closely he walked with God. And as a result of that, he is one of only two people in the Bible who never physically die.
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So I want to tell you two interesting facts quickly before we get into the meat of this word. The first one is that he's not the first Enoch. In Genesis 4, there's another Enoch, but that Enoch is the son of Cain, who if you know was the bad guy who killed his brother Abel. Whereas this Genesis 5 Enoch is the son of Seth, and if you continue his line, you get to Christ.
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God is perfect, and we are imperfect. Can you imagine being married to a spouse who was perfect? How well do you think that relationship would go? I think that would be a challenge for me personally. God is all -knowing, and we are vastly limited in our understanding. God is infinite, and we are finite. God is all -powerful, and we are frail. God is supernatural, and we are bound to this natural body for now. God is holy and pure, and we are sinful. If that was the only reason, that would be a big enough reason that this relationship would be difficult to work out.
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One of the most amazing revelations the Bible has for us is that we are made in the image of God. That even we might be quite far apart in our natures, but there is a likeness. There is a touching point. It's not like God in a toaster, you know, we are made in His image, and we are relational because God is relational.
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To not have relationship, to not have connection, is one of the worst forms of torture that a human being can go through. So one of the things about this, about being made in the image of God, is sometimes we forget that God is a person.
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God is, he is a person. He is relatable. He's not an entity. He's not a robot. He's not an ideology or a doctrine. He's a person that we relate to.
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Aren't you glad that when something is leading your heart away from God, that it stirs up the jealousy of God, that he's moved to act on your behalf, to win you back, to draw you back? Isn't it a wonderful thing that God is not indifferent to us?
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God's emotions are always a perfect expression of a perfect being. Isn't it wonderful that God can understand how we feel, that because Jesus came down to earth, he knows what it's like, what we go through?
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God not only has thoughts and plans, he has feelings and desires too. In contrast to the unreliability and instability of human sin -tainted emotions, God's emotions are as completely dependable and immutable as he. Isn't it wonderful that we serve a God that is alive, that is not just a dead list of rules and regulations?
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To be a friend of God is like to be in the king's inner circle. You can imagine if you are a trusted advisor to the king. Not that we advise God, just go with me on this. But if you are, you have access to the inner circle. You have privileged information. You're in the know of what is going on and what is happening. And when Jesus calls us friend, it means we are his confidence that he shares the secrets of the kingdom of heaven with. He shares the secrets of life with us.
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We have been designed with like a homing beacon that sits in the depths of our hearts, that is longing to connect with God, longing to connect with the Father.
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Right now you are as close to God as you have chosen to be. That is an incredible statement. It's an immense encouragement, because it means as close as you want to get to God, you can get there, but it's also an admonishment.
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To know God and to love God is our greatest privilege. To be known by God and to be loved by God is our greatest pleasure. That is the prize. That is the reward that Enoch is talking about. God rewards those who earnestly seek Him.
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It means that your heart longs for God. Your heart is reserved for God. When something else comes and tries to take your heart, there's just a reserved sign that is permanently on your heart that says, I've been reserved for someone else.
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As we see in the life of Enoch as he walked relationally with this God and he sought Him wholeheartedly, we see the unity that they had in how they walked. In Amos 3 verse 3 it says, can two people walk together without agreeing on the direction? That's a rhetorical question. The answer is no, they can't.
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As we walk with God, we've got to learn to hate the value system of the world, but to love the people who are in it as much as Jesus loves them. And that is a lesson that we can take from Enoch, how he walked and how he loved God and he loved what God loves.
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When your heart is committed to God, you are like Enoch, you're like this blinker in a sense that comes up on God's radar because He's looking for hearts that are fully devoted to Him. And when He sees those hearts, He rushes to strengthen them, to walk with them, and to be a blessing to them.
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If you're here today because you honestly came because you have faith in Jesus, then I want to say that act is pleasing to God. You've done something today that is pleasing to God. If you worship this morning because you believe in Jesus and you believe what He's done for you, the faith that you exercised this morning went up to heaven as a pleasing offering and aroma to God.
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What Jesus did on the cross opened a way for us all to walk closely with God. The tragedy, if you look at the Old Testament, is how few the select group of people that really walked closely with God? But after Jesus died on the cross and that curtain was torn in two and the way was opened, how many people do you know who enjoy a close relationship with God?
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One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to connect you to the Father who loves you.
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God has prepared everything. It's available. But Simon, you've got to be brave. You've got to be prepared to get up. You've got to be hungry enough for that text to do whatever it takes to stand up in front of whoever is there to go to the front. And what you did was an illustration and it was a picture of what I'm hoping many of us are going to do from now on is be hungry enough to get up and go and appropriate that which Christ has already done for us.
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If we are fully committed to Him, every day just gets sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. And the memories of Him coming through for you and the memories of Him blessing you at PTP and the memories of Him encountering you in worship, they just begin to pile up and pile up and pile up and pile up. And then you get to a space where you are just so in love with the Father. And we are able to do that because He's perfect, because He's so good and because He's so loving.
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