How to Touch the Greatness of God

Scriptural text for today and we're going to be looking throughout the chapter so you need to leave your Bible open. If you didn't bring your Bible today, a couple of things I want to say. First of all, you should be seated near someone who has a Bible, slide over and step on their foot until they let you share with them. And if that isn't the case, ushers, I think we even have some Bibles, Fred, hello? If we have some Bibles out there that people would like to borrow, this message today requires that people be able to follow along. So look down there at the lost and found, Fred, and your Bible could be given away right now, folks. I've been wanting to do this for a long, long time. We'll be reading all the way through Isaiah 40 in just a moment. As some of you know, I just got back from our family vacation last Sunday morning and it didn't take long for the pile of messages and requests and callbacks to find its way to the top of my desk and folks, I spent a lot of time getting back to people, talking to them about their circumstances. If you need a Bible, wave your hand out now and we'll be happy to pass one out to you. There's someone over here, great, great, just keep your hand up for a moment. Anyhow, as we were looking through this week, I was calling people, talking about some folks who lost their job and didn't know what to do now, a couple people who had fallen into some real tough financial times, a few other people who said, you know what, I had been feeling very well and some sickness I had came back on me, those kind of things. But I've discovered something and it came back loud and clear this week. Very often when we find ourselves in some problems, we have a propensity to begin to blame somebody for those problems and if we don't address that, it isn't long before we even take our puny little finger and start shaking it, at who, at God. And then an ordinary problem, you know, a common to mankind kind of problem, a problem of difficulty, whatever, a problem of strife, of adversity, that problem becomes infinitely more complex because now God's character is assaulted and oftentimes, and I've heard it this week probably five times, the church is to blame. So let's blame the church and let's shake our finger in God's face because we have a problem and we haven't had an answer. And folks, I say, you know, what's really going on here? As I think back in the Bible, when you think of a person who had trials, I mean, who really had a rough time in life, what one name surfaces above everyone else's, huh? Good old Job. And Job had some majorly trials, I mean, all, whoever among you is maybe having a hard time right now, it couldn't compare to what Job had happen in his life. He lost everything, everything. And then he himself was terribly put, but in the end, you see, God broke in and answered Job's problems, not by explaining why all these things happened, but God broke in and answered his problems simply by saying, I'm the God who created everything that there is and I'm your God. And what more do you need to know? And you know what? By the end of all those trials and God's breaking in and giving that explanation, Job was satisfied and he said, you know something, God, you're right. Now here in the book of Isaiah, the same thing is happening. The people of God are about to come under severe judgment. Isaiah 1 through 39, the first 39 chapters talk about the fact that God is sending them off into exile where they will be banished. They will go through adversity. They will have trial and struggle, but God doesn't leave them without hope. Here in Isaiah chapter 40, God says to the prophet, now speak these words and let's look at them. Now Isaiah 40, verse 1, open your Bible, take a look at it, some of you are hugging your wife and stuff. Look at your Bible, okay? Here we go. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and Jerusalem in the Bible is often a picture of the church, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. Now listen to these next verses, they'll be familiar. A voice of one calling, in the desert prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, and every mountain and hill be made low. The rough ground shall become level, and the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. This is one of those series of verses that has multiple fulfillments. The Lord fulfilled this for the people of God when he delivered them out of Babylon. He later fulfilled it through John's prophecy, John the Baptist, before Jesus came. But when is the glory of the Lord really going to be seen throughout the earth? Whether it's in Africa, or Great Britain, or China, or here in America, when's it really going to be seen? When the Lord comes again. That's when this verse, and by the way, if you don't understand prophecy, many times it's because we try to impose a particular time of fulfillment on it. When God may have multiple levels of fulfillment. Okay, let's go on. Skip down to verse 9. You who bring good tidings, all this is comfort now to the people, in the midst of their trial. You who bring good tidings to Zion, get up on a high mountain. You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up and do not be afraid, and say to the towns of Judah, to the people of God, here is your God. Say that with me. Here is your God. Let's flash it up for those who don't have a Bible, Isaiah 40, verse 9b. Say it again. Here is your God. See, the sovereign Lord comes with power, and His arm rules for Him. See, His reward is with Him, and His recompense accompanies Him. And see, the Lord begins to describe Himself. Here is the God that you need in the midst of your affliction and adversity. Look at verse 11. He tends His flock like a shepherd, He gathers the lambs in His arms, what a tender little picture this paints for us, and carries them close to His heart. He gently leads those that have young. And God goes on and begins to describe, here is your God. Now look at verse 27. This is what it's all pointing to, let's leap over a number of verses. So therefore, why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel? My way is hidden from the Lord, my cause is disregarded by my God. You see, God is saying, in the midst of trial, and affliction, and adversity, which none of you are going through, right? He is saying, why do you say, O Jacob, why do you complain, O Israel? Where is God? My ways are hidden from Him. And dear ones, what we're going to see here, is that God has clearly spoken to us in the midst of whatever we're going through. And I can look out here this morning, and I see etched in some of your faces the fact that you're going through some pretty deep stuff. The Lord is going to say to us very clearly today, I have spoken to you in the midst of this. I have revealed myself, now lay hold of it, and be changed. Little audience participation here. If we were to go down the steps with a microphone and walk over to you and say, are you going through a time of perplexity, confusion, trial, or adversity right now? How many would say, that's me? Just put your hands up. Go ahead. Hold it up. I don't mean, no, I don't mean, you know, just like there was hair in your toothbrush or something like that. I mean, you really had a hard time. Let me see your hands again. All right. I thank you for your honesty. I won't bring the microphone down. And I want to say to us as a church, for those of you who aren't going through that right now, be thankful. I believe God is about to allow our church to go through some significant change, very significant change. I shared with our leaders, we had about, I don't know, a hundred and something leaders here yesterday, had a very good meeting. And I shared with them where I believe God is about to take us, and we are going to go through some changes, folks. And I want to tell you, I mean, there's going to be some adversity and some trial and some discomfort and some questions. And I believe what God says here in these verses is the best counsel. If you could pay $150 an hour to go to a counselor, he or she could not give you better counsel than the Word of God is going to give you right now, if you're going through a trial or right now, when we as a church begin to see some things change around here. This is what God wants to say to us. And what I want you to hear is that over and over again, when God's people began to get into complexity and confusion and hurt and discouragement, and they began to say, where is God? What's He doing? God answers them over and over and over again by saying, wait a minute, look at creation. Now most of you know, this past vacation, Gary Beasley from out in California invited our family to go out and spend some time out there with him, so we did. And you could maybe attribute a lot of what I'm going to say today to the fact that I'm still in awe of what I was able to see of God's creation. Here in Pittsburgh, by the way, folks, you know, this is a typical day. It's usually sunny like this and beautiful, not. But we were out in this, you know, this incredible landscape near Lake Tahoe and all this kind of thing. And in the midst of that, I wasn't thinking about messages and I wasn't thinking about preparing or anything like that. But in the midst of that, the Lord reminded me, and so much more so as I've been meditating on these verses, that if we'll look at creation, God has said some things to us about His sovereign control and His ability to order His plans for our lives. And what He wants us to know is if we'll come to grips with this and just let it sink in past all of the surface kinds of responses that we have, we'll be satisfied that we don't need to have a specific answer from God for each thing that we're facing in our life. But rather, we can be confident that God who placed the stars in the heavens and raised the mountains out of the seas and causes the sun to rise and to set each day, that this sovereign God has a plan for you that will not be frustrated by the powers of darkness and that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day of Christ Jesus. We can know that with certainty, and we can be assured that God will work all things together for good, for those that love Him and are called according to His purpose. Now those can be words in a book, or those can be life-sustaining promises to the child of God who has eyes to see. Now, what I'm sharing with you today isn't just, you know, a couple of thoughts. I'm believing that what God has said here is, comfort my people with this. Isaiah 40 verse 9b, comfort my people with this thought, here is your God. The greatest need of God's people then, and I believe the greatest need of God's people today is the revelation of the greatness of God. And folks, here in America, we have just a tendency to forget how great God is because we think, well, how great we are. Many sincere but misguided substitute emphases, self-help kinds of things, and psychology and so on, have begun to emerge to push out the greatness of God as the answer to our needs. You know, when God appeared to Job, He didn't share with him the 12 steps. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, last week, if you missed Reed Carpenter's message, you ought to hear. Pick up the tape. Hear what was spoken about us and who we are as a church, even as it relates to the founding of that whole movement. And yet, I believe it's been just an ongoing quality, if you will, or characteristics or better word of the church, to begin to substitute everything but God as a solution for our problems. Is that folder down there anywhere? It's under your desk. Let me read a quote for you from J.I. Packer, by the way, who is a Brit. J.I. Packer wrote these words. This is rather long, but listen carefully because I believe it captures the essence of what our struggle is. Are you ready for it? There's no doubt that evangelicalism today is in a state of perplexity and unsettlement in such matters as the practice of evangelism, teaching of holiness, the building up of the local church, and the exercise of discipline and growth. There is evidence of widespread dissatisfaction with things as they are, and of equally widespread uncertainty of the road ahead. This is a complex phenomenon to which many factors have contributed, but if we go to the root of the matter, we shall find that these perplexities, what many of us are facing, are all ultimately due to our having lost our grip on the biblical gospel. Without realizing it, we have, in this past century, bartered that gospel for a substitute gospel, which, though it looks similar enough in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing. Hence our troubles. For the substitute product does not answer the ends for which the authentic gospel has in past days proved itself so mighty. Why? We would suggest that the reason why lies in its own character and content. It fails. Now, speaking of the new gospel, to make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts, because this is not primarily what it's trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be helpful to men. That's what it's trying to do. To bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction, and so on, and too little concerned to bring glory to God. Do you see the difference? The old gospel was helpful too, more so indeed than the new, but so to speak incidentally. For its first concern, the old gospel, was always to give glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of divine sovereignty and mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the mighty Lord upon whom men depend for all good in both nature and grace. Its center of reference was unambiguously God. But in the new gospel, the center of reference is man. This is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach people to worship God, the concern of the new seems to be limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and his ways with men. The subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There's a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed. I hope you can feel with me why. I mean, that is so accurate. How many of you agree with that? Now, it's been very subtle. It's been a long time coming, but here's how you can prove my theory or his quote and my theory on this. Walk into any Christian bookstore. I asked Mary Zeke here, who coordinates our bookstore, I said, just let me see the titles, the new titles of 1992 that have been published by Christian publishers. And folks, you can go in there and look. Almost all of them, I'd say 90% are concerned with how man can get better, how he can deal with his problems, how he can feel better about himself, how he can come to terms with this conflict and that problem. And there's not one or two good books this whole year that have been written about God. And as that gets pushed on down the line, what we find is we have to create this monstrous kind of administrative thing to sustain the interaction that everyone's looking for from one another because we've lost the ability just to touch God. Now, please don't take any of this out of context. I'm not against man being helped. I'm not against counselors. I affirm those things. But folks, if God isn't at the center, these things fall short. And what Isaiah is prophesying and saying here is that it's time to recognize that God does not exist for our help, but we exist to know and glorify Him. He's not just the man upstairs, some secret being, you know, behind our formulas, not to be casually referred to. He's the awesome and terrible and sovereign Lord God Almighty. Yes, He's full of mercy and grace, but He also is coming in judgment to call His church to Himself. So many distortions seem to prevail about His nature. I don't know about you, but all I hear is, oh, you know, God's so loving, He's so merciful, and He is, but He also is a God who demands some things of His people. And Isaiah stands and he says, proclaim to the towns, proclaim to the nations, here is your God. Here He is. And let's look at who He is when Isaiah proclaims it. Look at verse 12. Here is this God we're talking about. Look at verse 12. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand? Look, everyone cup your hands like this, please. The Lord says, when I do that, I can hold the oceans, the great lakes, the rivers. I can hold all the bodies of water in the hollow of my hand. Look down at yours. How much could you hold? Here is your God. Then He says, by the breadth of His hand marked off the heavens. Go like this now, put the breadth of your hand out there. The Lord says, I can do this and go here and here and here, and I can mark off the heavens. It takes light four years to get to the next star at 186,000 miles per second. God says, I can do this. How many of you could measure heaven with your hand? How long would that take? That's how I do things. Then He goes on and says, who has weighed the mountains on the scales, or the dust of the earth in a basket? Folks, that's a lot of dust, and those are big mountains. I love that. The mountains of the earth on the scales. Here's Pike's Peak. Over here is Mount Everest. I'll just kind of weigh those in the scales. That's how our God presents Himself in these scriptures. He goes on. Look at verse 13. Or who has understood the mind of the Lord, or instructed Him as His counselor? Just a little honesty here. How many of you have recently counseled God? You said something like this, God, you don't understand my problem here. You need to do this, God, because this is the way I see it. I have to say, I've said, God, clearly, clearly, you don't know what's going on here, right? And we tend to question His control. We tend to blame others instead of just humbly, and in speechless, adoring worship, say, God, thank you. I see your sovereign control. Look at verse 14. Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten Him? Was it the elders? No. Home group leaders? No. Then who taught Him the right way? Who was it that taught Him knowledge, or showed Him the path of understanding? No one has enlightened God. Dear ones, let me say this. God doesn't have any need for that. And if you grew up in some kind of a tradition where you were suffering, but look what the verse says. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, and now crowned with glory and honor, because He suffered death so that by the grace of God, He might taste death for everyone. You see, dear ones, let me conclude with this. We must come to terms with this issue. You may be going through a trial today, a struggle, a perplexity, a problem, and you don't see the answer. And you're asking God why. And I want you to hear today the Lord breaking in and answering your need, not by giving you an explanation, not by defending Himself, not necessarily by even solving your problem, but by coming in and saying very clearly, Here I am. This is who I am. Look at me in creation and understand my sovereignty. And then look on the cross and see my Son. And know that that's how much I love you. And that if I loved you enough to spare not my only Son, how much more will I not give you all things with Him, Romans 8.32 says. Do you see the point of today? Let's get away from the need to know. And let's come to the place of saying, God, I affirm my trust. You're enthroned. And by the way, folks, when we praise God, the Bible says that the Lord is enthroned on the praises of His people. Today, if you haven't yet praised Him wholeheartedly, dig down inside and say, Lord, I'm going to praise you and enthrone you because that's where you are. I just want to come in line with that. And all you need to do today is in just a few moments as we come to communion, as you hold the evidence of God's love for you, just say, God, this is all the evidence I need that you're going to take care of me. This is all the promise that I need to have that you're going to work out my situation. That nothing can frustrate your plan for me. And I know I'm talking to people right now who are out of work, people whose marriages are right on the very edge of falling apart, people whose sons and daughters are in serious trouble. I know I'm talking to people in trials and perplexity like that. I just want to say to you one last time, here is your God. He rules sovereignly over creation and He loves you enough that His Son died on the cross for you. Let that satisfy you. Because Isaiah says, and let's look at the last verse, if you do that, those who hope in the Lord shall renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They'll run and not be weary. They'll walk and not faint. And that's the kind of hope and promise and power God will bring. Let's stand for prayer, shall we?