Will of God sermon 4 of 5 7/31/11
Will of God
Ultimate Will of God - Sermon 4 of 5
7/31/2011
For the past three weeks I have talking to you about the will of God. I am doing this because; if we don’t understand what God’s Word tells us about his will we are left to come up with our own version of the will of God. And since we are a sinful people living in an upside down world that we think is right side up, we, will always come up with the wrong understanding of God’s will. And that wrong understanding of God’s will leads us to live lives that are not lived the way God wants us to live them.
The first Sunday I told you that I was going to call God’s perfect will by three different names; intentional, circumstantial, and ultimate will. This does not mean that God has three separate wills, for he has only one, his perfect will. It is just as way for you to better understand that perfect will which never changes works in a different way before sin, after sin, and at the end of time.
The next Sunday we looked at what I have called God’s intentional will; his intent that he had for his creation which was and still is that his human creation would walk in righteous fellowship with him, do good toward others, and live in harmony with the rest of his creation which when he created it, was very good.
When Adam and Eve sinned the intentional will of God was temporarily blocked or at the very least hampered by their actions. That still happens today, as we too do not walk in fellowship with God, as he desires, always do good to others, or live in harmony with the rest of his creation.
We like to think we do what God asks of us, but at some time or other God will ask through his Word more of us than we want to do. Humanity has become self-centered and will do good only if it serves its own purpose. For we no longer fully trust in God to care for us and his creation and ultimately we want to hide from God just as Adam and Eve did so long ago.
This has, in an earthly sense, created a problem for God. Since his intentional will did not change after sin entered the world he needed he had to do something drastic; really earth shattering under the circumstances in which we live, as a fallen and broken people living in a fallen and broken world.
That drastic thing that God did so that his intentional will would be accomplished was to come into our midst, as one of us, to do what we will not do and then die in our place, so that eventually his intentional will would be fulfilled.
God used the evil of the world, as we see when Jesus was tortured and put to death to accomplish good; the salvation of his human creation. In the suffering and death of Jesus the process of restoration was started. I do not mean by that that Jesus did not complete the act of freeing us from condemnation when he died. He did that, but as we are all well aware, the whole restoration is not complete, for all forms of evil, sickness, and death surround us.
We also learned last week that although God can and does in fact use evil to do good he does not create evil. God is good and thus, cannot do or create evil, even if good comes from it. Thus disease or any of the other evil things that happen to us do not come from God.
God’s intentional will was and still is that his human creation is to walk in fellowship with him, love others, and live in harmony with his creation. Under the circumstances of sin filled world with a people who in their innermost being really do not want to come to God, God’s circumstantial will came into being at the cross when his perfect Son Jesus took the punishment that we still deserve. Because of Jesus’ death we will not get God’s wrath, even though we still deserve it. We are, as I said in my fourth of July sermon, “Free, free at last.”
That brings me to the subject for today, the ultimate will of God. The ultimate will of God is simply that his intentional will under the circumstances of a fallen world will ultimately take place in the end. At that time his entire creation will be restored, as it was in the beginning when he looked at it and said that it was very good.
You might be asking yourself, “How can you say that? From what authority do you base your statements? As I said at the beginning of this sermon series on the will of God that all I said concerning the will of God would come from God’s Word. That wonderful book of Revelation in God’s Word tells us that God wins in the end, as he locks Satan up, restores his creation to the way it was when he said it was “very good.”
That, my dear brothers and sisters, is Good News. But what about the lives we are living right now with all of its problems, diseases, and tragedies? How can I be sure that God’s intentional will under the circumstance of live be ultimately done?
All of those are good questions to ask, so I went to Weatherhead’s book The Will of God for an illustration of how God’s intentional will under the circumstances of our lives will ultimately come to fulfillment.
He tells of the time that a young woman came to see him whose husband had been killed in the war leaving her two small children without a father. She asked him how God’s intentional will was being worked out in the circumstances of her life now that her husband was dead her children were without a father. She was alone and life was going to be terrible without much hope for it to get better.
He writes that he told her, “In this life no one can answer save in faith, for no one can see the end from the beginning. On Good Friday night eleven men, in the deepest gloom felt like you. They said in their hearts, ‘We trusted him, we followed him. It was his will to establish his kingdom. After all he told them so. And evil has been allowed to take him from us. It is the end of everything.’ But they were wrong weren’t they? It was only the end of their false understanding and the beginning of the most wonderful use of evil which God had ever affected. One day like them, you will find out how wrong you are.” God’s intentional will, will ultimately be done. There is nothing that can stop it.
When my brothers and I were young we used to go down to the creek behind the high school. It came out of a spring and flowed down to a river. You could say that that was its intentional will. Every summer we would try to dam up the creek, so that we could have a swimming area. We would pile up rocks. We filled in the holes with mud, leaves, and sticks. We would build it as high as we could. We would do all we could to change the circumstances of the creek, to stop it from doing what it intended to do, that is to flow down to the river.
But no matter how high, or how well-built we made our dam each summer, we could only manage to slow the creek down. Eventually its intentional will to flow down river was accomplished, for it would under the circumstances it found itself eventually break down the dam, no matter how much we tried to stop it. It would then ultimately continue to its final destination. Its ultimate will, as God had designed it was eventually accomplished, as it flowed into the river below it.
Just as that creek under the circumstances it found itself in ultimately accomplished what it had set out to do when it came out of the spring, God’s intentional will under the circumstances of a fallen sinful world will ultimately take place. That my dear brothers and sisters in Christ is our comfort in this fallen evil world in which we live. Amen.
Next week, now that we understand what the will of God is, we will look at how we can better discern the will of God in our lives and what that means for us. If you have missed any of the sermons they are on the Saint John website under sermon archives.
Ultimate Will of God - Sermon 4 of 5
7/31/2011
For the past three weeks I have talking to you about the will of God. I am doing this because; if we don’t understand what God’s Word tells us about his will we are left to come up with our own version of the will of God. And since we are a sinful people living in an upside down world that we think is right side up, we, will always come up with the wrong understanding of God’s will. And that wrong understanding of God’s will leads us to live lives that are not lived the way God wants us to live them.
The first Sunday I told you that I was going to call God’s perfect will by three different names; intentional, circumstantial, and ultimate will. This does not mean that God has three separate wills, for he has only one, his perfect will. It is just as way for you to better understand that perfect will which never changes works in a different way before sin, after sin, and at the end of time.
The next Sunday we looked at what I have called God’s intentional will; his intent that he had for his creation which was and still is that his human creation would walk in righteous fellowship with him, do good toward others, and live in harmony with the rest of his creation which when he created it, was very good.
When Adam and Eve sinned the intentional will of God was temporarily blocked or at the very least hampered by their actions. That still happens today, as we too do not walk in fellowship with God, as he desires, always do good to others, or live in harmony with the rest of his creation.
We like to think we do what God asks of us, but at some time or other God will ask through his Word more of us than we want to do. Humanity has become self-centered and will do good only if it serves its own purpose. For we no longer fully trust in God to care for us and his creation and ultimately we want to hide from God just as Adam and Eve did so long ago.
This has, in an earthly sense, created a problem for God. Since his intentional will did not change after sin entered the world he needed he had to do something drastic; really earth shattering under the circumstances in which we live, as a fallen and broken people living in a fallen and broken world.
That drastic thing that God did so that his intentional will would be accomplished was to come into our midst, as one of us, to do what we will not do and then die in our place, so that eventually his intentional will would be fulfilled.
God used the evil of the world, as we see when Jesus was tortured and put to death to accomplish good; the salvation of his human creation. In the suffering and death of Jesus the process of restoration was started. I do not mean by that that Jesus did not complete the act of freeing us from condemnation when he died. He did that, but as we are all well aware, the whole restoration is not complete, for all forms of evil, sickness, and death surround us.
We also learned last week that although God can and does in fact use evil to do good he does not create evil. God is good and thus, cannot do or create evil, even if good comes from it. Thus disease or any of the other evil things that happen to us do not come from God.
God’s intentional will was and still is that his human creation is to walk in fellowship with him, love others, and live in harmony with his creation. Under the circumstances of sin filled world with a people who in their innermost being really do not want to come to God, God’s circumstantial will came into being at the cross when his perfect Son Jesus took the punishment that we still deserve. Because of Jesus’ death we will not get God’s wrath, even though we still deserve it. We are, as I said in my fourth of July sermon, “Free, free at last.”
That brings me to the subject for today, the ultimate will of God. The ultimate will of God is simply that his intentional will under the circumstances of a fallen world will ultimately take place in the end. At that time his entire creation will be restored, as it was in the beginning when he looked at it and said that it was very good.
You might be asking yourself, “How can you say that? From what authority do you base your statements? As I said at the beginning of this sermon series on the will of God that all I said concerning the will of God would come from God’s Word. That wonderful book of Revelation in God’s Word tells us that God wins in the end, as he locks Satan up, restores his creation to the way it was when he said it was “very good.”
That, my dear brothers and sisters, is Good News. But what about the lives we are living right now with all of its problems, diseases, and tragedies? How can I be sure that God’s intentional will under the circumstance of live be ultimately done?
All of those are good questions to ask, so I went to Weatherhead’s book The Will of God for an illustration of how God’s intentional will under the circumstances of our lives will ultimately come to fulfillment.
He tells of the time that a young woman came to see him whose husband had been killed in the war leaving her two small children without a father. She asked him how God’s intentional will was being worked out in the circumstances of her life now that her husband was dead her children were without a father. She was alone and life was going to be terrible without much hope for it to get better.
He writes that he told her, “In this life no one can answer save in faith, for no one can see the end from the beginning. On Good Friday night eleven men, in the deepest gloom felt like you. They said in their hearts, ‘We trusted him, we followed him. It was his will to establish his kingdom. After all he told them so. And evil has been allowed to take him from us. It is the end of everything.’ But they were wrong weren’t they? It was only the end of their false understanding and the beginning of the most wonderful use of evil which God had ever affected. One day like them, you will find out how wrong you are.” God’s intentional will, will ultimately be done. There is nothing that can stop it.
When my brothers and I were young we used to go down to the creek behind the high school. It came out of a spring and flowed down to a river. You could say that that was its intentional will. Every summer we would try to dam up the creek, so that we could have a swimming area. We would pile up rocks. We filled in the holes with mud, leaves, and sticks. We would build it as high as we could. We would do all we could to change the circumstances of the creek, to stop it from doing what it intended to do, that is to flow down to the river.
But no matter how high, or how well-built we made our dam each summer, we could only manage to slow the creek down. Eventually its intentional will to flow down river was accomplished, for it would under the circumstances it found itself eventually break down the dam, no matter how much we tried to stop it. It would then ultimately continue to its final destination. Its ultimate will, as God had designed it was eventually accomplished, as it flowed into the river below it.
Just as that creek under the circumstances it found itself in ultimately accomplished what it had set out to do when it came out of the spring, God’s intentional will under the circumstances of a fallen sinful world will ultimately take place. That my dear brothers and sisters in Christ is our comfort in this fallen evil world in which we live. Amen.
Next week, now that we understand what the will of God is, we will look at how we can better discern the will of God in our lives and what that means for us. If you have missed any of the sermons they are on the Saint John website under sermon archives.
posted by Pastor Rhoads | 3:41 PM
|
0 comments
