Hope Church LV Sermons
The Heart of Hope: God Dependence
I want to begin this morning by giving you a quiz. Don't you love the word quiz? I mean, that just brings up bad memories when you hear it, but I want to ask you a simple question, and I want you to kind of formulate the answer in your mind. I want you to think about what your answer might be. Here's the question. Here's the quiz. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring three items, what would they be? There's your quiz. Think about your answer. I'm going to give you a few seconds. Don't talk to your neighbor. No cheating. All right. Only your answers. If you're stranded on a desert island, you can only bring three items, what would you bring? Don't say it out loud. Just think about your answers. I just want you to kind of formulate it. All right, you begun to formulate your answer. Let me tell you what I did while you're thinking about your answer. Let me tell you what I did this week. I took that question and I entered it into the ultimate question answer. I went to Google, right? What in the world did we do before Google? If you have a question, you immediately just enter it in and you get your answer. Well, I put that in Google this week, and one of the things that came up was a website called Yahoo Answers. I don't know if you're familiar or use Yahoo Answers or not, but Yahoo Answers is basically a forum where you can online post a question, and people from all over the world literally will respond to that particular question. Well, this question that I've posed to you this morning was actually listed on Yahoo Answers recently, and they had a laundry list of answers to this particular question. Let me, as you're thinking about your answer, let me give you a few that I found out there on the internet. One is by username Vienna. Vienna said that she would bring her laptop, assuming the island had Wi-Fi, a camper, and toilet paper covering all the bases there from a laptop to toilet paper. The next one was username A person, a very creative person here apparently, said they would bring a speedboat, 20 dominoes pizzas, kind of random, and my friend Oliver. The next one was Coffee Junkie. User named Coffee Junkie said, "I would bring my family, my Bible, and a hatchet." And I was tracking right along my family, my Bible, and you're thinking in a warm fuzzy teddy bear or something. What is that in case a family dispute comes up and we're going to solve it with a hatchet? My favorite was dancing queen. Dancing queen said, "I would bring a cellphone, hair straightener, and underwear." Apparently, there's a party on the island, huh? Well, it doesn't matter how you answer that question. The bottom line is this, how you answer it says something about what you value. When you begin to think about it, and we've all been in those leadership seminars or those types of environments and a business where they've kind of posed some of those questions that you have to kind of think through, it really begins to address the issue. What are the things that I value? A value is a conviction that guides or governs your actions. At Hope, we kind of say it this way, values drive our decisions, values drive our decisions, and then decisions shape our lives. You see, what you value drives the decisions that you make, and ultimately, our life is a sum total of the decisions that we make. Values drive our decisions, and decisions shape our lives, so what we value is very important. Early on in the life of our church, our pastoral team sat down, got before the Lord, and we sought to establish what are the values of us as a church? What are going to be the things that we value? We begin to study the scriptures and look through the New Testament, and after a long period of time of doing that, really whittled it down to for what we call our core values here in the life of our fellowship, and they literally do drive the decision-making that we have here as a church family, and what we're going to begin this weekend and over the next few weekends is we're going to walk through a series where we unpack those four core values. We're going to look at them from a biblical perspective, and here's why we're going to do this. It's very important that you understand, if this is your church family, that you understand what it is we value, because if you don't understand our values, listen, you will not understand the way we make decisions, nor will you understand the decisions we make and why we make them, because values drive those decisions. So this weekend, we're looking at the first of those values that we call the heart of hope, and we call it that because these values really are our DNA, they're our heart. If you cut us, it's what we bleed, it's who we are. Everything that we are as a faith family is driven by these values that are rooted and grounded in the Word of God. Here's the first one, God-dependence. And here's the way we define it, apart from Him, we can do nothing. Through Him, we can do all things. I want you to read that definition off the screen out loud with me this morning. You ready? Here we go. One, two, three. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. Through Him, we can do all things. God-dependence. Now, there's a lot of places in the Bible that we could go to unpack the biblical reality here that we're defining as God-dependence. But the place that we've chosen to look at this morning is in the Old Testament book of Isaiah. If you have your Bible, I want to invite you to open your Bible to the book of Isaiah. If you're not familiar with where that is, just kind of let it fall open to the middle, and you're probably going to wind up in the book of Psalms, just move to the right a little bit, and you'll hit Isaiah. If you get to Jeremiah, you've gone too far, turn around, back up. Isaiah, we're going to be in the very last chapter, the 66th chapter of the book of Isaiah. If you don't have a Bible with you this morning, you can follow along. We're going to put these verses up on the screen. Isaiah chapter 66, verses one and two. Here's what the Bible says, "Thus says the Lord, 'Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool, where then is a house you could build for me, and where is a place that I may rest, for my hand made all these things, thus all these things came into being declares the Lord, but to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at my Word." It's an incredible passage of Scripture. It's one that, to be honest with you, you can just sit down with this passage of Scripture and meditate on every word and every phrase in these verses because it's so packed with truth. But what I want to do this morning is simply unveil two of the primary truths that Isaiah reveals to us with these two simple verses, and here's the first one, God is great. That's a good place for an amen. God is great. All right, you're almost there. You're almost there. God is great. There you go. Hey, listen, God is great. That's something to be excited about. That's a truth that is dominating the Old Testament Scriptures and into the New Testament, but as you unpack Genesis to Malachi in particular, over and over again, the Old Testament writers teach us about the greatness of God. The Psalmist said in Psalm 95 and verse 3, "For the Lord is a great God," and in Jeremiah chapter 10, Jeremiah said, "There is none like you, O Lord. You are great and great is your name in might." There's nobody else like him. God is great. Now, the Hebrew word for the word great is a word that literally means that it emphasizes the importance, the size, or the significance of someone or something. In our English dictionary, Webster's dictionary, we define great like this, notably large in size, remarkable in magnitude, markedly superior in character and quality. Every part of that definition speaks to the character and person of God, notably large in size, remarkable in magnitude, markedly superior in both character and quality. God is who God is, God is great. Another way of saying it is God is big. I want you to say that out loud with me this morning. You ready? One, two, three. God is big. Now, I want you to say it a second time and I want you to raise the roof. You ready? God is big. One of the tragedies of the contemporary church in America. I think we scared somebody to death. One of the tragedies of the contemporary church in America is that we've become so focused on ourselves. We've become so consumed with our needs and our wants and our desires that we've lost sight of the greatness of God. We've lost sight of the bigness of God, AW Tozer is one of my favorite authors. I'm just finishing a book that he wrote called The Knowledge of the Holy. You've never read it. I highly recommend it. The Knowledge of the Holy by AW Tozer. In that book, he wrote it in 1961, so over 50 years ago, but the book is even more relevant today than it was 50 years ago. So the problems he was addressing 50 years ago, they've only magnified over the last 50 years. But listen to what AW Tozer says. I'm going to put it up on the screen in this book. He said the church has surrendered her wants lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge. And her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic. The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. We're not careful in our American Christianity. We become so man-centered. We even come to church on the weekend and we pull up thinking about ourselves. Our problems, our needs, our desires, what I need God to do for me today, I show up with my list looking for my pick me up, my lift, and this whole experience can become all about me. And in reality, the Bible teaches us a Christianity that is not man-centered. It is God-centered. Let me tell you what we need. We need a fresh awakening and a fresh vision of the greatness and the bigness and the glory and the grandeur of God. That's what Isaiah begins to give us here in these verses. And he shows it to us in two ways. Number one, we see God's greatness in his name. Look how he opens this text in Isaiah 66 verse one, he says, "Thus says the Lord." The Hebrew word that we translate into the English language here, Lord, it's very interesting. It's really a very mysterious Hebrew word. It's a Hebrew word to be totally honest with you. We're not exactly sure what the pronunciation is supposed to be and when you transliterate in the English, we typically translate it or speak it one of two ways. We would either say the name Yahweh, how many of you have heard that before? Somebody say Yahweh. The other is the word Jehovah. Sometimes we translate or transliterate that word, Jehovah. Yahweh or Jehovah, the two ways we most typically say this name, but to someone who is a devout Jew or even someone, sometimes who's a devout Jewish Christians, they hold this name with such reverence. They won't even attempt to pronounce it because it is such a mysterious name. It comes from a Hebrew root which literally simply means to be. And it reminds us as we think about it because this word speaks to God's existence. It reminds us of the story when Moses was meeting with God and God told Moses to go to the children of Israel and lead them out of the land of Egypt to the Promised Land. And Moses said, "When I go and tell them, I'm sent to lead them. Who should I tell them? Sent me." And God said to him, "You tell them who I am has sent you." It's a name that speaks to the eternal existence of God. Those you said because God lives in an everlasting now, He has no past and no future. This name speaks to the biblical reality that there's never been a time when God was not. Meaning you can go back as far as you want to go in human history. You go back to over 2,500 years ago when the Babylonian Empire ruled all of the known world. And you find a young man named Daniel who refused to bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar and because of his refusal to bow down, he was thrown into a lion's den. And yet 2,500 years ago, God is there as he clothes the mouths of those lions and he keeps Daniel safe. You can go back over 3,000 years ago and you'll find a young shepherd boy in a field facing an entire army of Philistae. All the Philistine army is there and they're being led by a giant over nine and a half feet tall named Goliath. Goliath is taunting the children of Israel and he's taunting the armies of God and little David steps up with a slingshot and a few stones and God shows up and through David performs this mighty miracle and brings down Goliath and delivers the whole army. And David's testimony over 3,500 years ago, David said, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Listen, you can go all the way back to the beginning of humanity, Adam. And the Bible says of Adam, "It was God who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being." You can go all the way back to the first four words of the Bible. You know what they are in, say them, the beginning God. There's more truth in the first half sentence of the Bible than you and I can even wrap our heads around. You know what that teaches us, right, that when the beginning began, he already am. I know that may not be the best English, but let me tell you what it is. It's real good theology because it's not that he was, he am. He doesn't have a beginning or an ending. We can almost wrap our heads around something that has no ending, right? Because, I mean, we know that if you're a believer in Jesus Christ and you've come to know him that you're going to spend forever in heaven and in eternity with him, so we're not, we kind of have no ending, but we're talking about something that also has no beginning. No beginning and no ending, he always has been and he always will be. Have you ever given much thought to how much time there was before Genesis 1,1? I encourage you not to think about that too long. You wound up sucking down a bottle of Advil with a headache, right? I mean, that just doesn't fit in my brain, but the answer is infinity. He's never been a beginning with God. He always has been, he always will be God. And Donald, I encourage you today because what it means is he's seen it all. There's nothing new in your life that is catching God off guard. God is never surprised with anything. He lives in the eternal present. There is no past, there is no future, it's the eternal now. He sees tomorrow as clearly as he sees yesterday because he am. Here's what it means. Let me give you a little phrase that God's never spoken. Uh-oh. Now, you and I have to say that at times, right? There are times in our life things come our way. We didn't see him coming and we have to say, oh, I didn't see that coming. Hey, that never happens with God. He exists in the eternal present. He just am. We see his greatness in his name. Secondly, we see his greatness in creation. Listen to what Isaiah goes on to say, thus says the Lord, heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. Stop right there. I mean, just wrap your head around that. Heaven is a phrase for everything that's not the earth. He says, everything that's not the earth. That's my seat and the earth. That's where I prop my feet. Let's talk about big. He says, where then is a house you could build for me? For my hand made all these things, thus all these things came into me. That little phrase, all these things, it has really two implications. All these things means all the whole, everything, the whole enchilada, the whole package. But it also means all every individual single little part and detail. God made the whole. He made it. Oh, I want to put a picture up on the screen. I want you to look at this picture. I want you to tell me what it is. What is it? The solar system, right? Somewhere I don't remember when it was 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th grade. We get introduced to the solar system. You're sitting home told to make this diorama with these styrofoam balls and you got to start making the solar system. You were a kid. You thought it was kind of cool. Now that you're a parent, you're thinking, how many times am I going to have to do this? We've all made more dioramas of the solar system than we ever thought we'd have to make in our lifetime. We should have saved mine. We could just reproduce it over and over again, right? The solar system we were taught, I was taught when I was in school, nine planets revolving around the sun. Somebody has reclassified things. Pluto has been kicked out of the club. Now we understand there are eight planets and three dwarf planets revolving around our sun. We call that what? The solar system. I want you to see it this morning as our cul-de-sac. Because our cul-de-sac, the solar system is located inside of what scientists and astronomers call the Milky Way galaxy. That's our zip code in the universe. Our cul-de-sac, the solar system, our zip code is the Milky Way galaxy. The solar system inside of the Milky Way galaxy. Did you know that NASA, through their telescopes, have been able to look in the outer space and has come to the discovery that there are billions of solar systems inside of the Milky Way galaxy? Now why we decided to call ours the solar system, I'm not real sure, but we've named ours with the definitive article the solar system, but they're actually inside of the Milky Way galaxy, billions of solar systems, billions. Beyond our galaxy, through the use of the Hubble Space Telescope, we've been able to look into outer space and understand that our galaxy is not the only zip code out there, but there are literally hundreds, listen, hundreds of billions of galaxies. Inside of our zip code, the Milky Way galaxy, when you look up at night and you see all those stars, you know what those stars are in our galaxy? Many of those stars are suns that center other solar systems inside of our own galaxy, but then beyond our galaxy, the Milky Way, astronomers tell us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. One German supercomputer estimates there are as many as 500 billion galaxies in the universe. And somebody way smarter than me has done this math, but here's what they tell us. That means that there are approximately 12 quadrillion solar systems in the universe. Now I can tell that didn't wow you like I wanted it to, so I'm going to break it down for you. We hear those words like quadrillion now, all those words that end in young, you know, because of our national debt now they just all kind of run together. All it means to us is gas prices going up, right? Million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, just add another one and let's keep on going, right? What is a quadrillion? I want to try to help you put it in a box this morning. I want to put it in the context of time. One million seconds ago was 12 days ago. One billion seconds ago was September 1980. One trillion seconds ago was 31,709 years ago. One quadrillion seconds ago would have been 32 million years ago. Scientists estimate that there are 12 quadrillion solar systems in the universe. Now you got it. That's what I'm looking for. Hey, have you ever wondered why God made all of that? I mean, as best we can tell through looking through the most powerful telescopes and sending researchers all over the year, the best we can tell through our own scientific discovery and the revelation of recorded scripture given to us by God, the best we can understand there's only life on one little planet and one little solar system and one little bitty corner of the universe. It's called Earth. We didn't need but one little planet. Why are there 12 quadrillion solar systems in the universe? I know the answer. I'm going to show it to you in the Bible. Psalms chapter 19 verse 1, listen what it says, the heavens. The word heavens refers to everything that is not the earth. Everything out there in the universe, all 12 quadrillion solar systems are telling. The word telling means to show, to declare, to celebrate. The Bible says the heavens are a constant testimony, a constant declaration to the glory and the greatness and the grandeur and the majesty of God Himself. The heavens are declaring the glory of God and they are declaring the work, the expanse, declaring the work of His hands. It means that from any point on planet earth, 365 days a year, 24 hours of every day, 7 days of every week, from any angle that you want to gaze into outer space from this little planet, you get a glorious picture and testimony to the greatness of God. A group of scientists wrote a book called The Privileged Planet in that book. Listen to what they said, it's very humbling. Our home earth is a fairly comfortable porch from which we can gaze out to the ends of space in the beginning of cosmic time. I don't have time to unpack it all, but scientists and astronomers go on to tell us that where earth is positioned in the context of the universe, that we've been placed, earth is at the very primo spot to be able to gaze into the expanse of the cosmos. We have the best seat in the universe to look into every angle of the expanse and see the greatness and the glory of God. God made the whole, but also God made every detail. I want to put another picture up on the screen. This is a picture of a microscopic view of a living cell. The cell is the smallest structural unit of living matter capable of functioning independently. You and I are made up of a whole bunch of these. Those in the medical profession and scientists tell us that the average human being is made up of 60 trillion body cells, give or take a few trillion, right, depending on who we're talking about. 60 trillion body cells, we're just going to use the average today, we're not going to be specific. 60 trillion body cells will make us up. Of those 60 trillion body cells, 8 million blood cells are born and die every single second. I want you to take your hands and hold them out with me like this this morning. Just hold your hands out on account of three, we're going to clap them together, one, two, three. 8 million blood cells just were born and died inside of your body. Just happened again. It just happened again. It just happened again. It's happening every second. Every second of every day inside of your body on any given moment, 8 million blood cells are being born and they die. Those 8 million blood cells inside of your body, if you prick your finger and a drop of blood comes out, there's 5 million red blood cells in one drop of blood. Those blood cells inside of your body are born in the bone marrow and then they're sent through the circulatory system and before those blood cells make it back to the bone marrow where they were born to die, they do 250,000 round trips of your circulatory system. There's a lot going on inside of you this morning as you sit here in church. No wonder you're tired when you get home, right? I mean, you're working. How does all that happen? How's everything moving around like that? Who keeps it pumping? Well, the same medical community tells us that the average human heart beats three billion times in a lifetime. Three billion heart beats. I hope you're not counting and close to the end, but three billion heart beats. Now here's the reality. You're not thinking about any of that this morning. You didn't come in here hoping your blood cells keep moving, right? I mean, that's just something that happens. You don't even think about it. Why are we able to live and not even worry about any of this stuff? Because there's a God who created us and fashioned us not just the large expanse, but down to the very minute details of human existence from the very cosmos to the microscopic cells sustaining your life in this given moment. We see the greatness of God. Let me tell you what that tells us today. There's nothing too big or too small for God. I don't know what you came in with this morning. I don't know what the challenges and problems are that are in your life. I don't know if it's something that seems so big. You can't wrap your arms around it or something that seems so small. You think God doesn't even care, but listen to me. It doesn't matter how big it is or how small it is. Not only does he care, he's aware, he knows what's going on. He's in control of it. He's seen it before. It hadn't caught him off guard. He's going to see you through it for his glory and for your good. We see the greatness of God. Now understanding this great God, there's only one conclusion that you and I can draw. The conclusion is I need God. I need God and you need God. We need God. The second truth that I want you to understand out of these verses that I hope brings you incredible encouragement, not only God is great, but that this great God desires a relationship with me. I want you to read that little statement off the screen with me this morning. I want you to make it personal. I want you to hear you say it. Here we go. One, two, three. This great God desires a relationship with me. Do you hear the text? For thus says the Lord. For thus says the Lord. Heaven is my throne. Your earth is my footstool. Where then is a house you could build for me? For my hand made all these things. All these things came into being declares the Lord but to this one I will look. The phrase look, that little word look, it literally means to focus the attention. It means to regard with favor. Here's what the text is saying. This great God who sits on the heavens and props his feet on there. This God that spoke everything you can see, taste, touch, feel and smell into existence. The big things as well as the minute detail. This God that created it all desires, listen to this, to focus all his attention. All his favor on you and on me. You want to talk about something that's hard to wrap your head around? It's hard for us as human beings to even focus all of our attention on one person. We're talking about God, the great I am who always had, he said I desire to focus all my attention on him who is humble and contrite and who trembles at my word. There's a one word description of our relationship to God. Let me give it to you, it's the word dependence, dependence. We need him. God is looking for men and women who will walk in dependence on him. Listen, God is not inviting you into a relationship with himself so that you can do something for him. God is inviting you into a relationship with himself so that he can do something through you as you and I live in complete dependence upon him. Therein is one of the challenges we have especially in our Western American mindset that's about being your own person and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and living this independent life, the very relationship that God's invited us to is a relationship of utter and complete dependence on him where we live in an awareness of how desperately we need God moment by moment in our lives and God describes what this dependence looks like. He says first of all it begins with an attitude of our heart. He uses two words, humble and contrite. The word humble or humility is a word that describes desperate need or want. The word contrite is a word that describes, it literally refers to somebody who's laying in a ditch as a result of an accident or a physical attack and they're helpless. There's nothing they can do for themselves. God's here describing our heart and he says I'm looking for those who in their heart have come to the place where they realize God only in you. God only you. God I'm desperate for you. God apart from you, I am helpless. God apart from you, I am hopeless, God I need you. And there's one of the reasons why so many people miss out on a relationship with God. We think we have something to bring to the equation. We think God needs us, listen, God does not need us, we need him. Let me show it to you the way Jesus said it in John chapter 15. He said I am the vine, you're the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit for apart from me you can do. What does it say? Say that loud. Say that word again. You know what that means, right? Say it again. Nothing. That's exactly what it means. A big, bad zero. It means nothing. You know the problem? We don't think that's what he meant. We think he meant apart from me you can't do big things. Let a big thing come up in your life and what do you become? God dependent, right? You go to the doctor in the morning and let the doctor tell you there's nothing else I can do. You got six months to live. Let me tell you what you just became. You became God dependent. But Jesus didn't say apart from me you can't do big things. He said apart from me you can do what? Nothing. It means I need God for everything. I can't love my wife today that Christ desires for her to be loved apart from Christ in me. I can't be a father to my kids today. The way that God desires them to be fathered apart from his very life in me. I can't be a friend today. I can't be an employer today. I can't be the child of God today that I'm supposed to be apart from his very life in me. I'm desperate for God. I can't even spend time with God today apart from his life in me. We need him and when we have this attitude in our heart it spills into the activity in our lives and he gives us that example he says to him who's humble and contrite and who trembles at my word, he describes a reverential fear of God. It's not a fear I'm afraid of God. It's a reverential respect. Understanding how desperately I need God, the pattern of my life is to pursue him through his word. You want to get a real good self-evaluation of how desperate you are for God? How much time do you spend sitting at his feet, trembling at his word? Oh, we'll grab the Bible occasionally and say a quick prayer when we eat, but if I really knew how desperate I was for God, he'd be evident in my life, blow into a church service a couple of three times a month, in living a life of desperation for God. These are deeply convicting questions in my own life. Am I hungry for God? As a fellowship, are we hungry for God? Not just for the things I need God to do in my life. Do I hunger for God? Do I want to know God? Do I want to walk with God? There's a paraphrase of the Bible called "The Message." That paraphrase, listen to the way they paraphrase Psalm 119, verse 147, look at it on the screen. He says, "I was up before sunrise, crying for help, hoping for a word from you." Is that the cry of your heart? Could it be said of you that, "Man, when I woke up this morning, my first thought was oh God, I need you, Lord, even though I may not feel it today, God, I need you, God, I need you." Listen to me, Church, hope, listen to me. I know we've moved in a new campus, we're very grateful for what God's given us, but listen to me, we are as desperate for God as we've ever been. We need Him, and we will only walk in that dependence as you and I daily walk in that dependence. We need Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]