Losing the Biblical Awe “Why knee-knocking awe is replaced by a yawn of familiarity”

A Critical Topic — GOD ! A disconnect (Matthew 15:7-9). No person ever rises above his idea of God “The gravest question before the Church is always God Himself ”

“Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is...and substitutes for the true God one made after its likeness…

“God begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God...The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind...The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true” (5).

“The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God...The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is…The heaviest obligation lying upon the Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him” (7).

Think about the way in which God is viewed today. Visit any church worship on Sunday morning and you will likely find… “Reverence and awe have been replaced by a yawn of familiarity. The consuming fire has been domesticated into a candle flame.” “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?”

Written in 1539 … “The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols. There was a kind of renewal of the world at the deluge, but before many years elapse, men are forging gods at will…The human mind dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God…The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth.” (John Calvin, Institutes)

A Summary Conclusion … Many have accepted a concept of the God of the Bible and whittled it down to a manageable proportion; they refashion God to fit their expectations and to serve their desires…modern man has "exchanged" the glory of the incorruptible God for a god that is more convenient.

Even in the Lord ’ s Church … “Each of us will see God differently, and seek to worship Him differently…Our God enjoys spontaneous, loving, heart-felt responses of any nature as long as they are authentic.” “(The God of our) Worship is different from one person to the next.”

Israel : Losing Awe At Mt. Sinai Lost the awe of the Almighty (32:4b) Lost patience with God's silence (32:1) Lost the war with individualism’s rule (20:18-19; 32:23)

The Church : Losing Awe Today We are losing… The awe of the Almighty Our patience with God's silence The war with individualism to rule

Concluding Thoughts Have you ever considered that Exodus 20:4, 5 was NOT to pagans but to those who believed in God? Today’s philosophy… “What God really is shouldn't concern us; what matters is finding an image of God that will be useful.”

Why the God of the Bible is being replaced … We have lost a sense of awe in appearing before the Almighty. We fail to deal with God's silence. We reverence individualism more than we reverence God.

Making The God Of MY Choice : “The Mechanics of making your own god” Our next lesson…