God Reveals Himself

Dear Worshipers,

I know that we have been at this for a while now, but I want to spend a couple more weeks looking at our vision statement.

Our Worship Ministries exist to nurture worship as a lifestyle characterized by sincere responses to God’s self-revelations.

This week I want to consider how God reveals Himself to us. Henry Blackaby in his Bible study Experiencing God stated this as one of the Seven Realities of Experiencing God: "God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church, to reveal Himself, His purposes and His ways." The other six realities are just as life-changing as this one, but I will let you discover them on your own. [If you are interested in knowing and doing the will of God and are looking for a resource to train you in this, you have just found it.]

God reveals Himself. We do not discover God. Like rounding a corner and finding Him setting there. He puts Himself in our path and leads us around the corner. Then He gives us eyes to see Him. Otherwise, we simply would not. The Holy Spirit is the person who does this. When he does it, He is revealing the Truth to us. The Truth is a person: Jesus Christ.

Any believer would agree that God reveals Himself to us through the Bible and prayer. How many times have you been reading or meditating on a passage of Scripture and it was as though the light had been turned on in the dark room of your mind exposing things that you previously had not noticed? God speaks to us and shows us Who He is as we read and pray. But God also often uses circumstances and the church, or other believers, to help confirm what He is saying.

In John 5:17 Jesus gave us an example of God using our circumstances to speak to us. He said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.” In verse 20 Jesus tells us that the Father would let the Son (Jesus) know what He was doing. The Father took the initiative and revealed to Jesus what He was doing. That revelation is an invitation to join the Father in what He was already doing. God does the same with us.

He starts doing something around us, in us, through us, etc. He reveals that activity through our circumstances. That revelation is His invitation to join Him. We respond with obedience or disobedience. As Blackaby says, two words that should never go together in a Christians vocabulary are “No Lord.” Unfortunately, though we may not speak those words, sometimes our response SHOUTS them.

The fact that God speaks through the Church is born out beautifully in I Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 which form our concept of the Church as the body of Christ, and Jesus as the Head. This is a picture of how we are mutually interdependent. We all need each other to function as intended. God has intended for the church to function as a unit, not just individual parts. Blackaby says, “As I function in relationship to the church, I depend on others in the church to help me understand God’s will…Apart from the body, you cannot fully know God’s will for your relationship to the body.” If you have ever walked through a period of rebellion in your life, where the church was not an important part of your life, you know this to be true. If you have never experienced the peace of having God’s will for your life confirmed by a number of other believers, then you may still have yet to understand this vital truth.

My prayer for all of us is that we would ever be open to the speaking of the Holy Spirit, through all these vehicles. They will be in agreement when God is revealing Himself. Then the crisis of belief occurs. Will I obey what God has revealed…or not?

Next week...

Our responses to God's self-revelations. When God reveals Himself, His purposes and His ways, what we do next is crucial. We will consider that a little further next week.

In Christ,

Pastor Scott