God Is... | 12 Lines | Pastor Derick Amsler

We are in a series called 12 lines. Everybody say 12 lines. Yeah. It's where we are recalibrating our lives around this public proclamation concerning what do we believe and why do we believe it? For centuries, empires would rise and fall and politicians and presidents and kings and Caesars and emperors would change course.

And yet, 12 lines has given the world not just a sense of identity, but stability. Who are we as followers of God and why do we believe it? And so, for a thousand years, people have been publicly proclaiming the essence of what did the disciples believe? In other words, we don't want to center the gravity of our belief system around TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and celebrities, even my space. No, no.

We want to center our lives around the fundamental foundational essence. What do we believe about the person and the work of Jesus? Who is God? Who is Jesus? What do you believe and why do you believe it?

We left off here last week. The question we're asking in this setting, in this series is not do you believe in God? What we're asking is, which God do you believe in? The God that has been constructed and assimilated like an IKEA furniture from celebrities and culture, in church tradition, in church dogma, or the God that revealed himself through scriptures and through the person of Jesus Christ? What do you believe and why do you believe it?

And have you oriented your life around what you claim you believe? I'll never forget, when I was in seminary, there was this worship leader that was just phenomenal. Incredibly talented, gifted, charismatic, could play every instrument under the sun. And every day in chapel that he led worship for us, he had this go to song. He would sing and be like, I believe, I believe.

And he played the bass too, so. Oh, man, all the girls loved him. You know, he said, I believe, I believe. And then you do a little run and then even switch hands, showing off a little bit, because, you know, sometimes God gets the glory. Sometimes he needed it too.

And so he'd be like, I believe. I believe. I believe in the word of God. Everybody. I believe.

I believe. Burnt burn. I believe in the word of God. Oh, it was electric. The problem was he was an atheist.

And so he's leading the entire seminary in chapel, proclaiming a belief in the word of a God that he does not believe in. And it has me thinking, how many times do we say what we believe in our society? It's very easy to be a person of faith. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe in God.

Yeah, yeah. I'm a person of faith. Yeah, yeah. I go to church. Yeah.

Yeah. I believe in the big man upstairs. Yeah. We see celebrities accepting awards, thanking their Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Accepting an award sometimes for glorifying something that Jesus died to wash us clean from.

You guys know what I'm talking about. The question is, what do you actually believe? Beyond pop and circumstance, behind vocabulary, behind Instagram filters, what do you orient your life around for? That is your belief. Are you ready to get into it?

Acts chapter 17. The apostle Paul walks into the city of Athens. You need to know this. Athens is not a church town. There's no seminary in Athens.

You won't find liberty online in this particular city. This is what historians call the. The secular intellectual capital of the world. Harvard, Yale. Before their time, conversations were built on ideation.

Public debates was the norm. Psychologists and philosophers and stoic thought influencers and thinkers were on every street corner, pontificating the essence of an idea, pushing the conversation to its edge. And everywhere you looked in Athens, there was be statues of generals and great men and women of authority, but especially their gods. Athens was known for carving their. Their gods in stone.

And they would line the streets and they had temples and synagogues and altars on. On every street, in every corner. Kind of like we have mattress stores here in Martinsburg, they had temples there in Athens. And so they were pluralistic, which means that they believed in many gods for many different needs. They had a category for every God.

You want wisdom, we got a God for that. You want love, there's a God for that. You want success, luck, prosperity. They've got options. This city was known for four major gods.

Let me give them to you quickly. There was Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Students would gather just beneath the feet of this statue and they would debate one another, believing that if they could outsmart, outwit their opponent, the goddess would look favorably upon them and grant them success and extra wisdom of the mind. Then, of course, there was the God of war. Soldiers would touch the base of this statue in search of protection and favor.

Not for today, but for future battles. Then, of course, there was Aphrod. Flowers would lay at her feet and people would stand or kneel next to her statue and they would whisper prayers for love and for fertility and relationships and desires and affections. Things that you don't say anywhere else out loud, but you would go to this image and whisper prayers of the heart. There was Hermes, the God of trade, and if need be, the God of thievery, success at any cost.

Merchants would tap the statue's foot on their way to the market hoping that this God would tip the scales in their favor and they might have a successful day today. Everywhere you turned another God. Everywhere you looked another name. Everywhere you went, another place that you might go and find a God or a goddess to cling to. In a world of hopelessness, what is the altar?

What is the shrine? What is the statue that I might find comfort in the shadow of its wings. Now, before we grow too critical of Athens, we need to remind ourselves we, even us, are not a people without our own shrines. Tell the person next to you you got it too. Come on, let them know you got it too.

We would have what I would call the altar of productivity. The altar of productivity is if I work hard enough, optimize well enough, my life would be held together enough. I can find a sense of stability. If I can outperform my competition in my company. Then there's the altar of self importance and improvement.

My importance rest in my self improvement or ability to fix myself. If I just read enough and write enough, if I read the right kind of books and network with the right kind of people, and if somebody would give me the right kind of opportunities, if I finally get in the right type of shape, maybe I will be desirable. And upon feeling of value in my. In my. In my self worth, then maybe I could be enough.

There's the altar of relationships. In a room this size. There's people that are thinking, if I was just married, I would feel complete. And there's other people saying if I could get unmarried, I would feel complete. If I could have kids, I would feel complete.

If I could sell my kids on ebay right now, I would feel complete. We're all a mixed bag of desires and emotions. And then of course, in our society, there's the altar of finances. We're looking for stability in the margin of financial security. How do you know what your God is?

How do you know what your altar is? Here's a great question to ask. It's not what you say you believe because words are cheap. Your altar is the first place you go to when life gets hard. The moment my life is confronted with pressure, the first thing I turn to.

Is it control? Is it my bank account? Is it my position and my title at work? Is it codependency? The first person or place or thing I look to to give me a sense of grounding it's all going to be okay, is in a sense my altar.

Now, that doesn't necessarily make us flawed, but we have to be aware of our humanity so we can knock down those shrines so that we can point to the only throne that will outlive and outlast and outshine every other altar on the face of the planet. And that is the throne of God. Back to Athens. Now the Apostle Paul is walking through the streets. He's taking it all in.

He's overhearing the debates and the conversations and the whispered prayers. Every statue is being worshiped. Every statue is labeled. Every God is clearly defined. Then he sees one statue.

People are before it, they're touching it, they're rubbing it, they're praying for it. They just don't know what they're praying to. Matter of fact, this particular statue is written with a caveat for the intellectual powers at be got together in Athens and said, we have a God for everything. But what if we missed one? What if there's a God beyond the scope of our intellectual property?

What if there's a God in a different space, in a different universe, in a different cosmos that we need to be praying to, but we just don't know his name? So they created a statue and. And below it, Athens put to the unknown God. Paul sees it, and he gathers the intellectual committee of the day together and he says, let's define our terms. When you say you believe in God, when you say you're a person of faith, when you say you're a spiritual individual, what do you mean when you say God?

Are you ready? Acts 17, verse 22. The apostle Paul stands up and he says, people of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship.

You don't even realize what you worship. And this is what I'm going to proclaim to you. I love the fact that the Apostle Paul doesn't shame them, he just clarifies for them. There's something in your heart that longs for a purity of worship and dependability. I want to put my heart somewhere.

I want to put my trust in someone. I want to anchor my hope and my life and my very existence into something. I just don't always know what that is because I've been let down a few times. Anybody else? I put my hope in somebody, but I put my trust in somebody and it backfired on me.

So I get why you have all these statues. I get why you search all these different temples. But at the end of the day, you search the world over and you're still empty in your search. I will give you clear direction about God. Then he goes, the God who made the world and everything in it is a being, Lord of heaven and earth.

Immediately the committee just got uncomfortable. Immediately they start shaking a little bit, taking off their jacket. They're sweating down their forehead. All their gods have specific lanes and categories. The God of love, the God of battles, the God of victory, the God of fertility, the God of agriculture.

He just says, no, no, no. There is but one God and he is Lord and he's the Creator and he's the sustainer over all things. The Earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and everybody who lives in it. And he's also the Creator and the sustainer of this place that is beyond our wildest imagination and intellectual property is called Heaven. He is the Lord of Heaven and Earth.

Then he says, he doesn't live in temples made by man. You can't limit my God. Then Paul says, he is not served by human hands as though he needed anything. This would have blown their mind. For their only category for a God here in Rome would have been their gods lived somewhere.

They needed something from someone in order to move in someone's life. Paul says, no, no, no, my God. He Himself is not a taker, He's a giver. He gives to all mankind life and breath, and then he just wraps it up. And everything he made from one man, every nation, that they should seek God and perhaps find Him.

We have a God, Paul is saying, that is playing hide and seek and he wants to give himself away. Ready or not, here I come. I'm over here. He wants us to find Him. And then.

And then Paul sums it up. He goes, he is not far from any of us, for in him we actually live and move and have our being. And then he drops this theological bomb on him. He says, for we are his offspring. You see it?

We are this God, this God. I know you have your God for this and your God for that and categories for this. But our God is a family God. Our God is a relational God. Our God said that we can approach him not with fear and trembling in the sense that he's going to smite us, but approach him as a loving dad.

He is God. We are his offspring. If you're taking notes, you can write this down. All of a sudden, Paul is reducing their categories of God and he's giving them a new paradigm in which to think of this God we say we believe in. Number one is this God, is Not contained.

God is not dependent and God is not distant. God is not contained by anything, including your big problems. He's not dependent upon anyone and he's not distant from anybody, no matter what anybody has done. Then what is he? Paul says God is three things.

He is creator, he is sustainer, and he is a relational God. So Athens is built on pluralism. Many gods for many issues, for many problems for many desires for many people. But our God is a God. He's one God with no rivals.

My question is, where did Paul come up with this? Did he attend a TED talk in Athens on his way in? Did he listen to a podcast on his bus ride into Athens? Of course not. The Bible says that Paul was a Pharisee, which means he grew up studying the Hebrew scriptures, which then means he's very acquainted with the God of the Old Testament in all the stories of who God is, who God said he was, and how God participates in the activity of humanity.

In other words, this man knows. He knows something about God that's going to help us define who we say we believe in, when we say we believe in God. Paul reaches all the way back to the Old Testament account where a man by the name of Moses is hiding in the wilderness because he committed murder back in Egypt. Aren't you grateful that we have a God who doesn't hold us hostage to that which we have done before him, but he invites us into a future with him.

Paul, Moses is in the wilderness trying to figure life out, believes that his life and his calling is over. And the Bible says that he sees a bush that is ablaze but not being consumed. It's burning, but it's not burning up. He walks over to investigate that thing and the Bible says the voice of God was heard by, through the burning of the bush, Moses. That'll get your attention.

And so he stops and he, he, he, he talks to the voice. He's talking to God. And to make a long story short, God tells Moses. He says, he says, go to Pharaoh and lead my people out of Egypt. Moses asked a great question.

Who should I tell? Pharaoh sent me because Egypt was a lot like Athens. They were pluralistic. They had many gods for anything. Pharaoh's gonn know which God are you.

And I can't go and go into his office and tell him a burning bush. Talk to me. That's just where you see Pharaoh. What had happened was that bush was on fire. No, you know, like that's not gonna work.

And so God says to him, he says, oh, well, go to Pharaoh and tell him I am who I am. Which sounds great if you were raised in Sunday school, but let's put ourselves in Moses sandals. I can't go before the most powerful being on the planet and say, let God's people go. And he says, which God are you talking about? And then I say, he is who he is.

We need a name. But God doesn't give Moses a name. For God will not be limited by our expressions and titles of names. For example, God could have said, go tell Pharaoh and tell him something that's going to get his attention. Tell him I'm a God of miracles.

But he's bigger than miracles. Let's scare him. Go tell Pharaoh that I'm a God of war. But God is bigger than battles. Go tell him that I'm a king.

I'm a Pharaoh too. No. Then Pharaoh would have saw him as a peer. So he says, go and tell him that I am who I am now. In Hebrew, can we go deep?

For, like, 30 seconds? In Hebrew. It's coming from a verb, a Hebrew word. Yay, which means to be. It's the verb form to be.

Or we would say is. Is speaks to existence and activity. So you see what God is doing. He's not giving him a title, and he's not backing himself into a corner. Tell him I am this specific thing because I'm bigger than all of your categories.

Tell him I am the very existence, the very one who spoke the world into being. And I was there before it came to pass. I am who I am. The same Y. Yesterday, today and forever.

So when Moses goes in and says, pharaoh, let God's people go. And Pharaoh says, which God? The very existence of all reality, has sent me on a mission to talk to you. Every other God answers a need. Our God defines reality and existence.

Pharaoh, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't understand who sent me. Your gods were created. They were crowned, they were voted in. They had a battle for a position.

Mine wasn't. God is. Before Egypt had a name, before the Nile carved a path, before the first brick was ever stacked into your little empire. Pharaoh, God is. Before time started ticking and before the first seed was planted, before the first star was ever hung in its place.

God is. And because this always existing, forever existing one who is and is to come, he will forever be the same. Yesterday, today, and forever. Which means, Pharaoh, he was here before you got here. He's here while you think you're on the throne.

And he'll be here long after you are dead and buried. With the fathers of your pharaohs. Our God is. Is what is high and lifted up, is riding on the clouds of glory, is the King of all kings, is the great Promised One, is the great sacrificial One. He is love, he is hope, he is peace.

He. And he is the very definition of existence. You say, what does this have to do with my life? It's got everything to do with our life. Because when we say that we believe in God, what are we echoing?

We're echoing. We're echoing this reality that because God is currently active and he'll always be active in his creation and because he'll always be love, always be a promise, always be graceful, always be just, always be true, always be holy and righteous. We can trust him because he is. It's the isness of God that speaks to the existence and the activity that God always is. You can't limit him, you can't reduce him, you can't define Him.

So before the diagnosis and after God is. Job in the Bible says, sometimes the Lord gives, sometimes he takes away. But in either way, blessed be the name of the Lord. Why? Because he is before the setback, after the victory, God is.

If it comes to pass, God is. If it doesn't, God still is. On my best days and worst nights, in my celebration and in my heartbreak, there is a being that lives beyond the scope and scale of my intellectual understanding. God. Therefore I can trust his plans even when the activity of his hands don't always make sense.

Because he is God. I am not. God is. Now we come to the Apostles Creed. Thousands of years ago, people got together and they said because of this reality that there really is a God who rules and reigns over the affairs of all of history.

How can we in a succinct manner declare who we believe he is? Because it's a little hard to say. Which God do you believe in? Well, you see in Moses and there was a burning bush. No, no.

How do we just say who God is? When we say I believe in God, what are we saying? The Apostles Creed begins like this. I believe in God. The existence of God.

God the Father. God the Father. Right away you can feel the tension in the room as some people hear the word Father and they think of something safe and comforting. And other people feel something complex and or painful. And so we need to investigate the word just briefly.

Because Jesus, aware of our realities and the examples, good or bad, before us, Jesus still taught us to use the Word when we pray to God. He says, when you pray, pray like this. Our Father, who is in heaven, most holy and awesome and powerful and pure and beautiful and protective and safe is your reputation.

So Jesus still wants us to view God as a father, not because he's describing our earthly dads, but because he's restoring the true definition of what father is. Someone safe, someone secure, someone who will guide you, look out for you, protect you, provide for you. In Romans 8, it says you, when you give your heart to Jesus, you immediately receive the spirit of adoption, that God wants to adopt you into his family. And then it says this by whom we cry out, abba, Father. The word abba means daddy.

So it almost sounds like Paul is stuttering a little bit or he's using the same word or the same essence, but through two words. Daddy, Father. Why don't he just pick one? It's because God is both. Father tends to speak to authority and responsibility, protection and provision.

Daddy tends to speak to intimacy and closeness and relationship. Here's what Paul is saying. When you give your life to Jesus, you don't have just a man upstairs or a God. You have Daddy. God, who delights in taking responsibility and loving well, his children.

So you come close to him. The Jewish metaphor was think of a dad sitting on a chair, and a kid comes up and says, daddy, I want to talk to you. Daddy, can I tell you a story? And the Jewish father would pick the kid up and put him on his lap. It's intimate, it's relational.

He is a God who is a father to the fatherless. And he's a better example than your earthly father could ever imagine. The creed says, I believe in God the Father. And then I love that they coupled this word next to it, I believe in God the Father Almighty. Everybody shout Almighty.

Now, this is important to us. This is important to us because if we stop at I believe in God as a fool father, we will unintentionally, accidentally reduce God down to only a nice, kind grandfather figure who invites us over in the avenue of prayer to talk about our emotions. You having a bad day, buddy? Come on over, we'll play Chinese checkers and talk about it. And is God kind?

Yes. Is he nice? Absolutely. But he's more than just a father figure of nicety and kindness. The text says he's an almighty God, all powerful, all just, all holy, all righteous.

For the affairs of all of history, past, present and future, he holds in the palm of his hand. He's not up in heaven, stressed out, freaked out, pacing streets of gold. He's got the whole world in the palm of his hand. The Bible says, for an outstretched arm, the mighty God. Yeah, yeah, I'm taking care of it.

I'm taking care of it. So he's a father. Come close. But he's an almighty judge and ruler of the universe, so come close. Just don't get it twisted.

It's not our chair. It's not our throne. It's his throne. So this is a father who invites us to come close with love, but we never get to scoot him off. I'm wondering, what areas in your life do you say you believe in God but you still sit in his chair making him know God at all?

I know I say this all the time, but just humor me. Let me say it again. I never preach a message to you that I've not first preached to myself at least twice. So I've been wrestling with this question all week, too. Where do I proclaim and profess my belief in God?

But what is that category in my life that God doesn't rule over? Have I brought accidentally another God into his throne room and I'm asking him to share seeds? It's a hard question we gotta wrestle with, but nothing would mature your soul and strength, your resolve in how God is forming. You then quite like an awareness of where are you asking God to compete with power? That's no power at all.

These other idols. I believe in God, the Father Almighty. In Hebrew, the word almighty is a compound word. It comes from El, which means God, and Shaddai, which means the mountain one. In Hebrew literature, mountains weren't a picture of scenery.

They were a picture of stability. They would often use it. If there was something, an immovable reality in your life, they would call that a mountain. The writer here says, God is the mountain one. He is God of the mountain.

So Psalms 91, it says, you can rest in the shadow of the Almighty. The writer saying, God is a father. He invites us into safety. But he's more than just a good company. He's the Almighty mountain, one in which we can find safety and rest, rescue and refuge in the cavern of his strength.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty. And then the creed goes on to say, creator of heaven and earth. That's not poetry. That's a truth claim. He made the earth and the heavens and everything in between.

Which means he's not just a God of spiritual things, He's a God of all things. He's not just the God of your Sundays, he's the God of your Tuesday evenings and your Friday nights and everything in between. He's not just a God. When you pray and praise and we worship, he's the God of your relationships, your career, the direction of your life. What anchors your hope, what scares you at night, what causes and pushes out tears in your eyes.

He's the God of all things. Even the Book of Colossians in the New Testament, it says that in him all things work and hold together. God is the master potter. We are the clay. He intertwines the fabrics and the fabrics of human life and existence.

What I'm saying is you can trust God. He's a father, so come close. But he's still almighty. Worship, praise, respect, honor him. What's proof in all this?

He's the creator of the heaven and earth. And now we jump back to the first two words that we passed over. I believe.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth. After everything we walk through, everything hinges on this. It's not, does God exist? It's which God are you serving? And where have you tried to push God off his seat so other gods could have a seat?

That's the essence of spiritual growth and maturity. Watch this now. I believe not what my pastor believes, not what my best friend believes, my mom, my grandma believes, my church believes. What do I believe?

Here's our takeaway question. And then let me give you three steps for this week. We're not asking, does God exist? We're asking what in our life still acts like he doesn't. Is it our finances?

Is it our fears? Is it our health? Is our. Our relationships? Where is there a distance between what we say we believe and what we actually give God?

Here's our steps. Here's what we want to do this week. Step one. Pay attention. Pay attention.

When something goes wrong in our life, when we feel stress and pressure, what's the first thing we go to pay attention to that? It's a shrine. Step number two, interrupt it when you feel the pull to control it, fix it, manage it, put your hope in it, freak out over it, Pause and remind yourself, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of the heaven and earth. I don't know how all this is going to work out, but I believe in God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Driving to work tomorrow morning.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth. I'm going into the hospital later on today to pray with some people. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth. I can come close, and he's good for it. Step number three.

We reorient our life around that decision that he is God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven earth. So make one decision this week where we need to start trusting God in that specific category.

Follow me. Where does my heart go? How do we interrupt it? How can I trust God through it?