Do fears and worries consume your thoughts, distracting you from the task at hand, maybe even disturbing your sleep? Today, on Truth for Life, Aleister beg tells us about the best antidote. It may not change your predicament, but it's sure to change your perspective. Let's open our Bibles to one Timothy chapter six. He is powerful.
Only ruler, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Blessed One, He is perfect. That's the significance of the statement at the beginning of verse sixteen. He alone is immortal, in the sense that His immortality is intrinsic to His being. If you know your Bible well enough, you will know that in just a few verses in Second Timothy chapter one and verse ten, Paul tells Timothy that life and immortality has been brought to light through the gospel, and that in Christ we become immortal. In point of fact, even the heathen have an immortality to them, because they will live forever, but not in the presence of God.
But the distinction is this, and the reason he says he alone is immortal is that while a believer discovers immortality from drinking at the fountain of life, God Himself is that very fountain, and He is not only immortal, but He dwells in unapproachable light, like the sun. We need it to see by, but we cannot look into it because it's too intensely brilliant. In the same way, we cannot look into God. Hence, we're told, thirdly, that no one has seen Him or can see Him. He is immortal and He is invisible.
Now, when you think about God's invisibility, you can only but assume that Paul has in mind the scene in Exodus chapter thirty-three, where Moses asks God to show him His glory. And the Lord said in response, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But he said, 'You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.'" And then the Lord said, "There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock.
And when my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. And then I will remove my hand, and you will see my back, but my face must not be seen." My loved ones, when we begin even just to get an inkling of this wonder of God, who is transcendent, it points to triviality. At any point in our experience, not least of all in our worship, you see, because if your notion and my notion of God is that He is simply somehow an extension of myself, He is, as in the book, places in the heart. Sheila's God. She says, Sheila, one of the characters in the book says, "I have my own little God.
I call it Sheila, and my religion is called Sheilaism." Well, there's a huge difference between that and this. But if we live with this, then when we come to worship, and someone says, "Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our God, our Maker," do you ever do you worship and bow down in your heart as you drive your car? I hope you do. I hope you regularly kneel before God in prayer as an act of subjugation before Him, as a reminder that when I kneel down in prayer, it is only God, by His grace, that will ever allow me to stand back up on my feet again. Before we're too quick.
To dash off into the practicalities, to charge to the bookstores for another how-to book, to try and fix that and try and fix the next thing of our lives—we're charging past the very place where the answers to our dilemmas are first catered to. He is powerful. He is perfect, and he is therefore praiseworthy. To him, he says, "Be honor and might forever, Amen." See, the first call of God to those whom He has made is a call to bow down and worship Him. Honor and power and might and majesty are the sole prerogative of He who is the only ruler, immortal and invisible.
Having said that, and I can do justice to that, I feel my own impoverishment in speaking. Let me make three points by way of personal application, and let me do so by reminding you of this, by painting a picture. Imagine that you're walking down a road somewhere, let's say in in Europe. The scene I have in mind is. Like one of those little French villages, where as you walk along the road, the street level is actually above your head.
It's about fifteen feet, so it's like there's a two-story deal, like in in Chester in England as well. And people can sit up here, fifteen feet above where you are, as you walk, and they're on the balcony level. And as they look down from the balcony, they can make comments on the people who are walking on the street. And they can say, "Oh, he walks funny. Oh, I wonder why he walks alone.
Oh, I wonder where he's going. Oh, I wonder about this and I wonder about that." And from the perspective of the onlooker, all of the questions and the potential problems are theoretical. But if you are down on the path, the questions are intensely practical. They are not issues of idle speculation. They are issues of immediate application.
Am I walking alone? At what point will I turn off this path? How am I doing? Am I on time? These matters are all of great significance.
They are of significance to the traveler in a way that they are not of significance to the onlooker.
Now, when you think about that in relationship to thinking of God, some of us are idle in our speculations about God. We are, if you like, balcony dwellers. We have all these questions that we never have answers to, and we like just to throw them out from time to time. They are idle and they are ultimately futile. Especially when we realize that although we like to assume we're on the balcony pontificating, we're actually on the street and in great need.
And therefore, what I know of God is not something that I'm going to articulate in a theological paper. What I know of God has to make a difference to every aspect of my life. And indeed, it is that knowledge of God which transforms life, and it is that ignorance of God which makes life empty. Why do you think men and women live in such futility? Why do you think they are paralyzed by such fear?
Why do you think they roam from place to place, looking for something to answer the deepest longings of their hearts? Because they do not know God, and someone has told them, "You don't need to know God." You know, knowing God—that's for—that's like you know, way at the end of the line. You know, no, it's right at the very beginning. Let me share with you now, in conclusion, just how much it is a part of life. What you and I know of God determines how we think.
How we think, or if you want it in a word, mentality. Mentality. How we think about what? How we think about absolutely everything. How we think about history, for example, is directly related to what we know of God.
When we take Isaiah forty and we lay that out as the template, and we use that as the platform for our understanding of the movements of men in history, then it gives provides a wonderful antidote to this stupidity that is provided for us on a daily basis via the media.
Now, not all media is full of stupidity. Please don't misunderstand me. But the prevailing drift of the media is atheistic. It is godless, and therefore it reports the news from a humanist perspective. It reports the news from the position of godlessness, and you sit and listen to half an hour of godlessness.
That is interpreting for you the great movements of time, at least as they are suggested. What is happening in the Middle East? What is happening in Ireland? What is going on in Bosnia, and so on? And the way that we receive this information is largely filtered through an atheistic perspective.
Therefore, how do you stop yourself from going insane? How do you prevent yourself from burying your head in your pillow and crying yourself to sleep? What is the antidote to this? It is a knowledge of God. Oh God, I know the news tonight at eleven o'clock was horrible.
But you are powerful. Oh God, I know that the circumstances that were just described to me appear to be absolutely paralyzing. But oh God, you are absolutely perfect, and you have never yet made a mistake. There is no ruler in place in the whole of the world that is not there, but by your divine appointing. Therefore, I can lay and go to sleep in my bed.
I can view history. I can view. Adversity, in a totally different way, when I see it in the light of God. That's why when the twelve guys go to spy in Canaan, and you can read it for your homework in Numbers fourteen, you remember they're sent up to spy out the land, and they come back down, and ten of the guys say, "Stay away from there." Why?
Well, there's giants up there, there's difficulty up there, and so on. And they're all agreed on that. Nobody disagrees with that. But Joshua and Caleb stand up and say, "We should certainly go up there and take this land." Why? Because there are no giants.
No, but because God is powerful. Why? Because there are no difficulties. No, but because God is perfect. You see, some, as the song says for children, some saw the giants big and tall.
And some saw the grapes in clusters fall, and two saw that God was in it all, and it changed their mentality. Christianity is mind altering. Make no mistake about it. It is a radical shift in the way in which we view the world. It turns our upside down worlds the right way up, and now we look upside down to the world because it is upside down.
And you go through your days in our secular world, and the whole drift of the world view will rearrange your head for you. You have to talk yourself in the car. Believe me, you got to talk out to those bumper stickers. You drive up behind it says. The earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the earth. Start preaching right there. What a lot of nonsense! That's absolute rubbish. I know that's rubbish.
The people's going, "What's he talking to himself?" That's rubbish. God created the heavens and the earth, and He made us stewards of it. Don't give me that new age nonsense on the back of your car. I got to completely get my mentality right here. You see, young people—they don't read their Bibles.
They don't think. They don't study Christian doctrine. We don't give them a framework in which they can view life. We give them a couple of little notes, quotes, and anecdotes about how they trusted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, and as if that was the whole answer to everything. The great testimony of the New Testament is not people walking around explaining that they trusted Christ as their personal Savior, which is imperative to do.
You understand that, but it is testifying to who God is and who Christ is and who the Spirit is, and they're testifying to the veritable truths that are out there and beyond me. It's not a story about what happened inside of me. It's a story of what God has done out there. Because you go back to your friends and give them what happened inside of you, they'll tell you they just had a conversation with an angel and it was amazing what happened inside of them. And then you're going to say, "But what happened inside of me was better than what happened inside of you." And they're going to say, "No, what are you going to do at that point?" See, that's not where we go.
We got to go like Paul in Athens. Hey, listen, I noticed that you're a little confused about these things. You got to think to an unknown god.
Well, let me tell you that the the one that you worship is unknown. He's the creator of the universe. He made everything. He established when people live, where people live. He is powerful and he is perfect and he is praiseworthy.
He changes my mentality about history and about adversity. My time is gone. Second thing I wanted you to notice is that it changes not only the way we think—that's our mentality—but it changes everything we do—that's our activity. Why do we worship? Because God is powerful and He's perfect and He's praiseworthy.
Why do we come on the first day of the week to remind ourselves of that? We don't come here to get our tickets stamped. Is it not chapel at college? No one's checking you in, checking you out. God has established in the great cycle of life that we would have one day in seven, in which we could lay aside all other considerations of work and the things that press upon us, and we could devote ourselves to the fact of the wonder of who God is, and that that in itself would bring a semblance of reality into our lives.
When we understand this, it changes what we do. Our worship changes the way we do our work. We don't go back to work on a Monday saying, "Oh well, we had a Christian time yesterday, and now we've got six days, and then we'll try and have another one." No, Herbert says, "Teach me, my God and King, in all things thee to see, and what I do in anything to do it as for thee, a servant with this cause makes drudgery divine, who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine." Such a knowledge of God not only changes my mentality, how I think. Not only changes my activity, what I do, but changes the level of my security, who I trust, who I trust. You see, the great challenge, and with this, I want to draw this to a close.
The great challenge in my life—I wonder if you share this—is to learn somehow to refuse to view anything that comes into my life apart from God's disclosure of Himself. To refuse to view anything that comes into my life apart from God's disclosure of Himself, all of my fears arise when I look at my problems apart from God. I don't know if that's true. If you would agree with that, all of my fears arise when I isolate my problems and I view them apart from a God who is powerful, perfect, and praise worthy. But when I put back that He is powerful, perfect, and praiseworthy against my predicaments, then my predicaments don't go away, but my perspective changes.
One of my buddies in Scotland, I got such a thrill yesterday listening to him sing as I drove in the car. He was singing, "Oh what fellowship! Oh what joy divine!" Leaning on the everlasting arms, and then he's saying, "What have I to doubt? What have I to fear? Leaning on the everlasting arms." He was ministering to my soul.
He, my disciple. Is teaching his teacher as I drive in the car, thinking, "How am I going to do this? And how will I fix that? And what am I going to do with the next thing?" I can't make it a Wednesday. I'll never make it a Wednesday.
I can't even make it to tomorrow morning. And you build the whole thing up in front of you. It's like you built the Iger in front of you on Two Seventy One South. And his little voice comes. What have I to do?
What have I to fear? Leaning on the everlasting arms. But if I ain't got no arms to lean on, then I have every reason to fear. You see, it's an amazing wonder. It's the law of God's providence that those who fear God should have nothing else to fear, and those who do not fear God become slaves.
To a thousand fears. Let me give you one verse to take away with you into the week. Deuteronomy and thirty-three, and the twelfth verse. I think it is. Yeah.
This is what it says: Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in Him. Here's the security, for He shields him all day long. And the one the Lord loves rests between His shoulders. Tremendous picture of security. When Sue and I were traveling these last couple of weeks, we saw a lot of different things, but we were in one small place, standing in the street, and both of us noticed this at one in the same time.
A guy on a bicycle, a young man on a bicycle. He had long hair. That wasn't what was striking. But he had a dog with him. That wasn't ultimately what was striking.
It was where the dog was. The dog was lying in between his shoulder blades as he sat on the bike.
So, if you imagine I'm him, this is my bicycle, and here's my dog, and his head is here. The rear view is. That my dog's back is lying in between my shoulder blades, and his hind paws are down like this, and his tail is in between, and without a word of a lie, in front of his head, where his paws not simply hanging on the guy's shoulders because his head was on his shoulder, but his paws were crossed in front of him like that. And Sue said to me, "That's amazing that a dog would be that trusting, especially on a bicycle when it's moving through the streets. The dog never skittered, never moved.
It just it just rested." And 20 minutes later, somewhere else, as we walked, same guy, same bike, same dog, same thing. Man, look at that. In the next hour or so, we came face to face with the bicycle, the guy, and the dog. Not by plan, but we were on a boardwalk, and who's coming? This is the guy and the dog.
And up he comes, and he stops to talk to another fellow whom we had engaged in conversation, and the dog. It's just, it's just like this. And Sue said to the guy, "She said, 'It's remarkable that a dog would allow you to do that, and would rest so contentedly. Have you had it since it was a puppy?'" "No," said the guy. "I got him when he was quite old, but I rescued him from the pound, and he's trusted me ever since." And I said to myself, "That's that verse in in Deuteronomy thirty-three.
That's the story of Paul. Oh, I never told you, and you want to know what kind of dog was it? Right, a pit bull, without a word of a lie, a pit bull. Oh, I said a pit bull." But isn't that the story of Saul of Tarsus, a pit bull, breathing out fire and slaughtering and murder, rescued and placed between the shoulders of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? How did he endure these beatings?
How did he go through these shipwrecks? How did he stick it in all those nights in the jail? He had a different mentality. It changed his activity. He lived in total security because he understood that God is powerful, God is perfect, and God is praiseworthy.
Do you know God? Fear Him, and you will have nothing else to fear. You are listening to Truth for Life with Aleister Beg. As we just learned, knowing God changes everything, including the way we approach our retirement years. While we may step down from our jobs, we never retire from being a Christian, and that means we're to continue serving God and telling others about Jesus throughout our lives.
If you are currently in your fifties or your sixties, or if you have a friend or loved one who is, request a copy of the book we're recommending today. It's titled "Not Old, Not Young, Not Done." Following Jesus in your 50s and 60s, the author Christopher Ash offers practical biblical wisdom for navigating this unique season of life. Instead of viewing this age as a time for winding down, he assures us that God has plans for our continued growth and service to the cause of the gospel. Ask for your copy of the book, not old, not young, not done. When you donate to Truth for Life today, you can give online at truthforlife.org/donate, or call us at eight eight eight five eight eight seven eight eight four.
Thanks for listening today. Tomorrow we'll address the matter of money: is it sinful to be rich, or is it a blessing from God? Join us as we consider the Bible's response. The Bible teaching of Aleister Beg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
