God is God
From the Series: God Is
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: June 14, 2009
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Transcript
Hello National Community Church. It’s good to see everybody this weekend. Thank you to those who are visiting with us, thanks for making NCC part of your weekend. Regulars, welcome back. This is a tough series to end. We’ve been in a series called ‘God Is’ and it’s one of those series that, theologically speaking, could go on forever. Technically, A.W. Tozer said that eternity won’t be long enough to learn all that God is or to praise Him for all He has done. That is so true and so good, but all good series must come to an end. So, this weekend, we wrap up with ‘God is God.’ I hope you know that, but the flip side is a little tougher to come to terms to – you’re not! So I’m hoping that we have a fresh revelation of the fact that God is God and we are not, and I believe He is going to speak into each one of our lives this weekend. If you have a Bible, turn to Daniel 4 and we’ll get there in a couple of minutes.
This week, I fly out to Las Vegas to shoot a film series called “Surrendered and Untamed” working with an NCCer, Joel Clark, who started a film company called Switchvert, Joel is the Director, I’m the Host, but the main character, if you will, is a South African explorer by the name of Alex Harris. This particular film series tracks his 65-day, 692-mile unsupported journey to the South Pole. So it is really a cool story, I love adventure, and even it is vicarious through him, it’s pretty cool. I love Alex’s conversion story. I love every conversion story, each one is unique, but as I heard about Alex’s spiritual back-story, it was really inspirational. When he was 25 years old, he tried to climb Mt. Everest with a team of folks, no oxygen, and on the way, well, before he went, a friend gave him a Bible to read and at that point in his life, he wasn’t a Christ follower. He knew about Jesus but wasn’t really following Christ, and at the advanced base camp, about 6,500 meters, he started to experience some altitude sickness, nausea, dizziness, and he started reading the Bible. Well, they continued their trek, I think they got to 7,300 meters, only 1,500 meters from the summit of Mt. Everest, and a storm started raging on the top of that mountain and there came a moment where Alex wasn’t sure if they would actually get off the mountain, and he prayed a simple prayer. He said, “God, I don’t know if You are out there. A lot of what I’m reading doesn’t make sense to me, but if You are real, I need You. I don’t think we can get off this mountain alive.” And it was in that moment and those circumstances that Alex heard the voice of God. God said, “Fear not, I am with you.” Listen, this is profound to me; Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. The same one who gave this promise to the disciples way back when is the same One who can deliver on that promise at 7,300 meters on Mt. Everest and He can deliver on that promise in your life. I think that is an awesome thing. God delivered on that summit, they made it off the mountain. And for the record, it was nine years later on his third attempt that he actually did stand on top of the world and summit Mt. Everest.
Let me zoom out and make an observation about that story because I think there is something here for us to grasp. I think many of us spend our lives trying to manage God. It’s really less about God managing our lives and more about us managing God. In a sense, we want God, but we want a God who is measurable, a God who is manageable or a God, if you will, who is controllable. But there comes those moments in our lives where you are in a situation that you cannot control. It is out of your control, the spouse files for divorce, the boss hands you a pink slip, a loved one dies in an accident, a doctor comes back with a diagnosis, a child makes a bad decision, an investment goes bankrupt, or, you’re 7,300 meters on Mt. Everest and a storm starts raging. And it is out of your control, and I think sometimes it takes those circumstances for us to come to this simple revelation that we are not God, we are not in control, that there is nothing about our lives in those moments that are manageable. We cannot man-manage it. I think sometimes that’s what it takes for us to discover that God is God. I think that is what happened about 2,500 years ago with a guy named Nebuchadnezzar.
Let me give you a little bit of context, then we’ll pick up this passage in Daniel 4. Nebuchadnezzar was the King of Babylon and he was literally on top of the world. He was powerful, wealthy, ruled the kingdom. One night, he had a dream. He dreamt of this tree that grew very strong and very tall and in the dream, the leaves on the branches of this tree were green and it was full of fruit and there were animals that would find safety in the shade of the tree, it was incredibly visual, birds would nest in the tree, but then someone chopped the tree down so that all that was left was a stump and Nebuchadnezzar woke up. He is wondering to himself what the dream means. There happened to be a guy in that kingdom, a Jewish captive, who actually ascended into a position of power and had the ability to interpret dreams. He is name was Daniel, and it was his job to interpret that dream for Nebuchadnezzar and that is where we pick up the story in Daniel 4:24.
24 “‘This is what the dream means, Your Majesty, and what the Most High has declared will happen to my lord the king. 25 You will be driven from human society, and you will live in the fields with the wild animals. You will eat grass like a cow, and you will be drenched with the dew of heaven. Seven periods of time will pass while you live this way, until you learn (until you learn, until you learn until you learn, until you learn, until you learn) that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone he chooses. 26 But the stump and roots of the tree were left in the ground. This means that you will receive your kingdom back again when you have learned (when you have learned, when you have learned, when you have learned) that heaven rules.
27 “‘King Nebuchadnezzar, please accept my advice.’”
Can you imagine how difficult it must have been for Daniel? This is not the dream that he wants to interpret. But then to muster the courage and to give this advice:
Stop sinning and do what is right. Break from your wicked past and be merciful to the poor. Perhaps then you will continue to prosper.’ 28 “But all these things did happen to King Nebuchadnezzar. 29 Twelve months later he was taking a walk on the flat roof of the royal palace in Babylon. 30 As he looked out across the city, he said, ‘Look at this great city of Babylon! By my own mighty power, I have built this beautiful city as my royal residence to display my majestic splendor.’
It doesn’t take a Bible scholar at this point to pause and make the simple observation that Nebuchadnezzar was full of himself. Looking in the mirror was his favorite hobby. He was his hero. Sometimes my imagination gets a little carried away and I can’t prove this but I can see him walking around the palace singing Bette Middler’s song Wing Beneath My Wings to himself! I think there are moments where you have to make yourself realize how silly something is. This is so silly, here is this guy on the rooftop of his palace singing his own praises, so full of himself, he has absolutely no perspective. His life is all about him. This guy has a huge ego, in fact, we know the dimensions of his ego from Scripture. His ego is 90 feet tall and 9 feet wide. The reason we know this is because in the prequel to this story, he built a statue to himself and made people bow down to it and worship him. That’s another sermon to another day but he gets so hung up on the fact that those three Jewish guys, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, don’t bow down to him, he throws them into the furnace, they escape, and by the way, the Bible says they don’t even smell like smoke. Another sermon, another day. This guy is so fixated on himself that he can’t handle everybody not bowing down and worshipping him. There is a little part of us saying what a silly ancient, what is this ancient king doing, building a statue? We would never do that. Well, that’s because you don’t have the means to do it. But the truth is that many of us live our lives that if you really evaluated them, so much of our lives really revolve around trying to get people to bow down and worship us, trying to get our way, we want everything to revolve around us. We are control freaks. If you don’t think so, have some kids! Get married first! Then have some kids and you will begin to discover what a control freak you are because so much of our lives revolve around that. When we came into this world, the world revolved around us. Someone feed us, burped us, changed us and rocked us to sleep. Deep down inside, part of us still want someone to feed us, burp us, change us and rocks us to sleep. But at some point, hopefully sooner than later, we discover the painful yet joyful reality that the world doesn’t revolve around us.
It was a Polish astronomer by the name of Nicholas Copernicus who challenged the scientific and the religious status quo about 500 years ago suggesting that perhaps the earth actually revolved around the sun, not the other way around. We still refer to the daily revolution of the earth around its axis as a sunrise and a sunset and yet despite some unscientific language, we all know that the earth revolves around the sun, and that heliocentric cosmology totally changed the way we view the universe. It was a paradigm shift. Up until that point, it was this frame of mind, but it totally flipped. I think one of my primary responsibilities as a parent is to make sure my kids experiences a Copernicus revolution. In other words, at some point, it is my job as a parent to stop caring for their needs and make sure they start caring for the needs of people around them. They come to a point in their life that they realize the world does not revolve around them. I think one dimension of spiritual growth is defragmenting this selfishness that is such an integral part of our lives back to the moment when everything revolved around us.
It happens in a lot of different ways, but is it alright if I share my personal theory? I think selfishness is one reason why God gave us marriage, because when you get married, life is no longer exclusively about you. You switch pronouns from ‘you’ to ‘us.’ Listen, you can be selfish and married at the same time, but you can’t be selfish and happily married at the same time. It just doesn’t work that way. So I think that one reason why the Lord gives us marriage is because we realize it is about more than just us, it is about something bigger. And for the record, the goal of marriage isn’t happiness anyway, the goal of marriage is holiness. It is part of the sanctification process in our lives. I know of very few mechanisms whereby I can grow more spiritually than to be in close proximity with another member of the human species. It is part of the process. Here’s the catch – very rarely does marriage do the trick. We still have deeply ingrained selfish tendencies and that is why God gives us children. And it usually takes more than one. Do you see what I’m getting at here? I think the very heart of what it means to grow in a relationship with Christ is just defragmenting this selfishness that is so ingrained into our lives. At some point, I think all of us have to answer this question – who are you going to worship? Everyone worship someone or something. You can’t not worship, it is hard-wired in the human soul. Either you are going to worship God with a capital G or you are going to worship a god with a lowercase g. If you worship God, let me tell you what’s going to happen. Your universe will get larger and larger, it will expand chronologically into eternity and it will expand experientially into a place called heaven. If you worship you, your universe will get smaller and smaller and smaller. In fact, it will shrink until it is about the size of you. In fact, you are the only thing that will fit in your tiny little universe. You can try to put yourself on the throne of your life, you can build that statue, try to get people to bow down, but here’s what I’ve discovered. You will run out of things to worship really quickly. You will get to a point in your life where the only thing that fits is you. The other word for that is called Hell. Hell is an actual place, Hell is the absence of God. It is removing ourselves from the presence of the One who loves us perfectly and who created us to all that is left is this little tiny universe. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.”
Here is one of the mistakes we make. I think we think that we are going to find happiness by pursuing happiness, but that’s like looking directly at the sun to see the light and then going blind because of it. Happiness is a derivative, not an end in and of itself. Let me put it this way, if you want to alleviate your own suffering, the way to start is to alleviate the suffering of others. It will begin to put your own pain into perspective, it will help you deal with what you are going through. If you want to be happy, it is not about trying to make yourself happy, try to make other people happy and you’ll begin to experience this derivative happiness. You want your needs met? Then meet the needs of others. It’s about this Copernicus revolution where it is not about us, it is all about God. Are you still with me? Verse 31:
31 “While these words were still in his mouth, a voice called down from heaven, ‘O King Nebuchadnezzar, this message is for you! You are no longer ruler of this kingdom. 32 You will be driven from human society. You will live in the fields with the wild animals, and you will eat grass like a cow. Seven periods of time will pass while you live this way, until you learn that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone he chooses.’
33 “That same hour the judgment was fulfilled, and Nebuchadnezzar was driven from human society. He ate grass like a cow, and he was drenched with the dew of heaven. He lived this way until his hair was as long as eagles’ feathers and his nails were like birds’ claws. 31 “While these words were still in his mouth, a voice called down from heaven, ‘O King Nebuchadnezzar, this message is for you! You are no longer ruler of this kingdom. 32 You will be driven from human society. You will live in the fields with the wild animals, and you will eat grass like a cow. Seven periods of time will pass while you live this way, until you learn that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone he chooses.’
33 “That same hour the judgment was fulfilled, and Nebuchadnezzar was driven from human society. He ate grass like a cow, and he was drenched with the dew of heaven. He lived this way until his hair was as long as eagles’ feathers and his nails were like birds’ claws.
Now that’s a mental image! A picture is worth a thousand words. I think it was the English Poet, William Blake, who tried to depict Nebuchadnezzar and I want to show it to you and then tell you a little bit of history. Here’s the great irony of what happened to Nebuchadnezzar. According to Josephus, the famous Jewish historian, Nebuchadnezzar was merciless, he was cruel, he was famous for it, and he treated those he conquered like animals. I find that interesting that he would then find himself in that same state years later, and I’m going to spare you the details but let me give you one story that I think explains the kind of person he was.
When he took Jerusalem in 586 B.C. he took captives back to Babylon and he took the princes of Judah and he stripped them naked, chained them together, made them walk that way on that journey back to Babylon, and then to just make it a little bit more difficult, he took their sacred scriptures and made them into sacks, filled them with sand and made them carry them. Have you found this to be true? Sometimes what you do to others has to happen to you in order for you to have a revelation? Part of me wonders if this is what happens. I think that William Blake’s illustration captures it. Here he is, like an animal but living naked, his hair growing like feathers, nails like talons, just really hardly anything human left, reduced to this animal image. I think sometimes that is exactly what needs to happen for us to come to the revelation that God is God.
Listen, it can happen other ways and that’s the good news. I’m not saying this for effect, but I find it interesting because it is a thread that runs through Scripture and it is something that is very difficulty to ignore but I think there are moments in our lives where we have to get naked before God. And I don’t mean physically, I mean emotionally, spiritually, relationally, where you have to be reduced to nothing. Everything has to be striped away. I don’t have time to go into detail but you go all the way back to the Garden of Eden, isn’t that what happened? There is a moment where they are naked before God and God clothed them as the first act of atonement in Scripture; and there are other moments throughout, and this is one of them, where Nebuchadnezzar literally finds himself naked before God.
Listen, it’s not coincidence that eventually, our Redeemer would find Himself hanging half-naked on the cross. In that same place and serving our sentence. There is something about this. This week, I was reading, I don’t know if it would be wisdom literature or historical fiction, but a book called Chasing Frances. It’s about Saint Frances, and for what it’s worth, more biographies have been written about Frances than any other saint. He lived in the 13th Century and he was born the son of a nobleman and his dream was to become a knight, but he lacked skill and almost got killed. He was about to go into another battle and I think God spared his life, because he had a vision and he returned to Assisi and began to care for the poor. One day he is praying in the chapel and he hears the voice of God telling him to repair the church. He is not sure what that means but here’s what he does. He goes and takes some of his father’s cloth and sells it and gives it to the priest to begin repairing the church. The priest didn’t even accept it but as you can imagine, his father got upset, angry, embarrassed because his son wasn’t becoming who he wanted him to be. He imprisoned his son in the cellar for a while. I guess that was ok back then. He ends up going to trial before the bishop. Now imagine, family, friends, everybody in that church, in that courtroom if you will, and as the charges are levied against Frances, he does something very interesting. He removes all of his clothing and places it in front of his father and says, “Until now, I have called you my father on earth, from now on, I desire to say only ‘Our Father who art in heaven’.” He took a vow of poverty and he devoted the rest of his life to serving the poor and the sick. Now, there are a couple of traditions here. One is that the bishop was so moved by his testimony that he gave him his cloak. Another one is that a poor farm-hand gave him a change of clothes and that that is the genesis of the habit that is worn by Franciscans today. But one way or the other, here is what is powerful to me about that story. There was a moment where Frances was willing to get naked, for lack of a better term, and I know it is a little uncomfortable but imagine how awkward it was for him! I don’t know if it is involuntary like in Nebuchadnezzar or voluntary like in Saint Frances, but what I’m getting at is this – I think there has to come a point in your life where you get to the end of yourself, where everything is stripped away, and it’s in that moment when you realize that all you need is God. God is all you need. And that’s the thing that will make all the difference. Verse 34
34 “After this time had passed, I, Nebuchadnezzar, looked up to heaven. My sanity returned, and I praised and worshiped the Most High and honored the one who lives forever. His rule is everlasting, and his kingdom is eternal. 35 All the people of the earth are nothing compared to him. He does as he pleases among the angels of heaven and among the people of the earth. No one can stop him or say to him, ‘What do you mean by doing these things?’
36 “When my sanity returned to me, so did my honor and glory and kingdom. My advisers and nobles sought me out, and I was restored as head of my kingdom, with even greater honor than before.
37 “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and glorify and honor the King of heaven. All his acts are just and true, and he is able to humble the proud.”
Go ahead and jot this down if you’re taking notes. Sanity equals humility. I think it is interesting that it says twice that his sanity is restored, and really, translated, sanity is simply humility. And if you want to flip the coin, insanity is pride. Any measure of pride in our lives is absolute insanity. It just is. Here’s the reality that I’m trying to bring to bear on our lives. The day is going to come when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and in that moment, the measure of foolishness a person feels will probably be in direct proportion to their pride, and pride will quickly vanish because there won’t be any room for it. Humility is one of our core values as a family. As I went through the discipleship program, it’s one of the four that we landed on – gratitude, generosity, courage and humility. I don’t know which one is the key but I think humility is the very heart of what it means to follow Christ.
This is fascinating to me, an interesting book a couple years ago entitled Saints and Madmen, I don’t know why I’m reading stuff like that, but the author, Russell Shorto. makes a fascinating distinction between mystics and psychotics. Would you like to know what the difference is? I think it is really the only thing I got out of the book but I found this fascinating. He said, “A mystic is humbled by his experience; a psychotic is inflated.” Let that sink in for a second. There’s a very fine line between being a mystic and a psychotic, but if I’m reading it right, a psychotic is someone who, when they have these kinds of experiences, it inflates them and leads toward pride; but a mystic, it is a humbling experience. Psychological term is grandiosity. I think if you want to diagnose Nebuchadnezzar in a nutshell, talk about grandiosity, but the cure was humility, he came to this place where he humbled himself. Now, contrast that with one of my favorite presidents, Theodore Roosevelt. I’ve read so many Roosevelt biographies, I love Roosevelt Island, I just like him, a great man, very cool President. He had an interesting habit – every now and then, he would go out and look up into the night sky with his naturalist friend, William Beebe and they would locate a faint spot of light in the lower left-hand corner of Pegasus and recite the following, “That is the spiral galaxy of Andromeda, it is a large as the Milky Way, it is one of a hundred million galaxies, it is 750,000 light years away, it consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our own.” Then the President would pause and grin and say, “Now I think we feel small enough to go to bed.” I love that. I love that because I think there are moments in our lives where we need to come in for a landing. I think there are moments in our lives where we need God to reveal to us our smallness. What will happen in that moment is it won’t devalue your life or your significance or who you are, it will simply remind you of how big God is and it will help you put things in perspective. Have you ever had a moment like this? I think my most recent moment like that was about a year ago, hiking through the Grand Canyon. We are at the foot of this natural wonder of the world and there really isn’t a whole lot of room for pride, especially when you’re not an expert hiker, you’re not sure you’re going to make it out. It’s the bigness of it that makes you feel so small, but it is in that smallness that you feel tremendous significance. It’s almost impossible to describe.
A few years ago, it was driving the bus on this mission trip to the Galapagos and we are back in Ecuador and we are driving through the Andes Mountains and we drive through this cloud cover that formed a ceiling but we drive through it and it becomes a celestial floor and we are on top of the world. I remember getting off the bus and taking in that panoramic sight and I felt so small and it felt so good.
God is God and you are not. We need experiences that remind us of that. Let me close with this promise. Nebuchadnezzar comes to this conclusion about God. He is able to humble the proud. How many of you know He is really good at that? He is so good at humbling the proud. The good news is – He is awfully good at exalting the humble. If you try to exalt yourself, God will find a way to humble you. If you try to humble yourself, God will find a way to exalt you. Here’s the conclusion I came to as I read this story. I think Nebuchadnezzar would say that this is the worse thing that ever happened to him, the worst season of his life. But a few years later, I have a hunch that he would say it’s the best thing that ever happened to him. Sometimes the worse things can become the best things. Sometimes you need to have everything taken away to realize that God is enough. Let’s pray.
Father we come before You and pray that You would help us, to get some perspective on ourselves, to get some perspective on You. Lord, thank You for now big You are. You are bigger than our biggest problem, You are bigger than our biggest fear, You are bigger than our biggest failure, God You are bigger than our worse sin. We thank You for that. Lord we humble ourselves before You and acknowledge that You are God and we bow our knees to You. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
