God is Incomparable
From the Series: God Is
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: May 17, 2009
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Transcript
Welcome to everybody at all five of our locations. We are thrilled to be together this weekend and excited about beginning a new series of messages. We just ended an incredible series called ‘Influence’ and we heard some really unique voices that I believe spoke into our lives in a unique way. I’m also excited about kicking off a new series entitled ‘One Prayer’ which is a series we did last year and you may remember that there are literally thousands of churches doing the same series at the same time. We are all doing the same theme and the theme this year is ‘God Is’ and over the course of this series, you will hear from some of our teaching team, and we will also invite some pastor friends from across the country to come and speak via video, then I will be speaking via video to some of those churches as well. So here’s the deal, we need to pause for station identification. I’m going to pray for us, then I will pause for a couple of seconds, not because I don’t have anything to say, but because we want to prepare this to be able to go out to some other churches in other places. So let’s pray and open our hearts to what the Lord wants to speak to us this weekend.
Father, thank You that we can gather in this place and worship You. Lord thank You for what You are doing in our lives individually and what You are doing in the life of National Community Church. We are so excited, I feel like I’m just hanging on for the ride. Lord I pray that your plans and purposes will prevail in our lives and that any obstacle will be removed so that our destiny can be realized so that everything You want to do in us would be unhindered. Lord, may we have the courage and the humility to be able to put on the table anything that we know would keep us from growing closer to You; and God I pray that You would open our eyes and help us to see your beauty, your majesty, your graciousness in a new way this weekend, in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Welcome to all of the ‘One Prayer’ churches. I am Mark Batterson. I am the Lead Pastor of National Community Church in Washington D.C. Thanks for letting me be part of what God is doing in your church. We are excited about this series! If you have a Bible, turn to Ephesians 1:16, I’ll give you a moment to turn there.
Let me reveal one of my idiosyncrasies. I just have this thing for nicknames, I always have, I love nicknames and I tend to nickname the people I like. I nickname my friends. There is a staff member who will remain nicknameless but has at least two-dozen nicknames. When our first son, Parker, was born, we were concerned that he wouldn’t know his real name because I had so many nicknames for him. And I had many nicknames. Nicknames are interesting because I think they reveal a dimension of your personality. I played basketball in college and one of my nicknames was the Black Hole because my teammates knew that if they passed the ball to me, they were never going to get it back. I took that as a term of endearment! Now, you may think that’s annoying, but I think it’s one of the things that makes me a little bit more like Jesus, because did you notice that He nicknames almost everybody? Like James and John – Sons of Thunder! What an awesome nickname! Then you’re got Peter – The Rock! What a cool, cool nickname! So I think that nicknames are an incredibly significant thing. All of that is to say this, when you read the Bible, what you discover is that there are more than 400 names or nicknames for God and I think each one reveals a unique dimension of who God is, or a unique dimension of his kaleidoscopic personality. We are going to look at one of those names, one of those dimensions – incomparable. It’s the word Paul uses in Ephesians 1:16 to describe God and his power. So let’s dive in,
I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that God, our Lord Jesus Christ, our glorious Father, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance of the saints, and (here it is) his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at his right hand in the heavenly realm far above all rule and authority, power, dominion and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the ages to come. God placed all things under his feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the Church, which is his body, and the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.
What an amazing passage of Scripture! Do you think we’re going to get through the whole Scripture this weekend? Neither do I! But here’s what I want to do. I want to unpack what I think are some of the important pieces in this passage that I believe can change our lives.
Most of us remember speeches or lectures or sermons because of what was said, but not this one. This particular lecture was memorable because of where it was delivered. I was a freshman at the University of Chicago, and honestly this was not the most exciting class I took. I spent of the semester nodding my head, not in agreement with what the professor said, but in a colossal struggle to stay awake because it was the afternoon time slot, and I think at one of those moments as my head nodded, our professor revealed something that turned an ordinary lecture hall into hallowed, scientific ground. He told us that just a few feet from our lecture hall was where Enrico Fermi, on December 2, 1942, unleashed the power of the atom by splitting it. The technical term is nuclear fission and the full impact of that discovery was felt on August 6, 1945when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. It took 43 seconds for that bomb to fall 31,000 feet. A barometric switch triggered the first subatomic reaction and in a matter of a few millionths of a second, the heat at the core of that bomb reached a temperature of several million degrees Celsius. When the bomb exploded at 8:16:02 local time, four square miles of that city were completely devastated. 66,000 people lost their lives without even knowing what was coming as silent shockwaves out sped the speed of sound. Buildings were leveled six miles away, glass was broken twelve miles away, and the energy produced by that bomb, the glare from that blast, would have been so powerful that it would have been visible from Jupiter, roughly 390 million miles away. Those statistics are staggering but here is what is almost inconceivable. The energy produced by that bomb was the byproduct of a subatomic reaction that only used 1% of 2 pounds of uranium, 1/3 of one ounce of uranium was sucked out of existence and it translated into an explosion 2,000 times more powerful than the most powerful bomb in the history of warfare. Stick with me for a moment, you are going to have flashbacks to your physics class.
It was more than a century ago that Albert Einstein published what may be the most recognizable equation in the realm of science, e = mc2, energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. Now, the speed of light squared is such a large number that really, in a simple translation, it simply means this – there is an awful lot of energy in a very small amount of matter. In fact, the amount of potential energy in every invisible atom is almost inconceivable. According to author and professor David Lenanus, one-fifth of one proton has enough potential energy to supply all the power needs of Berkeley, California. A proton is a subatomic particle, and in case you care, the mass of a proton is 1.67 times 10 to the negative 27th power kilograms, or to put it in different terminology, there are more protons in the dot of an eye than there are stars in the galaxy. Yet, one-fifth of one proton can generate 200 million electron volts of energy.
Here’s what I’m getting at, if the amount of energy in every subatomic particle is virtually inconceivable, then how can we even begin to comprehend the potential energy of an omnipotent Creator who created all matter? The truth is – we can’t! And that is the point of Paul’s prayer. He combines two Greek superlatives and he says God’s power is not just great, God’s power is not just incomparable, he says God’s power is incomparably great. In other words, there is no comparison point. And it strikes me that this is where I should stop preaching, because if there is no comparison point, then how can we even begin to imagine something for which there is no comparison. Let me see what I can do in 30 minutes with 26 letters of the English alphabet.
No ear has heard, no eye has seen, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for us, but let me talk for a moment about what I think is one of the greatest spiritual challenges that we face. We tend to think about God in human terms. We do that because we are human. In the beginning, God created us in his image, we’ve been creating God in our image ever since. The term is anthropomorphism and it’s the attribution of human characteristics to God. Let me give you an example, we tend to think of God in four-dimensional terms because that’s all we have ever known. We cannot conceive of anything beyond our four dimensions of space time, so what we do is project our four dimensions of space time limitations on God, and what we end up with is a God who is a little bigger, a little better, a little stronger and a little wiser than we are. We end up with a God who is a supersized version of ourselves. We tend to think that God’s power is slightly more powerful than the most powerful thing we can imagine. We tend to think of God’s grace as slightly more gracious than the most gracious thing we can imagine. We tend to think of God’s wisdom as slightly wiser than the wisest person we’ve ever known.
I think what Paul is saying in this passage is, “No!” “No, no, no, no.” Listen, God is incomparably great. There is no comparison. God is not a little bit bigger, a little bit better, a little bit stronger, a little bit wiser, He is so much more than that.
A couple weeks ago, I was in southern California speaking at a conference and I happened to be near Seal Beach. It was about 10 years ago that I first visited Seal Beach, close to Long Beach, and there was a little Mexican dive and I decided I wanted to go back and eat there. So I ate there and then I was driving along Pacific Coast Highway down toward Newport Beach when I had a flashback, I hadn’t thought about this in years, but when I was there 10 years ago, I was with my two brothers-in-law, Rob and Joel. Pastor Joel is our Campus Pastor at Ballston, he’s about my size, and my other brother-in-law, Rob is a little bit bigger, supersized, Rob is a big guy. We decided we were going to go boogie boarding but the water was really cold, so the pastor friend we were hanging out with got us some wet suits. One minor detail, he borrowed them from three junior high kids. So we are preparing to go boogie boarding and I kid you not, it took me 10 minutes to get the wet suit on. Part of that was I put it on backwards, but finally Joel and I get our wet suits on, it was a workout just getting those things on. Rob hadn’t even gotten his arms in the arm-holes yet. He has these hands that wouldn’t fit, and this is a little embarrassing and I promise this is the only time Joel and I have ever dressed Rob, but we are pulling the sleeve and finally his fist gets through and we get the wet suit on him, but we can’t zip it up! No way! So we go out anyway and Rob has like this V-neck in back. We pretended like we didn’t know him! So, the first time in, you can imagine what happens, Rob’s suit fills with water, he’s like a whale that goes down. I have rarely laughed that hard in my life. And I’m having these flashbacks and it was hilarious. Honestly, I’m a little afraid of the mental images you have in your heads right now. Why would I give you a ridiculous mental picture like that? Here’s why, because that’s exactly what we try to do to God. We put a little junior high wet suit on Him. We try to bring God down to our level, as if God can fit within the constraints of our left brain. It’s ridiculous. And if it wasn’t so sad and detrimental to our health, it might be funny, but it kills us.
Listen to me, our biggest problem is our small view of God. Every other problem is a by-product of that poor problem. Oh, so you’re telling me that my financial problem is not my problem? Right, its God’s because He owns the cattle on a thousand hillsides. Wait, wait, you’re saying that my anger issue is not my issue? That’s exactly what I’m saying, because the truth is, your anger is evidence that you have an incomplete appropriation of God’s love and gifts in your life, because if you understood how big his love is, those issues would begin to go away. Wait, so you’re saying that my incurable condition is not my problem? That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m saying that the Great Physician is bigger than your incurable condition. The truth is that you might die, but you will cross into another dimension and you will enter into a realm where there is no more sorrow or crying or mourning or pain, where there is no more death. Eternity will put all of our problems into perspective. I know there is the place for mercy but I’m trying to speak some perspective. My problem is perspective. My problem is that my problems seem so big to me and God seems so small in comparison to those problems.
So here’s the question that will determine our spiritual destiny – how big is your God? Is He bigger than your sin? Where sin abounds, grace does much more abound. Is He bigger than your addiction? Jesus said, “I came to set the captive free.” Is He bigger than whatever kind of physical problem you have? By his stripes, we are healed. Is God bigger than those things? I think the answer is an unequivocal YES! I think most of us would agree that God is Savior, Deliverer, Healer, that He is those things. But it’s just so much easier for us to believe God for the impersonal big stuff like keeping the planets in orbit than the little personal stuff like my problems. God is bigger than that.
A.W. Tozer said it best. He said, “A low view of God is the cause of a hundred lesser evils.” That’s so true and so good. He also said, “A high view of God is the solution to 10,000 temporal problems.”
Let’s keep going. That power is like the working of his mighty strength which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at the right hand of the heavenly realm. This is an amazing thing, the same power that raised Christ from the dead dwells in us. If we could just grasp that, what an awesome, awesome reality. He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at the right hand of the heavenly realm far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and every title that can be given not only in the present age but also in the one to come. Wow!
I want to try something here. Let me ask you a question. When I ask you to think of a painting of Jesus, what comes to mind? I wonder what images or sculptures or paintings or pieces of art come to mind when I ask that question. I’ll give you a few seconds to think about it. For me, there are two pictures that are dominant in my mind for some reason. One is a picture of Jesus with a lamb draped around his neck. Anybody else? The other one is a picture depicting Jesus standing outside a door poised to knock and it’s a depiction of Revelation 3:20. I think that those are paintings that my grandparents had in their home, so those were early images of Jesus in my mind and my hunch is that all of us have those. Mental images that come to mind when we think about Jesus. My hunch is that for most people, the dominant image is an image of Christ on the cross. That is the crux of our faith, that is where the love of God is painted blood red, and it’s a sacred picture. But I want you to hear what I’m about to say because I think this is huge. Jesus is not hanging on a cross, He is seated on a throne. But that’s not an image we see depicted very often, and because we don’t have a mental image of Him in that place of power and authority, I wonder if it robs the victory from us before we even get started. I wonder if our greatest shortcoming is how much we underestimate the authority of Christ and the authority we have because we are in Christ. Listen, thank God for that picture of Christ on the cross. For what had to be the longest day of his life, He suffered, He sacrificed and He gave us a picture of what love is. He rose from the dead! He is seated at the right hand of the Father. That is who we are praying to. And that’s what Paul is saying. He is saying here is the picture I want to paint for you. It is not good enough for us just to hear those words, my prayer is that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened and we would see the authority that He has and that we have because of who we are in Him, because that will change your life.
Before the day is over, my prayer is that some of us would bow the knee to Jesus Christ. The Bible says that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. It will happen either now or then. My prayer is that that would be a decision you would make. So before the end of the day, somewhere, sometime, somewhere, that you would bow the knee, and in that moment what happens is you submit your life to the One who has incomparably great power and it begins to work in your life. It begins with that moment of submission, submitting our lives to Jesus Christ.
A couple of weeks ago, I renewed a membership at our gym. I went in and got a free training session so I took advantage of that because I’m really trying to get in shape and I wanted to find out what my body fat was and I wanted to learn some new exercises. What was I thinking? I think I regretted that decision. But here’s the thing, I was feeling pretty good going in, I’ve been working out, I was keeping it real, I was thinking that the trainer might be impressed! Or that he might want to pick up a few tips from me! That’s embarrassing but I’m keeping it real. So I get there, and the Bible says pride cometh before the fall. He put me through a 20-minute routine, that was all I could take. I work out with weights but he put me through these resistance exercises, crunches, lunges, pull-ups, I had never done any of these things. I am dying. Four days later, I was still sore! I didn’t even know I had some of these muscles, it was pathetic. I couldn’t even do all the reps he asked me to do and I almost threw up. It was like I was back in the days of getting ready for basketball, but something happened. There was a little revelation, it was interesting, he said to me that the problem with the way most people exercise is that most people exercise the extremities, like arms, but what you need to do is work on the core. So all of these exercises began to work on my core. He said to work on the core and strengthen the core first and then go to your extremities. I couldn’t help but think to myself, I mean, everybody has seen that guy at the gym with the huge upper body and flamingo legs, you know, like if you pushed him, he’d fall over. I wonder if a lot of Christians are like that, great physique but where’s the core? What is the core? I think what I’m trying to get at is that the core is what matters. You can know what your spiritual gifts are; you can be working on spiritual disciplines, but what I’m saying is that right at the core is this image of who God is. How big is He? Is He seated on the throne, not just in your life but of the universe? Do you understand the authority that is yours in Christ? If you’ve got that, then you’ve got this amazing, strong core that changes everything.
I have a prayer that I pray frequently, that Lord, I can’t do this alone. It’s kind of a goofy prayer because He knows that, but it’s my way of saying that I’m not smart enough, I’m not strong enough, I need your help. I think we’ve got to live our lives in a place where we have this fundamental understanding, that without Him, we can do nothing and with Him, we can do anything. If we have those two things, I think it changes everything about our lives.
I’m going to try to wrap this up, but I want to touch on one other piece of this passage to unpack it. Paul starts out, to reverse engineer, He’s got incomparably great power, mighty strength, He is seated far above every power, rule and authority, but how do we appropriate that to our lives? What difference does that make in our lives? Paul starts out this prayer, what does he say? He prays for a spirit of wisdom and revelation. He says may the eyes of the heart be enlightened so that we can see, and what I want to say is that you can’t reason your way to God. It will not get you there. Reason is a wonderful thing but reason will only take you as far as the hundred billion synapses that you have, no further.
I was reading an interesting article by Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, he grew up an atheist, but during the process of writing that best-selling, prize-winning book, he came to faith in God and he said something interesting, so striking to me. He said, “I was sick to death of being reasonable.” Like, at some point, it’s just not enough. Reasonable is not enough. But wait, a lot of people say that Christianity isn’t logical. Well, no it’s not logical, but it’s not illogical, it is theological. It simply adds God into the equation. There is a God far beyond what we can imagine. And you cannot reason your way, it only comes by revelation. So my prayer would be that what my words can’t accomplish, the Holy Spirit would do for us as He begins to reveal to us this incomparably great power and begins to work in our lives.
Now, I can’t even describe what’s going to happen or how that works. I can’t. This week, I was thinking about Thomas Aquinas, one of the 33 doctors of the Catholic Church, maybe one of the greatest philosophical and theological minds in the Church ever, and it’s very interesting to me because he was a huge proponent of natural theology or reason. Then, on December 6, 1272, something happened, he had a vision, and he quit writing, he never finished. He said, “All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.”
I want a moment like that where God reveals to me what is beyond my natural ability, what is beyond what I can imagine. Let me close with this.
He was born a slave, he was orphaned at a young age, shouldn’t have amounted to anything. He was supposed to die before his 23rd birthday because of his medical condition but he went on to be one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the last century. George Washington Carver didn’t just survive, he had an incredible impact and influence on culture and especially on farming in the South. Let me tell you a little bit about his journey. He earned his Masters degree in Botany at Iowa State University and went on to teach for 47 years, and he saw that the agricultural economy in the South was suffering, in part because of the boll weevil and part because they were planting one crop over and over again and depleting the nutrients in the soil. Stick with me. Carver introduced the concept of crop rotation and encouraged farmers to plant peanuts and the harvest was amazing, but something happened. The farmers got ticked off at him because there was no market for peanuts, so they rotted in warehouses. So George Washington Carver decided to do what he always did, he prayed about it. He got up a 4:00 a.m. most mornings to take a walk in the woods and asked God to reveal the mysteries of nature. Ask the animals and they will teach you or the birds and they will teach you, Carver took that verse literally, he asked the earth to reveal its secrets to him. One of his favorite stories to tell was in this moment when he was asking God to reveal the mysteries of the peanuts, he said, “Why’d You make the universe Lord?” and the Lord told him to ask for something more in proportion to that little mind of his. “Why’d You make the earth Lord?” “Your little mind still wants to know far too much, ask for something more in proportion to that little mind of yours.” So, “Why did you make man?” Lord said, “Far too much, ask again.” “Explain to me why you made plants Lord.” “Your little mind still wants to know too much.” So, I asked meekly, “What about the peanut?” “Yes,” answered the Lord, “I will grant you the mystery of the peanut. Take it inside your laboratory, separate it into water, fats, oils, sugar, starches, resin and amino acids and recombine it under my three laws of compatibility and temperature and pressure and then you’ll know why I made the peanut.” Long story short, George Washington Carver found more than 300 uses for the peanut.
This is cool, January 20, 1921, he testified before the House Ways and Means Committee representing the Peanut Growers Association. The Chairman told him he had 10 minutes. An hour and forty minutes later, the Committee said that George Washington Carver could come back anytime he wanted to and talk for as long as he wanted to. They were amazed at the mysteries he revealed, and the uses. I don’t have time to list them all, shaving cream, shampoo, insecticide, acne, wood stain, fertilizer. He didn’t invent peanut butter but he popularized it. Listen to what Carver said, “To me, nature in its very forms are little windows through which God permits me to commune with Him and to see much of his glory by simply lifting the curtain and looking in. I look to think of nature as wireless, telegraph stations through which God speaks to us every day, every hour and every moment of our lives.” That’s amazing! That’s Psalm 19. The heavens speak of his glory. There is no place where his speech is not heard.
What if we approached every situation, every person, everything, the way George Washington Carver approached the peanut, and asked the Lord for a spirit of wisdom and revelation, to reveal to us the mysteries. That would be an amazing. He said one other thing, I’ll close with this. “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or the little peanut, they will give up their secrets; but I have found that when I listen and silently commune with people, they give up their secrets also, if you love them enough.” If you love them enough.
May God give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation; may he enlighten the eyes of our hearts so that we can see the incomparably great power that is ours in Christ.
Lord, thank You. Reveal to us in your way what You want us to know, what we need to know. God help us live with a confidence that comes from the fact that we are in Christ, that we serve the One who is seated on the throne. God may we live in that power and in that authority and may it transform our lives. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
