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Chapter 1 – Why We Must Think Rightly About God
· Prayer: Those who do not know You may call upon You as other than You are, and so worship not You, but a creature of their own fancy; therefore, enlighten our minds that we may know You as You are, so that we may perfectly love You and worthily praise You. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
· Worship is pure or corrupt depending on how the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. So the most important issue before the church is always God Himself, and the most important thing about a person is not what he may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.
· If we were able to get from a person, a complete answer to the question, “What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we may be able to predict the spiritual future of this person.
o Share and write down your thoughts about God.
· “Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God. Thought and speech are God’s gifts to creatures made in His image; these are intimately associated with Him and impossible apart from Him. It is highly significant that the first word was the Word: ”And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We may speak because God spoke. In Him word and idea are indivisible.”
· Actual thoughts vs. creedal statements
o “Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is.”
· Practical Christian living
o In these last days, the Christian conception of God is so decadent (self-indulgent) as to be beneath the dignity of the Most High God that it often leads to our own moral calamity.
o The person who believes rightly about God is relieved of ten thousand temporary problems.
o But even if all these problems were lifted, there remains one mighty single burden of eternity – that burden is his obligation to God. When his conscience tells him that he has failed in loving God as he ought, the pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.
§ The Gospel lifts this burden, but unless the weight of burden is felt, the gospel will mean nothing. Unless a vision of God high and lifted up is seen, there will be no woe and no burden.
§ Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.
· Idolatry
o At the root, idolatry is an insult on God’s character.
o The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is. It says this other thing is more worthy than God. It substitutes the true God for something that is created, including ideas. “Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.”
· Consequences of thinking wrongly about God
o History of Israel – bondage to sin, idolatry, death
o The Church
§ Worship, purity, faithfulness, anything godly will rot and decline when the right and true knowledge of God is missing.
§ Only love à(leads to) condone sin; Only justice à no mercy; Only fear à no love; etc.
§ The church that simply gets a wrong answer to the question, “What is God like?” will start to believe that God is different than what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most deadly kind.
· “The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him - and of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place. We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past. This will prove of greater value to them than anything that art or science can devise.”
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