June 6, 2010 - Zooming Out on God

Judges 6: 7-10 When the Israelites cried to the Lord on account of the Midianites,⁸the Lord sent a prophet to the Israelites; and he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt, and brought you out of the house of slavery; ⁹and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians, and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you, and gave you their land; ¹⁰and I said to you, “I am the Lord your God; you shall not pay reverence to the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.” But you have not given heed to my voice.’

(the media tech shows the church on screen from the internet view of google earth. As I begin preaching, he will zoom the perspective out slowly to reveal the U.S. and even more of the earth)

Sometimes trying to accomplish life’s “to-do” lists keeps us from seeing the bigger picture. For example, right now in worship, here’s a view of the church using google earth software. Now of course, we know that our faith and our God is larger than this one place in time. We’re in Mesa County of Colorado of the western United States of North America of the world!

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to zoom out on our perspective of life’s problems to see the bigger picture of how God is at work within our situations?!

What occurred to the size of the church building as the camera zoomed out? That’s right, it got smaller and smaller. As our perspective of faith and our concept of God grow larger, our problems decrease in size. It’s a matter of where our focus lies.

John Ortberg’s little girl named Laura was asked by her daddy "Laura, how big are you?"  She always had the same answer: "So big!" Then she would raise her hands to get additional stature, as if she were saying, "I'm huge, I'm enormous! There's no telling how big I'm going to be!"

We want our growing kids to know that how they think of themselves matters. We don't want them to think of themselves as small or weak or insignificant. We want them to think they are "so big!"  How big is our God? How big is Christ in our life? Is it possible that the way we live is a consequence of the size of our God? A primary predicament in life is we are not convinced that we are absolutely safe in the hands of a fully competent, all-knowing, ever-present, utterly loving, infinitely big God. 

When human beings zoom in on their problems instead of zooming out on God, John Ortberg writes that “they pray without faith, worship without awe, serve without joy, suffer without hope, and the result is a life of worry and fear, a loss of purpose, an inability to persevere and see it through. It's against this backdrop the writers of Scripture never tire of telling us that we do not live with a little God. Whatever we need, God is bigger. Whatever our weakness, God is stronger.”

Take “worry” for instance. Does anybody here ever wrestle with worry? Does anybody ever get anxious? Fear is a universal experience.

There is an article in the New York Times that says the scientists working on the human genome project have identified what they call "the worry gene." I'm not making this up. It's the SLC 684 gene on chromosome 17q12. People who have the short version of that gene, they say, are especially prone to worry. Now that I'm telling you this, how many of you are worried you have the short version of that gene? See? Worry just gets in our heads, doesn't it?  

It was like that for the people of Israel in today’s bible text also.  They felt beat up by the Medianite bullies.  And when the Israelites cried to the Lord because the their big problems, a prophet spoke to them on God’s behalf – reminding them how big their God is, “‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt, and brought you out of the house of slavery; ⁹and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians, and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you, and gave you their land; ¹⁰and I said to you, “I am the Lord your God; you shall not pay reverence to the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.” But you have not given heed to my voice.’”

 Israel’s worries were not because God isn’t big enough, it’s because they did not heed God’s voice. They had turned away and done their own thing. Therefore their view of God became smaller and of course the view of their problems became magnified.

 Think back to little Laura exclaiming, “I’m so big!” What is it like to live with a God who is so big?

 + As we zoom out on our problems and get a perspective on our big God, there are two views I want to encourage us with today:

1)    The first view is Time: to zoom out on time can be helpful in working through challenges.  To compress time is to increase our stress. 

If you were asked to think about your one of your favorite hymns, and then find the page number for it. That seems fine.  Now take your time, you have 5 more seconds!

How quickly the lack of time gets all of our attention, and not the subject of our favorite hymn.

The art is to stay focused on the challenge without panicking about the time.

Another way to zoom out on time is historical perspective.  Has this challenge happened to others in the past, did they survive it?

2)    The second view is perspective. When we have a small view of God our perspective is skewed to make the problems bigger than they really are… when we zoom out to view our situation from perspectives such as: I’m not the only one who’s ever been dealt this hand so what can I learn from others? Where else can I get support from – a friend, family, church member…

 Things around you can be swirling out of your control, but there's this inner reality: God is enough. Jesus makes possible the big-God life.  He carried the world’s burdens on his shoulders so we wouldn’t have to carry it on ours. And it's in that empty tomb from which Jesus came forth that we zoom out on the God who is bigger than death itself.

The apostle Paul later wrote in Philippians, “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. ¹³I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” 

Let us heed the voice of God.

(Thanks and recognition to John Ortberg for ideas used in this sermon that are from his sermon “Big God/Little God”.)