Episode 1442: All-Knowing Creator

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1, 442 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:07] Jerry Fu: I'm Jerry Fu. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence, and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to understand and resolve conflict is key, and one way To be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend, Scott Maderer.

[00:00:40] Scott Maderer: God is bigger and more powerful than we can grasp. And God is more bigger and more powerful than we've ever given God credit for. And that is our one and only job to seek out and believe in that power so that we're driven to [00:01:00] action that then deepens our belief. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:01:08] If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:35] In today's Spiritual Foundation episode, I talk about Psalm 139 verses 1 through 6 and 13 through 18 and Mark chapter 2 verses 23 through chapter 3 verse 6. I talk about how having questions is part of believing our faith. I also talk about how belief and action feed into each other. . Psalm 1 [00:02:00] 39 says, oh Lord, you have searched me and known me.

[00:02:04] You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways, even before Word is on my tongue. Oh Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.

[00:02:26] It is so high that I cannot attain it. For it was you who formed my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

[00:02:49] Your eyes beheld my unformed substance, and your books were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me [00:03:00] are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them. They are more than the sand. I come to the end, and I am still with you.

[00:03:10] And Mark, chapter 2, verses 23 through chapter 3, verse 6 says, One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? And he said to them, Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food?

[00:03:35] He entered the house of God when Abathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat. And he gave some to his companions. Then he said to them, The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

[00:03:55] Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. [00:04:00] They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, Come forward. Then he said to them, Is it lawful to do good or do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?

[00:04:15] But they were silent. He looked round at them with anger. He was grieved at the hardness of their heart, and said to the man, Stretch out your hand. He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

[00:04:35] An expression that I used to use whenever I was growing up, and I still probably say it way too often to be cool is search me, right? You would throw your hands apart and you'd say, search me. It basically was a way of saying, I don't know or I'm not sure. You have to look to me and figure it out on your own.

[00:04:57] It was an admission of ignorance, [00:05:00] complacency. It just refers to what we don't know. And I don't know about you, but my list of things that I don't know is rather long and seems to be growing each and every day. I don't know things about myself. I don't know things about how I think or live or do. I don't know things about my wife for sure.

[00:05:20] I don't know things about other people in general. I don't know things about how the world works. I don't know things about my faith, my belief. I don't know things about the Bible. There are things I don't know and that list seems to get longer and longer every day. And today I want to talk a little bit about God.

[00:05:42] And studying God, analyzing God. That's known as theology. You've probably heard that word before and that's really all that means is the study of God. And what do we know about God? What do you think you know about God? What do you believe about [00:06:00] God? I don't know about you, but my best answer to that question is probably search me.

[00:06:07] I think a lot of people look at that immediately and go that's one of the problems with the church this day. They don't know what they believe. They're no longer sure of their beliefs. We want to move beyond a childish faith, a kind of acceptance of all things, and we want to incorporate all of the things that we've learned about how the world works and science and all of these things about psychology.

[00:06:32] And yet, we're also told that what the world knows about us and What faith is, what God is, those are two different things and they can't belong in the same mind. You can't believe in science and in God. You can't believe in the things of the world like that and follow God. That they're mutually exclusive.

[00:06:56] They're domains or magistra that don't fit [00:07:00] one into the other. We can't fit what the world knows into God, and we can't fit God into what the world knows. They don't match up. They don't belong. Something has to go. And I think, in a lot of cases, what's gone is any sort of real theological thought.

[00:07:17] Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying people have lost their faith. I'm just saying we don't think about it a lot anymore. We do a surface level belief. We simply try to pick out a few verses from the Bible and say, those are the most important ones and I'm doing that, so I'm good. Or we simply accept things the same way that they were taught to us as children.

[00:07:40] We have a surface level of faith. That's easier than really thinking the hard thoughts and asking the tough questions and trying to figure out more about what do we really believe and why do we believe it. In Psalm 139, though, search me is [00:08:00] used in a different way. Here it's used as searching for the acknowledgement of God's searching for us.

[00:08:09] God reaching for us and saying, reclaim your faith, reclaim your part of existence. Be reasonable in your faith. Of course, being reasonable about your faith is part of the contradiction, part of the thing that becomes hard. You actually have to be able to hold more than one thought in your head at a time.

[00:08:31] You actually have to recognize the theology of the both and as opposed to the theology of the either or. Instead of one thing being true or another thing being true, perhaps there is truth in both. And out of that, we can begin to discover and itemize and declare what are the core things that we believe.

[00:08:55] You can look at the Apostles Creed. You can look at the, what we call in the Methodist, the book of [00:09:00] discipline, which has some things in it that lay out and says, these are the core beliefs. We believe in God. We believe in the Father. We believe in the Almighty. We believe in the Creator. This breakdown of the creed looks at how we have trust, how we have obedience, how we have loyalty, how we have structured our core beliefs.

[00:09:26] And as part of that, it also calls us to respond to those beliefs, to have action that we take in response to our belief, to do out of belief. That's the works that we do. The church is a gathering of those committed by faith to having a response to God. that response grows out of that communal identity.

[00:09:55] And the question is, which comes first, belief or action? And the answer is yes. [00:10:00] It's a feedback loop. So you can start anywhere. You can start with action, which then leads to belief, which then leads to further action, which deepens the belief. Or you could start with your belief, where you are today, and begin to take action, begin to do things, begin to live, to love, to serve, to act.

[00:10:19] And from that, your belief. will lead to action, which then deepens that belief again and leads to further action. The truth is, if we think about God and we think we're going to answer all the questions, we're going to figure it all out. God is too big for us to grasp. Every statement, every image, every description, every word, everything that we've ever tried to put down on paper or in thought or in imagery or pictures that captures God cannot capture the full richness of God because God is belong, holy beyond our reach.[00:11:00]

[00:11:00] That's what this Psalm says. That's what Mark is talking about. Mark is talking about the fact that here we've set up out the rules of the Sabbath. We've said, this is what God has told us to do. And here is God saying, wait a minute. You're missing the point. The point is loving each other. The point is taking care of those who are hurt.

[00:11:21] The point is helping others. And you've set up these rules in some sort of arbitrary way, not me. God is bigger and more powerful than we can grasp, and God is more bigger and more powerful than we've ever given God credit for. And that is our one and only job, to seek out and believe in that power, so that we're driven to action that then deepens our belief.

[00:11:54] Thanks for listening.[00:12:00]

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