Renewing Our Wonder of God

Introduction

Seven Wonders of the World

Hanging Gardens of Babylon sheet

This invokes our wonder because our imaginations begin to picture what it was like and how they would have made it.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton once said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.”

What about with God?

Have we lost our wonder of God?

In many ways the church, particularly of North America has.

We have worked to neatly package God as presentable to those who don’t know Him and we have lost much of our awe and amazement and wonder at whom He is and what He has and is doing.

I. Familiarity can breed stagnation/mediocrity.

For some of us, especially those who have grown up in the church, God has become too familiar to us.

Years of hearing sermons and Sunday School stories that have tried to explain God may have left us stagnate and stuck in mediocrity.

Christmas is great example of this, especially when we are young. When we are given a gift a Christmas, one that we really wanted, we become excited and happy. But as time goes on that gift become just another thing we have until eventually it is forgotten and sits on our shelf.

This is a danger when we spend our whole life learning about God but never seeing it in action.

If church is just about learning and knowledge and duty we lose wonder but if we live to know God our wonder will grow.

II. We know and experience too much

Today technology has imparted us much good but in many ways has destroyed our sense of wonder.

When scientist can look at stars billions of light years away and explain scientifically why things are the way they are we lose wonder.

When graphic designers can with computers portray the destructive force of a tornado or the eruption of a long dormant volcano we lose our wonder.

When we can find resources everywhere we turn that explains what the Bible says about God we lose our wonder.

It gives a false sense that we know what’s going on when scripture tells us no one can know the mind of God.

III. We display wonder at the wrong things

Our wonder of God is often contingent on what He does in our life.

When God is doing something amazing in our life then we praise and glorify Him.

Many times I’ve seen on TV we want more of Jesus or the Holy Spirit and maybe they really just want to be closer to God.

But most times these people are on a program that is all about miraculous movements of the Holy Spirit. Ex. Holy Laughter, changing fillings to Gold etc.

And yes God can and does miraculous things but our faith and wonder cannot be based on these things or they become shallow and easily destroyed.

It is just as anything that makes us feel good wares off and so we want more.

But what about the wonder in the fact that God has even given us His Holy Spirit. Or that Jesus was somehow God and man and came to give up His life for us. Or that God even created us and wants us to know Him intimately. What about when Jesus said “I am the bread of life.” What did He really mean?

Oswald Chambers said, “wonder is the very essence of life. Beware always of losing the wonder. The only evidence of salvation or sanctification is that the sense of wonder is developing, not at things as they are, but at the One who made them as they are.”

Our wonder must not be in things or deeds but in God Himself.

Conclusion

In conclusion let me recount for you a short story that Mark Buchanan tells in his book Your God Is Too Safe. He writes, “Author and theologian Os Guinness was once speaking in Australia, and afterward Japanese CEO approached him. He said to Guinness, “When I meet a Buddhist monk, I meet a holy man in touch with another world. When I meet a Western missionary, I meet a manager who is only in touch with the world I know.” And then Guinness adds this comment: “You could say that many, many Christians are atheists unawares.”

Mark goes on to say, “This is a bitter irony. That a faith based on staggering mysteries—the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Cross and Resurrection, the imparting of the Spirit—should have become shorn of mystery, so plodding and prosaic, so mundane and managerial is a bitter irony.”