Who is God?

Intro: Name’s Mean Something

Name’s are important. They mean something to us. When we think of our friends, they are more than just a name. We have memories attached to those names, and characteristics we associate with that friend. We may have some good thoughts associated with a location that is special to us, or even destination that we hope to be at somebody.

However, names can also have a negative connotation in our mind. Many of us probably have had bad relationships and tend to have stigmas with people with the same name as an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend. I worked in a school for a number of years, and it was common to hear the teachers talk about how the long list of names that they can never name their children because of the the bad experiences they had with names.

But regardless of your experience, it is easy to see that names of immense meaning and significances to us. A name can cause us to perceive and color our life according to what we associate a name with.

The same can be said about God. When we hear the name “God”, I am sure there a million different ways our brains begin to fire off.

A.W. Tozer had a very interesting and true quote when he said:

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us....No religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.”

I tend to agree with Tozer here. What we think about God, and how we think about God will drastically impact the way we live our daily lives before God and before others. The problem is, we often don’t know much about God or we hear information from people that seems to contradict each other. Is God loving, or is he a judge? Is God angry at the world, or does he long to see the world come to know him?

So tonight we are going to look at a passage of Scripture where God actually reveals himself and describes what He is like. God reveals himself in a particular way, and what we see may actually surprise us.

Text: God Reveals Himself

Then the Lord passed in front of him and proclaimed:

Yahweh—Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, 7 maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion, and sin. But He will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.