Happy Monday!
A friend’s sermon title prompts today’s word-of-the-week…
SENSE
My friend Tom Roepke began a sermon series yesterday: When God Doesn’t Make Sense.
I’m sure Tom’s got a great message in mind, but I chuckled when I saw his title. Seriously, God never makes sense.
All that nicely worked out theology? The explanations we’ve concocted to rationalize the revealed actions of an infinite Creator toward His creatures? That’s all our stuff.
God Himself is quite simply beyond our comprehension. Probably we don’t think in exactly those terms all the time. It’s sort of difficult to focus continually on the unfathomable.
If you think you can explain God, you’ve made Him too small. If you think you can make Him conform to human logic, you’re putting Him in a box.
God doesn’t make sense, because making sense means applying to God some human standard of what’s sensible. That, well, doesn’t make sense.
I’m poking a bit of fun at my friend Tom. We have to think about God, talk to God, worship God, and do our best to make sense of our faith in God. It’s just good to remember that when we do those things we’re trying to wrap our arms, heads, and hearts around the infinite.
That’s faith. It doesn’t make sense.
It’s Monday. Might be a good week to remember that God is quite simply bigger than anything we can imagine, think about, or explain.
great post Rich! Just a little back story that drove me to push into this series ( with a little help from Craig Groeschel and Andy Stanley.) Its been a crazy couple of weeks and I was looking to help explain in what took me about 27 minutes (according to Melinda) but your effort much less. Folks always come to the pastor to make sense of life and quite honestly it doesn’t. I used the 5 year anniversary of the tornado in Joplin as part of my message (having ridden there as part of the Present Hope Tour in 2011). My take away this week was even when God appears to be silent in our messy world, doesn’t mean He is absent. Or…that just because my plan in life isn’t working how I want, doesn’t mean that God’s purpose is being frustrated. Or as Pastor Aaron from Joplin… says…#lifewins. grateful for our shard journey, rich, your bride and that crazy dog! blessings!