1996 SINGLE SERMONS
TO KNOW GOD AND TO LOVE GOD
DR. JIM DIXON
OCTOBER 20, 1996
ACTS 17:22-31
There’s an old saying, “He who aimeth at nothing barely hitteth it every time.” Now, that saying has been attributed to Confucius, the ancient philosopher who lived in China in the 6th century before Christ. The attribution is bogus. Confucius never said those words. And yet the words are true. We all need purpose. We all need direction. We all need goals in life. The Bible says, “Without a vision the people perish.”
This morning I feel led to focus on the two supreme goals of this ministry, the two supreme goals of Cherry Hills Community Church. You see the five-fold purposes of the church itemized on the front of your bulletin, but these five-fold purposes really relate to two supreme goals. The first goal is this: to know God. This is the first goal of this ministry, that we might know God and that we might enable others to know God, because the Bible tells us the world does not know God. For this reason Christ came into the world and for this reason Christ raised up His church, that the world might know God.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Reverend William Archibald Spooner. Reverend Spooner labored for 60 years at Oxford University, first as a professor and then as president of Oxford. From 1903 to 1924, a period of 21 years, Reverend William Archibald Spooner was president of Oxford. He was also an ordained minister in the Anglican Church. He was considered a brilliant man, but he had one problem, and that one problem was the problem of getting letters, syllables, words, and phrases confused. His problem was linguistic flipflops. That was the problem that William Spooner had, and he has left a legacy of laughter because of the way that he had his words confused.
Standing in front of the student body and the faculty at Oxford University, Spooner once said, “Three cheers for our queer old dean.” But, of course, he was referring to the dear old queen, Queen Victoria. On another occasion, as World War II was drawing to a close, Spooner said, “When the boys come home, we’ll have the hags flung out,” but he meant the flags hung out. When Spooner was addressing the British Parliament, he lionized England’s farmers by calling them “noble tons of soil” instead of sons of toil. Of course, he made a lot of mistakes at church as well as he preached Sunday after Sunday. He once told his congregation that the Lord Jesus Christ is a shoving leopard instead of a loving shepherd. He once, as he was performing a marriage ceremony and the wedding was drawing to a close, looked at the groom and said, “It is kisstomary to cuss the bride.” All of these have been called spoonerisms, and we’re all capable of spoonerisms—getting letters and syllables and words and phrases confused and mixed up.
But, you see, linguistic confusion is not really a serious problem. It can be embarrassing, it can be funny, but it’s not really a serious problem. Theological confusion, however, is a serious problem. Theological confusion can affect eternity. It can affect one’s destiny.
Now, it was in the first century AD that the Apostle Paul arrived in the city of Athens. He went up on the Acropolis and saw the Parthenon and went over to the hill of the Acropolis where he spoke. Athens was the theological center of the Greek and Roman world, and yet all Paul saw was confusion. All Paul saw was theological confusion. The problem was the people in Athens simply didn’t know God. They were, Paul said, God’s offspring, but they didn’t know God. God was not far from each and every one of them, but they did not know God.
In Him, in God, those people lived and moved and had their being, and yet they didn’t know God. They even had an altar inscribed to an unknown god. They were confused, and so Paul delivered a message in order that they might know God. That message is the gospel, and it must cover the Earth, because the world does not know God. The world is theologically confused. America, this nation, is theologically confused. People don’t know even today whether God is a tyrant or a teddy bear. The average person you talk to doesn’t know whether God resides in Heaven or in every tree and rock. Many people don’t know whether they’re monotheistic or polytheistic, whether they are pantheistic or monastic. They’re theologically confused, and they don’t know God.
Now, in the first century after Christ, the Greeks didn’t expect to know God. In fact, they had been taught by Socrates and Aristotle that it was not possible to really know God because Socrates and Aristotle had taught the Greek and Roman worlds that knowledge could only come from a combination of logic and sensory observation. It was Socrates that taught the inductive method of reasoning. That was the Socratic method. And it was Aristotle who taught the deductive method of reasoning. But both of them taught that through a combination of reason—either inductive or deductive reasoning—and sensory observations—what you could observe through your five senses—you arrive at knowledge and you could only know what you could observe with your senses and what you could reason through inductive or deductive reasoning. That’s all you could know.
Of course, the thinking of Socrates and the thinking of Aristotle greatly influenced the enlightenment in Europe, the so-called Age of Reason, and it became the basis for what we call the scientific method today. There’s nothing wrong with the scientific method except that you can’t know God that way. Socrates and Aristotle understood this, and they told the people, “You can’t know God.” This is what Paul is referring to.
In the book of 1 Corinthians, the second chapter, when Paul said, “Since in the wisdom of God, man could not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For the Jews demand signs and the Greek seeks wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.” You see, you can only know God through the gospel. You can only know God through the word of the cross. You can only know God through Christ. The gospel speaks to our souls and it’s in the soul that we must respond if ever we would know God. You see, that’s why Christ came into the world.
In the prologue of the Gospel of John, we’re told, “No person has ever seen the Father. The only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known.” You see, that’s why Jesus Christ came into the world: that we might know God. His supreme purpose was that we might know God.
In 1 John, chapter 5, the Bible says, “We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding to know Him who is true.” This is why Christ came, that we might know God. Jesus said to His disciples, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also. Henceforth, you do know Him and you have seen Him.” You see, in knowing Christ, they knew God. In having a relationship with Christ, they had a relationship with God. This is so important. It’s so important because knowing God is tied with eternal destiny.
In Christ’s high priestly prayer, in John 17, Jesus prayed like this. He said, “Father, the hour has come. Glorify the Son that the Son might glorify Thee. Since You have given Him authority and power over all flesh to give eternal life to all those You have given to Me… And this is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” What is eternal life? To know God. That is why, in the Parable of the Ten Virgins, in Matthew, chapter 25, our Lord Jesus Christ tells us that five of the virgins were refused at the great wedding feast. They were denied entrance to Heaven with these words: “I do not know you.” That is why our Lord Jesus Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, said to the masses, “In that day, many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name? Did we not cast out demons in Your name? Did we not do this in Your name? Did we not do that in Your name?’ and I will say to them, ‘Depart from Me. I never knew you.’”
You see, everything is knowing God. We think that it all hinges on being good and doing good, but being good and doing good are just by-products of knowing God. Apart from knowing God, everything is lost. But we need to understand this word “know.” In the Greek, this is the word gnosto, and that’s a relational word. It did not refer to the knowing of information. It refers to the knowing of relationship. This is what the gospel is all about. That’s what this ministry is all about. It’s what this church is all about: that you might come into relationship with God through Jesus Christ and then grow in that relationship, because it’s that relationship that saves us. It’s that relationship which fulfills us. It’s that relationship which gives us purpose. When the Bible speaks of knowing God, it’s not speaking of the knowledge of information, the mere accumulation of facts. It’s speaking of the knowing of relationship. And relationship with God begins when we respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I first knew God when I was five years old and knelt with my mom in the living room of our home and prayed with her, saying, “Lord Jesus, come into my heart. Come into my heart. Forgive me of my sin. I want to live for you.” You see, that was the beginning of my relationship with God. I had felt the tug of the gospel in my soul, and I made a decision to respond to the gospel and begin a relationship with God. That’s when I began to know God. I came into a relationship with Him. I became His child. God became my Father. Jesus Christ became my elder brother and my Lord. That’s when the relationship began. From that point, we seek to grow. We seek to know God more and more. That’s what this church exists for, that you might know God and that you might then know Him more and more, that you might come into relationship with Him and that that relationship might deepen and that relationship through the years might grow.
The Apostle Paul, in the book of Philippians, in the third chapter, said that his supreme purpose, verses 7 and 8 of chapter three, is to know God. And this is our purpose as a church. This is our first supreme goal: that you might know God and that we might enable others to know God because we live in a world that does not know Him and has no relationship with Him.
Our second supreme purpose is to love God. Our first goal is to know God. Our second goal is to love God. I’m sure most of you have read the Gospel of Mark. In the12th chapter (really, the 12th chapter of the gospel of Mark is one of the most…I mean, it’s a compelling chapter, a powerful chapter, and it’s a very unusual one) three different individuals representing three different groups approach Christ and question Him. Three different individuals come up to Christ to interrogate Him. The first individual, in verse 13, is a Herodian. The Herodians were a political sect. They were not religious by nature. They were supporters of Herod Antipas and his dynasty, and they sought the Hellenization of the Jews. The Herodian asked a question of Jesus Christ, and it was a bogus question. I mean, it was not sincere. It was designed to ensnare Christ. It was a question about taxes and whether they should be paid to Caesar.
Now, later in the chapter another individual comes to Christ and this individual, we are told, is a Sadducee. The Sadducees were a religious sect with political ties to the Romans. This Sadducee, in verse 18, also asked a bogus question. It was not sincere. His question, too, was designed to ensnare Christ and it was a question about marriage in Heaven.
But there was a third person who came to Christ and that third person, in verse 29, was a scribe. Of course, the scribes were linked to the Pharisees, and they were kind of the enemies of Christ and so you would have expected this scribe to also seek to ensnare Christ, but that’s not the case. In fact, the scribe had been listening to the other questions and he was deeply moved, powerfully affected, by the answers of Christ. So he poses a legitimate question to Jesus Christ. He was seeking a sincere answer. He said to Christ, “What is the first and the greatest commandment?” Jesus Christ responded by quoting the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4-5: “Hear, oh Israel. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This is the first and the greatest commandment. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. We are on solid ground when we say that our primary goals as a ministry is to know God and to love God. You see, the Bible tells us that, in the end times, not many people will love God. That’s what the Bible prophesies. In the last days in this world, not many people will truly love God.
In 2 Timothy 3, the Apostle Paul writes, “In the last days, there will come times of stress. People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, profligate, slanderous, fierce, haters of what is good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.” What a description of the world in the last days!
The word for love in that passage is the Greek word phileo. Love of God is philotheos. You see, Paul is saying that in the last days the world will not be characterized by philotheos. It will not be characterized by the love of God, but it will be characterized by three other types of love. It will be, the Apostle Paul tells us, be characterized by philautos, the love of self. This is the great god of our age: autos, self. Is this not one of the great gods of our age?
If you know history, you know something of Antiochus IV who, in the second century before Christ, was the great king of the Seleucid Empire. We’re told that he minted coins with his own face, his own image. On the coin and beneath his face were the words Theos Epiphanes, “god manifest.” He showed a laurel wreath above his head and the rays of the sun descending upon his face. He literally worshipped himself and he wanted others to worship him. He became, the Bible tells us in the book of Daniel, the prototype of the Antichrist who is to come, because the Antichrist will be totally into self and the devil who empowers the Antichrist is totally into self and he would sell this philosophy to put self first to the world.
Now, the Bible tells us that we should love ourselves, but not as much as we love God. It all gets twisted when we put self over God. Autos over theos. When we do that, it all gets twisted somehow. It’s happening. We’ve all bent the knee to self, haven’t we? It’s a struggle, and every day we have to wake up and we have to put God back on the throne. We have to put Christ Jesus back on the throne every day. We have to decide we’re going to love God first.
In this little passage of scripture, Paul says there’s a second god that will be worshipped in the last days, and it’s the god hedone. People will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Philhedone, “lovers of pleasure.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with pleasure, just like there’s nothing wrong with self. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure as long as it is subjected to the will of God, as long as our love of God controls our love of pleasure. But when we put pleasure above God, it all gets twisted. We live in a culture where hedone is one of the great gods.
In the youth culture today, many young women and men have just gone after drugs and alcohol and recreational sex. It’s all hedonistic and it’s all outside of the will of God. The real issue is love. Do we love God first, above all?
Of course, we all bend the knee to pleasure when we take the free time we have and we use our free time predominately for comfort and just for enjoyment. If we use our free time primarily for TV and for restaurants and for movies and for sporting events (and there’s nothing wrong with any of those things), if those become the focus of our free time, then we really are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. It’s all reflected in the way we live. I know this isn’t a message any of us wants to hear. It’s not comfortable for me. It surely isn’t comfortable for you, but this is what the Bible prophesies concerning the last days. Surely, we are at least in the beginning of those last days.
The Bible tells us in the last days there will be one other false love, and it’s the love of money, philarguros. In the last days, people will be lovers of money, philarguros, rather than lovers of God. Again, there’s nothing wrong with money, but when our love for money supersedes our love for God, then money becomes a false god. Arguros is one of the great gods of this age. Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Mammon was a word meaning wealth. You cannot serve God and wealth. Mammon is one of the great gods of this age. Of course, that’s one of the problems when a church or any ministry has a capital stewardship campaign. It makes us uncomfortable. It makes us uncomfortable because we all bend the knee to this god, mammon. We’ve all bent the knee to this god called money. Our love for God is tested. I mean, our love for God is greatly tested when any ministry with which we’re involved seeks our help financially.
Of course, in a church like this when we have a capital stewardship campaign for a godly cause and for kingdom purposes for the sake of ministry, we’re still uncomfortable because it threatens us. It threatens us at the level of our financial worship and our financial security, our love of money.
Well, as a church, our purpose above all else is to help people love God and help people know God and help people understand what that means, what it means to come into a relationship with God and grow in that relationship, loving Him more and more. As a church, we seek to accomplish this through the proclamation of the Word.
Fourteen years ago when God raised up this church on Orchard Road, we resolved that we would simply preach and teach the Word, trusting that the Word of God would not return to Him void. And so, through the proclamation of God’s Word, we seek to help people know and love God. So our strategy is to use the Word of God. It is to use the worship of God because we know and love God more and more as we worship.
Why does God want worship? I mean, does He just get off on it? Why does God want you to worship Him? Because when you come into His presence and you see Him as He is, you will begin to be transformed and your relationship with Him will grow and your love for Him deepen. So we use the Word of God and we use the worship of God and we use the people of God. That’s why we have a Congregational Life Department, that you might come into relationship with other brothers and sisters in Christ and not only know and love them more and more but through them know and love God more and more. That’s how it works—by the power of the Holy Spirit. We use the Word of God, the worship of God, the people of God, and the service of God as strategies for helping people know and love God more because, you see, Christianity is not static. It’s dynamic. Christians were never meant to be stationary or stagnant, but active. Christ calls us into ministry. You’ve been called into ministry and it’s only as you minister that your knowledge of God, your relationship with Him and your love for Him, will deepen.
So, we have these great purposes as a church, that we might know God more and more relationally and love Him more and more as well. Let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.