Romans 1:18-19

Our God is a consuming fire, a warrior God who brings justice to the earth. The cup of his wrath is kindled against all the godlessness of the earth. What a great mother’s day sermon! But seriously, what does the wrath of God have to do with being a mother?

Our sermon this week brings us some deep truths, even if you aren’t a mother, but especially if you are. What do you do when your children are threatened? You get angry! Wrath is a derivative of your deep love for your child, and it overflows when your children are broken, either by themselves or others. Wrath is perhaps more essential to raising children than anything else we can imagine because it means that God is in the ring with us. Our God is angry with the twisted-ness of this world, and He’s cosmically more angry with it than you and I could ever be. As Ted said Sunday morning, when your kids are in trouble, you are never the first one the to the fight. God is always on the move. He is living and active. His love-inspired anger is on your child’s side, and it never sleeps.

Imagine what life as a Christian would be like if our God was not a wrathful God. In a group of letters to his friend named Malcolm, C.S. Lewis offers a brilliant perspective on the wrath of God. Malcolm proposes to Lewis that God, rather than being a personally angry God, is more like an electric current, who shocks people when they cross his standard of justice. But Lewis responds,

“My dear Malcolm: What do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us up all in despair, for the angry can forgive, but electricity can’t… Turn God’s wrath into mere enlightened disapproval and you turn his love into mere humanitarianism. The ‘consuming fire’ and the ‘perfect beauty’ both vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious magistrate. It comes of being high-minded… Liberalizing and civilizing analogies can only lead us astray.”

You see, an angry God means that we also have a deeply loving God. His anger is not spinning wildly out of control, going this way and that, destroying everything in its path. It is exact, coming into the blackness of this world with mysterious power, excising sin from us and from creation with precision. God’s anger reminds us that He is also a loving God, for the two are inseparable. In fact, his wrath and love are perfect, whereas mothering on earth is but a shadow of the nurture, love, care, and defense that we get from our earthly mothers. Although God reveals himself as a Father, the Bible uses the imagery of a mother to describe the nurturing care of God. What we need more than anything else is to climb up into the motherly arms of our God and rest in the shadow of his wings. His is our refuge. Our defense. In the bosom of God is complete security. In Him we find exactly what our mothers remind us that we need: a tender, yet powerful advocate. No, our God is no electrical current, He is a person, overflowing with passionate grace and mercy. May we all find rest for our souls in our Friend, Lover, Counselor, and “Mother,” the Lord God Almighty.

Kyle

GSPC. Kyle brought a message specifically aimed at those soon to be high

school graduates yet deeply applicable for those of us who have long

forgotten the complexities and challenges that await our Seniors.

Everyday we step into an amazing world. As we see in John 1 we live and

move in a world that was created by God through the Word. God did not

simply create this world as a mere toy to watch it spin madly but instead he

participated in his creation. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) The

creator amazingly became a creature in his own creation. Like a father

stoops down and squeezes into a tiny chair, holds a tiny plate, and drinks

imaginary tea from a tiny cup at a tea party hosted by his daughter, God

comes down to “our” world. But unlike that father he does not look so

awkward because he did not just pretend to be like us but he put on our

flesh and became fully man. As Kyle illustrated it is like Tyler Perry who

not only writes and directs his movies but puts on “flesh” (a dress and wig

in this case) and becomes a player in the story he is writing.

God is not some far off presence who wakes up on Sunday morning at 10:30 to

listen to us pray. No, because he is both creator and creature God speaks

with wisdom into every moment of life. When we turn to heaven and say, “O

God help me know what to do,” Jesus the creator is there with the wisdom of

providence to guide us in his purpose. When the pleasures of creation call

to us, Jesus, the creature who turned water into wine, is there to guide us in

his wisdom. When a broken relationship makes you think, “O God why?”, the

creator of all humanity and the creature who was killed by humanity gives

comfort for your pain.

I pray you find comfort and joy in your creator God who became a creature in

his creation.

Peace,

Michael