Today's scripture is taken from Isaiah chapter 6, verse 1-4.
Please follow along your Bible.
If you don't have one, please do grab them placed nearest to you by the doors.
There's one at the center at the back as well.
Our passage is on page 534 to 535 in the church Bible.
Here then God's word to us today.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.
Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings.
With two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
And one called to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
Let us believe and respond to God's true and living word.
Okay, thank you, Jasmine.
Let me pray for us as we look at this passage.
Heavenly Father, this passage is short, but it is a resting.
God, we pray, won't you open the eyes of our hearts to see you freshly this morning and to understand who you are, God.
We so need you.
And so I pray, come and help me to hopefully make sense of this passage, to help us see what you want us to see.
And God, I pray for each one of us, speak to us, our lives.
You know what the things that are going on in our lives.
Come and speak to us this morning in your great and wonderful name.
Amen.
Friends, let me ask you a question.
What is your biggest need in life?
If someone were to come to you and offer to give you anything that you needed, what would you ask for?
What is your biggest need?
What would you want?
If you could change one thing about your life, what is it that you would change?
Whenever I meet up with people, I often like to end our time together saying,
How can I pray for you this week?
I love to pray for the people that I've maybe met up with or interacted with.
And invariably, people return the question to me and say,
And you, and how can I pray for you this week?
And it's an interesting question.
If I had to get many people to pray for me, what is the one thing I would love them to pray for?
What would I want if I had one prayer that I wanted God to answer?
What would my one prayer in life be?
What would be the one thing that I feel like I need in life and I'm desperately wanting God to answer?
Over the last four or five years, I found myself coming back to one prayer again and again.
And I feel like a bit of a stuck record because every time someone says,
How can I pray for you?
I just say the same thing.
What about you?
If you had somebody that you knew their prayers would definitely be answered.
Somebody who has an unbelievable connection to heaven and they offered to pray for you.
What would you want prayer for?
Friends, what do you pray for yourself?
What do you pray for your children?
What is your deepest desire, your biggest need?
Today is Father's Day.
As fathers, what is your biggest need?
What will make you a great father?
What will make you a better parent?
In the opening chapters of his book, The Knowledge of the Holy,
A.W. Tozer writes this.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
We tend, by a secret law of the soul, to move towards our mental image of God.
For this reason, the gravest question before the church is always God himself.
And the most revealing fact about any person is not what he or she may be at any given time or say or do,
but what deep in their heart they conceive God to be like.
Friends, what is our biggest need in life?
What is your biggest need?
My biggest need in life?
What is our city's greatest need?
Our world's greatest need?
Surely it is to see God rightly.
It's to see God for who he is and to be amazed and blown away and astounded by the majesty of God.
It's to see and know the one who designed the world and spoke it into being.
It's to know the one whose existence gives meaning to our very existence.
To understand God correctly is to understand life correctly.
To see God accurately is to see ourselves accurately.
To know God is to know what life is all about.
Why you were born.
What your purpose on this world is.
How to conduct your life.
To have a vision of God is to have a vision for life itself.
My greatest need and my biggest prayer request for myself, for my children, for us as a church, for this city of Hong Kong,
is God open our eyes to see you.
May you be big in our hearts and may we be small.
As the Proverbs say, to fear the Lord is the starting point for a life well lived, a wise life.
And so my prayer is God be big in our hearts.
I start off with that because of the next three weeks, we're going to be looking at this Isaiah chapter 6.
Isaiah chapter 6.
It's an amazing passage in the book of Isaiah.
One of the grandest chapters in the Bible.
And we're going to spend three weeks just on this one chapter working through a little bit slowly.
And today we're just looking at the first four verses that Jasmine read to us.
This vision of God.
And the context of Isaiah 6 is not actually all that encouraging.
Isaiah 6 falls against the background of some dark and difficult times.
But it's against this backdrop that God calls and commissions Isaiah to the life that he's called him to.
And so let's dive in and look at it.
So look at how the chapter begins.
It says this,
In the year that King Uzziah died.
Now, just by the way, there's two names that are very similar.
One is Isaiah.
One is Uzziah.
Okay.
I know they sound the same.
And especially my bad accent makes them sound even more similar.
These are two different people.
Okay.
Isaiah is the prophet who wrote the book.
Uzziah is the king.
Okay.
So the year that King Uzziah died.
Who was Uzziah?
He was one of Israel's greatest kings.
He was a magnificent king.
He became king at 16 years old when his father passed away.
And he ascended the throne.
And he restored and revitalized Israel.
He did a fantastic job of rebuilding and cultivating culture and magnificent things.
And Israel prospered under his rule.
He was a reformer that led God's people in the right ways and the right paths.
But now he has died.
And the darkness is kind of descending upon the land.
Their great and favored king who ruled for 52 years has gone.
But in fact, the opening chapters of Isaiah paint the picture of Israel as in a dark and desperate place.
They are pictured as being a patient on the doctor's examination bed.
And this patient is unwell.
From the tip of their toes to the top of their head.
Here is a patient that has got festering sores and wounds and infection.
And this patient called the nation of Israel is very unwell.
And chapters 1 to 5 serve as a kind of prologue to the book of Isaiah.
And they set the scene.
And look at what we discover.
We discover there is a deep failure in God's people.
In chapter 2 verse 5, Isaiah says,
Come, he says, O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.
But they refuse.
Chapter 5 ends with,
If one looks to the land, behold darkness and distress.
The light is darkened by its clouds.
In fact, Uzziah, the king, he was one of the good kings.
But even he was not perfect.
He was fallible.
He tried to heal and restore Israel.
But Uzziah does not live forever.
One day he dies.
In fact, his reign ends off worse than it started.
It started on such a high note.
But at a point in his kingdom, he gets proud and arrogant.
And things start to go down.
And his reign ends with a sense of shame and disgrace.
Look at how 2 Chronicles chapter 26 describes it.
It says,
His fame spread far, for he was marvelously helped by the Lord until he was strong.
But when he became strong, he grew proud to his own destruction.
And Uzziah's reign ends with him getting sick and being secluded, being quarantined in another house for the final years of his reign.
And the last couple of years of his reign, the throne is kind of empty.
He's on the throne, but he's not really on the throne.
There's kind of no one on the throne.
He's almost abdicated the rule and reign.
And Israel's in a dark state.
Things are not going so well.
The king is kind of around, kind of not around.
He's sick.
He's proud.
He's under God's judgment.
Israel's not in a great way.
And darkness has descended on the land.
Friends, how do you feel about the state of the world at the moment?
I don't know how Harriet feels about it.
She feels excited.
Friends, how do you feel about the state of the world?
How do you feel about the state of your world?
About your relationships?
About your friendships?
About marriage and parenting?
About work?
How do you feel when you wake up in the morning and the news headlines tell you war continues?
The Straits of Hormuzah closed once again.
Friends, Israel was meant to be a picture of hope in a world of hopelessness.
An outpost of heaven on earth, a source of light in the midst of darkness.
But they've become just like the nation around them.
Darkness has set in.
And friends, those of us who live in this world should not be surprised when life is hard.
When darkness sets in.
When evil prevails.
When war abounds around us.
When our news feed is anything but encouraging.
This is the world in which we live.
And it's a natural consequence for us having rejected God and gone our own way.
The world is covered with a kind of darkness.
Darkness.
And Christians are not those who are taken out of the world and planted in just this beautiful paradise.
We are called to live in the midst of our broken world.
Our world is broken.
Our world is filled with darkness.
And Isaiah's calling and commissioning doesn't take place while he's sipping cocktails on the beachfront.
You know, the kids playing in the water and everything's going lovely and swimmingly.
Isaiah's calling comes in the backdrop of things not going so well.
Isaiah encounters the glory of God in the backdrop of darkness and despair.
Can you resonate with Israel, with Isaiah, the world in which he's in?
But look what happens.
In the midst of this, Isaiah sees the king.
Friends, in the darkest of times, we too need to see the king.
And so, King Uzziah is dead, but there is another king who is not dead.
And what Isaiah sees is that the true king of the world, of the universe, is not dead.
In fact, the true king will never die.
If Isaiah is going to be even remotely faithful to the task that God is calling him to be,
if he's going to be the man that God is calling him to,
what Isaiah needs to see is that in the midst of the darkness around him,
there is one who is on the throne.
The throne is not vacant.
In fact, this throne will never be vacant.
And so, look at how our passage starts off.
It says this,
In the year the king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon the throne,
high and lifted up, and the train of his robe fills the temple.
Isaiah's throne has been empty.
Israel's throne has been empty.
The throne of the universe is not.
But God is on the throne.
And God is commissioning Isaiah here to be his messenger,
both to confront but also to comfort the people of Israel.
But first, Isaiah must see who is it that we're dealing with.
Who is this God that speaks and demands attention?
Who is this God that's going to challenge their sin
and yet come with words of comfort and hope in the midst of the brokenness?
Who is the God that demands that they turn from their self-centered ways
to follow him and love him and trust him?
Who is the God that says life is found in following him
and death is a consequence of turning from him?
What does Isaiah see?
He sees the king.
He sees a king.
One who is on the throne.
Israel's human king has died.
Isaiah sees him who is truly king.
Yahweh, the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth,
the one who will never die.
And the nation of Israel have had a whole series of kings.
Some good, some bad.
None of them perfect.
None of them infallible.
None of them immortal.
Here, Isaiah sees a different kind of king.
Yes, he is Israel's king, but he's much more than that.
He is the king over all creation.
The one who holds supreme authority over every inch of the galaxies and the cosmos.
Isaiah sees God.
And look at how he describes him.
He says,
In the year the king Uzziah died,
I saw the Lord sitting upon the throne,
high and lifted up.
Isaiah's God is not just one of the myriads of gods in Israel.
You've got the gods of the Canaanites
and the gods of the Amorites and these gods.
Oh, here you have the God of the Israelites.
No, no.
This is a God who is seated on the throne above all gods.
He is not just one of many religions or deities or revered figures.
He is set apart, elevated and exalted above all religions and customs and superstitions and cultures.
Set above and apart from all creation and creatures.
And he says here that the train of his robe fills the temple.
It's a beautiful picture.
Here, the word train actually means hem.
I think we've spoken about this before.
Like, you know, the hem of your garment is the,
just the edges of the garment.
The kind of part that's folded and sewed in, right?
And the Hebrew word here is the hem of his robe fills the temple.
Now, what is the temple?
Well, in the book of Isaiah, the temple is the whole universe.
The whole universe.
And here is a picture of God sitting on the throne and his robe kind of falls down.
And the end just tassels.
The kind of the corner of his robe, or maybe you could say the sleeve of his robe, fills our entire universe.
So just think about our universe for a second, right?
We, as humanity, are quite proud of ourselves because we've just recently sent some astronauts into space.
And they've gone further than any human being has ever gone.
Artemis 2 mission, right?
They've gone 250,000 miles from Earth, further than any human being has been further from Earth.
And that's a great achievement.
NASA did very well.
But when we think about how big our universe is, I mean, really, we were just playing in our backyard, right?
I mean, 250,000 miles away.
I don't know how, what did it take, like 10 days to get there or something?
But when you think about our galaxy, which is something in the region of 33 billion light years away, okay?
And the light that we see from there is already 13 billion years old.
I mean, just think about that.
13 billion years ago it originated and it's moving towards us.
That's how big our universe is.
And God is on the throne and it's kind of like the robe, the hem of His robe fills our entire universe.
Which is something in the region of 100 billion light years in diameter.
The corner of God's sleeve fills it.
Now, this isn't a scientific book, okay?
This isn't a textbook.
Isaiah is trying to give us a picture of the vastness and the bigness and the majesty of our God.
That we don't even understand 0.1% of our universe and that is nothing compared to God.
And the point of Isaiah's vision here is that if God were to sit on the throne and were to wear a royal robe,
the ends of His robe would utterly fill our universe.
Or think of Isaiah chapter 40 where God says He holds the universe in His hands.
Our universe that is something in the region of 200 billion galaxies.
Each one of them is hundreds of billions of stars and solar systems.
I can't even fathom that.
And God holds it in the palm of His hand.
And Isaiah wants us to see this, friends, is the God that we've come to worship and adore this morning.
This is the God that we sang to and said,
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.
And the point here is that God's being is so all-encompassing.
The God that we've come to know and serve is not a little God
who is content to occupy His seat amongst the pantheon of gods and deities in the world.
The God that we've come to know fills creation.
The cosmos is His temple, is His dwelling.
And there is no part of it which He fails to fill and occupy.
And what Isaiah sees here is what we all need to see is something of the bigness and the majesty and the sovereignty of God.
His sheer awesomeness.
A.W. Tozer, I've read this before, said this,
We must not think of God as the highest in an ascending order of beings.
Starting with the single cell, then going to maybe the fish or the bird, and then the animal, then the human, then the angel, then the archangel, and then up at top we have God.
No, friends, God is high above the archangel as above a caterpillar.
For the gulf that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is finite, but the gulf between God and everything else in creation is infinite.
And that's what Isaiah sees, and that's what Isaiah wants us to see.
He sees God, and it shatters every category in his mind as he comes to see God as infinitely more breathtaking and majestic than ever He had conceived.
God is not simply one deity who is the biggest and the strongest of all.
He is in a different category altogether.
He is the King.
Heaven and earth's true King.
And He sits on the throne.
The Sovereign who reigns supreme.
We sang earlier this morning, God the uncreated one.
Think about that.
Uzziah is on the throne, but there was a time when he was not on the throne.
He had to be coronated the King.
At the age of 16, they put a crown on his head and said, you are now King.
There was never a moment in all of eternity past where God was not King.
God was never coronated and said, set apart, you are now King.
God the uncreated one, author of salvation, who wrote the laws of space and time and fashioned world to His design.
He is King forevermore.
And friends, notice in this picture, what is the posture that this King is taking?
Is He running around managing things?
Is He directing people, receiving reports, issuing commands?
Is He pacing up and down, waiting for news from the front lines?
What happening at the edge of my kingdom?
Is everything still intact?
No, this King is seated on the throne.
He is sitting down, utterly at ease.
Not one bit worried about what is happening in His kingdom.
All is at peace, total control.
And the point of all this is that nothing can revoke or veto His decrees.
What He wills, He purposes.
That He accomplishes.
Daniel chapter 4 says this,
As John Piper said,
Friends, see the King.
When life is dark, when cancer comes,
when unemployment comes your way,
when the longings of our souls feel unmet,
when the darkness moves in,
see the one who is on the throne.
God is on the throne.
O Lord, open the eyes of our hearts,
that we may see you rightly.
See the King.
But see the King who is unlike us.
Look at verse 2 with me here.
Here we see something of what is happening around the King.
Verse 2 says this,
Above Him stood the seraphim.
Now, seraphim kind of means angels.
But when we think of angels,
don't think of, you know, the European cathedrals,
those glorious buildings where you have these chubby little babies
that have wings and kind of hover.
Don't think that.
That's not seraphim, right?
The word seraph actually means burning ones.
And the seraphim here,
think of these angelic beings who are balls of nuclear energy.
Think of the sun, right?
Which is like 5,000 degrees Celsius on the surface.
Think of these mini suns that are hovering around the throne of God,
these balls of nuclear energy that are around God's throne,
worshiping Him, right?
And if we were to see them with our eyes,
we would be tempted to fall down and worship them.
They are so utterly glorious.
But what do they do?
Above Him stood the seraphim.
Each had six wings.
With two, he covered his face,
not willing to look at God.
Isn't that quite amazing?
We think we can't see God because we're sinful.
Here are these sinless beings, I imagine.
I don't think they've ever sinned.
But they are still creatures.
And even they cover their eyes to not look at God.
With two, they cover their eyes.
With two, they cover their feet.
Feet is a picture of our humanity,
our earthiness, our fallenness.
With two, they fly around God's throne.
And what do they cry out?
They call to one another saying,
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The earth is full of His glory.
The word host there means armies.
Heaven's armies.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of heaven's armies.
These 10 billions of angelic soldiers in a sense.
God's army.
The Lord is Lord of all of them.
And the word holy here,
holy doesn't just mean morally pure
or very religious and devout.
To be holy means to be utterly distinctive,
set apart in a category of your own.
As Toza reminded us earlier,
it doesn't simply mean that God is slightly bigger
or stronger or more powerful version of ourselves.
God is in a different category altogether.
He's in a completely different category of being.
And for us, to be holy means that we are set apart
from the fallen world
and we're becoming a little bit more like God.
For God to be holy means He simply is who He is.
God cannot become anything more like anyone else.
God is in a different category.
He simply is who He is.
God's holiness is His absolute uniqueness,
His incomparableness.
God is unlike us.
A couple of years ago,
a lady called Jen Wilkin wrote a book
called None Like Him.
10 ways that God is different from us
and why that's a good thing.
And in this book,
she reminds us that so many of our frustrations
and our challenges in life
come not simply from our circumstances,
but from the fact that we can't control our circumstances.
Life happens,
but it's the fact that we can't control
what happens that we struggle with.
We want to be all-powerful.
We want to be in control of our lives.
We want to be in control of our futures,
our careers,
our health,
our children.
And we get frustrated when we realize
we are not all-powerful.
We want to be all-knowing.
We want to predict the outcome of every situation.
We want to know every health possibility.
And we get frustrated knowing that
we don't know all things.
We want to be omnipresent.
We want to be everywhere all at once.
Never miss an opportunity.
Always online.
And the result is we are anxious and exhausted,
depressed and depleted and disillusioned.
And the solution,
she says,
understand that we are not God.
We were never meant to be.
And that's a good thing.
Listen to what she says.
It's been on the screen.
We fear God rightly.
When we fear God rightly,
she says,
we recognize Him for who He truly is.
A God of no limits.
Utterly unlike anyone or anything we know.
So rather than casting your anxieties on the internet,
or AI now,
which cares for no one,
cast them on Him,
the sovereign God,
for He cares for you.
Friends,
day and night,
these angelic balls of fire,
beings of brightness,
declare and praise
the incomparable uniqueness,
the utter stand-aloneness of God.
They cry around God's throne saying,
Holy,
Holy
is God Almighty.
The earth is full of His glory.
And what does that mean,
that the earth is full of His glory?
It means that God is not just glorious up there or somewhere in the clouds.
He is pouring His glory out onto the earth so that you and I can see it and experience it.
It's what our world needs.
It's what Hong Kong needs.
Friends,
it's what you and I need.
Friends,
if you're a dad here,
if you're a man,
what's going to make you a great father?
What's going to steal the anger in our hearts?
Friends,
we need to see a vision of God and who He is,
the glory of God.
The earth is full of His glory.
God,
help us to see your glory.
Though our world doesn't recognize it,
we shun,
reject,
and defame His glory.
That does nothing to diminish
the utter reality of who God is.
Isaiah sees reality,
and we need to see it too.
In the year the king Uzziah died,
I saw the Lord sitting upon the throne,
high and lifted up,
and the train of His robe filled the temple.
Around Him stood the seraph.
Each of them had six wings.
With two,
He covered His eyes.
Two,
He covered His feet.
With two,
He flew,
and they cried out.
One cried to another,
Holy,
Holy is the Lord of hosts.
The earth is full of His glory.
Now,
friends,
what does this mean for us?
So what?
Why are we talking about this?
Well,
a couple of thoughts.
I started off this morning saying that
our biggest need in life
is to see the bigness,
and the greatness,
and the grandeur of who God is.
Sinclair Ferguson said it like this,
Our Christian lives,
indeed,
everything about our lives,
is always determined primarily
by our knowledge and understanding,
you could say,
our vision,
of God.
Friends,
the kinds of lives that you and I will live,
whether we waste our lives
trying to build a puny little monument
to our lives,
or whether we,
like Uzziah,
start off good and blow it
and fade away into oblivion
or flame out,
or whether we live the kind of lives
that are still going to be worthwhile
in a hundred million years from now,
in many ways,
comes down to our understanding
of who God is.
Who is this God that we worship this morning?
Who is in charge of the universe?
Who is glorious and worthy of our worship?
What kind of lives does God call us to live
and expect us to live?
Friends,
if God is small in our minds,
our lives will be small.
Our worship will be small.
Our dreams will be small.
Our prayers will be small.
And dare I say,
I don't have my phone on me,
dare I say that the more our lives
are consumed by screens,
the smaller our lives will become.
As we spend hours staring into a mirror
that just reflects our own finiteness
and our smallness.
Friends,
the God that we've come to worship
and pray to and trust this morning,
the Lord of heaven and earth
who fills the universe,
he does not need anything
that we can give him.
He is not served by human hands
as if he needs anything.
He has everything we need
and he needs nothing that we have.
He is the source of all life
and we find life as we come to him.
So what do you and I need?
Friends,
what do our children need?
What do our co-workers need?
What does the great,
great city of Hong Kong need?
What does our church need?
A vision of the king
who is glorious
and majestic
and sovereign
and rules
the king who is unlike us.
And so what does that mean for us?
Well, let me close
with just two very simple thoughts.
Two things this means.
Firstly,
the sovereignty of God
means we have an anchor
for our souls
in the storms of life.
Friends,
every one of us,
every single one of us
are going to face
significant storms
and challenges in life.
Some of us
are going through them right now.
And when the storm comes,
if you know God
to be sovereign
and holy
and majestic
and glorious,
it will be a refuge
for your soul.
A ballast
which will hold you upright
in the storms of life.
You know what a ballast is?
When ships have a ballast
that keeps them weighted down
so they don't blow over
in the storms.
The sovereignty of God
is a ballast for our soul
as an anchor
to which you can hold on to.
Friends,
when the storms come
and threaten
to wash you away,
what you and I
don't need
is a little sapling
to hold on to.
That is not going
to help us.
What we need
is to find refuge
in a building
whose foundations
go 100 meters deep
and hit the granite
of reality.
We need security
in God.
Just this week
I was reading
the book of Genesis.
I was reading
Genesis 39
which is the chapter
where Joseph
is thrown into jail.
Remember,
Joseph is a good man.
He's a God-fearing man
and part of his wife
quite likes Joseph.
And so she tries
to seduce him.
And Joseph says,
no,
I will not sleep with you.
You're another man's wife.
And she,
out of jealousy,
gets him thrown into jail.
So talk about
a storm of life, right?
You're just trying
to be a good man,
an honest man,
do the right thing
and you get thrown
in jail for five years.
Talk about a storm of life.
But in that chapter,
eight times,
it says,
the Lord was with him.
The Lord was looking
after him.
The Lord blessed him.
The Lord took care of him.
The Lord caused him
to succeed.
The Lord is with him.
Friends,
if God is not sovereign,
when the storms of life come,
who cares if God
is with you or not?
If God is puny
and small
and unpowerful,
how does that help you?
But friends,
what we need to know
is that when the storms come
and when injustice comes
and when cancer comes
and when unemployment comes,
and friends,
when the worst thing
that you can imagine
happens to you
as has happened
to people here this morning,
you need to know
that there is a God
on the throne
and that he is with you.
Not a small insignificant God
who says,
I wish I could help you
but my hands are tied.
The sovereign king
of all creation.
When the storms of life come
and they will come,
when you're going through
the lowest moment in your life,
we need to know
that the Lord is with us.
Isaiah 43 says,
fear not.
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you.
Through the rivers,
they will not overwhelm you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burnt.
Fear not.
I am with you.
The reason this is good news
is God is God.
Here's the second reason.
So what?
A God worth praying to.
Worth praying to.
One of the surprising things
that's happened to me this week
as I've been preparing
for this passage
is I found that my prayers
have been injected
with rocket fuel.
Where did that come from?
It came from seeing
the bigness of God.
Friends,
when we see
who it is
that we are praying to,
our faith
is going to expand.
This is a God
worth praying to.
Why should we pray
to a God
who is small
that cannot help us?
Why should we pray
to a God
who is puny
and incompetent?
But friends,
small vision of God
means small prayers.
Big vision of God
means big faith
and big prayers.
The God of the Bible
is the God
who is seated on the throne,
who is all-powerful
over every atom
in the world.
And when Jesus asks,
teaches his disciples
to pray,
how does he start off?
Our Father,
which that alone
is amazing,
our Father
who is in heaven,
who is seated
on the throne,
hallowed be your name.
Friends,
this is the God
that we can pray to,
totally in control,
of all things.
He holds the universe
in the palm of his hand
and he invites us
to come before him
to present ourselves,
our needs,
our requests,
our burdens,
our fears,
our longings,
our hopes,
our anxieties
to encounter him
in prayer.
So friends,
what is your biggest need
in life?
What is my biggest need
in life?
What is my children's
biggest need in life?
It's not just for
the wars to end,
to get into that
degree program,
to get your kids
into the right school,
to get the right job,
to find a spouse.
As good and as wonderful
as those things are,
we can get all those things
and yet still be self-absorbed
in our small little world.
We can get all those things
and still be self-centered
and miserable.
Friends,
what you and I need
is to see
with the eyes
of our hearts
the bigness of the God
that we've come before
this morning,
to comprehend
his majesty,
his holiness,
his glory,
and to fall down
before him.
What comes into our minds
when we think of God
is the most important
thing about us,
said A.W. Tozer.
For the most revealing fact
about any person
is not what he or she
may be or do
or say,
but what deep in our hearts
we conceive
God to be like.
Let's pray together.
Lord Jesus,
we do ask you, God,
open the eyes of our hearts
to see your majesty.
Help us to see you
for who you really are.
Help us to love you
and honor you
and trust you.
God,
won't you blow away
the small-mindedness
that we have
and help us
to see your glory
and to live for that.
In your great
and glorious name
we pray.
Amen.