What if I said, âStop prayingâ? What if I told you to stop talking at God for a while, but instead to take a long, hard look at Him before you speak another word? Solomon warned us not to rush into Godâs presence with words. Thatâs what fools do. And often, thatâs what we do.
We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.
The wise man comes to God without saying a word and stands in awe of Him. It may seem a hopeless endeavor, to gaze at the invisible God. But Romans 1:20 tells us that through creation, we see His âinvisible qualitiesâ and âdivine nature.â
Letâs begin this book by gazing at God in silence. What I want you to do right now is to go online and look at the âAwe Factorâ video at www.crazylovebook.com to get a taste of the awe factor of our God. Seriouslyâgo do it.
Speechless? Amazed? Humbled?
When I first saw those images, I had to worship. I didnât want to speak to or share it with anyone. I just wanted to sit quietly and admire the Creator.
Itâs wild to think that most of these galaxies have been discovered only in the past few years, thanks to the Hubble telescope. Theyâve been in the universe for thousands of years without humans even knowing about them.
Why would God create more than 350,000,000,000 galaxies (and this is a conservative estimate) that generations of people never saw or even knew existed? Do you think maybe it was to make us say, âWow, God is unfathomably bigâ? Or perhaps God wanted us to see these pictures so that our response would be, âWho do I think I am?â
R. C. Sproul writes, âMen are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.â
Switch gears with me for a minute and think about the detailed intricacy of the other side of creation.
Did you know that a caterpillar has 228 separate and distinct muscles in its head? Thatâs quite a few, for a bug. The average elm tree has approximately 6 million leaves on it. And your own heart generates enough pressure as it pumps blood throughout your body that it could squirt blood up to 30 feet. (Iâve never tried this, and I donât recommend it.)
Have you ever thought about how diverse and creative God is? He didnât have to make hundreds of different kinds of bananas, but He did. He didnât have to put 3,000 different species of trees within one square mile in the Amazon jungle, but He did. God didnât have to create so many kinds of laughter. Think about the different sounds of your friendsâ laughsâwheezes, snorts, silent, loud, obnoxious.
How about the way plants defy gravity by drawing water upward from the ground into their stems and veins? Or did you know that spiders produce three kinds of silk? When they build their webs, they create sixty feet of silk in one hour, simultaneously producing special oil on their feet that prevents them from sticking to their own web. (Most of us hate spiders, but sixty feet an hour deserves some respect!) Coral plants are so sensitive that they can die if the water temperature varies by even one or two degrees.
Did you know that when you get goose bumps, the hair in your follicles is actually helping you stay warmer by trapping body heat? Or what about the simple fact that plants take in carbon dioxide (which is harmful to us) and produce oxygen (which we need to survive)? Iâm sure you knew that, but have you ever marveled at it? And these same poison-swallowing, life-giving plants came from tiny seeds that were placed in the dirt. Some were watered, some werenât; but after a few days they poked through the soil and out into the warm sunlight.
Whatever Godâs reasons for such diversity, creativity, and sophistication in the universe, on earth, and in our own bodies, the point of it all is His glory. Godâs art speaks of Himself, reflecting who He is and what He is like.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
âPsalm 19:1â4
This is why we are called to worship Him. His art, His handiwork, and His creation all echo the truth that He is glorious. There is no other like Him. He is the King of Kings, the Beginning and the End, the One who was and is and is to come. I know youâve heard this before, but I donât want you to miss it.
I sometimes struggle with how to properly respond to Godâs magnitude in a world bent on ignoring or merely tolerating Him. But know this: God will not be tolerated. He instructs us to worship and fear Him.
Go back and reread the last two paragraphs. Go to the website www.crazylovebook.com and watch the âJust Stop and Thinkâ fifteen-minute video. Close this book if you need to, and meditate on the almighty One who dwells in unapproachable light, the glorious One.
There is an epidemic of spiritual amnesia going around, and none of us is immune. No matter how many fascinating details we learn about Godâs creation, no matter how many pictures we see of His galaxies, and no matter how many sunsets we watch, we still forget.
Most of us know that we are supposed to love and fear God; that we are supposed to read our Bibles and pray so that we can get to know Him better; that we are supposed to worship Him with our lives. But actually living it out is challenging.
It confuses us when loving God is hard. Shouldnât it be easy to love a God so wonderful? When we love God because we feel we should love Him, instead of genuinely loving out of our true selves, we have forgotten who God really is. Our amnesia is flaring up again.
It may sound âun-Christianâ to say that on some mornings I donât feel like loving God, or I just forget to. But I do. In our world, where hundreds of things distract us from God, we have to intentionally and consistently remind ourselves of Him.
I recently attended my high school reunion. People kept coming up to me and saying, âSheâs your wife?â They were amazed, I guess, that a woman so beautiful would marry someone like me. It happened enough times that I took a good look at a photograph of the two of us. I, too, was taken aback. It is astonishing that my wife chooses to be with meâand not just because she is beautiful. I was reminded of the fullness of what I have been given in my wife.
We need the same sort of reminders about Godâs goodness. We are programmed to focus on what we donât have, bombarded multiple times throughout the day with what we need to buy that will make us feel happier or sexier or more at peace. This dissatisfaction transfers over to our thinking about God. We forget that we already have everything we need in Him. Because we donât often think about the reality of who God is, we quickly forget that He is worthy to be worshipped and loved. We are to fear Him.
A. W. Tozer writes,
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.⌠Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.
If the âgravest questionâ before us really is what God Himself is like, how do we learn to know Him?
We have seen how He is the Creator of both the magnitude of the galaxies and the complexity of caterpillars. But what is He like? What are His characteristics? What are His defining attributes? How are we to fear Him? To speak to Him? Donât check out here. We need to be reminded of this stuff. It is both basic and crucial.
God is holy. A lot of people say that whatever you believe about God is fine, so long as you are sincere. But that is comparable to describing your friend in one instance as a three-hundred-pound sumo wrestler and in another as a five-foot-two, ninety-pound gymnast. No matter how sincere you are in your explanations, both descriptions of your friend simply cannot be true.
The preposterous part about our doing this to God is t...