Dead Men Walking

Attention Funnel: Pet Peeves – Things that Make You Irrationally Angry

 Introduction:

• There are certain passages in the Old Testament that people may point to in order to show a problem with God.
• They are passages where we encounter God’s anger. On the surface, it might seem like God gets irrationally angry and does horrible things.
• I want to take a look at a couple of these encounters tonight to see if that’s true, or to see if there’s something else they might be teaching us.

Big Idea: We don’t appreciate God’s grace until we appreciate His anger.

Main Points:

• God’s anger is aimed at sin.
• We assume God’s grace is ordinary.
•  Jesus gets what we deserve, and we get what we don’t deserve.

A King On His Throne

Attention Funnel:Close Encounters with Animals

• What’s the wildest encounter you have had with an animal?
• There’s something about encountering a wild animal in which you are both drawn to try to get close and yet fearful of getting to close.

Series Introduction:

• Throughout the Bible we see God show up in some unusual and extraordinary ways.
• This is not to say that God is not always present and working in the world.
  • God does not show up in the world on Sundays and then catch an UBER back to Heaven until he comes back later in the week to pick up his weekly Chick-Fil-A.
  • God is always present and always working. Everything that happens, happens because of him.
• But at certain times, God pulls back the curtain so that people get a clearer glimpse of who he is and what he’s doing.
  • This is where a Stranger Things comparison is fitting. In Stranger Things there is a parallel world called the upside down. Most people don’t even realize it’s there. And yet and certain times people get a glimpse into the upside down to see what’s really happening. The upside down was there all along, but it’s only when the curtain is pulled back that people actually see it.
  • Now this metaphor breaks down, because it’s not as if God lives in a parallel world where he is constantly trying to break into our world. He is as real, even more real, than the chair you are sitting on right now. But we don’t always see him clearly.
• These encounters are not regular or often, but they reveal God clearer than ever for us to see.
• Although our experience may look very different, we still have the opportunity to encounter God.
• And what we learn from these strange encounters will hopefully make us hungrier to encounter God
• Tonight, we start with Isaiah.

Big Idea: Encountering a Holy God will change us.

Main Points:

• God is Holy because no one and nothing else is like Him.
• Without God’s holiness, sin isn’t a big deal.
• Without God’s holiness, His love is cheap.
• Without God’s holiness, we are self-focused.

Father Time

Attention Funnel: What Decade Did that Take Place??

 Introduction:

• The final way that God is different than us that we are going to look at is that God is eternal.
• God is not bound by time. He has no beginning and end.
• This is obviously different then us. We are dominated by time. We have 24 hours, 7 days, 12 months, and perhaps 70-90 years. That’s it.
• It is impossible to escape time.
  • One year, I decided I was going to try to do it. My goal was to never look at a clock for the entire year. I would just set alarms on my phone telling me when the next thing was there for me to do. I quickly realized how foolish this was, not only because I would have to look at a clock to set my alarms, but also because I would spend so much time trying not to look at what time it was that I would end up wasting a lot of my time.
• One of the most well-known passages on time is found in Ecclesiastes chapter 3. It’s a passage quoted at funerals, in well-known songs, and by famous movie characters.
• And it’s a passage that teaches us to learn to live not only under the rule of time, but under the rule of the one who controls all time.

 Passage: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

 Big Idea: The timeless God orders all of our times.

 Main Points:

• Our lives are full of good and bad times.
• Because God is outside time, He orders all our times.
• We can live as ones who know the ending.
• We can know the ending because the incomparable God became one of us.

The Times Are A-Changin’

Attention Funnel: Youth Workers Then and Now; Video of Girl Every First Year of School

 Introduction:

• We love both change and consistency…
• We love change.
  • We love that we are potty-trained
  • We love that we aren’t stuck in Junior High for the rest of our lives.
  • We love that we don’t have to eat the same food every single meal.
  • We love fresh starts – a new year, new relationship, new school or new job.
• We also love consistency.
  • I love not waking up in different house every day.
  • I love that I can have coffee every morning.
  • I love that my keyboard doesn’t change every time I open my laptop.
  • I love that my paycheck is the same every two weeks.
• One of the ways that God is different than us (and the entire world) is that he is unchanging (God is immutable).
  • Malachi 3:6; James 1:17

Big Idea: The unchanging God wants to use changing circumstances to change us.

 Main Points:

• God alone is our rock and refuge.
• God remains the same even as our circumstances change.
• God wants to use our circumstances to change us.

Independence Day

Introduction:

• When I was in middle school, several friends and I had the best fort that any middle schooler could ask for.
  • It was a fort that could only be accessed by fourwheelers…
  • It had a recliner chair, bunk beds, a creek out back that we put our mountain dew in to cool, and a fireplace to have all our great late night discussions around.
  • We loved to go spend the night at this fort. We would make fires, cook hot dogs, drink Mountain Dew until our teeth hurt, and talk about what we would do if a murder on the run from the cops broke into our fort while we were sleeping. The answer of course was a roundhouse kick to the face and then threaten him with our swiss army pocket knives.
• Why did we love this fort so much? Because it represented independence.  It represented that we could survive on our own apart from our parents.
• In many ways, this is the same thing that drives people to live off the grid. They want independence. They want to be free of needing other people to help them survive. They want to be self-sufficient.
• The past couple weeks we have been exploring ways that God is different than us…
• Tonight we want to continue that journey by looking at the fact that God is self-sufficient. He doesn’t need anything or anyone. He is utterly perfect on his own.
• We see this in several places throughout the Bible, starting with the Isaiah 40 passage that we have been in.
• Isaiah 40:28-31

 Big Idea: The God who needs nothing created us to need him.

 Main Points:

• God doesn’t need anything.
• We don’t want to need God.
• Weakness is the new strength. 

Know-It-All

Introduction:

• Part of being human is that we are learners.
• Each day we learn something new about our world and the people we share it with.
• Learning something new at school, at a job, at home, about our best friend… those things should excite and exhilarate us.
• God created and designed us to be learners. We pursue truth because all truth comes from God.
• But this is also part of the way that we are different then God. God never learns anything new. In fact, God has never learned anything.
  • Isaiah 40:13-14

Big Idea: God has unlimited knowledge.

 Main Points

• God knows all things.
• God never forgets.
• We must learn to be content with a limited knowledge.

To Infinity and Beyond

Series Introduction:

• If you are a human, then you think thousands of thoughts throughout a day. And if you’re like me… those thoughts might be a little scattered.
  • At one moment thinking about what I need to do for my homework assignment, and the next moment wondering what Carson Wentz’s QB rating is.
• It would probably be both fascinating and embarrassing if you could catalog all your thoughts for 24 hours and then go back through them all.
• It would be interesting to see all the random thoughts, but also to see what I spent the most time thinking about throughout my day…
• W. Tozer has said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
• Over the next couple weeks, I want to spend time thinking about God and who he is by looking at some of the ways that God is different than us… what people refer to as his incommunicable attributes.
• Tonight, we start by looking at God’s infinite nature.

 Attention Funnel: Videos/Stories of Pushing the Limits

Introduction:

• We love to push the limits of what is possible.
• Whether that is going to Mars, performing a quadruple backflip, trying to stay up all night with friends, or seeing how far your car can go after the gas light comes on signally that your tank is empty.
  • Story of you coasting into a gas station.
• But ultimately, we are all limited.
  • If we make it to Mars, we will be reminded that we have not made it to Jupiter, Saturn, and the other planets in our solar system.
  • No one will ever land a decuple backflip (10).
  • If you stay up all night, the next day is miserable.
  • The day we run out of gas… we are shamefully reminded that a gas tank on “E” is not unlimited.
• However, one of the things we learn about God when we read the Bible is that he is not limited.
  • Which is another way of saying that He is infinite.

Passage: Isaiah 40:12-31

 Big Idea: The unlimited God created us to be limited humans.

 Main Points:

• God has no limits.
• We try to limit God.
• God created the entire world AND us with limits.
• We try to throw off the limits God places on us.

Unchanging God

Review and Refresh: We are in the second week of a series on Exodus 1-4. Last week we looked at Exodus 1 and we saw that God is sovereign. He rules over everything that happens in this world – the good and the bad and we saw how we can trust God in the midst of bad things even if we don’t know why those things are happening because God will use suffering and bad for our good. And we also saw how God consistently raises up delivers in the Old Testament – in this case Shiphrah and Puah – to help deliver his people from oppression. That deliverance doesn’t always come when or how we expect it to and in fact it may never come in this life time for certain sufferings – but we have the confidence that God has sent his final deliverer to save us from sin and ultimately to save us from its effects when we die or he returns. Tonight we are going to look at another deliver that God raises up in the Old Testament. Moses

Opening Activity: Three different previews from Moses’ life – Common theme – The story of Moses is mainly about Moses

Introduction: The story of Moses and the Exodus is an amazing story.. but it’s not a story primarily about Moses even though he is the main human character. It is a story primarily about God and who he is.

Purpose: To look at how God reveals himself in the first four chapters of Exodus. To show that God is far greater than our minds can comprehend and to combat the desire that we have to fit God into a neat box.

Big Idea: God does not change in who he is, his purposes for us, and his promises to us.

Main Points:

God is a God who saves

God is unchanging in his purposes and plans for us… even when we fail.

Prayer moves an unchanging God to change things