God's Character

Imagine an old European city with narrow cobbled streets and storefronts as old as the city itself. One of those weathered storefronts has a sign hanging over the door: The Mercy Shop. There's no lock on the door because it's never closed. There's no cash register because mercy is free.

When you ask for mercy, the Owner of the shop takes your measurements, then disap­pears into the back. Good news—he's got your size! Mercy is never out of stock, never out of style.

As you walk out the door, the Owner of the Mercy Shop smiles, “Thanks for coming!” With a wink, he says, “I’ll see you tomorrow!”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The writer of Lamentations said that God's mercies are "new every morning" (Lam. 3:23). The Hebrew word for "new" is hadas . It doesn't just mean "new" as in "again and again," which would be amazing in and of itself. It means "new" as in "different." It means "never experienced before." Today's mercy is different from yesterday's mercy! Like snowflakes, God's mercy never crystallizes the same way twice. Every act of mercy is unique.

Darkness captivates, baffles, and appalls us. It's a shifty thing of many textures, many moods, a state of fascination and of horror, an absence and a presence, solace and threat, a beginning and an end.

If you have ever been down a mine and been told by a guide to switch off your lamp you may feel like you have experienced it. But quantum physics has found that you are in fact surrounded by light you cannot see, for true darkness “does not exist.” Light particles—photons—exist throughout the known universe and beyond it.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Darkness is no impediment to our all-seeing God (Heb. 4:13). The One who created light (Gen. 1:3), sees all things (Prov. 15:3), nothing can conceal us from God, not even the deepest cave. Psalm 139:11-12 “… If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me’—even the darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines like the day, for darkness is as light to You.”

Rodney Holbrook no longer has to clean up his shed—he has a mouse to do that. Holbrook, a wildlife photographer and retired mailman, noticed that things were moving around in his Builth Wells, Wales, shed overnight. He set up a night vision camera and discovered that a mouse was picking up nuts, bolts, corks, and other items and putting them back into their box.

Holbrook dubbed the tiny housekeeper "Welsh Tidy Mouse," and said that "99 times out of 100," the mouse cleans up during the night. Holbrook said the mouse seems to have fun moving the objects. He doesn't even "bother to tidy up now, I leave things out of the box and they put it back in its place by the morning.”

Watch the adorable 1-minute video here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Throughout the Bible, God uses a variety of animals to help his people in significant ways. The Scripture references are just a few examples of the many ways God used animals to help, guide, and protect those he cares for. Each story offers unique insights into God's character and relationship with his creation.

Kathryn Buchanan was driving to work when she heard horrific news on the radio: Twenty-two people were killed in a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. Tears immediately streamed down her face and Buchanan later said, “That was really heartbreaking.”

Amid the deluge of devastating headlines about the event in May 2017, Buchanan noticed that “there was some coverage around all of the kindness that followed in the aftermath.” It gave her some sense of relief. For instance, people offered shelter, food, and rides to total strangers. Locals lined the streets to donate blood after the deadly attack. Cabdrivers handed out food and offered free rides.

Buchanan is a psychology professor at the University of Essex. She said, “I became very emotional and grateful that there was still goodness out there against the backdrop of horror.” Reading stories of kindness instilled a sense of hope in her that had been lost after hearing about the attack.

She began to contemplate whether being exposed to heartwarming content could counteract the known negative impacts of consuming harrowing news stories. Common symptoms include heightened stress, hopelessness, anger, anxiety, and depression. So, she started a years-long study in 2017, which was published in May of 2023.

Repeatedly throughout the research, Buchanan saw that uplifting news can provide an emotional buffer against distressing news. Buchanan also found that “there’s something special about kindness in particular.” She noted that while amusing stories diminished the effects of upsetting news, stories about acts of kindness were even more powerful.

Buchanan said, that the solution is not to avoid negative news, because “actually ignoring news all together can leave you feeling disconnected from the world you’re living in …. Following news stories that feature others’ kindness has a real set of emotional and cognitive benefits for people. It serves as a kind of reset button that allows us to have this faith in humanity.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In a world focused on the latest disaster, despair, and the universal feeling that our nation is headed in the wrong direction, imagine the positive effects of telling people of the kindness, goodness, grace, and love of God for them. Thanksgiving would be an excellent opportunity for this kind of witness to people in despair.

In an issue of CT magazine Pastor Jeremy Treat writes:

My high-school basketball coach was a classic, old-school screamer who motivated with fear and shame. His voice was powerful, but I heard it only when I did something wrong. If I turned the ball over on offense or blew my assignment on defense, practice would stop, and the shaming would begin. Red in the cheeks and foaming at the mouth, he would scream until I had to wipe the spit off the side of my face. I never really knew him outside of basketball practice, but I know he was an angry man.

Many people have a similar view of God. They believe he’s a grumpy old man who has to get his way, and that when he doesn’t, he will shame, guilt, and scare people to get them in line. Although most wouldn’t say it out loud, deep down many believers think of God as “the God who is out to get me.” That God is waiting for us to mess up so he can meet his divine quota for punishing sin. Perhaps this comes from a particular teaching or from a bad experience with a church or a Christian, but either way, this is how many functionally view God.

When we open the Bible, we encounter a very different God. The God who delights. The God who sings. The God who saves. “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zeph. 3:17). God’s rejoicing in us today gives us hope for tomorrow (Isa. 65:17-19).

The US has long ranked high among the world’s nations in its level of religious belief. But the Pew Research Center examined just what 80 percent of Americans actually mean when they say they “believe in God.”

Here’s what its survey of more than 4,700 adults found:

56% of Americans believe in God “as described in the Bible.”

97% God is all-loving

94% God is all-knowing

86% God is all-powerful

God determines what happens in my life…

43% All of the time

28% Most of the time

16% Some of the time

6% Hardly ever

6% Never

Talking with God…

56% I talk to God and God does not talk back

39% I talk to God and God talks back

Christmas is the season of choice. If you want to buy a food processor, Amazon offers you 2,000 types. Or how about a drill—there are more than 40,000 options. No, I'm not making those numbers up.

Choices can be glorious, and confusing, and empowering, and overwhelming, all at the same time. And in the West today, it looks as though it is the same with God. There is a huge array of deities to choose from, including the "no to all" option.

Walk through an airport or shopping mall anywhere and you will be walking past countless people who believe in no God, plenty of people who (believe) that there are many gods, and another great multitude who believe in one God but who have very different thoughts on what that one God is like and what he (or she, or it) thinks.

For some, God is kind of a distant grandfather guy, looking down benevolently and wanting us to be happy. To others, God is a harsh taskmaster, counting up your good and bad actions and weighing up whether he's going to have mercy on you in the end. To others, God is an impersonal force that wound the universe up and is now off doing other stuff while we get on with it down here. To others, God is the universe.

There are so many options to choose from—it's empowering and overwhelming at the same time. How do you know? How can you choose? And what does it matter?

Isaiah's claim was that the baby who would be born at the first Christmas would be "Mighty God." …. For all that Israel needed, for all that they lacked, for all that they could never be in themselves, they had God: The great I AM. The Mighty God … a purifying, ever present, shepherding, providing, healing, defending God.

Author Thomas Friedman writes of the rapid changes society has experienced:

If [a 1971] VW Beetle had undergone as many changes to its power and speed as has occurred to computer microchips, today that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as [microchips], you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In a world that's changing as rapidly and as unpredictably as our own, it's reassuring to know that God and His word remain the same from generation to generation.

There was a man who was a good husband and dad. He loved his family faithfully, was always around, steady, and took care of them. His influence, even if wasn’t realized, was central in everyone’s life.

But his family didn’t fully appreciate the scope of his love until one day when they found his journal. Upon opening it, they could see the backstory to their memories. Their happy experiences were intricately planned and carefully executed. He even reflected about how glad he was that he gave his wife and children such joy.

When they could see the backstory, these previously hidden details, in the journal, the family was filled with a new kind of appreciation and love for their dad and husband. They were welcomed into the quiet place of intentional planning and loving execution. They could see how they were central to everything that he had done. Thumbing through the journal, they realized his love for them engulfed their entire experience.

In Ephesians 1, it’s as if the children of God are permitted to thumb through the journal of their heavenly Father. Reading through it, we find out that the experiences that we enjoy so much were carefully and intricately planned. God has set his love on his people before the foundation of the world, and he carried it out in real-time. What’s more, these thoughtful, intricate, and loving plans gave our Father you himself. He loves to shower blessing on his children.

Bill Gates, the personal computing pioneer and billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, said in an interview that he regrets the decision to make the keyboard combination "Control-Alt-Delete" central on Windows computers. The key combination served as a command both to log in to a computer and force it to quit if it froze up. It was a confusing task for first-time users, and for most people would require two hands to execute.

"If I could make one small edit, I'd make that a single key," said Gates at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York. He had made a similar statement back in 2013 at a Harvard University event. "We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button." Apple's Mac computer have always logged in with a single click. Yet, Gates also conceded, "I'm not sure you can go back and change small things in your life without putting the other things at risk."

Potential Preaching Angles: While the co-founder of Microsoft may regret some of his design decisions years later (even some of the most iconic in the era of personal computing), we can rest assured that God has not and will not ever second guess his design of creation. Each and every one of God's children is fearfully and wonderfully made-and they will remain that way.

As the NBA gears up for the playoffs (right on the heels of college basketball's March Madness), there was an interesting article about one thing about basketball that hasn't changed since James Naismith invented the game in 1891—the floor of a basketball court. The first game was played on a floor of hard maple. According to an article in The Guardian, "Maple flooring is harder than red oak, black walnut, or cherry flooring, and its tight grain made it easier to clean and maintain. … The maple floor also turned out to be the perfect surface for dribbling a basketball."

So it is no surprise that "the NCAA said the official courts for both the men's and women's Final Fours were made of 500 trees of northern maple carefully harvested from the Two-Hearted River Forest Reserve in Michigan's Upper Peninsula."

And the NBA follows suit. All of the courts "but one NBA team are composed of hard maple; the Boston Celtics, who play on a red-oak parquet floor, are the exceptions. Hard maple offers the most consistent playing surface, but it also provides 'bounce-back,' or shock resistance, to lessen fatigue on players' knees and ankles."

Possible Preaching Angles: Some things have lasting value, even infinitely beyond maple floors—like God's Word, or the glory of God.

The furthest galaxy discovered by spectroscopy is z8_GND_5296. 6 No, that's not an old AOL screen name. It's a galaxy that is 13.8 billion light-years old, or 13.8 billion light-years away. Spatially speaking, it's the highest height. The deepest depth is the Challenger Deep, part of a trench 6.85 miles beneath the U.S. Territorial Island of Guam. From the zero gravity of space to the 1,000-times atmospheric pressure of the deep seas, God's love is present and accounted for. You can't escape it, even if you could escape time and space. His love goes beyond the borders of space, beyond the boundaries of time.

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, especially in light of his heroic struggles against Lou Gehrig's disease. But the new film about Hawking's life, A Theory of Everything has been called a "God-haunted movie."

In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, and tells her that he is a cosmologist. "What's cosmology?" she asks, and he responds, "Religion for intelligent atheists." "What do cosmologists worship?" she asks. And he replies, "A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe." In another scene Jane asks, "So, I take it you've never been to church?" When Stephen replies "Once upon a time," she asks, "Tempted to convert?" Stephen replies, "I have a slight problem with the celestial dictatorship premise."

Later on in the film, Jane challenges him: "You've never said why you don't believe in God." Hawking counters, "A physicist can't allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator," to which she responds, "Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists." In one of her two published memoirs, the real Jane Hawking argued, "However far-reaching our intellectual achievements … without faith [in God] there is only isolation and despair, and the human race is a lost cause"

This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her Christian beliefs.

Possible Preaching Angles: The movie does not come to any hard and fast conclusions about faith and doubt, but it does provide an interesting way to set up a sermon on worldviews, atheism, secularism, or faith and doubt.

In his book Soul Searching, Christian Smith summarized perceptions about God that are prevalent in the church and in contemporary culture. He said that most young evangelicals believed in what could best be described as "moral, therapeutic deism" (we could also call this viewpoint "the Santa Claus god").

Moral implies that God wants us to be nice. He rewards the good and withholds from the naughty.

Therapeutic means that God just wants us to be happy.

Deism means that God is distant and not involved in our daily lives. God may get involved occasionally, but on the whole, God functions like an idea not a personal being actively present in our world.

According to Smith, this is the version of God that's prevalent in our culture and in our churches. Often without realizing it, every culture quietly molds and shapes our views of God. But we can't grow in our relationship with God when we insist on relating to God as we think he should be. It's the same way in our human relationships: if I demand that you just meet my needs and conform to my assumptions about you, you will probably feel cheapened and manipulated.

That's why our surrender to God-as-he-is, as revealed in the Bible, is so important. Otherwise, we will have a god of our own imaginations—and, embarrassingly, our American god is an obese, jolly toymaker who works one day a year.

In his book The Pleasures of God, John Piper shares why God's love is superior to any love we will find here on earth:

Sometimes we joke and say about marriage, "The honeymoon is over." But that's because we are finite. We can't sustain a honeymoon level of intensity and affection. We can't foresee the irritations that come with long-term familiarity. We can't stay as fit and handsome as we were then. We can't come up with enough new things to keep the relationship that fresh. But God says his joy over his people is like a bridegroom over a bride. He is talking about honeymoon intensity and honeymoon pleasures and honeymoon energy and excitement and enthusiasm and enjoyment. He is trying to get into our hearts what he means when he says he rejoices over us with all his heart.

And add to this, that with God the honeymoon never ends. He is infinite in power and wisdom and creativity and love. And so he has no trouble sustaining a honeymoon level of intensity; he can foresee all the future quirks of our personality and has decided he will keep what's good for us and change what isn't; he will always be as handsome as he ever was, and will see to it that we get more and more beautiful forever; and he infinitely creative to think of new things to do together so that there will be no boredom for the next trillion ages of millenniums.

It used to be, "Is there a God?" and now it's "What I know about God I don't like."

—Wade Bradshaw, outreach pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the questions people are asking (quoted in The Washington Times)

Travel back 200 years in Christian history to John Newton, the slave-trader-turned-pastor and hymn writer. He would receive almost unbelievable answers to his prayers because he believed in what he called "large asking." When explaining what he meant, Newton would often cite a legendary story of a man who asked Alexander the Great to give him a huge sum of money in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage. Alexander agreed, and told the man to request of Alexander's treasurer whatever he wanted. So, the father of the bride went and asked for an enormous amount. The treasurer was startled and said he could not give out that kind of money without a direct order. Going to Alexander, the treasurer argued that even a small fraction of the money requested would more than serve the purpose.

"No," replied Alexander, "let him have it all. I like that fellow. He does me honor. He treats me like a king and proves by what he asks that he believes me to be both rich and generous."

Newton concluded: "In the same way, we should go to the throne of God's grace and present petitions that express honorable views of the love, riches, and bounty of our King."

Doctors and nurses were doing everything possible for my wife, the mother of my seven children, yet I could see the hopelessness in their faces. Through an emergency C-section during the fifth month of her pregnancy, it was discovered the detached placenta had grown through the uterus and attached itself to her bladder. Bleeding was so profuse during surgery that Kris was given 30 units of blood. As the night wore on, her battle for life became desperate.

I cried out, "God, what do you want? I know you can heal her; why don't you?" In the middle of my darkest night, God began to speak. I wanted a miracle. He wanted to discuss his nature.

"Do you believe I am a loving God?" the Spirit asked.

Sitting beside my wife's bed, amid the chaos of ICU, I needed to answer that question. I could have said, "No, God cannot be a loving God. Look around here. My wife is dying. My newborn daughter may die. I have to go home and tell six children that their mother will not come home again, …ever."

But that night God gave me the grace to see him as he is.

"Yes," I told him. "You are a loving God. No matter what happens here tonight I will not question your nature."

Kris's condition worsened.

Kris understood that all life is precious and was determined to give our child all she had to help her in her struggle to live. In the end, it cost Kris her life. Grace lived 16 days.

"What about our plans, God?" I asked. "Who will teach the kids, guide them, and love them like their mother?"

God laid it on the heart of a man to head up an effort which became known as "Help Bring Hope to the Hoyt Kids." In six months, hundreds of people worked, sent money, donated supplies and poured love into our family. Churches provided food daily; on weekends, as many as 50 people were fed.

I received more than 500 letters, e-mails and cards from people who said they were praying for us.

I am writing this in the house God has given us. The medical bills are gone. The house is paid for. I am working as well as schooling my children.

One night I lay awake, tormented with the memory of Kris fighting for her life. I tried to remember her with the light of life in her eyes, but all I could see was death. I could feel myself falling into depression when suddenly before me was a vision of Kris, so perfectly alive in Christ, shining and healthy. No pain, just pure joy on her face.

"See her as she is now," the Holy Spirit seemed to say. "She is alive."

Someday we will all be together with Jesus and our daughter Grace.

I asked God for the life of my wife; I received instead a lesson on the nature of God. God is good. Armed with that knowledge, I have no fear for today or the future. God will always be enough…for any situation.

God's wonderful works which happen daily are lightly esteemed, not because they are of no import but because they happen so constantly and without interruption. Man is used to the miracle that God rules the world and upholds all creation, and because things daily run their appointed course, it seems insignificant, and no man thinks it worth his while to meditate upon it and to regard it as God's wonderful work, and yet it is a greater wonder than that Christ fed five thousand men with five loaves and made wine from water.