2. BELIEVING GOD IS WHO HE SAYS HE IS

2. BELIEVING GOD IS WHO HE SAYS HE IS

1a. Matthew 16:13-19 – Christ knows that people around us influence us greatly; He knows that public opinion has a tremendous impact on us.

We were created with a spirit-man that desires to believe in God. It takes more faith to believe that He does not exist, than He does to believe that He does exist. We have all sorts of options that swirl around us on any given day. We have no clue what we are doing when we are pitching around God’s name. Somehow He has a way of calling upon us when we come to know Him intimately, this strange concoction of awe and affection. Revelation 19 says that He has a name that no one has heard, that we will hear revealed in the glory of heaven, so that man will not profane that name on earth.

1b & c - If we are truly going to grasp the God of the whole counsel of His Word, there are going to be things that we just flat-out cannot understand. He reveals many things to us and leaves many things beyond our reach. I don’t understand everything about Him, but I know Him. When we attempt to take away the mystery and the wonder that surrounds our God, we leave Him far less than who He has proposed Himself to be. We cannot tame the Lion of Judah! What makes Him so marvelous is that there is a mystery and wildness that surrounds Him. He is this wonderful blend of mystery and security.

We will never grasp the enormity of God. Home-school your children spiritually. Whatever our perceptions are, He is more and better. We are directly affected by who we believe He is.

2a. In order for our faith to be changed, sometimes it has to be challenged. Some people falsely learn through life that God is impractical, impersonal, unwilling, common, mean, and powerless. The holiness of God is the otherness of God; that He is above and beyond, and in Him there is no equal.

2b. Some people carve a god out of the image of man. We trust people to tell us who God really is, but what we get is an idol.

Psalm 135:15-18 – We will be reflections of the god that we perceive.

We find that we are in the fiercest grip of some addiction in our lives, and we need help. When we realize that we have got somehow perceived in our minds, a weak and unwilling god, we will never, ever have faith that exceeds the strength of the god we perceive. Our god has got to be the God of the Bible. The God of the Word is big enough to deliver us, mighty to save, and we have got to have our faith placed in something.

Jeremiah 10:4-5 – Let the real God stand up!

2c. Hebrews 11:6 – When He says that we must believe that He is, what the Scripture is saying is, we must believe He is who He says He is. He is the I AM – Self-existent One – presently happening.

Matthew 16:18-20 – When God begins to reveal Himself to us through His Word, His works, the revelation that He gives us; and when we believe He is who He reveals Himself to be, a spiritual empowerment can be entrusted to that person, that another person is never going to experience.

Peter (petros, Greek) – a piece of a bigger rock.

Rock (petra, Greek) – boulder or cliff.

1 Corinthians 3:11 – The testimony of the apostles was Christ. Christ was saying to Peter “You are a chip off the old block. You come from the One True Rock.”

Keys - In ancient eastern customs, any master over any estate, or any king over a kingdom, would have trusted stewards that he knew he could entrust to his provisions. A good example is Joseph in the book of Genesis.

Will be bound and will be loosed (perfect passive participles in New Testament Greek). “You may bind on earth what has been bound in heaven. You may loose on earth what has been loosed in heaven.” Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God has an enormous plan for us. Believe God for it! What God has always empowered in the heavenlies can be loosed on the topsoil of the earth.

3a. Psalm 100:1-3 – LORD (Tetragrammaton YHWH – Jehovah God), the covenant name of the Lord. God (Elohim –Creator God), God of all creation.

3b. Psalm 145:1-6 – His works as testified through Scripture, as well as His works that surround us day in and day out, as the whole earth, in one way or another, and the entire heavenlies cry “Glory!”