The Personality of God

This week our handout is lesson number three, the personality of God. And we're going to be studying how our God is a personal God, a God that we can know, a God that invites us to know Him. The very first Bible point that we have here for you who are filling in your blanks is, God is not a vague force or a higher power.

His name implies personality and presence. God is not a vague force or a higher power. His name implies personality and presence. When God sent Moses to deliver Israel out of Egypt, out of bondage, God tells him, "I want you to lead them out of Egypt," but Moses doesn't know who to tell the people of Israel who has sent them. He says, "Who am I going to tell them who sent me?" And we find that here in Exodus 3:14, the first Bible verse we'll be looking at tonight. Would someone care to read that for us, please?

Exodus 3:14?

"And God said to Moses, 'I am who I am.' And He said, 'Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am sent me to you.'" Yeah, He tells Moses, "I am." That's my name. That's what we call Yahweh. His name means "I am." His name implies both personality and also presence. He says "I." "I" is a pronoun. And what type of a pronoun is it? A personal pronoun, right? We speak of a person as being "I," not a thing or an object, okay? So God is a person, and He has all the attributes of personhood. And we're going to be looking at what that means over the next several points here in our outline.

I want you to think about, though, a God who is not a personal God.

One of the gods that this world serves is the God of Hinduism. His name is Brahman. That's what they call him. And if you know anything about the Hindu religion, Brahman is a god who supposedly binds all things together. He's everywhere in the universe. In fact, he is the universe. But he's an impersonal god. It means you can't know him. And in the Hindu religion, if you want to achieve salvation, if you want to rise above what we call karma and reincarnation, the way you do it is you lose yourself. You lose your personhood because Brahman has no personhood. You lose your personhood, and you become one with the universe. That sounds familiar. It's probably because you watched Star Wars a little bit too much. George Lucas based the force on that Hindu thought of an impersonal force. Well, our God is not an impersonal force. Yahweh is a God who wants to be known. He's a God who created us to be His people, the sheep of His pasture, and He's revealed Himself to us. So our God is a personal God. And His name not only implies personality, but also implies presence. He says, "I am." Tell them, "I am sent you."

Our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, but many of our founding fathers were what we would call Christian deists. Okay? And deists came out of the Enlightenment, and what they viewed, they viewed that God could be knowable to a degree. God doesn't reveal Himself, but through logic and through studying creation, we can know a little bit about Him. But He's a God who is not present in His creation. The deists refer to their God as a watchmaker God. That He created nature like a watchmaker would create a watch. He would create it perfectly and intricately. He wound it up, and then He walked away and left it to its own devices.

As an unbeliever, why would a watchmaker God be maybe appealing to you, a God who's not present on the throne?

Exactly right. No one is above you. No accountability, and that means by default you're on the throne, right? You with your reason and you with your wisdom can be the captain of the ship, right? To an unbeliever, why would an impersonal God like Brahman be appealing to you?

Because he can't be known. He can't be revealed as holy.

He can't be a God who's going to hold you accountable because he's an unknowable God, right? Well, our God is a God who's both present and He's also knowable, okay? The application is God is not "it was," nor is He "I was," but He is "I am." God is a God who is knowable, He's a personal God, and He's present with us. Deuteronomy 31 says, "The Lord, He is the one who goes before you. He will be with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you. Do not fear nor be dismayed." How comforting that is that God would tell His people that He's a God who will not leave you. He's a God who will not forsake you. He's a God who's present with you and a God who's knowable as well.

Flip over your sheet on the back, and we're going to look at reference number one here. Exodus chapter three. This is the story of where Moses is out keeping the flock, and he actually sees something that catches his eye. And what was it that he saw that bewildered him? A burning bush. It was a bush that was on fire, but the fire did not consume the bush. Normally a fire chars what it touches. If you've seen the footage out of Maui, that's pretty harrowing, right? Everything turns to gray dust when a fire passes through, but this bush was still green. It was still living and vibrant, but it was on fire. So he turned aside to investigate, to see what this was.

Verse three, "Then Moses said, 'I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.' So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush, and He said, 'Moses, Moses.'" Would a regular bush be able to speak?

Can a thing speak? No. But this is not a regular bush. This is God in the appearance of a bush. "And he said, 'Here I am.' Then He said," God said, "'Do not draw near to this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.' Moreover," He said, "'I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.' And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God." God knew Moses' name, right? He knows the hairs on your heads. He knows everything about you. He tells Moses that, "I'm the God also of your fathers. I'm the God of Abraham." At this point, Abraham had been dead for 329 years. At this point, Isaac had been dead for 224 years. At this point, Jacob, or Israel, had been dead for about 198 years. So a long time, that would have been from our consciousness, but not from God's. In fact, if you remember in the New Testament, when Jesus is talking with the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection, He says, "Don't you recall in the burning bush passage where God says, 'I am the God of Abraham. I am the God of Isaac. I am the God of Jacob.'" He says, "God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living." God is a relational God, a personal God who is always present with us at all times — in life and in death, right? He is always with us.

Number two, as a person, God is rational. That's the first point. God is rational. God thinks and reflects about Himself and His creation.

As a person, God is rational. God thinks and reflects about Himself and His creation. What we mean by this, you can even write out in the margin, God is a God who is self-conscious. He's aware of who He is. He's aware of His creation. We talked last week a little bit about idolatry. And can the stone graven idol, is it conscious of itself?

No, we read last week how it has eyes, but it can't see, right? It has ears, but it can't hear because it's a dead piece of wood or a dead stone. But our God is a living and true God, and He's conscious of Himself, and He's conscious of His creation. He thinks about Himself, and He reflects about Himself and with those He has created. Isaiah 55, verse 8, beautiful verse. Would someone read this verse for us, please?

"'My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,' says the Lord." God is high and above us, and He's very different from us. But like us, He thinks and He acts, right? His thoughts are not like ours, nor His ways like ours, but we are created in His image, right? We are persons created in the personal image of God, and so we think and we reflect about ourselves, about those whom we love, and about the God whom we relate to. So does God. The application is this: we must desire and treasure His thoughts. If God is a God who thinks about Himself, and He's revealed Himself to us, and He's a God who thinks about us, where do we find His thoughts? Do we pick up a seashell and put it to our ears and try to find those thoughts there? Do we look up to the stars and try to devise our future or our plans or God's will from that? Is that where we learn His thoughts? In the Bible. Exactly right. That's what we must desire and treasure — His thoughts — because His Word is the record of His written revelation to us, right?

The application is, again, we must desire and treasure His thoughts. The next verse, Isaiah 55:9, it says, "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." When God had sent stubborn Israel away into captivity, there they had been away from their homeland, away from Jerusalem, away from their central place of worship. There they were forced to serve pagan gods. That was part of the culture that they were in. They were far away from their homeland, but God had promises for them that they would be restored to their land. And so by the hand of Jeremiah, He has Jeremiah write a letter to them, to those who were in exile, on behalf of God. And in that letter we find Jeremiah 29:11, such a beautiful verse. Some of us may have this on a coffee cup at home, or you may have seen it on someone's notebook. God says, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you," says the Lord. "Thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." Here they were in the midst of being made slaves in a foreign land, and God's saying, "I know the thoughts that I think toward you. I'm not abandoning you. You're not going to be here forever. This punishment will not be on you forever."

We may not always hear His thoughts, nor may we always understand His thoughts, because some of His thoughts are higher. But it's comforting to know that He thinks thoughts towards us. Isn't that what that verse says? It says, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you." There's not a moment of your existence where you're not on the mind of God. We'll be studying that in a few weeks when we talk about God's omniscience, God being the God who knows all things. Psalm 139, the psalmist marvels, he says, "How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God. How great is the sum of them." God is so often thinking of us that he can't even count them — because of God's thoughts that are placed towards His creation, us who are His people, the sheep of His pasture.

In the New Testament, 1 Peter 5:7 says, "Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you." We have limits in what we can care for, only so much we can put on our own plate, right? Sometimes we speak of saying, "Boy, my fire's full of irons. I can't take another thing." Right? "Can't handle another problem."

God always has capacity. There's not a trouble that you can bring before Him that's too big for God. He cares for you. Flip over on the back. Exodus 3:7 through 10, this continues after God is speaking to Moses out of the burning bush. It says, "And the Lord said, 'I have surely seen the oppression of my people.'" If you recall, God's people had been imprisoned in Egypt as slaves for about 400 years. And God says, "Surely I've seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt." The word "oppression" can be translated "pain."

Sometimes you think that no one knows your pain. You think it's something that you carry, and it's your secret and your burden to carry. God knows it. He knew the pain of all the thousands of Israelites who were in bondage in Egypt. He says, "And have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, and I know their sorrows." God knows our sorrows. He knows your hurts. He knows your problems. He knows even deeper than you know them. "So I have come down to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from the land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come now therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt." So God is a God who thinks and reflects about not only Himself, but about His creation as well, His people.

Number three, as a person, God is... The first one was God is rational. Here is — forgive me for blanking out here.

He's resolute. As a person, God is resolute. This means that God freely acts and wills with purpose from within. What we mean by this is that God is not only self-conscious, but God is self-determining. He's not acted upon. He's not like the beast of the field that is driven by instinct.

He's not like the idols that have to be propped up, that have to be kept up. We talked about that last week, how the idols have to be propped up. Think about little Joshua over here. He lifts his head and he swivels around. And my understanding is he's crawling around really well. And that means he's more powerful than all the gods of Egypt, right? The gods of Egypt have no power. But our God is a God who acts freely. He not only acts freely, but He wills freely, and He does so with purpose. He is by all means self-determining. Isaiah 14, verse 24 says, "The Lord of hosts has sworn, saying, 'Surely as I have thought, so it shall come to pass. As I have purposed, it shall stand.'"

Can anyone stand against the purposes of God?

Can anybody resist His will?

Not one. God does all that He pleases. He does all His good pleasure. We'll be studying this in a few weeks when we get to God's omnipotence, God being all-powerful. The application is this: we can trust God's plans for us and know that what He appoints will surely stand.

Isaiah 46:9 through 10 says, "Remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure.'"

Does He say I'll do some of my pleasure?

Does He say some of my counsels will stand? It's all, right? Psalm 33:11, "The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations." There's no overturning our Lord's plans, is there? Flip over on the back. I'll show you several verses that speak of God's plans and God acting on our behalf.

Number three on the top right-hand corner, there are several verses here. Proverbs 16:9, would someone read that for us, please?

Yeah. Even us who are created in His image and who are self-determining, and we have free will — does not God act upon us still, right? Our will is accomplished, but His will is accomplished at the same time. We may plan our way, but the Lord is directing our steps. There's great confidence as Christians to know that the Lord is directing our steps, that we're not left to our own devices. Proverbs 19:21, "There are many plans in a man's heart. Nevertheless, the Lord's counsel, that shall stand."

Proverbs 21:1, "The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, like the rivers of water, He turns it wherever He wishes." I grew up in southeast Texas, and at that time, from my hometown to Houston was about a 45-minute drive through nothing but rice fields. It was really flat. Now it's turned into concrete suburbs, you know. So there's not much difference then. But when you go through the rice fields, they were full of irrigation channels. And right down the middle of each rice field was a nice little reservoir. And the rice farmer could turn a few valves and direct the water to any portion of the field that he wanted to, to flood that field. And if you know anything about rice farming, it needs lots of water. And that's what's being pictured here in Proverbs 21:1, "The king's heart is in the hands of the Lord." And just like the irrigation devices, the Lord turns it wherever He wills. And if God can do that with the heart of kings, a pagan king, can't He do that with His own children, whom His desire is set upon and whom He loves?

Ephesians 1:11, "In Him, in Christ, we have also obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will." It says He works all things according to the counsel of His will. Everything. Things that may even look like a frowning providence to us. Some of the heirs to the Reformation, the folks who followed them, are what we call the Puritans. And some of the Puritans would often speak of a frowning providence. Sometimes you look in life and things look bad. Maybe there'd be sickness in your family or death or you've had some kind of a loss. And you think, "How can this be for my good?" God's hiding behind that frowning providence. You may not understand how it's good, but God is going to use it for your good. And that's what Romans 8:28 promises us, does it not? "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." So our God is a God who is not only rational, but He is a God who is resolute. And this means that He freely acts and wills with purpose from within.

Number four, as a person, God is relational. At the heart of God's relational capacity is His infinite love. God has the ability to love us like nobody else can.

In 1975, I was almost four years old, and that Christmas there was a gift that everybody had to have. And I remember this, being that young. It's crazy what you remember as a young kid. But the hot gift that was in short supply that year came from the genius named Gary Dahl. Gary Dahl was an ad executive. And what he had done, he had taken some little boxes about the size of a small milk carton, and he had drilled some holes in them as if they were a carrier for like a little mouse. And he put some hay in there, and they had breathing holes in the hay, and he put a rock inside of it. And he marketed it as a pet rock.

The man sold over a million of them at four bucks a pop in 1975. That was a bunch. Parents loved it because this was a pet you didn't have to clean up after. You didn't have to take it on a walk late at night, right? You didn't have to go to expensive vet bills. You didn't have to feed it. It could sit forever unattended collecting dust, and it would be okay. But that wasn't really much of a pet, was it, right? Can you relate to a rock?

You know, relationships imply two-way affection, right? There may be things that you really enjoy. Some of you men may enjoy cars or maybe enjoy football. And you get some pleasure out of that, but does football love you back? Does your car love you back? No, because those are things, right? But God is a person, and at the heart of personhood is the ability to relate. Exodus 3:15, after God told Moses who His name was, that He is "I am," that He is the one who is going to deliver Israel out of bondage, He says, "Furthermore, God said to Moses, 'Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations.'" He begins again to name the fathers, those whom He has had relations with. God is a personal being, and He relates, and He loves us. The application is to love God who loves you. That's the application for number four — to love God who loves you.

Later, when God would give His law to Moses after He delivered them out of Egypt, He would specify to them why He chose Israel. We all know that Israel was God's chosen people, whom God chose to reveal Himself to and whom He chose to save in the Old Testament. But why did He choose Israel?

Why didn't He choose Egypt?

Why didn't He choose the Hittites or the Amorites or the Jebusites or any of the other "-ites" that you can think of? Why didn't He choose the Philistines, right? He tells them. Deuteronomy 7:6 through 8, "For you are a holy people to the Lord your God," that means set apart. "The Lord Yahweh, the I AM your God, has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more numerous than any other people. For you were the least of all people." Israel didn't have any bragging rights. They weren't especially bright. They weren't especially holy. They weren't especially large or powerful. They had nothing that would merit God's special love to be treasured above all nations. It says in verse 8, "But because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt." Did you catch that in verse 8? It says, "But because the Lord loves you." God sovereignly chose Israel, sovereignly placed His love on them, not for any worthiness of their own, not for any merit of their own, but because He loves us. He loves us. We're made in His image, and even in fallen man, God can see the residual of His image within man. That's indelible. So God simply chose them. He simply loved them. And He was faithful to Israel, was He not? Did He not bring them out of Egypt with a mighty hand? Did He not bring them through the Red Sea? Did He not go before them as a cloudy pillar by day and as a fiery pillar at night? He gave them shade during the daytime, light at nighttime. He protected them. Did He not provide for them in the wilderness all that time they wandered? Did they not cross the Jordan and into the Promised Land eventually? Yes, because God loves His people.

Flip over on the back. Revelation 21 talks about God's love for His people.

And it's depicting the people of God in the new creation here in heaven. It says, "Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." God has set His love on His people as a bride. "And I heard a loud voice from heaven, saying, 'Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and will be their God.'" God loves us so much that He desires to dwell with us, right?

It says, "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. Then He who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new.' And He said to me, 'Write, for these words are true and faithful.'"

God is with us right now. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit live within our hearts through the mediatorial work of Christ, through the Holy Spirit who lives within us. But one day, our faith will be made sight, right? And one day, the Lamb of God will light up the new heavens and the new earth, and He will dwell among men. And how awesome that day is going to be, because He loves His people.

Number five, as a person, God desires fellowship with us.

It's one thing to say you love someone, but it's another thing to want to fellowship with them, right? If someone said, "You're my best friend, I sure enjoy you," but you maybe see them at Christmas service, or maybe at Easter, and they're absent the rest of the year, is there any real fellowship there? Is there any connection there? Not at all. That's why Paul said for us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, but so much more as we see the day approaching, because we need community, right? We need fellowship with our brothers and our sisters in Christ. We need that edification. As a person, God desires fellowship with us. Jeremiah 29, which is the same passage that we read earlier, says, "I know the thoughts that I have for you," or "think towards you, plans for peace to give you a future, to give you a hope." He continues here to write to the Israelites who are in exile. He says, "Then you will call upon me and go and pray to me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart."

The application is that we are to seek God and call upon Him, and that we are to trust in Him. The application for number five is we are to seek God and call on Him and trust in Him.

Isaiah 55:6 through 7 says, "Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let them return to the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon." We fellowship with God by coming to church and hearing God's Word, right? We fellowship with God when we read God's Word in our own private devotions, in our homes, and with our families. We fellowship with God when we pray, and we pour out our hearts to the Lord, right? We fellowship with God through what we call the ordinary means of grace — simply hearing God's Word, praying, and encouraging and edifying one another as the body of Christ, taking communion, witnessing baptism, which are pictures of His gospel, right? That's how our souls are fed, and that's how we fellowship with God.

If you flip over on the back, Jesus invites us to Himself. He invites us to fellowship with Him. We often think of the gospel message as being some steps you've got to follow, okay? You've got to admit you're a sinner, you've got to believe, and you've got to confess — the old ABC thing, right? But look how Christ presents the gospel. He says, "Come to," what?

"To me." It's a personal invitation. "All you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

God calls us into fellowship with Him.

Faith simply is us, a sinner, putting our trust in another person, a Savior, right? It is coming and taking. We come to Him, and we bring to Him all of our sin, our shame, our sorrow, and He takes that away from us, right? We come to Him, we take His righteousness. We put on His righteous clothes in place of our filthy rags. It's coming and taking. It's giving and receiving. It's giving ourselves to Him and receiving His yoke upon us to learn from Him, for He is gentle and lowly in heart. And it's consecration and appropriation. We are saying, "God, I am yours." We can't take Christ the Savior apart from taking Him as Lord. We take Him as He is — the whole of Christ — and we find that He's a God who's for us, and we appropriate all that He is, all of His promises, all the favor that God has poured out on the Son is given to us who are united to Him through faith. Okay? There's an acronym for faith. You probably learned this maybe when you were in vacation Bible school, and it's simply this: forsaking all, I take Him.

That's faith. It's turning from everything else and turning to Christ. That is what it means to have fellowship with Christ.

Point number six, our personality is complete only in Christ.

We are made in the image of God, and God is a personal being. We, too, are persons, right?

Not only were we originally created with a personal nature like God that is both reflective and willful and that is self-determining and self-conscious, but we were also created originally with a moral likeness to God as well, right? The only way that Adam could have walked in the garden with God in the coolness of the evening is if he would have been made upright, as Scripture confirms, right? He was created holy, but he fell. Pascal said that man is therefore now both the glory and the scandal of the universe. He's a scandal of the universe because he's lost that moral likeness to God. But he's still the glory of the universe in that he is created in God's image and he has that personal likeness. But even our personal likeness is marred by the fall, and it can only be made complete in Christ.

Colossians 2:9 through 10 says, "For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." Who is the "Him" that it's speaking of? Jesus Christ, right? In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. He's God made flesh.

"And you are," what? Complete in Him. Complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. Let's look back at these points here. Number one, when we see that God's name implies both personality and also presence, how about us?

Are we persons who are knowable?

In other words, do we hold our guard up and refuse to let people know us? Do we put up barriers between our spouses, between our children, between our parents, between our brothers? We do sometimes, don't we? Maybe we've been hurt before, and we're afraid that we're going to get hurt again, so we put up barriers. Or maybe we have a low sense of self-esteem, we feel like we're not worth knowing, so we shy away from transparency. That's not what Scripture tells us, is it? James says, "Confess your sins to one another," right?

Humble yourselves before one another. God will lift you up, right? With Christ's help, with Christ's power, we can be persons who are knowable, can we not? We can also be persons who are fully present. How many times have you gone to church, and your body's in church, but your mind's far away? It's on that tax return that you still haven't filed.

It's on that pain-in-the-backside at work that you just can't get out of your system because that person's so hard to work with, right?

So we can be present, but not fully present, right? But Christ can make us complete, right? He can help us to be fully present. Look at number two.

As a person, we said that God is rational. Well, we are rational, and we can think and reflect about ourselves, and about others, and about God. Are our minds set upon God?

Can we say we love God with all our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind and strength? No. Do we think about others as we ought to, or are our thoughts only about ourselves, right? Do we think about the lost? Do we think about those who are hurting? Do we think about those who are in bondage and who sit in darkness?

God can help us do that. We can be complete in Christ. Do we have a proper view of ourselves, of who we are in Christ, adopted as a son of God in Christ Jesus? Do we have a proper understanding of our identity that Scripture tells us time and time again in the book of Ephesians and the book of Colossians? Do we? Not always, right? And we believe the lies of the devil. Well, God and Christ Jesus can make us complete. He can help us to be fully self-conscious.

What about number three? As a person, God is resolute. This means that God freely acts and wills, and He does so with purpose from within.

Do we act righteously?

Do we act properly? Is our meat to do the will of the Father?

A lot of times it's not, right? We go our own ways, right? How about our will?

Is our will poured out like Christ in Gethsemane, who said, "Nevertheless, God, not my will, but Your will"? Is it yielded to Him? In Christ we can be made complete. In Christ our wills can be redeemed. Can they not? Just as every part of us can be faced and renewed in the image of Christ, right? Our purpose, just as God acts and wills freely from within, He does that with a purpose. Cannot we have a life of purpose, and is not that purpose to glorify God? God can make us that way in Christ Jesus. He can repair what the moths have eaten and what the rust has corroded.

Look at point number four. As a person, God is relational.

Do we relate to God like we should? Do we love God with all of our heart — the great commandment — and all our soul and all of our mind and strength? And the second is like it, do we love our neighbors as ourselves? We fall woefully short, right? But in Christ Jesus, He can redeem our relationships. Maybe you have a relationship in your family, or perhaps in your workplace, or maybe it's a neighbor that you're at odds with, and you just don't think it can ever be set right. You've just written that person off and you said, "You know, that's beyond redemption." Nothing is beyond redemption, right? Christ can make all your relationships complete in Him.

Look at number five. As a person, God desires fellowship with us.

Our fellowship with God may not be where we want it to be.

I'm not going to ask you to say this out loud, but before you came here tonight, how many of you read your Bibles today?

How many of you started your morning in prayer?

How many of you poured out your heart before the Lord?

You can start tonight, right? God is there to redeem our fellowship, right? He's there to redeem our fellowship with one another, right? To make our fellowship meaningful.

So our personality is only complete in Christ. If you flip over on the back, we're going to close with this.

I talked last week about Augustine, who was one of the great blessings of the church. He lived about 300 years after Christ. And remember last week I mentioned a quote. He says that, "God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Him." That was a beautiful quote of his devotion to God. But Augustine wasn't always who we'd call Saint Augustine. He wasn't always a righteous man. In fact, early in his life, he was a follower of Manichaeism, which is a form of Gnosticism, which was not a Christian religion at all. And it focused on the intellect and reason. And he was a brilliant man, as geniuses can be. And in Gnosticism, they say that the body is the prison house of the soul, and the spiritual realm is what's important. So what you do with your body isn't important. So instead of treating his body like a temple, he treated it like a gutter. And he debased himself in the most wicked debauchery, the most awful living you can imagine. But then he found that that left him empty. So he began to turn his attentions to the Christian religion. He wasn't a Christian yet, but he began to read the Bible. He began to turn his attention to Christian thought and Christian thinking.

And when he started reading the Bible, the Holy Spirit works with the Scriptures. As we said last week, never the Word without the Spirit, never the Spirit without the Word. And one day, while he was outside in a garden, God began to convict him of his sin and moved him to tears over the body that he had wasted in sin and the years he had wasted. And so he goes before a fig tree, and he's not well versed in prayer. So what he does, he begins to quote part of Psalm 13: "How long, how long will it be till I see Your face? When will You deliver me?" is what he begins to pray. And as he prays, he hears the voice of children. Later on, he says he doesn't know if there were children nearby playing or if it was just something God put in his head. But he heard a singsong voice of children saying, "Tolle lege, tolle lege," which is Latin meaning "take up and read, take up and read." And he happened to have his Bible there. And so he opened up his Bible and he came to Romans chapter 13. It's on the back of your page, verses 11 through 14. This was the passage that he read.

He says, "And do this knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep. For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry or drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts." When he read that, "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ," he says instantly his heart was changed. He knew that any change had to be by putting on Jesus Christ and appropriating the righteousness of Christ and the power of Christ in his life. In that very moment he was born again and his life changed. He became such a great religious leader, such a great theologian that we still read his works today. If you have ever read any of his works, such as the Confessions, they are wonderful reading just for your own devotion. But the point is, is that he looked to Christ and he put on Christ and Christ changed him from the inside out, right? And we too can only be made complete in Christ Jesus.

Application for number six. The application for number six is to follow God and walk in His love. Follow God and walk in His love. And the verse that goes with that is Ephesians 5:1 through 2, "Therefore be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God, a sweet-smelling aroma."

Thanks. Thank you, David. Please stay.