Sovereign Grace Chapel, located
at 135 Annabel Lane in Beaver, West Virginia, invites you to
listen to a gospel message concerning Jesus Christ, our Lord. If you
would like to turn with me this morning to Titus 2, Titus 2 and verses 11 through
14. For the grace of God that bringeth
salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying
ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously,
and godly in this present world. looking for that blessed hope
and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior,
Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem
us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people,
zealous of good works. I've entitled this message, How
Great Thou Art. I want to look at this great
God we see in verse 13. And when I say great, this is
what I mean. Big, exceedingly great, high, large, loud, mighty,
sore, strong. That is what the word great means
here in this passage. What is great to you? I thought
many things were great when I was young, and even as I got a little
bit older. But in time, I had to be revealed
what was truly great, something that would never leave or be
gone or wear out. I learned this, and this not
of myself, mind you. I learned this from another.
I learned there is a greatness that never wears out or ever
leaves or that ever changes. I have been brought to know that
I myself am not great at all. I learned this by being taught
who is in fact great by the very nature of who it is that is great. Are you insignificant like me? Are you of unimportance like
me? Then maybe I can tell you of
one who is far greater than anyone you have ever known or anything
you have ever known. I learned that God, the God of
Scripture, is great. Jesus Christ the Lord is God,
and he is, in reality, a great God. Something that I still fear
in this sense, God has the power to destroy both body and soul
in hell. With everything we have going
on lately, this has come to my mind even more. This morning
I want to talk to you about our great God, and I want to talk
to you about it in light of prayer. You hear everyone around us saying
we need to pray. They say this not because they
want to bow down to the great God, but rather most do this
because they need something from him to make their life easier
or more pleasant. In short, they need their bellies
filled once again. The rain falls on the just and
the unjust alike. God feeds all men and women.
I'm talking about physically making food available to them,
physically making them well, or keeping them from getting
sick. He does all this according to His wise purpose. But to bow
down to Him for who He says He is is not important to them. It is not a part of who they
are. They cannot bow down to him because
they have not been bowed down by this great God. Simply put,
they only need him when they are in trouble or they simply
want something. I do believe that God has purpose
to allow them to have what they ask for, but they have their
reward. That is what they get and that
is all they will ever get. Who is this great God that we
should be bowing down to? That is what I want to talk about
this morning. I will do it this way. What is God's will and what
is man's will? What is God's will? God's will
is what I want to spend the most time on because what his will
is will let us know of his greatness. His will is tied to his purpose.
As I said, I want to do this in light of prayer. So please
turn to Matthew 9. Matthew chapter 9. I'm sorry,
Matthew chapter 6. Matthew chapter 6 and verses
9 through 10. After this manner, therefore,
pray ye. Our Father, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be
done in earth as it is in heaven. Verse 10 is where I want to part
for just a little bit. When we pray, Jesus Christ the
Lord is telling us that we ought to pray that God the Father's
will be done. Jesus Christ is the Son of God,
who is equal with God. He tells us to pray this way. He tells us to pray in this manner,
not as some recital of a prayer, repeating the same words, but
with these thoughts in our mind, or this mindset about who God
is. So if we are to pray that God's
will is to be done on earth, then we need to know what is
God's will. Let's look through some scripture
to see what God's will is. I say is because God is eternal. But some of these things, of
course, since we are creatures of time, may be in the past.
Some of these things we know are God's will because they happened.
We have record of them in the scripture. I want to point out
God's will in Noah's time, God's will for Sodom and Gomorrah,
and God's will with Pharaoh in Egypt. what was and is God's
will for the people in Noah's time. In Genesis 6 and 13, we
read this. And God said unto Noah, the end
of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with
violence through them. And behold, I will destroy them
with the earth. Then in Genesis 7 and 4, we read
this. For yet seven days and I will
cause it to rain upon the earth 40 days and 40 nights. And every
living substance that I have made will I destroy from off
the face of the earth. How many people did our God destroy
because he was willing to do so? All but eight people, eight
human beings. I don't know how many people
there were in that time, but I imagine it was a pretty big
number. But it was every one except eight people, and that
is all that God intended to say. Does scripture teach this? In
Genesis 6, in verse 17, we read this. I, even I, this is God speaking,
do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh
wherein is the breath of life from under heaven. And everything
that is in the earth shall die. Verse 18, but with thee, that
is Noah, will I establish my covenant and thou shalt come
into the ark. thou and thy sons and thy wife
and thy son's wives with thee. This sovereign almighty God who
created everything was willing. It was in fact what was intended
by our great God to destroy a lot of people. And yet he saved the
world because he saved a people. Next we have Sodom and Gomorrah.
In Genesis 18 we read of the account of Sodom and Gomorrah.
First, we have Abraham talking with God. He goes from 50 down
to 10, asking God to spare the city if there are 10 righteous
people there. In verse 32, we read this. Genesis
18, verse 32. And he said, oh, let not the
Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once. This is Abraham
speaking to God. Peradventure, 10 shall be found
there. And he said, this is God speaking,
I will not destroy it for 10's sake. But there were not, as
we know from the account. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. You can read the account in Genesis
19, one through 26, and get a sense for the kind of people they were.
This is us by nature. God willed to destroy Sodom and
Gomorrah. Abraham spoke with God and he
went from 50 down to 10, asking God, saying, if there were that
many righteous, would he spare the city? There was not even
10 righteous souls there. But God said he would spare the
city for 10. But there was not. We can see
what Sodom and Gomorrah was like when the men sent by God arrived
at the door of Lot's house. The men of the city, both young
and old, wanted to know them. They were ungodly men, just as
we are by nature, and God willed to destroy it, and we see that
he did. I imagine there were quite a
few people who lived in this place, and the only ones that
made it out of that place were Lot and his two daughters, three
people. If you think you will mock God
and refuse God, this will be your end as well. You will be
finally and ultimately destroyed. And then the last one, God's
will and what we read in scripture concerning it as we have record
of it happening. This is the account of Pharaoh
when the people of Israel were going to leave. In Exodus 12,
12 we read this. For I will pass through the land
of Egypt this night and will smite all the firstborn in the
land of Egypt. both man and beast, and against
all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgment. I am the Lord. There's a lot more on the will
of God in the account of Pharaoh, but the ultimate or final one
was the death of the firstborn in every family. Either it was
the death of one in the place of another, or the firstborn
died. There had to be a lot of families
in the land of Egypt at that time. God willed to kill the
firstborn in every family, and He did. When you look at God's
will and what He does, there are always some that His will
is judgment and destruction to them. But then there are others
who benefit from God's will and Him destroying things and people.
God makes a difference between His people and all other people. He does this. There are more
places we could go to look at God's will concerning judgment
and mercy being shown at the same time. We see that there
are some, when God does as he pleases, his will is for some
and against others. The examples we have looked at
deal with God's will as it concerns a lot of people at one time.
Now don't get me wrong, God deals with us individually, even though
he may take action in his purpose collectively. But we have other
examples where God dealt with individuals. Now in this dealing
with individuals, it may also involve others as well or affect
others as well. But when you look at the account
of Job, here was one God himself said he was a just man. Then God, when talking to Satan,
asked Satan if he had considered his servant Job. God asked Satan,
have you considered my servant Job? Satan did not ask this. Satan responded to God and basically
said, you have a hedge about him and I cannot touch him. God
told him, okay, the hedge is gone. Do what you will, just
do not touch his life. God was in complete, total control
of this. God permitted or allowed Satan
to take everything that Job had, including his possessions as
well as his family. His children died and even his
wife turned on him. Turn to the Book of Job sometime
and read it. You will see this is what happened.
So God deals with everyone as individuals, although it may
be his will and his purpose that it is done in multitudes or that
it affects many and not just one individual. Now I want to
leave the point of God's will for just a little bit, but I
will come back to that later. But let's talk a little bit about
man's will as he is born in Adam to see what scripture says about
man's will as it relates to the holy, just, sovereign God. To know what man's will is, we
have to start with looking at what man's heart is. We see above
in the accounts given where man's will, where his will takes him. But what does God say? The heart
is desperately wicked. Who can know it? First of all,
the answer to this question is God knows it. No one else knows
how deceitful and wicked even their own heart is, let alone
someone else's heart. But God is the one who had men
write this down, to write these words down. The heart of man
is desperately wicked. In Jeremiah 17 and nine we read,
the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? First of all,
deceitful, what does that mean from scripture? It means fraudulent,
crooked, deceitful, and polluted. Then you have desperately wicked.
That means frail, feeble, desperate, incurable, sick, woeful. So now we see. The heart is crooked,
polluted, deceitful, and so much so it is incurably sick. That is what God says. That is
what God has said about our heart. Our heart is so deceitful that
it will tell us we have life before God when we are dead.
Our heart is so deceitful that it will tell us we are doing
something good for God when it is an abomination before God. Our heart is so deceitful that
it will tell us we know God when we really know nothing. Our heart
is so deceitful it will tell us we believe God when we really
believing a God that is a figment of our own imagination and not
God at all. Our heart is so deceitful that
it will tell us our will can be exercised by us to accept
Jesus or to reject him. depending on our will or depending
on our own choice alone. This is how deceitful our hearts
are by nature. But we read a verse like this
in Exodus 35, 29. It says, the children of Israel
brought a willing offering unto the Lord, every man and woman
whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work,
which the Lord had commanded to be made by the hand of Moses.
Does God love and accept an offering from a deceitful, incurable heart? Is this the heart that made them
willing? No, the heart we have by nature
is just as God describes to us. It is deceitful above all things
and desperately wicked. So something has to change. We
have to be given a heart that will make us willing. In Ezekiel
36 and 26, we read this. A new heart also will I give
you, this is God speaking, and a new spirit will I put within
you, and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you an heart of flesh. The difference is the
taking away of a hard heart of stone, a dead heart, and the
giving of a new heart of flesh. Not a fleshly heart, but a heart
that is living, a clean heart. That is what this means here
when it says a heart of flesh. What we have is a stony heart,
and if God wills, he will give us a new heart, a living heart.
But it is only if he wills to do so. Now back to God's will. There are some other places that
talk about God's will, a merciful, loving will towards his people.
He dealt with a collective group of people, you might say, although
it was still individually, but he dealt with them in one man.
It was the will of the Father that he would send Jesus Christ
the Lord down to this earth to be made of a woman, made under
the law to take away the sins of his people. But what has God
told us in his word about this one who was to take away the
sins of his people? In Genesis 3.15, it says God
willed to put enmity between the seed of Satan and the seed
of woman. Jesus Christ was that seed. Paul
tells us this in Galatians 3.16. In Genesis 6.18, God tells Noah
it is his will to establish his covenant with him, his wife,
his sons, and their wives. That was eight people God willed
to be saved in the time of Noah. In saving these eight people,
God saved the world. These eight people were brought
into the ark and the door was shut by God. This ark typifies
Jesus Christ the Lord. Oh that God willed to place me
in his ark of salvation. I want him to bring me into the
ark of Jesus Christ my Lord. Is this what you're looking for?
What else is God's will in scripture concerning his son, Jesus Christ
the Lord? To Abraham, God proclaimed the
gospel to him when he told him that it was his God's will that
he would bless him in that seed, singular, spoken of as being
at enmity with Satan, and that he would come through his loins.
That all who would be blessed would be blessed in that one
seed. But then he tells Abraham that
he wills to provide himself a sacrifice for a burnt offering in Genesis
22 and verse eight. So Jesus Christ the Lord would
come as the one sacrifice for sin. Matthew 26 and 31 says,
then saith Jesus unto them, all ye shall be offended because
of me this night. For it is written, I will smite
the shepherd and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered
abroad. God tells us his will is to be
gracious to whom he will be gracious, and he will show mercy to whom
he will show mercy. And also, whom he wills, he will
harden. Just as he did Pharaoh, he hardened
his heart so that he would not bow down to God. Romans 9.18
says, therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and
whom he will, he hardeneth. God wills to show mercy on son. Mercy implies two things. One
has been offended, and one has done the offending. We are the
offenders, and God is the offended. Otherwise, there is no need for
mercy. So who does God show mercy for? In Matthew 9 and verse 13 it
says, but go ye and learn what meaneth. I will have mercy and
not sacrifice. For I am not come to call the
righteous, but sinners to repentance. He will give life to those he
wills to give life to. And in John 5 21 we read this. For as the father raiseth up
the dead and quickeneth them, even so the son quickeneth whom
he will. Man's will is totally against
God as he is born in Adam. We have to have our own will
changed by God. But that is all up to him whether
he does this or not. Him giving us a new heart that
will make us willing in a day of His power. This God who we
pray to that His will be done. Listen, His will will be done
regardless whether we pray for it or not. But God's people pray
for this because His people know that what He does is for their
good. No matter what the circumstances
may be. No matter whether I can directly
see it or not. There are a lot of people who
may turn to God in times like these. But when their belly gets
full, they will leave. When the truth starts to be told,
they will leave. Or they will simply go to where
their belly continues to get filled with no truth being spoken. Just somewhere they can go to
make them feel good about themselves. For many, they get a false hope,
and that is dangerous. They are told that a decision
by them secures their everlasting soul. For God's people who might
be called to him in times like these, or maybe who are being
called by God in other times when everything seems to be going
okay in the world, no matter what, might be going on in the
world, the child of God who is being called by him comes to
know they are the sinner before a great, sovereign, holy, and
just God. And they have nothing that will
satisfy this God. They have some sense that if
they die today, they will be consumed unless God Almighty
does something for them. They know they are guilty before
him. They see themselves as being
consumed by this Almighty God. This is the implanting of that
new heart, that heart that is molded by God, where the Spirit
of God comes in to dwell and does make them willing, willing
to bow down to Him. All those for who this is done
will see that the will of God was done by His Son, who we read
done all the will of the Father. They come to see this Jesus Christ
as their only hope by the preaching of the gospel. The only hope
being that if he took their place, then God was satisfied with that. We do pray for and God does help
our families and others and we have scriptural examples of that
happening. In Matthew 9, we have the example
of a certain ruler bringing his petition to Christ on behalf
of his daughter. He thought his daughter was dead.
Christ healed her. In Matthew 15, we have a woman
from Canaan bringing her petition to Christ on behalf of her daughter
being vexed with the devil. Christ healed her. And you know
this account. This is the woman that was a
dog of the master. In Matthew 8, we have this centurion
bringing his petition to Christ on behalf of his servant. Christ
healed him. Then we have John 11 when Mary
the one that wiped Christ's feet with her hair She came to Christ
with her petition on behalf of her brother Lazarus Christ raised
him from the dead They did pray to God. This is praying to God
when you come to him for help when you bring your supplications
to him there was one thing in common amongst all these who
prayed to God they all had faith and A faith given to them by
God. A faith that believes God. But now let's look at an example
of where God's people are brought to by God. An example whose will,
they think, is important. An example of what God's people
think of themselves at God's appointed time. Someone who has
been given a new heart and one that has been given faith. In
Luke 5, in verse 12, we read this. And it came to pass when
he, that is Jesus Christ, was in a certain city, behold a man
full of leprosy. He was full of uncleanness and
condemned by the law. Who seeing Jesus fell on his
face, he got down on his knees with his face to the dust, is
what it's saying. And he besought him, Jesus Christ,
saying, Lord, if thou wilt, It is your will to do so, great
God, if it is your will to do so, great God, if thou, Jesus
Christ, wilt, thou canst make me clean. The one who has been
given by God this new heart, making them willing to bow down
to Jesus Christ, knowing if they are to be made clean, it will
be him that does it, and only if he wills to do so. then that
sinner has to wait on the Lord to find out his answer. But to
those who are like this, the answer from Jesus Christ will
always be the same. Reading on in verse 13. And he,
Jesus Christ, put forth his hand and touched him saying, I will,
be thou clean. And immediately the leprosy departed
from him. My hope and prayer is that Jesus
Christ is willing to show you mercy on a poor, wretched sinner,
making him clean by the power of his might and because of his
will. This is my cry for myself even today. It is always a matter
of God's will as to what will happen, no matter what that might
be. God does not always answer our
prayers in the positive, you might say. He does not always
say yes to our prayers, but he does always answer our prayers
and does right. Paul prayed for the thorn in
the flesh to be removed three times. God said no. God told
Paul, my grace is sufficient for thee. I pray to him to open
my heart, for him to open my understanding, for him getting
me through a trial or help in a trial, for him saving my soul. My God is in the heaven and hath
done whatsoever he has pleased. How great of a God do you worship?
There is no other God, so if you're not worshiping this God,
your worship is in vain. Can you bow down to this great
God? Is this the God you seek? Is
this the God you know? Can you say in agreement with
scripture, knowing all these things? Oh, how great thou art.