By Dan Jones
A lady in my church recently shared with the congregation that she was celebrating one full year of not smoking. She said she must have tried to quit a hundred times, but then she heard the Lord tell her He would help her. And He did it. She took none of the credit for herself.
Monday at lunch time, I heard Kinship Christian Radio’s new announcer Michael James Lorin give his testimony on how he had spent an entire night some years ago at the end of himself crying out to God, only to have a man call him the next day and tell him God had sent him to save him.
Eventually, Michael was saved.
The pastor of our church pointed out that the non-smoking lady had tried a hundred times and failed because that’s exactly how God planned it. She tried all those times and failed so that when she finally gave up and let God do it, there would be no doubt who got the glory.
And, I can see that same thing in Michael’s testimony. What happened to him cannot be written off as mere coincidence.
It was God-incidence and it happened in such a way that God gets the glory.
Which leads me to one of my favorite recently-discovered verses from Isaiah 42:8.
“I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols.” (NIV)
The glory belongs to God. It is His glory and no one and nothing else can claim it or share in because only He is worthy of that glory. It is His possession. It is His right.
One of my favorite books is “The God Who Smokes” by Tim Stoner. (Definitely not a book you should judge by the title or the author’s name for that matter.)
Stoner writes about how the prophets have come before the God who smolders and smokes with a burning, passionate love for His people and come away… well, here’s a quote from page 83 of that book:
“He is fierce, and He acts like He owns the entire planet. No, make that the universe. He really believes that He is the most worthy, most majestic, magnificent, glorious, stunningly beautiful being in the universe. And He is fixated on the certainty that only He deserves worship—that to Him alone belong honor, glory, and praise forever and ever. With red-rimmed, stinging eyes and burning hair, all we can say is—He is right.”
Indeed.
There are people all around us who think that God is like a cartoon wizard in the sky handing out lollipops to those who play by His rules, or a malicious deity who delights in torturing humanity with the evil deeds of others or, worst of all, a God who wound up the universe and watches as it spins down to its inevitable, self-inflicted demise for His own amusement.
There are even those who deny that He exists.
But I don’t believe in atheists.
Sure, I have met them. I have talked with them and touched them and I can attest that there is scientific, verifiable, tangible evidence of people who call themselves atheists. By their own definition, they exist.
But they cannot be real.
See, to call yourself a true atheist is to categorically state, with absolute certainty, that there is no God.
And only an omniscient being could do that.
Human beings are fallible. We make mistakes. And, even the greatest human intellect on the planet has to admit that we don’t know everything. In fact, I believe we are incapable of knowing everything.
I would even go so far as to contend that what we don’t know vastly exceeds what we do know.
So, atheists cannot logically exist because not one of them can honestly claim to have the degree of knowledge necessary to say there is no God.
Now, I believe agnostics do exist because they simply claim to be unable to discern whether God exists or not.
And that, I think, is merely a matter of timing.
I will grant that a person can be at a point in their life where they are unable, through any number of reasons, to be able to know there is a God.
Yet.
Just like Michael Lorin or the lady in church, there can come a day in any person’s life where they reach the end of themselves –where intellect and human striving and will power and stick-to-itiveness and pride crumble into the dust like bricks whose mortar has turned to mush and the walls come tumbling down. And, in that day when we realize we can’t do it on our own, there is a God who can. And that smoldering, smoking, burning, God who will not share His glory with another will snuff out that which is killing His beloved child and replace it with a new man or a new woman wholly devoted to His praise and His glory.
AMEN!
Today’s Praise
Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29: 12-13 NIV