What's God Really Like? What Does God Want | Shane Huey
MESSAGE NOTES
Today I wanna try to answer this question, “What does God want? What doesn’t he want from me? How do I please him?”
A little bit about me: I was born and raised here in Columbus, Ohio and I got the tattoos to prove it, but as far as my home life was concerned I wasn’t exactly dealt the best hand. My dad was an abusive alcoholic. He was physically abusive, verbally abusive. And my mom, God bless her, has pretty debilitating mental illness. My mom is the strongest woman I know and she did her best to make sure we were taken care of but my dad drank away all of our money and nothing I ever did was good enough for him.
This led to a really distorted understanding of a God who seems to insist throughout scripture that we know him as a Father. As Christians, we believe some crazy stuff, the one thing that was an affront to my faith when I was younger was that God was a good father.
What Does God Want? - Reflections on Grace
For me, and this may be true for many of you, I thought I had to earn God’s love. I thought I had to measure up and based on my own merit, maybe God would let me into heaven. So as a result, Christianity became “list-ianity”. It just became a list of rules to keep and boxes to check and on the comic scales of justice, at the end of it all, if my good stuff outweighed my bad stuff then maybe, just maybe, God would be nice enough to let me in.
What happens is, in the midst of all of our rule keeping we miss out on the thing that God wants most. What does God want? He wants you! He wants to be in relationship with you. He wants you to know and believe that He’s a good Father who loves you and cares for you and longs to be with you.
I was at a low point in my faith because the pressure to perform and appease God by keeping all the rules had become too much to bear. And I was sitting in parking lot of Panera Bread with my dear friend, Brian Williams and he shared with me this scripture that changed my life.
John 17:3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
Something went off in my heart like a bomb. And all at once all that weight was lifted off of my shoulders and in that moment I knew… I knew that this is what I was made for. You were born and born again for the sole
purpose of knowing God, for being in relationship with him. And that doesn’t start when you die and go to heaven, that starts right here, right now.
You see, the core of Christianity isn’t primarily about what you do and don’t do. It’s about what Jesus has done for you.
I hope to show you 2 things in answer to this question, “What does God want?
1. He wants you to know how loved you really are.
2. He wants to set you free from striving.
Ephesians 2: [1] As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,
- Dead. If you look it up in the Greek, wanna guess what it means? Dead. You see, the problem with sin isn’t that it makes you a bad person, it’s that it makes you a dead person. And because we’re dead in sin, we can do nothing to save ourselves. You can try to be good all you want but you’re still spiritually dead and no amount of good works can compensate for that. A dead person with a stellar resume is still dead.
- [4] BUT GOD…
- “But God!” I shoulda been dead, BUT GOD! I shoulda been overcome by depression, BUT GOD! I shoulda been strung out, BUT GOD!
- [4] But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, [5] even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ —by grace you have been saved—
- God wants to love you to life. Jesus didn’t die to make bad people good. Jesus died to bring the dead back to life!
God is not in love with a future version of you. The version of you that’s cleaned yourself up and got your life together. God loves you just as you are and oh brother and sisters, what freedom can be found in realizing that you are fully known and yet fully loved.
- You don’t have to clean yourself up, you don’t have to have all your stuff together. And this news is so nice he says it twice. Look with me at Verse 8:
[8] For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, [9] not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Look what he says in Verse 10:
[10] For we are his workmanship, (some of your translations say “masterpiece”. I love that) created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
That word workmanship or masterpiece in the Greek is the word “poiēma” (poy-ya-ma). It’s where we get the word poem. You are like a perfectly crafted poem penned by the creator of the universe. You are his masterpiece.
-Knowing that you are God’s masterpiece has the power to free from from striving, striving to earn God’s love, striving to earn acceptance and approval from other people. In the Message translation of the Bible, Jesus says in Matthew 11:28, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out by religion?” What’s religion? Trying to work your way up to God. That’s religion. The Gospel says God loves your so much that he’s coming to you.
- Your Father wants you to know He loves you. Not with the imperfect love of your parents. Not with the kind of love you have to earn. He loves with an everlasting love. A love that is not wearied by your sin. A love that brings purpose and meaning to your life. A love that will set you free from striving. A love that will not let you go.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
-What are some ways that your earthly family has effected your view of God?
-What are some ways that you find yourself trying to earn God’s love?
-How do you discern the good works that God has set aside for you?
-How does knowing you’re loved by God effect the way you live your everyday life