Sunday January 24 message

Who is God? Message 1 I am a big picture thinker. I look at things and I immediately see down the road a ways. I try to put big picture thinking into everything I do, people call it being a visionary. Well, there are times where it is vision that God gives me and there are other times where it is simply big picture thinking. Things like putting an underclassman in to play in a lot of softball games even when they are struggling simply because a few years down the road it will pay off. Maybe playing someone out of position from time to time because well, things happen like injuries and such. We make a lot of decisions as parents don’t we. I will guarantee you that the bigger the picture is of your kids future, the better decisions you will make. We have to punish them, and feel like they hate us in the immediate moment but in the big picture we know that they will grow up to be better people and love you more because of it. I tell parents all the time to let coaches be hard on their kids and push their kids because it prepares them for life. Un-coachable kids grow up to be unemployable adults. Now if I, as a fallible human being can see the big picture what does God’s picture look like? I liken it to a puzzle, each day we are given a piece of that puzzle and each day we search for where it fits and God has the box cover before we are even born. He knows where the piece you get each day goes and he knows what you need. God is a different type of gardener: Jeremiah 17:5-6 Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands, he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert in a salt land where no one lives. Now I know quite a few farmers, and they have seasons that they plant their crops because that is when they will grow the best. They can plan and plan and watch their almanacs or their weather channel apps, regardless they are not going to be able to overcome floods or a drought, they just can’t. Jeremiah 17:7-8 But, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. Now look at these verses, this second half of our passage and think about what they are saying. I mean yes a tree next to a stream isn’t worried about the heat or the weather, but what about a real roots system. I mean a roots system grounded in the water isn’t very strong at all. The whole point to these verses is that when we trust in God, when we place our trust in Him, we can release all of our worries. Because, God isn’t just a gardener who plants, he is a gardener who guarantees the fruit that He needs. But let’s look at another passage on God as the gardener. John 15:1-2 Now a gardener in a vineyard would have several jobs, all of them pretty much for the same purpose but different all the same. 1. He oversees the wellbeing of the vine. Overseeing is not micromanaging. If God micromanaged us we would not love Him as strongly as we do. 2. He oversees the wellbeing of the branches of the vine. He oversees the vine and he also oversees the branches. 3. He prunes the branches so that they produce more fruit. Here is the part that none of us like. He prunes the branches so that they will produce more fruit. Raise your hand if you want to be pruned to produce more fruit. God uses us to reach the lost, but when the fruit isn’t happening He does some pruning. You see if a grape vine was left just to grow on its own it would. It would grow and it would produce fruit but it would stretch out and grow all over the place and soon it would produce less quality and then soon less quantity and what it does produce eventually would be overbearing and would end up on the ground, trampled and rotten. The vine has to be pruned, it has to be watched over or it will never produce the way it was created to. 4. He oversees the production and development of the fruit. He oversees again, no managing but overseeing. Giving the nutrients and pruning needed to bring about the best of results. 5. He gathers the fruit. No the vine doesn’t gather the fruit, no the branches don’t gather or eat the fruit, the gardener does. We talked last Wednesday night about how if we truly believed John 3:30 and that all that man has comes from above then we would take every ounce of fruit, every positive gain that comes to us as a gift from God. Realizing that we were simply vessels that God used to reach His people with. Instead, however, we do something good and we post it on social media, we wave our flag, and we eat up every ounce of credit, AKA glory hogs. Chinese bamboo many times gets chopped down prematurely by unsuspecting people. To those who don’t know anything about it Chinese bamboo appears to do nothing to grow the first 4 years of it’s life. At the end of 4 years it is rarely more than a few feet tall, it is seemingly puny and weak. But, the entire first 4 years of it’s life it is growing underground, it is growing a roots system that will stand up the demands of year 5. In the 5th year of it’s existence Chinese bamboo can grow to well over 80 feet tall. Think about that, 2 foot in the first 4 years, 80 plus the next year. That is all part of God’ design and if you don’t know anything about it, you know nothing about the roots that God put there first. God always has a plan. The birth of Jesus was not God’s alternative plan when the rest of His plan didn’t work out. God foretold of Christ’s coming as far back as the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:15). You can trust today that God has a plan for your life.