Perfection Is.
Niverville/Chatham Center United Methodist Church
11-November-2001
Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21
Psalm
145:1-5, 17-21
A psalm of praise. Of David.
1 I
will exalt you, my God the King;
I will praise your name for ever and ever.
2 Every
day I will praise you
and extol your name for ever and ever.
3 Great
is the LORD and most worthy of praise;
his greatness no one can fathom.
4 One
generation will commend your works to another;
they will tell of your mighty acts.
5 They
will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty,
and I will meditate on your wonderful works.
17 The
LORD is righteous in all his ways
and loving toward all he has made.
18 The
LORD is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.
19 He
fulfills the desires of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and saves them.
20 The
LORD watches over all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy.
21 My
mouth will speak in praise of the LORD.
Let every creature praise his holy name
for ever and ever.
The Bible is filled with
praise of God. First Chronicles
16:25, Psalms 48:1, and Psalms 145:3 say, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to
be praised.” Psalm 103:1 says
“Bless the LORD O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name”
and there are many other references.
Often we spend our prayer
time with petitions, asking God for the things we desire.
We need also to spend time in praise alone.
This morning I’d like us to examine together some of the reasons we
should praise God.
In examining reasons for
praise, it will be helpful for us to consider some philosophical concepts
relating to God. This will require
us to do a bit of mental work, but I believe we are up to the task.
I think we would all
agree that God is perfect.
Anselm, a great early
Christian thinker though so and he expressed this belief by making a very
simple, yet incredibly profound statement.
Anselm said that “God is that than which nothing greater can be
conceived.” This idea is so
simple that it is easy to miss its importance, so I encourage you to roll this
over in your head for a while. God
is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
Some have argued that it
is possible to conceive of a perfect being or thing in the mind only and that
this thought does not require the existence of such a being or thing.
To clarify this thought we have only to ask ourselves, which is greater;
an idea that exists in our minds, but does not exist in reality, or an idea that
exists in reality and not in our minds only.
If we say, as most of us would, that the second idea is greater, we have
accepted the argument. We agree
with Anselm that such an idea—if in our minds only—cannot be “that than
which nothing greater can be conceived” because the being or thing to which it
refers lacks something we can conceive, namely, existence.
This makes it something less than “that than which nothing greater can
be conceived.”
I have found this an
excellent and useful way to consider God and to measure a particular concept to
determine the traits of God.
Scripture tells us
that God is Love. In First John 4:8
we read: “Whoever does not love does not know God,
because God is love.” Verse 16
carries the thought further: “And so we know and rely on the love God has for
us. God is love. Whoever lives in
love lives in God, and God in him.” Our
passage from Psalm 145 says, “The LORD is righteous in all his ways and
loving toward all he has made.
The early creeds of the
church were created to clarify our beliefs as compared to various heresies and
attacks. In the creeds we find a
clear Scriptural message about who God is and what God’s traits are.
The Nicene Creed puts it this way:
I believe in one God, the
Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and
invisible. And in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds;
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of
one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.
In the creed we agree
that God created all things; that God was before all things; that God was not
created. This is an important
point. If indeed God is “that
than which nothing greater can be conceived,” then this statement must be
true. When we attempt to
conceptualize infinity, we can easily see that anything created must have had a
creator. If God were not eternal,
if God was created, then we could imagine something greater—that which caused
God.
Working from the position
that God is eternal, and the cause of all things, we must conclude that God is
perfect in every way; that He is infinitely perfect.
Infinite perfection allows us to conceive some of the other traits of
God. The perfect One, the One than
which nothing greater can be conceived, must be loving.
This must be true because we can easily imagine something greater than
one who does not love.
Scripture tells us not
merely that God loves, but that He is love. If God loves and in fact is love, He necessarily loves
perfectly—infinitely. Perfect
love requires an object. To be said
to have love, one must love someone or something.
How could it be possible to love nothing?
Now imagine loving
someone who does not love you in return. Can
you imagine something greater? Certainly.
You can imagine loving someone who loves you in return!
This is obviously better. In
this way we see that for God to be perfectly or infinitely loving, He would need
to express that love, but not in the way that a child might love a Teddy
Bear—with love that is not returned. Perfect
love would need to be expressed to someone with the capacity to love in return.
First John 4:12 points us in this direction, “No
one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his
love is made complete in us.”
Someone might argue that
God could then simply have created beings who love Him by their nature; beings
who love Him because they are created for that purpose; who must love
Him. This line of thought would be
flawed however, because again we can imagine something better than loving
someone who is forced to love us in return.
Loving someone who loves us in return because they choose to love us of
their own free will would be immeasurably better. Think of a time when someone has shown you love for no
particular reason.
For this reason, God
created us with freedom of will, as free moral agents.
Within our temporal existence, we are free to love God, or not.
That God has given us such incredible freedom is amazing and certainly a
strong motivation to praise Him.
Clearly it is right and good for us to praise such amazing love! Praise is at the heart of worship and it is right and proper that we should praise Him. In the Lord’s Prayer we find, “thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Scripture gives us a few glimpses of what happens in heaven.
Here
are some of the things we find in the book of Revelation:
Day and night they never stop saying: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.”
They lay their crowns
before the throne and say: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory
and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were
created and have their being.”
In a loud
voice they sang: “Worthy is the Lamb,
who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and
glory and praise!”
Then I heard
every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and
all that is in them, singing: “To him
who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!”
I remember as a boy going
to praise services where we would gather and hear testimonies of the great
things God had done in our lives, and I’d like to give a testimony this
morning.
I praise God this morning
for blessing me even while I ignored Him.
I was raised in a solid
Christian home and accepted Christ at an early age, but I was not really much of
a committed Christian for many years. I
began to struggle with my beliefs. I
questioned things I had always believed. I saw hypocrisy in many Christians. This led me to live a more secular life under the pretense
that I was figuring out what I really believed.
I wasn’t. I was ignoring
God. I removed Him from any
prominent place in my life. I
simply didn’t think about Him. I
still believed in Him, but I had dismissed Him.
And yet… He continued
to bless me. I praise Him for that.
The sovereign God of the universe continued to love me while I refused to
love Him. I join with those in
heaven this morning and praise our great, loving, infinite God.