Sermon Tone Analysis

I’m at Kid’s Kamp

which I have done for maybe 20 years here in Southern California.

Each year we have a weekend camp that is kind of an introduction to youth camp, but mostly stands by itself to help 7 to 11 year old campers experience some time with God, learning more about what salvation means, and sometimes giving their hearts to Jesus.

We fill up more than 40 hours with lessons, games, crafts, skits, adventures and nature, all the while getting more in touch with what it means to believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior.

So that’s where I am live this morning, on Palomar Mountain in San Diego county, at the Palomar Christian Conference Center.

Most years we have had students from ICC or Sidewalk Sunday School attend, but that didn’t happen this year.

I’m still there are Kamp Pastor, and last night we probably had a wonderful time around a campfire in the woods, thinking about our own relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

And that gets me to the theme of this morning’s message.

Last week, I preached that God’s Heart is Freedom from Injustice.

If you missed that, I invite you to go to our YouTube channel and check it out.

Andrea has done a great job of archiving almost every sermon that has been shared online since March 22 of 2000.

That means over 100 are there.

Youtube.com:

Inter-Community Church of God, Covina,CA

Just search YouTube for Inter-Community Church of God, Covina and you will find our channel with a picture of the church on the title page.

You can also subscribe to the channel and get notifications when something new is posted, or if the ICC Sunday Service is live-streaming like it is right now.

So you can keep up or catch up with us on your smart phone, your tablet or computer, or even your smart TV.

Sometimes it’s the lazy person’s way to be connected to church, and that’s OK too.

Thinking about being at Kamp so kids can know God better, I began to think about the reality that God’s Heart is for us to Know Him.

So let’s explore that idea of . . .

Knowing God

Sometimes, when we think of the idea of knowing God, it seems like it should be obvious: Of course we know God.

But we need to stop and think sometimes: do we truly know God, or do we merely think that we know God because we know something about God.

Knowing about God, or knowing some things we believe about God, or because we have been reading up on all the discourses people use about God.

And then there are all those other people in the world that seem to talk abut a different god than we know.

The Hindu gods are many, and idolatry abounds in trying to illustrate what they believe about their gods.

Their gods are not the examples of how to live a good life, instead they are many and varied because they are trying to make sense of life by assigning a god to each kind of thing in life.

Is seems that Hinduism is a combination of many different tribal cultural beliefs.

They never come to know their gods personally.

They just try to avoid making them mad, so they have various ways to appease them.

Spiritually, they focus on practices of living that finally come to the achievement of 4 goals:

To have a purpose and duty, which you must do well so that you store up plenty of good karma.

Karma is just the belief that every good action will benefit you in the long run, and every wrong action will be to your detriment, if not now then later, even in a next life.

Since reincarnation is a core belief, that after you die your soul is recycled into another being or another person, you want to live well enough that you are reborn in a higher caste, or at least no lower than you are now, and certainly not as another animal or insect because you did life poorly.

Along the way you want to achieve the second goal of pleasure in life.

This works out in a variety of ways, but in the end, if carried too far outside of marriage, it is just a theme of “if it feels good, do it.”

The third goal is to be prosperous, which is proof of living well.

The final and highest goal is Moksha, which is their word for salvation.

But for the Hindu, salvation is not about being with your Creator God who loves you; Moksha is escape from the recycled lives that mankind is stuck with until they are no longer a part of the well of souls that will have to do life all over again, and again, and again.

One needs a lot of good karma to get this far.

Buddhists claim they don’t really have a god, they are just wanting to achieve some kind of enlightenment like their idol, the Buddha, has apparently already done.

Yet we find evidences of the idololatry of Buddhism in the statues of Buddha in many cultures and sometimes looking very different, from a starving Buddha to a fat-and-happy Buddha.

The goal for a Buddhist is to escape the endless cycle of suffering and rebirth.

It can mean to be reincarnated enough times that you can finally figure out how to be rid of get life right, and so escape the suffering of this world which is fed by the passions of greed, hatred, and ignorance which mess up life as it should be.

Do it right, enough times, and you enter the nothingness of Nirvana where you no longer feel much of anything, forever.

In Thailand, the national religion is Buddhism, and it is illegal to do or say anything that dishonors their ideals about the Buddha.

It is considered disgraceful to have a tattoo of Buddha, even though you can buy all the images and idols of Buddha almost anywhere.

I could go on a long time, covering many more of the world’s religions, but that is not really my goal with you this morning.

Our question is this:

What Does It Mean to Know God?

Now, as I said, some of us might not have known that is a question at all.

Don’t we already know God if we believe in Him?

There is the term atheism.

It means no God.

not K-N-O-W God, but N-O God.

The atheist claims very certainly that there is no God.

God is just a human idea to explain things he hasn’t learned the science for.

There is no God, so you can’t know Him.

That’s the atheist’s belief, anyway.

You see, everyone believes something.

The agnostic belief takes a slightly different tack.

The word means “no knowledge”.

Maybe there is a God, but the very nature of a spiritual God who is so powerful and pre-existent to have made the whole universe make him unknowable.

There might be a God, but is no possible way to know God.

Then there is the Theist.

The atheist believes there is no God, but the Theist believes there is certainly a creator God.

Only, once God finished the six days of creation he just sat back and kept on resting.

Everything keeps on running according to how God set it up to run, and now God is pretty much hands-off.

Don’t expect any miracles.

Give up on the idea of salvation.

Instead, it is up to us, as humans, to make good use of what God has provided us so the most people can get the most benefit from it.

So what does it mean to know God?

Knowing God is Having a Relationship With God

This is different than knowing about God.

It is different than believing in God.

It is different than studying God.

It is different than having a good understanding of who God is.

Knowing God is only possible through a relationship with God.

Enoch, the seventh from Adam, Genesis 5:24 “24 Enoch walked with God; then he was not there because God took him.”

Enoch walked with God: He knew God, and the Lord spared him from death and took him from the earth.

By the way, Enoch was Noah’s great-grandfather.

And the scripture says, that even though humankind had become evil to the point that God lamented the fact that he ever made man, Genesis 6:8 “8 Noah, however, found favor with the Lord.”

Noah found favor with God because he knew God.

Moses tells us how important it is to know God, so you know who is your help and refuge:

God is the only one able to keep his covenants with us perfectly, extending His loyal love to us no matter what the future holds.

David was the apple of God’s eye!

Hear what he had to say in Psalm 17:6-9

Did you hear the trust that was in David’s heart as he said he would call on God and God would answer?

That’s because David ben Jesse knew God.

Their relationship was close enough that David could say he was like the apple of God’s eye.

Th prophet Hosea moves us to be sure that we know the Lord:

Without a knowledge of God, that is, a personal, relational knowledge of God, we will be adrift through all our lives.

We need God.

We need to know God.

We need to trust in God.

We need to count on God, we need to be the kind of people that God can count on because he knows how he knows us.

How Can We Know God?

That is a super good question.

It begins, surprisingly enough, when we stop talking about God, stop complaining to God, stop worrying about God, and just sit down, shut up, and enter into a quiet time of God settling in to your very being.

It’s this means of knowing God that is one of our first steps to really knowing God better.