Text: Various
Topic: How God reveals himself

• Illustration: Shelley describes growing up during the black-and-white era of television.
• Is your spiritual life a mean and uninteresting acknowledgment of a bad news, black-and-white God?
• Christians have a tendency to make the gospel sound decidedly grim, hopeless, and unappealing, as if the burden is entirely on your shoulders.
• Fortunately, the Lord has revealed himself to us as beautiful, creative, and soul enriching.
• Without trusting the Sovereign Lord and enjoying the Creative Lord, we can neither fully experience nor fully communicate his gospel.
• God has revealed himself to everyone through creation (general revelation), and he has revealed more specific truth to his people through his Word (special revelation).

• Before God ever made known the specifics of his character and purposes for his creation, he revealed himself through his creation.
• We grow in awareness through physically experiencing the wonders of creation.
• With all our knowledge, we are increasingly impressed by the masterful complexity pointing to a super-intelligent Designer.
• Two things should be obvious in light of all the artistry around us: there is a higher knowledge, and his power is beyond limit.
• When Job demanded an explanation from God for what he had suffered, God spread before him the wonders of creation.
• Like Job, the psalmists, prophets, and even Jesus call forth praise for the wonders of creation.
  • Illustration: Shelley describes a time he was overawed by God's creation during a visit to the ocean.
• We can see God's invisible realities because of the wonderful imagination we inherit as people made in the image of God, and because of his special revelation.
• Don't miss the creative wonder of the Artist's masterwork.

• The ancients believed that language was our direct link to the divine element that gives meaning to all of life.
• According to John 1:1–3, God made himself known to us by means of his logos, his Word.
• God has revealed himself in a special way to his chosen people through his written Word, the Bible.
• God's Word is story—the record of the actions of God in direct relation to his people.
• When we treat God's Word as if it were a reference tool, we dissect it and end up taking what we want and ignoring the rest, becoming blind to the overarching work of God through history.
• The form in which God gave us his Word is not accidental; the whole story was necessary in order for us to know and follow him.
• The Bible opens in Genesis with poetry; it has rhythm, form, and flow.
• The Lord summarizes creation, but he does not trivialize it.
• The Bible ends with the Revelation, which is written in the most intricate of poetic literature to vividly contrast the horrors of our fallen world with the glories of Christ's reign.
• The opening and closing passages of the Bible emphasize the unending, extravagant wonders of our Creator.
• Between Genesis and Revelation, the Lord unfolds a story of real people in real places who learn to deal with real struggles in their relationship with God in a fallen and broken world.
• There are also five books of pure poetry that grapple with the mysteries of suffering, human passion, and practical living.
• The Psalms call us 36 times to sing; a third of those songs are psalms of complaint dealing with grief, suffering, and the human struggle to understand.
• The Prophets turn the conversation around; using powerful and colorful poetry, God pours out his heart to stubborn, self-destructive people.
• The gospel is there, over and over again, in poetic, heart-wrenching, and graphic language.
• Ultimately God spoke his Word in human flesh (John 1:14).
• The four Gospels are called "Gospels" because they record God's entrance onto the human stage.
• The Gospel writers make every effort to frame the story in historical terms.
• When Jesus of Nazareth spoke to crowds of people, he did not describe mere theoretical concepts, but rather a Kingdom radically different from the kingdoms of the world.
• The story culminates in Jesus' being crucified by Roman soldiers on a hill outside Jerusalem, the righteous dying in place of the unrighteous, to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18).
• We dare not lose sight of the fact that God has revealed himself to us in a wonderful story in which he is the main character.
• Don't turn this amazing story into a mere formula; the Lord, whose gospel we proclaim, captivates and defines us.
• Don't miss the creative wonder of the Artist's masterwork.

• Illustration: Robert Culver tells in The Living God of a woman who, after hearing the gospel for the first time, replied, "I always thought there ought to be a God like that."
• Without a personal relationship with the source, you can only believe an abstraction.
• Because of sin, we all start out spiritually dead.
• Conversion is God's means of transforming our deadness into his spiritual life.
• His life is then present in us through his indwelling; that is, God brings his Holy Spirit into our dead existence and makes us living bodies.
• Through conversion we can know God in a personal, relational way; this is called "subjective revelation."
• We grow in this knowledge as a newborn grows in knowledge in relationship to her parents.
• God always brings life by his Word.
• We can't give ourselves spiritual life, but he speaks it into us through his Word.
• We receive his life by hearing his Word, receiving it in faith, and confessing that Jesus is Lord.
• Don't miss the creative wonder of the Artist's masterwork.

• God's people are formed to declare the praises of the One who brought them from darkness into his wonderful light (1 Peter 2:9).
  • Illustration: In Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis explains the relationship between enjoyment and praise.
• To be creative is to be a participant in the life-giving, soul-expanding, glory-extending activity of God.
• If you don't know him as more than a religious concept, now is the time to call on him to reveal his living presence in your life.

For the full text of this sermon, go to "The Colorful Creator."