Introduction: The most important thing about us

Have you ever met someone who seems to live a life so beautiful and good that it made you wonder, How can I get for myself a life like that? When I think of such a life, one of the people who comes to mind is Aiden Wilson Tozer. A. W. Tozer grew up in the early part of the last century. While walking home from his job at a tire company one day, the teenage Tozer heard a street preacher say: "If you don't know how to be saved, just call on God." The invitation struck something deep in the boy. "Help me know you, God," he prayed. There began one of the great journeys of discovering God ever recorded.

Though he had no formal theological training, Tozer set about trying to learn from the Scriptures everything about the nature and personality of God he could. That process of inquiry completely transformed his life. He went on to pastor for some thirty years the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago. Tozer wrote more than 40 books, among them The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, widely regarded now as among the great Christian classics. Though his intellect and leadership brought him tremendous fame and wealth, Tozer was known for maintaining a remarkably sane and simple life. He and his wife Ada never owned a car, preferring to ride buses and trains in order to have more time to observe God's creation, ponder life, and talk with regular people. To the very end of his days, Tozer signed away the majority of the royalties he earned from his published work to help people in need.

In one of his books, Tozer wrote something that still challenges me today: "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us …. Man's spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God." Chuck Colson adds that no culture has ever been greater than its idea of God either, because it is the cult of beliefs that gives rise to a culture. A society will be as "pure or base" as the people within it "entertain high or low thoughts of God," said Tozer. And if you ponder this, you will see that it is true.

What we think of God

If we believe there is no ultimate standard for life and love, or if we think of God as like an indulgent grandfather, then our morals will tend to become primarily matters of convenience or fashion, won't they? If our dominant idea of God is that he is an angry judge, it will create in us a psychology of anxiety or maybe a religion of jihad. If we think of God as a distant deity largely unconcerned with human life, or as someone content with being our celestial 911 service, or as a being particularly enamored with our party, nation, or tribe, then this, too, will profoundly shape the way we move through life. We do our religion and politics, our parenting and working, our hating or relating with others out of the ideas about God that we consciously or unconsciously hold. What comes into your mind when you think about God? If Tozer was right, then your answer to that question is the most important thing about you.

In his wonderful book The Good and Beautiful God, James Bryan Smith suggests that our particular ideas about God are formed fairly early in life. They get shaped by the narratives and experiences of our family, our society, and the religious circles we have inhabited. These understandings of God "once in place," writes Smith, "determine much of our behavior," whether they are accurate and helpful or not. "Once these stories are stored in our minds, they stay there largely unchallenged until we die." They tend to run us or ruin us, says Smith. It is, therefore, tremendously important that we have in our minds truly accurate ideas about God.

This is why I am inviting you to spend the next several weeks going on a journey of discovery as A. W. Tozer did. I want to invite you to join us in looking through the Bible for a vision, not of the God we may have gotten locked into seeing long ago, but of the God who really is—the God who Jesus knows. We're going to look together at just eight of a much longer list of attributes of the character of God the Bible reveals to us and see if a fresh vision of these doesn't alter our life for the better, as it did for A. W. Tozer and countless others through history. We begin this morning by considering an attribute that theologians simply call "the sufficiency of God."

The insufficiency of God?

My own initial thoughts about God were formed during my elementary school years at the church our family attended. Doing Sunday properly in those days required wearing "church clothes," a painfully uncomfortable uniform God apparently required in order to know if we were really serious about him. God needed us to go to Sunday school in a mildewed basement. He needed us to sit on hard wooden pews. God needed us to sing songs from George Washington's time, accompanied by musicians who clearly got their training at a funeral parlor.

Even though I now know that I was missing the point, the idea got planted in my mind nonetheless that church was basically about meeting God's needs. He needs us to dress up and tell him how great he is. God needs us to read his Book and sing his songs, so they won't go out of print. God needs us to give money to his church and volunteer for all his activities so that his organization can go on. Can any of you relate to this? Even after we grow up, many of us are still left with this idea that the spiritual life is all about oughts and shoulds and musts, because there is just so much we need to do for God. He needs us to give. He needs us to work harder. He needs us to defend him out there in the world. God, we can come to think, is somehow insufficient without all we do to meet his needs.

The sufficiency of God

The Apostle Paul met a similar mindset in the people of Athens long ago. The Athenians had erected shrines and spiritual symbols on almost every street corner. They'd made a business out of doing church for all kinds of gods. To make sure they'd covered all the bases, they'd even put up an altar with this inscription: "To an Unknown God." They were relentless in at least superficially attending to the needs of any possible deity. This is the new thought Paul sought to plant in their minds:

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. "For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:24-28).

The message of the Bible is that God does not need anything from us. He does not need our service. He does not need our temples, our religious ceremonies, or our affirmations of his worth. He does not need our nation or political parties. He does not need our efforts to set the dress code, the times and places for meeting him, and otherwise organize reality on his behalf. He does not need us to understand him, nor does he feel any obligation to account for himself.

"Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God," wrote the psalmist (Psalm 90:2). Before the universe or anything we see and are came into being, God already was and always would be God. He was and is perfectly content, joyful, and completely fulfilled in simply being himself—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is not lonely. He is not in need of a human project to keep himself busy. If you and I and this entire reality we call life went poof! and was no more, God would go on very happily. God is self-existing, self-perpetuating, and self-satisfying. The first and most important attribute of God necessary for us to grasp is that God is utterly sufficient in and of himself.

The mystery is that this self-sufficient being freely chose to create a species that could come to know him. The Bible teaches that God desires for you and me to live in relationship with him. He desires of us to discover the glory of his love and life. But the fact that he should desire to bless us in this way should not confuse us into thinking for even a second that it was because he somehow needs us or would be less without us. On the contrary, it is we who need him. It is we who are less, truly nothing, without him.

Conclusion

Together with Christians around the world today, we've dressed up in some measure and come to some building someplace. We've gathered beneath tall steeples or in mildewed basements, before a radio or video screen, not to meet any need in God, but because, despite our blinding pride, we are at least dimly aware that after all these centuries of trying to work out life on our own, some of us have discovered how much we truly need God. We need his love to change our broken relationships and fragmented politics. We need his peace to quiet our anxious minds and restless hearts. We need his wisdom to guide us through the maze of choices ahead. We need his forgiveness to lift the weight of all that has gone wrong in our character.

This God who does not need anything from us at all has nonetheless desired to come to us in the person of Jesus to offer us everything we truly need. He says: "My grace is sufficient for you" (2 Corinthians 12:9). My power can flow into all those places where you are weak. So open yourself to me. Feed richly and drink deeply of my sufficiency, and I will give you my life.

Dan Meyer is pastor of Christ Church.us, a nondenominational, multisite church with locations in Oak Brook and Lombard, Illinois.