2022 09 27 Wake up and Smell the Coffee

The speaker discusses how we can know that God is good. He uses the analogy of coffee to explain that just as there is a range of quality in coffee, there is also a range in our understanding and experience of God's goodness. The speaker encourages us to taste and see that the Lord is good and emphasizes the importance of accepting God and having a personal relationship with Him. The speaker also addresses common questions about God's goodness and explains that belief in God, or non-belief, ultimately comes down to faith. The speaker concludes by urging us to interact with God in the way He intended, deepening our relationship with Him and allowing His goodness to be reflected in our lives. I, once again, have the pleasure of being your speaker tonight, and tonight I'm going to be talking about how we can know that God is good. So, my message tonight is called Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, and we'll get to why it's called that in a minute, but first, let's jump into some scripture. So, I'm going to be reading tonight from Psalm 34, starting in verse 8, and we'll go on to 12. So, taste and see that the Lord is good, O the joys of those who take refuge in him. Fear the Lord, you his godly people, for those who fear him will have all they need. Even strong young lions sometimes go hungry, but those who trust in the Lord will lack no good thing. So, does anyone here love coffee? Anyone like coffee? Yes? A few coffee drinkers? Okay. So, I'm not the biggest coffee fanatic you'll meet, but I do like coffee. I like tea, too, but I like a good cup of coffee. Hannah and I, though, probably even more than we like coffee, we like being thrifty where we can. So, you know, here and there, we'll go out to Timmy's or somewhere and get coffee, but for the most part, we try to make it much cheaper for us, make at home, and then we can have it at home because it's much cheaper for us. The thing, though, that I find about coffee, even compared to tea, is there's an incredible range of quality when it comes to coffee. Tea is tea for the most part, but there's good coffee and there's bad coffee, and there's a huge range in between. And you may have tried coffee before, maybe you didn't like it, and it could have been the quality of the coffee. When I first started drinking coffee, it took me a while to realize that at the time, I didn't really like coffee. I liked sugar. So, I always had the mochas, the lattes, all these fancy ones, right, so much sugar, and then I tried coffee just black, and I was like, is this motor oil? What am I drinking? This is horrific, right? But really what it was is the sugar and the milk and all the stuff that I was putting in was masking the coffee that I have had. I'm not going to talk about coffee all night, just so you know. But my favorite coffee that I have ever had is from a place called Rhino Coffee. They started up in Tofino, they just opened a new one in Langford, and they have this really great coffee. So, when they opened up in Langford, we were really excited, we went and we bought some coffee that we could take home, and kind of an interesting thing happened when we got home. We had a great big canister of McDonald's coffee from Costco, like the big can, right, at home. And we were pretty happy with this coffee, we thought it was pretty good, you know. So, we got home, I smelled our McDonald's coffee, and I'm like, this smells okay, and then I smelled this freshly ground, you know, high quality coffee, and it smelled so much better. And then, I smelled the McDonald's coffee again, it didn't even smell like coffee anymore by comparison, it just smelled like chemicals, like, I don't know, or a carpet or something. It was really not good, right? The reason that I'm telling you all this, though, is because had I not tried that higher quality coffee, I could have gone on living my life having this McDonald's coffee, and being perfectly happy with that, until I'd experienced something greater than anything I'd experienced before, and I couldn't go back on it anymore. You know, some of you may be sitting here today perfectly happy with your life as it is, without Jesus, or maybe with Jesus kind of in the back of your mind, and you're happy with how things are. But when you taste and see, as we just read, that God is good, you can't go back. So today, let's all wake up and smell the coffee together, okay? So that brings me to my big idea for tonight, which is for us to see how God is good, we have to be willing to accept Him. A lot of people have questions in life about how can God be good if, fill in the blank with whatever latest strategy is on the news, or in someone's personal life, right? How can God be good if blank? But we have to be able to be willing to accept Him to be able to even see that He is good, right? I can't know that that coffee is good unless I taste it, right? Which brings me to my first point for us tonight, which is we don't know how good something is until we try it. Do we hear like a review reader, yeah? So Hannah is a review reader. I am not a review reader, okay? At best, I don't go to restaurants and then be like, what's their star rating on Google or on Yelp? I just go, you know? And maybe with movies, reads the reviews before we don't want to read the review because there's too many spoilers, that kind of thing. Hannah reads the reviews before we go to restaurants and then like, I don't know, no, we're not going to this place. It's no good, right? And, you know, she saved us from going to some bad places before. But I learned something really interesting about reviews online recently. There was an article on Forbes.com and a gentleman named Saoud Khalifa, he's the CEO of Fakespot, said that companies on Amazon constantly plant positive reviews on their own products and sully competitors' products with negative reviews. He says that as a result, many of the ratings you read online aren't credible. For example, up to 70% of the reviews on Amazon are not real. Some of us have in our lives been hurt by people who went to church or claimed to be Christian, but that review isn't an accurate reflection of who God himself is. It's not a direct experience, it's just a review. We never really know what it's like to live in a relationship with God unless we're willing to accept him, not just as our savior, the one who saved us from our sins, but as our Lord, the one who directs the steps of our life and who we try to pattern our life after. Which brings me to my second point for you tonight. We can't experience something if we're unwilling to believe it exists. I've met a lot of people, and again, going back to that question, can God be good? But they're not even willing to start with the notion that maybe he exists. There's many scientific things that do, I believe, in fact, point to the existence of God, which we don't have time to look into tonight, but if you're curious, I encourage you to look up Mark Clark's books, The Problem of God and The Problem of Jesus, they go into a lot of really interesting, at least introductions for those scientific proofs. Even the apostle Paul in the Bible said that there are, it's not on the slides, but in Proofs to the Existence of God, I'm just going to read this one for you, it's not on the slides, but in Romans 1, 19 to 20, it says, They, meaning all people, know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and the sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, so they have no excuse for not knowing God. You and I, as believers, have a part to play in telling others about Jesus, but even God's creation speaks about him and speaks to the evidence of him. But at the end of the day, we know these proofs don't always convince people. I can look at creation and clearly see the evidence of an intelligent designer, someone else can look at it and see random chance and evolution and all that kind of stuff. But both of those positions do ultimately come down to faith. In the podcast series Questioning Christianity, pastor and author Tim Keller points out that not only is believing God, in God, a faith position, but so is believing that God does not exist. If we can't definitively prove something or someone exists, the belief in their existence or non-existence is a faith position. People often assume, and maybe people have told you this before, that I don't believe in God because I'm scientific or I'm rational or logical. I mean, that's simply, that's not intellectually honest. We have a wonderful gentleman with us tonight who is a scientist and believes in God and he's a rational individual who believes. If someone told us, someone came in here from outside right now and told us there's a hundred cream pies in the foyer of the church, we would either have to take their word for it or doubt them. So if us in this room say, you know, we did a poll and some of you said, I think he's telling the truth, some of you said, no, I think he's lying, ultimately it would be based on whether or not we trust what he's saying. But none of us would be able to prove or disprove that there's a hundred cream pies in there until somebody goes out and sees for themselves and experiences it. And then when they come back and tell us, it's not proof to us until we personally go out and experience it. Until we experience God in our life, it's simply a position of belief. And unfortunately for the skeptic, the reverse is not true. We can't say, I've never experienced God, therefore that means he's not real. That's no more proof that there is no God than it is to say, I haven't seen the pies, therefore they don't exist. So how can we get real evidence? How can we get real proof, a real experience with God? That brings me to my last point for you guys. We can't experience something we don't interact with in the way it was meant to be interacted with. Is anybody here pretty handy? Okay, we've got a couple of pretty handy few. I feel better because I'm not very handy and very few hands went up, so I feel a lot better right now. Hannah can tell you, yeah, I'm not very handy. I'm good with words, I'm creative, but I'm not a contractor or a paraman. What I do know about tools though is, they only work if you use them the way that they were meant to be used for the job they were designed for, interacted with, the results when you interact with them the way they were meant to be interacted with. So if I have a hammer and I hold it upside down, it won't be very good for nailing in nails. It might kind of get the job done and if I try to use it to cut things, like a saw, because I've seen that that tool does that before, I'm going to conclude, this is a terrible tool. It's horrible at cutting things. The saw was a great tool at cutting things, but this thing, this is terrible. But a construction worker or a contractor might say to me, Chris, no, actually, a hammer is a great tool. And I'd say, well, I just used a hammer and it was awful, you don't know what you're talking about as I sit here trying to saw the table in half with the hammer. And what if I went around telling everybody else that hammers are no good based on my experience? The reality is that it's much the same with people who may have been hurt by the church or somebody who believed in God or maybe, maybe they went to church and they didn't really engage. They just, they just sat there and just like, you know, they didn't really engage with God's word or try and look into it further, or maybe somebody treated them poorly. And so they decided it wasn't for them. It wasn't, it wasn't good. But the question will never come down to what your church experience, Jesus doesn't, it will come down to what you did with Jesus. Jesus doesn't want to be your casual acquaintance. He doesn't want to be the, you know, great uncle that you see at Thanksgiving sometimes. He wants to be your best friend. He wants to be more than your best friend. He wants to be the one who gives your life meaning and direction. And maybe in the past, you've come to church, maybe you've prayed a prayer, but all you did after that was try and change your behavior. So you could be like the other Christians you see, well, they don't, they don't swear when someone cuts them off in traffic. So I'm going to try and, you know, say, Oh sugar, when they cut me off. And it's, that's, that's going to make the difference of it all. But real change comes from the heart, from the inside out. It's not about behavior modification. It's not about dressing a certain way, talking a certain way, none of that really matters. It comes from the inside out. It's not about behavior changes. It's about a relationship with a God who created you and who loves you. He wants to speak through his word and through prayer and through the movement of the Holy Spirit in your life. And ultimately, as I've said to different people at different times, I don't care if you go home and remember anything that I said tonight. I care that you will remember something that God said to you tonight. Whether it was from the song, whether it was from something I said or directly from his word, I care that that's what gets across to you tonight, because this, you ate the food that we just ate and you didn't eat anything between now and next Tuesday. You would be very hungry, right? You can't live off of, off of this, but you can live off of this. You can live off of the relationship that you develop with Jesus yourself. If, uh, if this relationship sounds good to you, if it sounds like something you want in your life, something you've been missing, then I want you to, we're going to pray in a moment, but I want you to consider coming to the front when we pray, and I'll explain a bit more about that in a minute, or maybe you have that relationship with God, but you feel that you've treated God with less importance than you know he really deserves. And you want to rekindle that relationship with him. You can also come up to the front when I pray or when we're singing our last song. Maybe you're nervous to do that, and I'm not going to feel you, make you feel guilty or say you have to come to the front, there's nothing special about coming to the front. What is relevant about it, what I have found relevant about it in my own life, is that sometimes taking a physical action, a physical step, helps it become more real to us. And whenever you see the front area of this sanctuary in the future, you will be reminded of that physical step that you made, and the spiritual reservoir, he's everywhere for you. But God can meet you equally right where you are. He's everywhere, whether it's when you're sitting now, whether you're in Walmart later, and he's still speaking to you then, he can meet with you. And I'll leave that between you and God. But I ask you that if you want to start a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, or rekindle one, that you'll pray with me in a minute. And I want you to remember as we pray that it's not about praying a prayer now. I think we've often associated those things closely, that we see that as just, yeah, I pray to Paris, oh, you know, I'm a Christian. I think of it a little bit more like a wedding ceremony, right? You go to a wedding ceremony, that is the beginning of a marriage, but it isn't the marriage. It's a ceremony that starts things. But that relationship has to continue lifelong, or, you know, that's only one part of it. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, I just pray for everyone here that they would know that you are a good God, really know in their heart. That they would experience you today in a fresh, new way. And that that would kick off either a new relationship or a new phase in their relationship with you, a new closeness. Lord, I ask this for myself, too, as I'm praying, Lord, this is all of us. We're all in this together right now, Lord. And I know that every single one of us, no matter how close we are with you, could be closer to you, could have more of you in our life. Lord, and we ask, Lord, to experience you, Lord, distractions, Lord, that make it hard for us to hear you, to experience you, Lord, that you would help us to be able to navigate through those distractions, to hear you, Lord, to get into your word, to grow in our relationships, Lord. And I pray that experiencing your goodness in us today, Lord, as we go forward, would be something that would be reflected out of us to those around us, Lord, those people we know that need your love, that need that touch, that experience of your goodness as well. We just pray for them, Lord. I know that people may be having names coming to mind right now or faces, if they're a more visual person, that are popping into their mind of people in their life who they wish either would come to know you or take their relationship with you more seriously, Lord. We pray for those people right now, Lord. We also pray for everyone in this room. I pray for myself even, Lord, that I would become a better reflection of you by getting to know you more, Lord. So, Lord, as we go into this song, Lord, help us to reflect on the ways, Lord, that it's so easy for the enemy to bring up memories of the bad things that have happened to our life, and those things tend to stick with us, Lord, but you've done good in our life too, Lord. And we pray that you would bring those to our remembrance now, in Jesus' name, amen.