This sermon was preached at Mt. Gilead UMC in Georgetown, KY.

If you want to listen to the whole worship service, click this first link below.

Mt. Gilead UMC Worship – 2021-05-30

If you want to listen only to the sermon, click this second link below.

God’s Not Boring

Psalm 139:23-24

Introduction

I’m not sure what to make of my sermon last week. I shared with you a lot about my family and our kids. I shared what God’s been teaching me, about how my first reaction to their misbehavior should not be sternness and yelling kind of like Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Instead, I shared that we are children in the hands of a loving Father. This might be the last time I share something so very personal and revealing in a sermon, because I tell you what, Paige and I just had our hands full all week, every day with behavior challenges that forced me so much to have to practice what I just preached. I feel like I failed at it this past week. It was such a difficult week. I feel like I was eating my words. It’s like when I point at you with one finger, I’ve got three pointing back at me. God was like, Tim, you haven’t mastered this yet. Or like Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader often tell Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, do not underestimate the power of the dark side. So that was our week. How was yours? But regardless of all of our failures this past week, we are loved, we are forgiven, and everything is okay, because God’s got us. Jesus has got us in his loving arms.

Trinity Sunday

So this Sunday is what we call Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost where we celebrate the beauty of the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now most Christians and even lots of pastors cringe when asked to explain the Trinity: how is there one God in three Persons? Isn’t that three Gods? Or isn’t one the boss of the other? After all, fathers are over sons. There are so many questions when it comes to how that all works and lots of Christians throughout the last 2,000 plus years have been pondering all of what it means that there is one God in three Persons.

So as I started to prepare for this sermon, I thought to myself, I should get all of my theology books that talk about the doctrine of the Trinity and share some amazing intellectual insight into how we can understand the triune God better, because that’s what people need: more knowledge, more information, more understanding. Not really, but that’s where my mind initially goes. And as I get all of my theology books, and they’re the best ones out there, I start reading and I trudge through one and as I’m starting the second one I found myself just completely and utterly bored. I was bored out of my mind, nearly falling asleep. Bored…reading about God, the triune God. And this is not because I don’t like reading or because I don’t like intellectual and academic discussions, because believe me I do! And it certainly wasn’t because God is boring! And in that moment, it hit me that we, Christians, are so very good at making God sound boring. We are so good at it! We make the Christian life and walk with Jesus sound utterly boring—a yawn fest! We’re so good at it. No wonder fewer and fewer people are in church today or have never even experienced church. For some of them, I think it’s a good thing: Good, spare yourselves of how boring we are! And how boring we talk about God, even in explanations about how our one God is three Persons.

I won’t bore you with examples—you’re welcome—but just know that I was snoozing, and I’m a professional theologian and doctor of the Bible and all things Christian. And I think that is part of the problem; people like me are the problem, people who have studied and studied and studied, and studied so much that we think that God can be found in a book or that proper understanding of a book will bring us salvation. We think that God can be studied and examined and analyzed. We even call ourselves Masters of Divinity. Wow! Talk about thinking quite highly of ourselves. More like Mastered by Divinity, I should hope! We think that we can put God in the laboratories of our minds, so that we can look him over in a controlled environment and do experiments on him, perhaps even dissect Him to discover what he’s really made of: “Well, this part here is a portion of the Father, and this part over here is the Son, and this part that no one knows what to do with is the Holy Spirit.” And I know that it sounds cliché and is a cliché, but we really are putting God in a box.

Now I know that scholars like myself are not the only ones who put God in a box. I’m sure that you’ve done this too. We limit God. We say, “God, this is who you are and what you can do and this is who you aren’t and what you can’t do.” Oh, really! There’s something that God can’t do? Well, I suppose God can’t lift something heavier than himself. But there we go again, analyzing God, trying to fit him into our minds with our finite, feeble little minds.

And so, here I was, bored to death reading a detailed history of everything said by the most important theologians throughout the past 2,000 years about God being three-in-one, and it just didn’t do it for me. I don’t imagine that it’d do it for you either.

God’s Not Boring

But you know what? It actually taught me a really important lesson; I learned something and it wasn’t from the book—it’s that God isn’t boring. God’s not boring. Say that to your neighbor this morning, to the person sitting next to you. God’s not boring. God’s not boring. You can’t find him in a book. Like the angel said to the women at Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning, I declare to us, “He’s not here!” He’s not in a book! He’s the living God. And I’ll even go so far to say that God himself is not even “in” the Bible. Yes, the Bible is inspired by God, but he doesn’t live and breathe and have his being within this book. No, instead, this book lives, breathes, and has its being because God has spoken it. And the good book, the Holy Bible tells of the God in whom we live and breathe and have our being. It tells of a God who is living, who always has been, who is now, and who always will be; a God who is eternal, who is uncreated; a God who is “somewhere out there” and yet also closer than our very breath in here. This book is not where God dwells, but it tells where God dwells—“Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?” This book is not the place where God works, but it tells of where and how God works; past, present, future. God is working right here and right now and living right here and right now in and among our very lives. God is in our world: Immanuel, God with us!

And I found myself after all of this saying, “Lord, I’m done studying you. I’m done examining you and analyzing you. Instead, Lord, study me, examine me, analyze me.” As the Psalmist in our reading this morning said, “Search me, O God, and know my heart” (Psalm 139:23). Not the other way around. Our job isn’t to examine God, but for God to examine us. “Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:24). So I said, “Lord, study and examine me. I don’t want to study you anymore. I want to know you. I want to worship you. I want to praise you.”

God doesn’t call us to know everything about him. It doesn’t say that God credited Abraham’s knowledge as righteousness. It says that God credited Abraham’s faith as righteousness. And Hebrews says that no one can please God without faith (Heb 11:6). We must come to him in faith believing who he is. Faith is what pleases God, that is, truly trusting and knowing him. John says, “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). And it was St. Anslem who defined the Christian life as “faith seeking understanding.” It’s not the other way around; we don’t first try to understand fully everything about God and then believe, instead we believe in him and then seek more understanding. But above that, we seek God himself.

So God’s not in a book and God’s not boring. Yes, he is three-in-one, but that shouldn’t evoke confusion in our minds. It should evoke worship and awe in our hearts. Let’s not try to understand God better this morning, but let’s try to worship him better. Let’s try to praise him better. Let’s try to be amazed at who he is, that God is love and light and Creator and healer and Father and joy itself. God is not boring. Jesus is not boring. The Holy Spirit is not boring. As Paul said, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (Rom 11:33-36). Happy Trinity Sunday! Amen.