LISTEN to God is…
I have a deep desire and passion for our church to know the story of GOD from beginning to end. The majority of what we have taught at Ethos thus far has been from the New Testament. The New Testament explicitly talks about Jesus, the Son of God, and so we study Him and we read the things he taught and we implement them and we could spend our whole lives reading Matthew-Revelation and it would be a great use of our time. But the story of Jesus, his showing up on the map didn’t happen in Matthew, he is in the Old Testament as well. We miss out on so much when we skip over the Old Testament and start in Matthew.
It would be like you picking up a book about John Wooden that was only about the last 2 months of his life. John Wooden lived an incredible life, he won 10 NCAA basketball championships at UCLA, a number that hasn’t even been on the radar of any other coach in NCAA history, he was a godly man that loved the Lord and stressed the fact that GOD always took priority over basketball and he did many other things to advance GOD’s kingdom on earth and yet if we pick up the book and start at 2 months before He died we miss out on a lot of the important things that he did and the things that he was a part of. And yet we love to treat scripture this way. We only read this tiny portion of Jesus’ life that documents what he did on earth and we consequently miss out on all of the things he has been doing since the creation of this world. For the next five weeks, we’re going to be looking at passages from the book of Isaiah, a book found in the Old Testament, where we will be attempting to develop a clearer understanding of who GOD is and how He has been working all throughout history.
I know that a lot of us view GOD in a lot of different ways and for a variety of reasons. Some of us view GOD as this angry man that we have to be extremely careful around, it’s like we’re walking on eggshells around him, trying not to upset him, because if we do bother him or mess up, he will pour his anger and wrath out on us. And some of us view GOD as this white-bearded, fat old man-like Santa Claus or like our Grandfather- that gives us whatever we want as long as we’re good. And some of us view GOD as this distant Spirit that is somewhere in heaven, but is not on earth. He is not close. He got things going and then distanced himself from us, leaving us to figure all of this out by ourselves. And some of us don’t believe there is a GOD at all. I want to invite you to come and study the book of Isaiah with us as we allow GOD to teach us the truth about who He is and what he has been doing.
Brandon Steele
Leader | Community and House Churches
