What if the path to personal growth, comfort, and a different perspective on life was not in the self-help section of the bookstore, but in a closer relationship with God? That's where our exploration of God's attributes leads us. In this wrap-up episode of our series, we delve into how understanding God's sovereignty, immutability, goodness, and faithfulness has not only strengthened my faith but also profoundly influenced my outlook on life and the world.
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Check out the YouTube channel Faithfullyliven youtube.com/@faithfullyliven
Do you want to read about how to live faithfully? Check out the blog http://lyfe102.org
What if the path to personal growth, comfort, and a different perspective on life was not in the self-help section of the bookstore, but in a closer relationship with God? That's where our exploration of God's attributes leads us. In this wrap-up episode of our series, we delve into how understanding God's sovereignty, immutability, goodness, and faithfulness has not only strengthened my faith but also profoundly influenced my outlook on life and the world.
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Check out the YouTube channel Faithfullyliven youtube.com/@faithfullyliven
Do you want to read about how to live faithfully? Check out the blog http://lyfe102.org
Welcome to Faithfully Living, the podcast where we learn how to live for Christ in our daily lives. I am Dwaan, your host, and I would like to invite you on a journey with me to explore and learn how to be a faithful follower of Christ. Alright, so this is the end of our series on exploring the attributes of God and I just wanted to give just kind of like a reflection on this series. I'll kind of talk a little bit more freely in this episode about like I have an outline is talking about how this started, how's it going and then what can we take away from this series. So I guess how it started. If you don't know, I do have or I write a blog. It's called 102life102.org. You can check that out. I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 1:
So how my journey to talking about and studying about the attributes of God is by me writing about it on my blog. So usually I guess the process of me writing I usually like think of ideas and write about it almost probably about maybe six months before the actual blog post is published on my blog. So I wrote about the attributes of God on my blog in 2022, which was last year, so that means I started studying and reading about the attributes of God in 2021, probably August during that time. So that's where the idea of studying the attributes of God, because I had to not had to, but I wanted to write about it on my blog post. So the process of me writing on my blog post is that I do a lot of reading on the particular subject that I am going to write about, so I'll have some knowledge and that can be biblically sound in the things that I write, because I don't want to like leave people astray. So, as I was studying about, you know the attributes of God.
Speaker 1:
The more and more you learn about God it's you know the more you can learn to trust him and know who he is. So you know, as we read the Bible, we know that the Bible is a book about God, so we see God progressively reveal himself in scripture to us. So it helps us get a. It gives us a better understanding of who he is, what he can do, what his plan is for us, for those who believe in him, and then what the outcome is going to be at the at the end of time. So I guess we can talk about how's it going so studying these attributes of God. When I first wrote about them on my blog in 2021, I wrote about a number of them, so I had that time to read and study about each of them and then, as I launched my podcast, I read and studied about them again.
Speaker 1:
So this is probably like maybe a year and a half study in of not in, but of the attributes of God. So I've come to you, know, understand who God is, just a little bit better. You know, in our episode when we talked about the incomprehensibility of God, that you know we will never fully know who God is and, yeah, we will never fully know who God is. We only know the things that he has revealed to us, about him in his work to us. So, learning about the attributes of God, it has stritten my faith to know that God is going to always be true to who he is and His character, and he won't ever deviate from who he is as God. So, just to pick out a few of them, like the attributes, that most resonates with me even though I've talked about this before in the episodes previously that God's character and His attributes. Neither one of them are greater or more important than the others. They're all like on an equal plane with each other, so, but I guess I want to talk about the ones that most resonate with me, even though, like I say, they're all important and they're all relevant and equal.
Speaker 1:
So I have the sovereignty of God, his immutability, his goodness and His faithfulness, and I guess I've chosen these because of, I guess, the different experiences that I have had in my life and then, like the experiences that I'm having now and then, how I view the world, the circumstances that happen to either to me or my family, are to just, you know, just the things that happen in the world in general, and it helps me to have a different perspective when I look at those situations. So, when I look and remember and meditate on, like, the different character and attributes of God, it just has provided me with a different mindset of my outlook and, like I say, in different situations. So the sovereignty of God this is one I have. I guess you can say I will just maybe struggle with maybe struggle is not the right word, I guess the one that I've wrestled with, that's the good word wrestle with more because it's something that we have to just take in faith when we think about the sovereignty of God, that he has had a plan from the beginning of the world, well before the beginning of the world, because he is the eternal God, but His plan has already been laid out and that, even though you know my finite mind and our finite mind, we see, we think, we see contradictions and we always have these questions of why or why not God doesn't intervene in certain situations or why he allows certain things to happen. But when you take the sovereignty of God and look at it in the context of the why and the why not, and we see that he has a plan and that we know that God is good and we take into context all of the other attributes that he is His sovereignty, but we also have His goodness, his mercy, his grace, his wrath, his compassion, his faithfulness to us. When we look at all of those attributes together and we see His sovereignty, we have to I guess we just have to have faith and then we have to just believe in who God is and His character and knowing that he doesn't change, he's immutable. There's nothing to be afraid of if we are truly followers and we truly say that we have faith and we can believe in Him.
Speaker 1:
Ephesians 1-11 kind of illustrates this for us. It says furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we are received the inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance and he makes everything work out in his plan. So God has a plan, first of all, and because he has a plan, we can fully trust him to know that he's always in control and he has good things, his good things, in store for us, for those who believe in him. And then the next attribute that resonates is his immutability. So his immutability means that he doesn't change.
Speaker 1:
And I guess in working with people and interacting with people in my day-to-day job, I see how people change, I see how people are capricious and it's hard to trust people who change all the time or they don't have a word, and it's difficult. But I think the most important thing to remember when we think about the unchangingness, or that God doesn't change, he doesn't grow, he doesn't learn anything, as you know, as we as humans move through the world, is that he can be fully trusted. You know people, you know we have trust in people, but they're gonna let us down. That's just the you know the fact of us being simple people who have flaws, who are always gonna have flaws. Whether we get it right today, we have a potential or potential to not get it right tomorrow.
Speaker 1:
So in Malachi 3.6, it says God tells us I am the Lord, I do not change. And then Hebrews 3.8 says Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. So the fact that God tells us in his word that he doesn't change and that he is the same yesterday and today and forever, it's a promise that we can, you know, we can hold on to. So the things that God promises in his word, we know that they are true because he's not gonna go back on his word. We see this, you know, in the counts of, you know, abraham, when God promised him a son. God promised him a son, he promised him land and, you know, even though Abraham, you know, took things into his own hands, you know God was still faithful to, you know, give him the son that he had promised and gave him or gave the land to his descendants, as he had promised.
Speaker 1:
So all through the Bible, we can see the promises that God has made and then we can see the fulfillment of those promises. So we know that in Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve had sinned, god promised the Savior to the world and all through, like the Old Testament, we see, you can see how God shows us. He prophesies the coming of Christ to be the sacrifice for our sins and we see that, like the combination of that in the, in the Gospels in the New Testament Matthew, mark, luke and John we see where you know, god's promise is fulfilled. So, like I say, we see that because God is unchanging, we can, we can trust his promises because he's not gonna go back on his promises. Alright, next is going to be God's goodness.
Speaker 1:
So when we think about all the other attributes I talked about, that resonates when we think about God's goodness. This is also helpful to look at it in conjunction with God's being. You know, not being able to change this, unchanging this of God, his immutability. So when we think of God's goodness, or when we think about goodness, god is the ultimate standard for goodness. So when we say something is wrong or that's not right, that standard comes from God, because God has laid a foundation and is word to what is good and what is bad. So God is that foundation for us.
Speaker 1:
In James 1, 17,. It says whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God, our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes our castes shattering. So James is telling us that everything that's good and is perfect, that happens in our lives, are from God, and that's something that we know and you know we should believe because God has given this to us. Psalms 84, 11 says God will withhold no good things from those who do right, and Psalms 145, 9 says God is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all of his creations.
Speaker 1:
So, thinking about you know that God is good, and being thankful, you know that God's attribute is good and that the things that he does is going to be in the best interest of us, or us as believers, to know that you know God is good and that we can trust that he's good and he's never going to be, he's never going to be not good. He's always the highest good, the standard for which you know we strive to be, even though we'll fall short. That's one thing we can always trust. Trust in him, alright. And then the last thing is going to be God's faithfulness. So this is one that you know truly resonates with me because and it kind of leans back on, you know, like the goodness of God, because God is good, because he's unchanging, because he's sovereign, he has a plan. We can trust in his faithfulness.
Speaker 1:
Deuteronomy 7-9 says Know, therefore, that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God. So having trust in someone is, you know, something that I think, something that we all hold near and dear. When we we can trust someone to, you know, keep the word, it gives us a sense of, like, security and I guess security and trust and comfort. So knowing that you know God, the all-powerful, the creator of heaven and earth, knowing that he's good and that he, he's always faithful to help us in times of trouble, when we struggle, it, I could say, provides us with a sense of you know, comfort and something that we can hold on to. Even in, even in the darkest moments of our lives, we know that God is always going to be there with us, he's always going to be there for us and he's always going to give us something good, even out of that situation. All right.
Speaker 1:
So what can we take away from this series on the attributes of God? So I think one thing it should shape our view of how we look at God, how we view Him, how we understand Him and then, most of all that, how we trust Him. So I can say, when I started studying the attributes of God, it's helped me to view situations in my life and the situations that I encounter through the lens of who God is, knowing that first of all, like I said when I talked about His sovereignty, that he has a plan, like everything that happens to us is all a part of the plan. I like to call it the plan because it's God's plan and it just, you know, think about, okay, it's the plan. And then, knowing whose plan it is it's God's plan and then understanding that, because God is good, he gives good things to His children and to those that love Him. So I know that the plan, it's gonna have good in it and that good is going to be for me and ultimately to bring glory to God.
Speaker 1:
You know, as believers, you know our purpose is. Our purpose in life while we're still on this earth is to, you know, to make Him known or to glorify Him and to make Him known. So, whatever we do, whatever God's plan is for us in our lives, it's gonna bring glory to Him. The plan includes bringing glory to Him and a part of that plan is for us to you know, make God known, even in our circumstances or just in our everyday life, that we should try to find ways to you know, make God known, share the goodness of God, share the you know saving grace of God's salvation, his sacrifice that he gave to us through His Son, and to, just, you know, try in all our lives to glorify Him in whatever, whatever we do.
Speaker 1:
So I hope this series was helpful to you in understanding, you know, the attributes of God and hopefully it can, it can shape your view of how you, you know, look at the world around you. Hopefully it inspires you to dig deeper into the word and, to you know, spend that time with God every day so that you know you can learn to trust and trust and love Him more. So, as I end, I always like to say my phrase at the end that you know, just remember that God is always good and he's always faithful. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Do me a favor by following the podcast and leaving a review to help spread the word. I look forward to hearing from you.