Who Is God Anyway?

Did you know that our beliefs about God can affect the way we relate to Him and therefore affects the quality of our life? Our experiences with our earthly fathers and other authority figures have influenced our concept of God as Father.

The more negative or painful our earthly relationships, the more distorted our view of our heavenly Father is likely to be. Thankfully, we can know our heavenly Father as He really is through Jesus and by renewing our mind with scripture. The more we know God as He really is the more we trust Him and can love Him. With this in mind, it is important that we clearly understand where and how our concept of God originated.

Remember, what was behind you can define you and then confine you. This is one of the reasons we can take comfort in God's name being I AM. He told Moses tell them I AM sent you. My name is I AM, not I was, not I will be but, I AM! I Am everything you need at any given moment in your life.

Remember in Ex. 34: 5-9 God comes to Moses to show what He is really like. He connects His glory to His own character. God begins to share with Moses the DNA of God. Let's go over these six characteristics of God together.

(I credit Graham Cook for these 6 points of the DNA of God)

Compassionate - Empathy. God knows everything you are going through and He is with you and for you. He has compassion for you. It's used 111 times in scripture. When God repeats Himself that many times He really wants us to get it. Compassion is love and sorrow mixed in our hearts for another. Compassion is an action that takes the weight off another person. In other words God our Father stands with us in our pain.

Gracious - Grace means to release favor to another person when they least deserve it. To act kindly, be friendly, be courteous. To impart unmerited blessing. God loves to be compassionate toward you. God will never change the way He feels about you, thinks about you and cares about you. God loves being your God. He loves loving you, He adores adoring you.

Slow to anger - He has a long fuse. He is easily able to patiently bear with us. It takes a lot to make Him mad. He is slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.

Full of mercy - Mercy treats the offender better than they deserve. Father is abundant with mercy. Rich, overflowing, generous, super abundant, God loves being merciful to you. God loves being kind to people who don't deserve it. God is amazing, astounding and eye opening with His mercy towards you.

Faithful - He will never ever leave us or forsake us, no matter what we do. We are wonderfully and beautifully stuck with Jesus Christ. God will keep His word to complete the work He is doing in you.

Forgiving - When Jesus died for our sins on the cross all of our sins were future. How exciting to know that you are forever deeply loved, completely forgiven, fully pleasing, totally accepted, absolutely complete in Christ.

May we cry out with Paul in Phillipians 3:10 that are deepest desire will be"that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformd to His death."

(adapted from Graham Cooke's talk on Uncommon Love)