Seeing and loving God as He is

Nearly 3,000 were in the church and more than 90,000 watched an audio-visual transmission. This is how many attended the divine service that Chief Apostle Jean-Luc Schneider celebrated on 13 December 2015 in our Tafelsig church in Cape Town (South Africa). The sermon was based on John 1: 18: “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.”

Visible only through faith

“We cannot see God with our eyes. In that sense there is no visible proof for the existence of God,” the Chief Apostle explained. “God can only be grasped through faith.”

Elijah and Moses had an encounter with God without actually seeing Him. The people of Israel triumphed over their enemies and heard the words of the prophets, but to see God’s intervention in all of this and to discern the voice of the Lord required faith, the Chief Apostle said.

This also applies to the divinity of Jesus: “The evidence that Jesus is God came with His resurrection. But only those who believed that Jesus was God received the proof that He actually was God.”

God reveals Himself in Jesus

Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” He was able to say this because He and His heavenly Father were one. “What do we learn about God when we look at Jesus?” Chief Apostle Schneider asked, and mentioned five core aspects to exemplify this.

• God is love: “He came on earth to serve and to save us. God loves everybody, also those who are rejected and forgotten, as well as those who are cursed and condemned by everybody.”
• God is grace: “Jesus said that we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. A child has nothing; it has nothing to offer. All a child can do is to receive. And what it receives is a gift; it is grace.”
• God is a God of perfection: “He wants a true change. He wants everything to become new. He does not just want to fix something. He wants to create something completely new. He wants man to become a new creature.”
• God is righteous: “He does not expect everybody to bear the same fruit. He looks at the effort everyone makes and judges the endeavour of every single one.”
• God is eternal: “His activity focuses on eternity. That means that in many cases today there is nothing tangible for us to grasp. We have to wait until the end to see.”

Homework: Exercise love

“It is not enough to say, ‘Okay, we have to accept that because it is the will of God,’” the Chief Apostle made clear. After all, Jesus expects us to love God with all our heart and all our strength.

This throws up a number of questions. “Do we love God, who loves our enemy as much as He loves us? Do we love this idea that God is the God of grace and that our merit counts for nothing, and who asks: ‘Has your faith grown?’”

“I could give you a few more examples”, the Chief Apostle said in conclusion, “but I think we have enough homework now.” Because, remember, “Jesus wants to give us His glory. He wants us to become like Him and to receive the same inheritance that He receives from His Father.”