The Most Important Thing About Us
- Ken Ramey
- Jul 1, 2008
The 20th century Chicago minister, A.W. Tozer, said it best in his classic book The Knowledge of the Holy: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” In other words, the most important thing about a person is his/her view of God. Every person that has ever lived or ever will live, lives their life based upon their view of God. Every thought, every action, every emotion, every word, every decision, every movie we watch, every radio station we listen to, every book we read, everything we buy, everywhere we go, how we treat our spouses, how we raise our children, how we relate to our parents, how we interact with our brothers and sisters, how we treat our neighbors, how we do our jobs, how we study for exams, how we have sex, what we do with our free time, what we eat, what we drink, how we vote, what we believe about abortion, what we believe about war, how we respond to tragedy, how we wake up in the morning, the kind of church we attend are all related to our view of God. Every detail of our lives is determined by our concept of who God is. Therefore, the greatest need of every person is a proper view of God.
The foundation for a proper view of God is the Bible. God wrote the Bible so we could know who He is and what He is like. Over and over again the Bible emphasizes the incomprehensible, incomparable greatness of God (cf. Isaiah. 40). And yet, instead of maintaining a high view of God, the Church today has unworthy, insufficient thoughts about Him. At no other time in her history has the Church needed to have a transforming vision of the greatness of God than right now. I heartily agree with what John Piper said in The Supremacy of God in Preaching:
People are starving for the greatness of God. But most of them would not give this diagnosis of their troubled lives….The greatness and the glory of God are relevant. It does not matter if surveys turn up a list of perceived needs that does not include the supreme greatness of the sovereign God of grace. That is the deepest need. Our people are starving for God….Our people need to hear God-entranced preaching. They need someone, at least once a week, to lift up his voice and magnify the supremacy of God. They need to behold the whole panorama of his excellencies….God himself is the necessary subject matter of our preaching, in his majesty and truth and holiness and righteousness and wisdom and faithfulness and sovereignty and grace. I don’t mean we shouldn’t preach about nitty-gritty, practical things like parenthood and divorce and AIDS and gluttony and television and sex. What I mean is that every one of those things should be swept up into the holy presence of God….It is not the job of the Christian preacher to give people moral or psychological pep talks about how to get along in the world; someone else can do that. But most of our people have no one in the world to tell them, week in and week out, about the supreme beauty and majesty of God.
That’s my goal as your pastor and preacher: to set forth the God of the Bible in all His glorious greatness so that we will grow to know Him more accurately, love Him more intimately, and obey Him more completely. May He be pleased to graciously help us achieve this goal as we study and apply His Word together.
Taking God At His Word,
Ken Ramey
