Preached at Markham Baptist Church, June 23, 2002

Here's a question I've been thinking about for a little while. Is God easy to live with? What do you think? It's an important question because what you think of God will be reflected in the way you live. For instance, the person that thinks that God is grim, loveless and hard to live with will in turn be grim, and loveless and hard to live with.

Think of the Pharisees - now there was a grim and loveless group. To be sure, on the outside they were an incredibly moral group, they did religion "right". But on the inside, well, Jesus our Lord looked at them and said that they are white-washed tombs. That is, clean and pure on the outside but on the inside, death. The God of the Pharisee was not easy to live with and as a result they were not easy to live with.

Is God easy to live with? It's an important question, for how we answer will be reflected in the way we live. If we see Him as stern and miserable, so our life will mirror that belief.

How we answer will also be reflected in the way we relate to God. If we think God to be cold and unforgiving, we will find it impossible to love Him and we will live our lives cringing in some corner, for fear the next lightening bolt will strike us down.

But more, it is not only an important question - it is a difficult question, for a selective reading of Scripture could lead a person to believe that God is difficult to live with. As we read the Scriptures we discover that He is not some benevolent, smiling game show host, ready to give us whatever we want as long as we play the game right. No, He is the Lord whose will shall be done no matter how we feel about it. He is the creator of heaven and earth, therefore above heaven and earth. He is the Lord who demands that we have no other God but Him (Exodus 20:3).

There is a phrase that we read repeatedly through Scripture - that is our God is a "jealous God." (Exodus 20:5; 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24; Joshua 24:19) It means that He is jealous for us and He does not want us to worship anyone or anything above and before Him. It is not that He is immature - it is that He loves us so much that He cannot stand to see us settle for anything less than the best. His heart breaks to watch us settle for a life that is satisfied to play with the little trifles of this life.

There is a sense in which God is difficult to live with because of His demands - He wants first place in our lives. And He demands that we give the whole of our lives to Him. If we are to follow Him it is to be with complete abandon, none of this lukewarm obedience - either you are or you are not a follower of His.

And then there is God's hatred of sin. He is the holy God and we realize that He will never condone wrong-doing; He will never say that the wrong is right. He desires for us to be holy above all else. He hates sin so much that He was willing to let His Son die for it and thus eradicate its power in our lives.

There is a sense in which God can be very hard to live with - there are His demands and He hates sin in our lives. But to stop there, and to let this thought dominate our lives would be, well, it would lead to being a Pharisee. For the dominant note through Scripture, the wonderful, exhilarating good news of Scripture, is that God is very easy to live with.

Consider the opening verses of Psalm 103.

"Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits- who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's. (Psalm 103:1-5) (NIV)

Do you think the Psalmist thought God was easy to live with? O yes, very much so. Listen to the words that he uses over and over again to describe our God - compassionate, forgiving, loving. Does that sound like a God that is hard to live with?

Think about the three sections that I recited - the first one, "Praise the Lord O my Soul." When you think of the psalmist writing Psalm 103 how do you picture his demeanor? Is he saying, "Praise the Lord, O my soul", or is he saying, hardly able to write the words because he is dancing around the room with joy, "Praise the Lord, O my Soul!!" Of course it is with joy! Why? Because one of the qualities that makes God so wonderfully easy to live with is the joy that He brings into a life. The apostle Peter speaks of an inexpressible joy that is ours in knowing God and His salvation. So walking with God and talking with God and following God is an experience of pure joy. You know there are some people you can spend an hour with and afterward you feel drained and tired, but there are others who seem to rejuvenate you, give your spirit a lift and afterward you feel like no time has passed whatsoever.

And so it is with God. He is a joy to be around, He's a joy to follow, He is filled with joy, so that we read in Psalm 21 that God's presence is a source of joy. Joy is one of God's characteristics.

As you know I have three children. One of the games my youngest, Nora, likes to play is airplane. I get to be the airplane. I get down on my back, lift my legs, raise my hands and with the bottom of my feet pressed against her I lift her up over me. And off we go, sometimes we pretend we are in a race, and we have to dart around trees, fly over a great mountain. . And sometimes we meet strong winds so that she goes up and down, up and down until finally she crashes on the floor, her airplane having run out of gas. And she laughs and thinks its great and she gets up and she says, "Do it again!"

So she climbs back on, and off we race, around the trees, over the flock of birds, up and down, up and down and then she crashes. And she laughs and thinks it's great and says, "Do it again!" I could do it fifty times and the fiftieth time she'll be hysterical, "Do it again, do it again!" She never tires of it. She doesn't tire of joy.

God's like that. Tony Campolo asks, "How do you think He created daisies? Did he just say, 'Daisies be?" Or does God with a child-like ecstasy, an awareness of the joy of life create one little daisy and He says, "Do it again!" And God creates daisy number two and he says, "do it again!" And daisy number three and four and five and fifty billion daisies later, the great God of the universe is jumping up and down like a little kid yelling, "do it again, do it again!" O, the joy that is in our God. Praise the Lord O my soul! Oh, let us get free from the idea that being with God, serving God, living for God is a grim and joyless affair.

And someone says, "But He is so demanding." Yes, He is demanding but let me tell you He's not hard to please and every simple effort we bring to do His will brings great joy. God is very easy to live with.

Then consider the middle of that passage and there in the middle we read verse 8 which says, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love." That is a theme that runs through the pages of Scripture. Here is Moses catching a glimpse of God and do you know what he hears? He hears the words, 'The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love." (Exodus 34:5, 7) Here is Nehemiah (9:17), here is the prophet Joel (2:13), and here is Jonah and they all testify that, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love." Over and over again we hear that God is compassionate and gracious slow to anger and abounding in love, and then in the fullness of time, when God reveals Himself fully in Jesus Christ we see it to be true.

And we look at Him and we say, "Is that what God is like?" Yes! He must be very easy to live with.

Compassionate? Martha and Mary could tell us about His compassion as Jesus came to the grave side of their brother Lazarus and in the sight of death He weeps.

Gracious - you know what grace means? It is undeserved favour. And Jesus Christ was all grace - the woman caught in adultery knew. He asked her where are your accusers? She looked around and they were all gone - for not one of them was without sin so as to throw the first stone. But there was one left, one who could accuse, one who was indeed without sin. The perfect son of God, standing in front of her, and she summons the courage to look into His eyes and what does she see? Not condemnation but grace. Unmerited favour.

And slow to anger? Here He is, the sinless one of God - He did not break one law. His trial is a farce, the accusations against Him are false, His friends have betrayed Him and the nails are driven into His hands and is there anger? No, He is abounding in love and the first words out of His mouth are, "Father forgive them." Is that what God is like? He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.

Our God is very easy to live with. For He is filled with joy, grace compassion, slow to anger and abounding in love.

But there is this one last section at the end of those verses I want to bring to your attention. Is God easy to live with? Consider this one last characteristic - His willingness to forgive.

"As high as heaven is above the earth so God's love toward those who fear him. As far as east is from west so far has he removed our transgressions from us." (Psalm 103:11-12) (NIV)

The truth of God's forgiveness is rooted in His love for you and me. It is perhaps one of the most revolutionary revelations ever to dawn on a human heart - it is that God loves you. As high as heaven is above the earth so God's love toward those how fear Him. There is no limit to His love for you. There is no ceiling, there is no stop of God's love for you. That's what makes God so easy to live with. He holds no grudge, He holds no ill will toward you, as far as heaven is above earth so His love is toward you. And He is willing to go to any extent to help you. Indeed He has, it was because of His great love for you and me that He allowed His son to die - to pay the price for our rebellion and stubborn refusal to allow Him to rule over our lives.

So we can say, equally with the Psalmist, but with a greater assurance, as far as east is from west so far has He removed our transgressions from us.

Notice the wording there. It is very important. Notice that it doesn't say as far as north is from south - no he doesn't say that. It's important because that is a finite distance. The experts tell us that light travels from pole to pole fourteen times a second. The north-south measure is finite, not so the east-west measure. If we travel north from a given point, sooner or later we will reach the north pole, a definite point. Then we travel south to the south pole, another definite point. East and west are a different matter. We can start to travel east and there is no point, so long as we continue walking that way there is no point at which we start to travel west. The same can be said from traveling west. No matter how long we continue, there is no point at which we start to travel east. West is always west; east is always east.

There is a point of course where that vertical line of God's love and that horizontal line of God's forgiveness meet and that is the cross of Christ.

Do you think God is easy to live with? Oh, may you answer yes. May you know the joy that is yours in Him, may you know the compassion, grace, that He is slow to anger and abounding in love. May you know His forgiveness in your life.

May you know that we bring Him the most pleasure not when we are frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections believing that He is always ready to fill us with joy, always ready to give us His compassion, grace and love, always ready to forgive through the sacrifice of His son.