The Key to Satisfaction

The question is, who is God? Who is God? What I would like to do is rephrase that a bit to the question perhaps, what is ultimate reality? I think you can say that God is anyone. God is what you think it is and God is what you make it inside you. I picture what everybody does, big gray beard with white robe. I do believe in what I call God. God is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I think our heart is the temple of God. God to me is the omnipresent and omnipotent one, the relative one. I believe God is the creator of the universe. He's the one that was before and the one that will be at the end. He's everything for us and everything around us. I believe God came to the earth in His flesh through His Son Jesus and He invites us to be His friend and to be able to have a life that's led and directed by Him.

Overall, a good summary of God is He is a perfect being with a plan for life that presides overall and has the emotions to care about what happens as He presides. He or she is not necessarily a person or like a person. Basically, I believe in Me. Who is God? Me. I define God as creative process. That includes both good and evil. All that is. God is all of that as well. Tell me all your thoughts on God. Do you know that song? You guys know that song. Yeah, right. OK, good. OK. It's a video I found on YouTube that is a perfect intro to our brand new series. We're kicking off with a preview weekend this week. Grab your message notes. God is, is the name of the series that we are beginning to explore.

If this is your first time here today, you came on a perfect weekend because we are launching a study of the most important, the most interesting, the wildest topic ever, God. And I want to start with the very last verse in your notes this morning. If you flip over to page two of your notes and you look at the bottom of the page, that is the verse I want to start on. The Bible says, if you search for it as for a hidden treasure, then you will find the knowledge of God. That is such an important theme verse for us that I want you to understand that I think it would be good if we all read this out loud together. So let me hear your voices as we say this together. Here we go. If you search for it as for a hidden treasure, then you will find the knowledge of God. Search for it as for hidden treasure.

Have you ever found a hidden treasure? Well, some of you are about to because I have a surprise for you. I've hidden something very valuable in this room. This morning I broke up a $100 bill into bills of various denominations and I hid those bills in the Bibles, in the pews in front of you or underneath your pews. So the treasure hunt begins now. Reach over to that Bible in your pews and see if you can find one of those bills. Search for it. I hear some cries of delight. Keep looking, keep looking. All right, show of hands, show of hands. Raise in fact, raise up the bills if you got it. If you found it, let's see. So everybody knows I wasn't lying. There we go. There's tens, there's 20s, there's five, there's ones. That's good. Raise your hand if you found the money. Good. How many of you wish you found money? Good. How many of you now that you know what my opening illustration is, wish you had come to all three services this weekend? I thought so.

Now I got another question for you. How many of you looked for money? Can I see that show of hands? How many of you looked? Raise your hands. It's practically unanimous, right? No matter how much money you've got, nobody's going to sit there when they hear somebody say, "Hey, I broke up 100." And there's different denominations sitting maybe right in front of you. Very few people are going to go, "No, thanks. I already got money. I don't need any more money. There's nothing I could do with any more money." Most of us are going to go, "Yeah, in fact, it was awesome for me to watch this." Because most of you kind of had this semi-alert look, kind of like looking down at your watches, "Okay, here comes a sermon. Maybe 35 minutes from now, I'll be able to get out and see the 49er game that I'm T-boing right now." And then when I said there is hidden money, suddenly everybody is snapped to wrap the tension, right?

That's what a treasure hunt will do for you. And the Bible says seeking for knowledge of God is like searching for a hidden treasure. If you fold your arms and go, "No, thanks. I already have my own thoughts about God. I already know all there is to know about God." There's nothing more you could tell me, René, that could possibly enlighten me any further. You are leaving potential treasure that will enrich your life beyond your wildest imagination untouched. But if you give the hunt for knowledge of God some focus, this will change your life. In fact, you could call knowledge of God the key to satisfaction. How in so many ways, what this message is about is about the who, what, where, why, when, and how about the treasure.

What is the treasure? Why is it valuable? Where is it buried? How do I find it? When does all this happen? I want to start with what is the treasure? What makes knowledge of God so valuable? Flip your notes back over to page one and look at the list at the top of your notes. And I want to ask you, do you identify with any of the feelings there? Go ahead and check all that apply. Like sometimes I feel a vague lack of satisfaction or purpose. Check that if it applies or at least make a little mental note. Sometimes I'm afraid secretly that God doesn't love me anymore. Like I never quite measure up to what he wants from me. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by stress. Or maybe you relate to this, I feel very lonely at times. I worry too much. I feel helpless. I'm not really enjoying a relationship with God. I hear Christians talk about this relationship, but it's not where I'm at right now. In fact, my spiritual life is blah. It's flat lined. I feel distant from God.

Now I want you to look at your list there in your notes. What did you check or what did you mentally check? Now what if I told you that there was something, one thing, let's say one pill, that would help cure every single one of those common human ailments, loneliness and helplessness and anxiety and worry and an alienation from God and a lack of purpose. What if there was one thing that could cure all that, that would be the greatest treasure on earth, right? Because money, cash, gold, silver can't cure all of that. Well there is one thing, one antidote, and it's this, knowing God, knowing the character of God, knowing who God really is, is the most valuable treasure on the planet.

The great thinker A.W. Tozer once said, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." I agree and I would only add the second most important thing is what you think that God thinks about you. Because how you answer those two questions changes everything about you. How you finish the sentence, "God is," can make you confident or worried, courageous or fearful, joyful or despairing and that is why for the next eight weeks we're going to be studying what theologians have for centuries called the attributes of God. And let me just kind of orient you in the message this morning. What is an attribute? An attribute of God is something true about God that he has revealed in any way.

Here's a preview of some attributes of God we're going to be looking at in this series. Condem presence, meaning God is everywhere. Omnipotence, which means God is all powerful. Sovereignty, which means God rules over all. Immutability, that's a two dollar theological word meaning God is unchanging. Now imagine believing that God is all of these things and then adding to that that God loves you infinitely and unconditionally. That the God who is all these things is passionate about you and wants to be involved in your life. If you really believe that it would change everything about your life. It would improve the quality of every relationship. It would improve the quality of every moment, even the most mundane.

But here's the problem. Most Americans, particularly most Christians would look at this list and go, "Check, check, check, check." Sure, of course God is all those things. I believe God is all those things. But in actual practical daily life we get lazy. In real daily life I really don't think of God like this. I tend to minimize God and customize God and make God in my own image. Somebody once said God made man in his image and man has been returning the favor ever since, right? We all do it. It's called idolatry and I'm going to show you a clip from a movie I don't exactly recommend unless you can see it edited on TV or on an airplane or something which is where I saw it. But I'm going to show you this scene because it really nails this tendency in America.

Dear Lord baby Jesus, we also thank you for my wife's father, Chip. We hope that you can use your baby Jesus powers to heal him and his horrible leg. It smells terrible and the dogs are always bothering with it. Dear tiny infant Jesus. Hey, you know sweetie, Jesus did grow up. You don't always have to call him baby. It's a bit odd and I'll put into pray to a baby. Look, I like the Christmas Jesus best and I'm saying grace. When you say grace you can say to grown up Jesus or teenage Jesus or bearded Jesus or whoever you want. You know what I want? I want you to do this grace good so that God will let us win tomorrow. Your tiny Jesus, your golden fleece diapers with your tiny little fat bald up fist. He's a man. He had a beard. Look, I like the baby version the best. Do you hear me? I win the races and I get the money. I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt because it says like I want to be formal but I'm here to party too. I like to party so like my Jesus to party. I like to picture Jesus as a ninja fighting off evil samurai. I like to think of Jesus like with John Eagle's wings and singing lead vocals for Leonard Skinner with like an angel band and I'm in the front row and I'm a cow.

Okay. Dear eight pound six ounce. I love that clip. I just have to admit right now because that is genius. That actually nails it. That's the American folk religion right there. I made God in my image. When I pray I'll think of God however I want to think of him and when you pray you can think of God however you want to think. You can think of him as a ninja or the lead singer for Leonard Skinner if that's what you want, right? What happens is we customize God. We minimize God. We force God to fit into our own imagination. The problem with that is by doing so we also limit God. We turn the volume down on God to the point where he's not really a priceless treasure to us anymore and what this series is about is casting aside those idols. What this series is about is about going beyond the box that we tend to put God in.

This series is not about defining God. The series is not about putting God on a leash. This series is seeing how crazy out of the box the real God must be and what a powerful effect that can have on all of our lives. So there's two foundational truths I want to talk about to this series as we start. First God is beyond imagination. God is beyond imagination. He's got to be mind blowing, right? If there is a being who created everything then this next verse has got to be true. Isaiah 55:8, "My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts," says the Lord. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could ever imagine." This has got to be true if God exists. He's got to be so far beyond me I could never hope with my puny brain to ever comprehend him or understand him.

One way to explain it, it's like this. Go off into a Santa Cruz forest and find a banana slug. And now try to explain to Mr. Banana Slug anything about your life. Anything. I mean try to explain to that banana slug the simplest truth about your life. It would be of course impossible. A banana slug has no categories, no capabilities to understand it. The intelligence differential between a slug and me is infinitely smaller than between me and God so I could never hope to understand God. It's just impossible. I have no categories to understand anything about God. I'm dumber than a slug to him. He's just far too big for me to ever wrap my head around. I mean forget thinking of him as a ninja fighting evil or as the lead singer to Leonard Skinner. And I could never hope to comprehend his greatness.

That's why you can't stop just at asking, "What are your thoughts on God?" Well, here's what I think. "What are your thoughts on God?" Because listen, by definition your thoughts are limited by your own imagination, right? By definition your thoughts are limited by your own imagination. And yet by definition God must be greater than your imagination because he created you and your brain and your imagination. So how can I ever hope to guess what thoughts about God are true? I could never comprehend God unless God chooses to reveal himself to me and being God creates categories in my mind expressly for the purpose of having me understand something about him. And the very good news is that's exactly what God does.

Foundational truth number two, God is self-revealing. God is self-revelatory. He reveals himself to you and me. I love this next verse. It's trippy and exciting and inspiring. Amos 4:13 and I'd love for us to read this out loud together. It's at the top of the page there and also on the screen. Let me hear you say, "He who forms the mountains, who creates the wind, and who reveals his thoughts to mankind, the Lord Almighty is his name." Did you notice? He not only creates and forms things, he what? He reveals his thoughts. God chooses to reveal himself to you and to me.

So where? Let's talk about how God reveals himself. Where's the treasure buried? First, through his creation. Through his creation. All around you, all the time. Theologians call this general revelation. The Bible says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies announce what his hands have made." Day after day they tell the story. Night after night they tell it again. Can you sense this? Do you see this? I want to challenge you. Throughout the next 50 days, spend time just walking around with your eyes wide open. As you see the stars, like this verse talks about, just stop and look up at the skies and hear the story they're telling you about God, about God's infinite power and God's artistry and God's engineering.

You'll notice that God has a story to tell, but not just in the stars, also in every vein on every tiny leaf. In every tree, in every forest, in every little flower, in every wave, he has a message that he is whispering to you in all these things. In fact, I would say this, in anticipation of spending 50 days doing this, day one is next Sunday. What I'd invite you to do is this, just kind of as practice. Take some time out this week, 30 minutes, half an hour, and just go to the cliffs or the beach or the redwoods and just sit there. Just sit. Go without the iPhone and answer email. Don't text somebody. Don't post to Facebook. Don't blog. I'm sitting somewhere just listening to God. Don't do that. Just sit there and wait and listen and think about the God who created all of this.

In the God is book, we have all kinds of little daily ideas for how you can see God's message to you in creation. This is important because we get lazy and we can miss the whole thing. One example, I was in Dallas visiting relatives once, and the Cowboys quarterback, Tony Romo, who incredibly defeated the 49ers even after his injury last weekend, but I'm not bitter. Tony Romo, the Dallas Cowboys star quarterback, and his then girlfriend, Jessica Simpson, who's a big celebrity for singing and for acting and so on, they were sitting at a table right next to us, in fact, kind of behind me, just a few feet from my back in this direction.

Imagine this is the table. I'm sitting here, and on the other side of the table is my wife, Lori, and I only figured out that there were celebrities sitting behind me. Of course, I wasn't facing them, but my wife was. She kept saying, "René, let me take a picture of you with your cell phone." "What?" "Let me take a picture of you." "Oh, okay." She'd go, "Click," like this. "Why is her aim so bad?" Right? Finally, she went, "Tony Romo, I just accepted her right behind you." I went, "Oh my goodness. There they are." I had my back to them, so I had to give my kicks not watching them. "What are they eating? What's just accepted eating?" No, but she's eating nothing. No wonder she's so skinny. Instead of all the stuff that the ladies were doing, I had to get my kicks watching other people watching them.

What was funny was, in my observation, most people never noticed. Most people in this crowded restaurant walked right on past with this body language like, "I was living this boring life," and sat down and ate and chatted with this kind of body language like, "Nothing ever interesting ever happens to me," and never noticed these two people who, in Dallas, really were practically royalty, a movie star, pop star, and a pro quarterback. But it was so fun to watch the recognition done when some people did realize, who was sitting there, I watched one girl kind of this direction from me practically choke when she realized who it was. That amused me.

Because these celebrities were sitting right behind me when people pointed, I was in a perfect position because they were right here in terms of my geography. So I loved to do this when people would point like this, I'd go, "Yes, I'm Pastor René. I know you've seen me on community television. Here I am in the flash." Being clueless, not hard to do for me, but here's the point. God, sort of the ultimate celebrity, is right at the table next to you all the time. And in the car next to you, and on the beach with you, and at work with you, and at school with you, He promises His presence. He says, "Wherever you go, I will go." He says, "I'll never leave you nor forsake you." He says He is omnipresent, and yet we don't notice.

And that's why in the God book we spend a lot of time on, "How do I notice Him more? How do I think of Him more?" And I'm going to tell you something right now. When you do, it will improve the quality of every single aspect of your life. That's why it is a precious treasure worth searching for. God reveals Himself through His creation, and God also reveals Himself through His Word, through His Word. Theologians call this special revelation. The Bible says, "In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways." At many times and in various ways. What's that mean? It means God reveals Himself in various ways.

I love this phrase because sometimes it can sound a little bit turgid to say, just, "God reveals Himself in scripture." The B-I-B-L-E, that's enough for me. You know, it can almost sound kind of boring or something, but I love the phrase various ways. That means in poetry, in song lyrics, in riddles, in adventure stories, in mysteries, in love letters, in family histories, in dramas, in epics, in exciting war stories. He reveals Himself in various ways because all of those genres are a part of the library that we call the Bible. I love to think that one way you can finish the sentence, God, is that God is a writer. He is because He knows deep in the human heart, we love to say, "Tell me a story," and so He tells you true stories about Himself.

And each day in that God is book, we look at another one of those brain-bending, imagination-staggering, mind-blowing revelations from scripture. So He reveals Himself through creation, and He reveals Himself in His Word. But the greatest way God reveals Himself is through His Son, Jesus Christ. The Bible says, "The Word became flesh." Jesus says, "If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father." If all of this theology stuff ever gets too complicated, you just look to Jesus and you will see what God is like. But look at these three ways He reveals Himself. Guys, this is where the treasure is buried. There are riches all around you, gifts of God's grace, just waiting to be discovered.

And you know what something cool is? This is the only treasure that's also looking for you. Jesus said that God is like a woman seeking lost coins. This treasure's looking for you too. That's why Jesus could promise, "If you seek this treasure, you're gonna find it, 'cause it's looking for you too." So seek it, hunt for it, mine it in all of these ways. That's the whole point of this series, to help you learn how to open your eyes to these ways to know God. Because I'm going to tell you, something happens. When you train yourself not to ignore it, but to see these triple ways of knowing God all around you, there are many benefits.

And I wanna wrap up today by just looking at three very heartfelt benefits to knowing God. These are ways you can expect your life to change during this series. If you seek for God as one searching for hidden treasure. One of my favorite books of the Bible is the book of Ephesians. And one of the reasons I like it is that the Apostle Paul prays one thing for the Ephesians throughout the book. He prays that they might know God better. He starts off his epistle to the Ephesians, his letter to the Christians in Ephesus, just a few verses in with this phrase, "I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better." And then really the rest of the book, he spells out the many benefits of knowing God better.

And if you're just still on the fence, like I don't know if I wanna really engage in this treasure hunt for knowledge of God, I want you to just listen to the ways that Paul says, understanding God, understanding revelation about God will change you. As I study the attributes of God, I am number one, reminded of his power in me. God's power in me. Next verse, Paul says, "I pray that you may understand how incredibly great his power is to help those who believe him." It's the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead. Have you ever been a witness to sheer, mind-blowing power? In the God is book, I have a description of what it was like to be a spectator at one of the Apollo rocket launches.

A man named Joseph Needleman remembers being an eyewitness at one of these launches. In the crowd, watching and waiting for the rocket, and I wanna read you what he wrote, but not just that, I wanna show you as I read his words, the actual footage of the blast of Apollo 17, which he describes in his words. So listen to this. He says, "I was an observer at the launch of Apollo 17. There were hundreds of cynical reporters all over the lawn drinking beer, wise cracking, waiting for this 35-story rocket. The countdown came, and then the launch." He says, "The first thing you see is this extraordinary white light, which is just at the limit of what you can bear to look at. Everything is illuminated with this light, and then comes this thing slowly rising up in total silence at first, because it takes a few seconds for the sound to come across, and then you hear the sound."

He says, "It enters right into you. You can practically hear the jaws dropping around you." He says, "The sense of wonder fills everyone up in the place as this thing goes up and up, and then it becomes a star, but you realize there are humans on it, and then there's total silence." And listen to what he says happens next. People look at each other and smile. They get up quietly, helping each other. They're kind. They're generous. They're soft-spoken. They look at each other speaking quietly and interestedly. He says, "These were suddenly moral people, because the experience of wonder had made them moral." Well, something like that happens when you study God.

The power and the majesty of God blows you away, and it changes you, and you feel it inside. And my prayer for this church during this study is not just that you learn stuff you didn't know before, but that the roar of the God rocket fills your soul, and that you are changed because you are thunderstruck. Maybe you really need this today, a dose of power. Maybe you checked, or you didn't even have the strength to physically check it, but mentally you checked on that list on page one. "Yeah, I worry. Yeah, I feel helpless. Yeah, I feel blah." Well, a study of God's power is the answer to that. It'll blow you away. And there's more than just power. It gets better, because as I study God, I'm also renewed by His passion for me. His passion for me.

Paul really goes on a riff, what he talks about this over in chapter three. He tells the Ephesians more about the benefits of knowing God. Starting in verse 18, he says, "And may you be able to feel and understand, as all God's children should, how long and how wide and how deep and how high His love really is, and to experience this love for yourselves. Though it's so great, you'll never see the end of it or truly understand it. But so, at last, you will be filled up with God Himself." He's saying you'll learn that God's not only infinitely powerful, He's also, and this is just as mind-blowing, infinitely loving.

I love how he talks about you and I as God's children and God as the ultimate loving Father. Father's and their children, an interesting relationship. How many fathers do we have here? Raise your hand. How many dads? Okay, lots of dads here. You guys are going to relate to this. I don't know if you heard the story about a father in a grocery store with a fussy, cranky, whiny three-year-old kid in the shopping cart who will not stop crying. Any dads ever been there before, right, in the grocery store shopping? The father's whispering quietly, "It's okay, Billy. It will be done soon, Billy. You're going to be all right, Billy." And a woman hears him and says, "You're so patient with your son, Billy." He says, "Oh, no, my son's name is Justin. I'm Billy, you know. Kids will do that to you, right?"

It's okay, Billy. And then he doesn't know what else to do, so he begins to sing his son a song. I mean, he's like, "What else can I possibly do, you know, besides talk to myself?" And so he's pushing along the grocery cart, and he starts to sing kind of a goofy song with a totally made-up melody, and he's just making up the words as he goes, and he sings, "I'm so glad you're my son. I'm so grateful I get to be your dad. I love to see your face a lot of the time." And then Justin stops crying for just a minute and looks up at his dad and listens, and kind of cracks a little crooked smile. And so his dad sings, "I love to see you smile." And Justin keeps looking, and so he says, "I love sometimes at night when you are fast asleep, and I sneak into your room and look at you and wonder what you will be when you grow up. I love dreaming of what you'll be like one day, and I want you to know that whatever happens wherever you go, whatever you do, your daddy will always love you, and your daddy will always be your daddy, and you will never be alone."

And Justin gets really quiet, and his eyes get really wide, and his face gets really calm, and his heart gets really still, and he listens to this song all the way out to the car. And his daddy puts him in the back seat, in the car seat, gets into the front to drive off thinking, "Oh, that's over." And then Justin says, "Sing it to me again, Daddy. Sing it to me again." That little boy was no more a son then than he was before. It's just that now he's listening. In the God Is book, I talk about how the Bible says God rejoices over you just like that, with singing. And I'm here to tell you, if you give yourself to a study of who God is and what that God thinks of you, you're going to find yourself not having to be reminded to go back to Scripture.

You're going to wake up wanting to crack open the Bible because you're going to be saying to God, "Sing it again." Sing that song to me again, Daddy, because you know what? You never get too old for that song. That's the song your heart was made to hear. That's the song that answers all of those needs on page one. I feel anxious. I feel helpless. I feel hopeless. Let your daddy sing a song to you again. You may have checked one of those things. Maybe you didn't check any of those things because you didn't want to embarrass yourself if somebody saw, but inside your whole life, you felt like an outsider. And God brought you here today to say, "Listen, I am so much more powerful than you could ever comprehend, but I love you and I love to watch you when you sleep. And I'll always be with you and I'll always be your daddy."

You matter to the God who staggers your imagination in a way that staggers your imagination. And like Paul says, if you really give yourself to a study of this, it will fill you up so thoroughly that you will at last be filled up with God himself. I love that phrase. You'll be filled up with God. You'll be soaked in Him. You know, in this culture, it's possible to be soaked in, to be saturated with a lot of other stuff. You could be saturated with violence. You could be saturated with the news. You could be saturated with anger, saturated with lust, saturated with worry. Most of us, we're just saturated in thoughts of ourselves all the time, thinking about ourselves. Doesn't that sound like a relief to not think about yourself for a while? I dare you just take 50 days off and just get filled up with thoughts of God. It'll enrich you in ways you won't be able to predict.

Those are just two of the many benefits. And the third one, the last one we'll mention today, is that when I study God, I'm refocused on His possibilities for me. You have a life of possibilities. The next verse, Ephesians 3:20, "Now glory be to God, who by His mighty power at work within us is able to do far more than we would ever dare or ask or even dream of infinitely beyond our wildest prayers, desires, hopes, thoughts." If you search for God as one searching for hidden treasure, you, I'll tell you this as a guarantee, you will be blown away at what God does in you. It'll be beyond what you now expect.

Maybe it'll be a renewed intimacy with God. Maybe it'll be a renewed intimacy with somebody else in your small group or in your family, and you're both talking about God together instead of your problems all the time, and somehow that sparks something that you haven't seen in a long time. Or maybe it'll be something that God does through you at the share fest, serve the bay, the food drive. I told you a couple of weeks ago about the little boy here in the church named Travis, six years old. I had a couple of weeks ago when I talked about how one way to meet God is to serve God, and Travis decided he's six, and he said, "I'm going to raise at least $100 for the food drive," and he took that on as a challenge as a six-year-old. He's not even old enough to get an allowance, so how's he going to do this?

And he decides, "I'm going to make kites," all on his own. His mom told me, this was 100% on his own, he says, "I'm going to make kites that remind people of God's promises and God's greatness, and I'm going to go door-to-door to my neighborhood and tell people that I'm selling these for the food drive, and I'm going to show them the envelope that you gave us in church, and I'm going to ask for a suggested donation of $2." This is a six-year-old boy doing this all on his own. So last night, he comes up to me after the service, and he gives me an example of the kites that he is selling, little decorative kites with little verses up here that he prints out on his computer, and then he signs his name, Travis, right there, right?

So I asked Travis last night, I said, "Travis, this is awesome," and I bought this little kite from him, right? And I said, "How much money have you raised so far for the hungry kids?" And he goes, "Well, with your $2, $135. Can you believe that? Isn't that amazing?" Now, for a six-year-old to do this, this verse comes true. Who would even dare? I mean, I won't ask for a show of hands, but how many of you adults thought, "A hundred dollars? I don't know if I can give $100 to the poor." Well, when you give yourself to study a god, he's able to do far beyond what you would ever dare or ask or imagine or hope or dream of, but you got to search for it, and you will uncover treasure.

And so here's my challenge to you as we start this series. Day one is Sunday. So let's get back to the verse we started with. If you search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will find the knowledge of God. I've shown you what the treasure is, where it's hidden, how to find it. It's hidden in creation, the Word in Jesus. So now mine it, because the good news is Jesus said that God is like a woman searching for silver coins. You see, unlike any other treasure hunt, this treasure is also looking for you, and that's why Jesus could promise, "If you seek, you will find." So seek.

Here's the problem. He's saying, "Grab this book, do the daily evotions, read the verses, join a small group, let's search for God together." Sounds good, but this is not an addition. You can't search for treasure as kind of an addition to an already crowded life. It's going to take some sort of a trade-off. You're going to have to trade off 30 minutes watching SportsCenter or something else for at least 30 minutes a day that you're going to spend mining the treasure all around you, but it's worth it.

You know, when I was a teenager in the '70s, our family moved from San Jose up to South Lake Tahoe, and it was there I first heard the true story of LaVere Redfield. LaVere Redfield was an eccentric, reclusive miner who lived near Carson City. I still remember his house. It was a ramshackle, old Victorian house that was just falling apart, and he was legendary in the area. A lot of people knew who he was, a real kind of crazy guy, and when he died, he didn't leave a will. So the state took over his house and announced, "Well, we're just going to auction off his house and whatever we can find in it, probably just a bunch of old broken furniture to the highest bidder."

And so they had it all down in legal documents. They scheduled a date for the auction, and then when they were looking through the house collecting all the furniture, they discovered a false wall, and hidden behind the false wall were bags of rare silver coins. I'm not talking about a couple of bags or even 100 bags or 200 or 300. There were 400 bags of the rarest silver coins on earth, hidden behind that false wall, but they were part of the contents of the house. So they were going to go to whoever won the auction.

Well, three coin collectors formed a consortium, and they hocked everything they had. They mortgaged their homes. They called in loans from all their friends. I mean, they sold everything so that they could win that auction. During the auction, they're calling up people. They're selling more stuff so that they can win the bid. And this was in 1974, and they won the bid with $7 million. That's a lot of money. Did it pay off? As of this past week, I just looked this up, that hoard of silver coins was still being sold by those coin collectors, and they have made, to date, with hundreds of coins still in their cash, they have made over $100 million. Was the trade-off worth it? It was worth it.

Jesus told a story very much like that. He said, "That's what the kingdom of heaven is like." He said, "If you knew that there was a field with a treasure, you'd sell everything you had to buy that field so you could have that treasure. This is a theme developed all throughout scripture, so seek for that treasure. Mine it. Look for it, because the trade-off is worth it. It's worth trading 30 minutes that aren't going to enrich your life for a habit that will enrich your life for all of this life and beyond." So here's my challenge to you as we get ready to start these 50 days.

Make your quest for God a daily priority. Have this book. You don't have to pay the 10 bucks. If you don't have it, I just want you to have it. Next Sunday, day one, get into it, and not only the devotions, but please read the scriptures that it refers to every day, and as a church, we are going to see our lives enriched in ways far beyond what we can possibly hope. I really want to drill this home, and so I'm going to ask Adrian to come up, and instead of a closing prayer with me just kind of asking you to bow your heads and close your eyes, probably you'll get distracted and you'll be reaching for your purses and gathering your stuff together so you can bolt, get to the parking lot as soon as possible.

Here's what we're going to do for a closing prayer today. I'm going to ask you to all stand up where you are, and Adrian's going to lead us in a closing prayer through song. This is a song of commitment. This is a song saying, "God, I commit myself to the trade-offs necessary to seeking knowledge of You as for hidden treasure. And if this resonates with that desire in your heart, I'd invite you to lift your voices and sing this song as your prayer. I'm giving you my heart, and all that is within. I lay it all down for the sake of You, my King. I'm giving You my dreams. I'm laying down my rights. I'm giving up my pride for the promise of new life. And I surrender all to You, all to You. And I surrender all to You, all to You.

I'm singing You this song. I'm waiting at the cross, and all the world holds dear. I count it all as loss for the sake of knowing You, the glory of Your name, to know the lasting joy, even sharing in Your pain. Sing it together. And I surrender. And I surrender all to You, all to You. And I surrender. And I surrender all to You, Lord. All to You, Lord. And I surrender all to You, Lord. All to You, Lord. All to You.

Heavenly Father, to each heart, I pray that You would just show what we need to surrender so that we can make the trade-offs necessary to go on the treasure hunt, to explore the ways that You lavish us with Your free gifts of grace that are there for the finding scattered all around us. Help us to open our eyes to things that God is saying to us. In Jesus' name I pray, amen.