Psalm 19: 14
God Consciousness

But today I just want to talk about the idea of "developing an increasing God consciousness." 

I. THE HUMAN MIND IS NEVER AT REST. 

1. It always has something in view. Our peers think about success, sex, money (wishing they had it our about how they could get it), relationships (whether happy or unhappy), personal problems, fears and the like. Some people spend all of their lives, during a significant amount of their waking hours in worry and anxiety. 

A few people think creatively about art, life, eternity, truth, etc. and are some of the worlds great producers. The Christian ought always -- at some level in his thoughts -- to be thinking about God -- his existence, his works, his grace, his will, his sovereignty. 

2. What we think about is not entirely under our control. To do this artificially by legalistic discipline would end up as a neurosis. To a great extent, we program our minds by our religious experience (church worship, personal prayers, the recalling of memorized verses, fellowship with other Christians, sitting under Christian teaching). Or we can program our minds with the things that most people program them with. Here the old expression about feeding data into a computer and getting statistics from it applies. The rule is GIGO, "Garbage in; garbage out." 

Now as we increasingly see our culture decline and as we, in our individual cases, mix with people who do not know the Lord and are influenced by their cultural values, this becomes a strain on our living the Christian life. It is important that we try to discipline our lives in this regard and program our thinking with what the N.T. calls "the renewing of (our) minds" with what amounts to a consciousness about God.

1. Our text puts the emphasis on having the serious aspects of our consciousness acceptable to God. "v.14" Frequently, the psalms talk about "waiting" upon the Lord, having the mind "fixed" upon the Lord, about not "forgetting" the Lord. 

2. Very frequently the Psalms talk about cherishing and not forgetting his Word but hiding it in the heart and meditating on it day and night. "Blessed is the man who delights in the law of the Lord, and on whose law does he meditate day and night." 

Probably this and many other similar expressions refer to the truth as well as the text of the Scriptures, the latter being in order to the former. 

I am so thankful for the experience of having memorized a lot of verses in my college and seminary years when it was easier to do. They were course assignments then but have been a blessing ever since. I am sorry I did not keep up a program of reviewing that memorization through the years. The treasuring up the Word in the mind is invaluable and if I had children, I would strongly stress the memorization of Bible verses. One of the sad results of our richness of Bible translations is that it is harder to memorize a modern paraphrase than it is a classic translation and you don't get the value of repetition that we used to get when everyone was reading from the same translation and the person heard the same thing repeated all the time. 

But even if it is only a verse once in a while, memorize verses that God has brought to your attention in some way or another. 

3. But also we think about God in his creation. That is a part of thinking about God. 

Luther talked about the 2 books that tell us about God. One was the "written book," the Word Of God. The other is the book of nature, he said. Psalm 8 says "When I behold the heavens, the work of thy hands; the moon and the stars which thou hast made; What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou doest care for him" 

And Psalm 19: "The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth shows forth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech; night unto night declares knowledge. There is no speech nor are their any words; Their voice is not heard. yet their message goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the earth." 

One way for us to be delivered from secularism is to frequently remind ourselves that God is the great Creator and whatever secondary agencies he used to create the Grand Canyon or the Smoky Mountains, they are his handiwork. Indeed the lines of fine craftsmanship in a Victorian antique or a Michelangelo painting do, too. They speak not about an unknown wood carver or a magnificent Renaissance painter but about the Creator who created man in his own image, "a little lower than the angels" and having wonderful capabilities by right of that fact. 

It is well to remind ourselves that the hushed reverence we feel in the midst of nature's grandeur is not an experience of God nor is the overwhelming awe or sheer delight we feel upon hearing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, or Beethoven's Choral Fantasy or Brahms' Mass an experience of God. But we should remind ourselves that it is God's handiwork in very much the same way that nature is. Through processes of nature or through man's created-in-the-image-of-Godness, we see the glory of God in second causes. It is God who has done this through his sovereign intentions in creation. 

I think you will do a tremendous good for your Christian growth as well as to please God if you stop and thank God the next time you especially appreciate something in his creation. You don't have to be a bore and tell everybody within hearing. Tell God! He will be interested, and he won't think you are a cracked pot. Of all people -- even taking pantheists and hopeless romantics into account -- Biblical Christians ought to be preeminent lovers of God's creation and a people who appreciate of the finer things of life and human culture. And they should easily give God thanks who made the world and who made us the way we are with cultural and esthetic appreciation. 

4. But it is not just the Word of God or nature or cultural magnificence which ought to cause us to think about God and thank him worshipfully. We should have the same frequent consideration for his providential working in our lives. 

The very circumstances of our lives are providential. They are not random. History is not accidental but "all things work together for good to them that love God, who are the called according to his purpose." 

It is a strong motif in Psalms. "The Lord established his throne in the heavens; his kingdom rules over all." 

God is sovereign in His involvement in history. God is working in our circumstances: Even when we have to occupy our minds with earthly details they have something to do with God who is working in them. By prayer we may learn from them and may be positively guided by them or we may react to them but "The steps of a good man are guided by the Lord." Through our prayerful and godly reaction to them and the wisdom gained from the Word of God we may discover God's will for our lives. (Of course I am not talking about God's moral will for our lives, which is contained in the infallible Word, but the environmental, situational will of God.) 

In retrospect, as we look back on the difficulties and adversities of our lives which were, at the time, thought to be both good and bad in one case or another, and we cry with the Psalmist in Psalm 77: 11: "I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord. I will meditate on all thy works and muse upon thy mighty deeds." 

A great deal of our meditation may perhaps contain the question of what God is saying or what God was accomplishing by some of the deeds that seem to us to be unhappy or traumatic. But in full understanding of them in retrospect we cry with Psalm 23: "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup overflows. Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." 

I urge you to form a habit of quietly and frequently thanking God for the happy little outcomes of your life that other people call "luck". You don't need to become a bore by insisting that everybody else clap their hands and jump up and down over a pay raise you got and think it was a blessing from God but you can certainly say to God: "Thank thee dear Lord for thy favor." 

And when you can't honestly give thanks, perhaps you can thank God that you know he is in control and that you will feel thankful when you see the unhappy event in full perspective and outcome. Do you thank God when you have narrowly missed a traffic accident or when you have had an accident and it turned out to be much less serious than it might easily have been? You should. 

Do you thank God when you see the outcome of circumstances that go half way back to your birth turn out for your eternal good or for God's glory? -- Or when they were clearly a way to channel you into the path he would have you walk in?