We are in a series looking at the Majesty of God in a number of different Old Testament passages. Each passage has introduced us to a particular attribute or characteristic of God and today we are looking at God’s grace.

I suppose for some people it’s a bit of a surprise to be going to the Old Testament to find out something about the grace of God. The reason for that is the popular misconception many people have about the Bible that the Old Testament is mainly about law and judgement, while the New Testament is mainly about grace. Even the famous Sunday school acronym for "grace" – God’s riches at Christ’s expense – tends to push us towards the NT if we want to learn anything about it.

This week I want to suggest that if we had to identify just one factor behind the weightlessness of God in our culture then it would have to be our own lack of faith. People have made God weightless in their lives because they don’t believe God is who He says he is and that He can do all the things He has said He will do. And the reason is that they can’t see the evidence in their own experience.

We are looking at a number of different Old Testament passages in order to be able to understand the Majesty of God more clearly. And each passage has been teaching us about a different attribute or characteristic of God.

You might say, "Is this really necessary? Can’t we simply look at one passage on the Majesty of God and then move on to something else?" And the answer is "No" because every event in our lives is there to teach us something about God. I wonder if you have ever thought about that. Every sadness, every success, every failure, every joy! Although we may not see it until much later, each event without exception is there to draw us into a deeper understanding about who God really is. And in this series I am trying to give us some pegs on which to hang those experiences so that we can learn to start looking behind the surface of events in our lives and see what God wants to teach us about himself.

In our current series we are trying to blow away the fog that has obscured the Majesty of God for many Christians for far too long, so they no longer have any clear idea of what God is really like.

One of the consequences of this spiritual blindness is that it has taken the soul out of Christian worship. We saw this last week when we spoke about the two extremes on the Christian scene today, where on the one hand we find churches where the accent is on emotional experience with minimal Bible content, and on the other hand an increasing number of churches where the emphasis is all on Bible teaching but where emotional responses are viewed with grave suspicion.At both of these extremes, the worship is lacking something vital.

In our series we are looking for the cure to the weightlessness of God that is apparent in the lives of many Christians today. And this week I have been struck by a puzzle. Because it seems that God has become weightless in the church at a time when there is a more interest in spiritual things now than there has ever been. (Hillsongs at CTICC, Angus Buchan, Oprah Winfrey). Why is this?

This week we are building on last week’s study. Because the astonishing claim that the Bible makes is that the God who is infinitely greater than anything we can ever think of, who is utterly beyond us in every possible respect...this infinitely great God has condescended to speak to us! In fact the Christian faith is grounded on this great truth. Take that truth away and Christianity falls to the ground. And God’s words, which are recorded for us in the pages of Scripture teach us how to understand the world He has made and how we are to live in it as His people.

I would like to begin this new series with a rather striking quotation.

"It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal, but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence, nevertheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgements no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness."

 John 4:1-30

In this short introductory series to John’s Gospel, we have been looking at how Jesus sets all his followers free from various different forms of slavery. So far we have seen that he sets us free from ignorance, sin, shame and even religion. Each one of these in different ways prevents us from being fully human. And as Jesus sets us free so we begin to understand what it means to be made in the image of God. 

I say we that we “begin to understand what this means” because there is a whole dimension to discovering our true humanity that we haven’t yet touched on and we must put that right today. Because today we are not thinking about what we have been set free from, but what we have been set free for.

 John 3:1-15

The strange title of our study is “Freedom from Religion”. So we are looking at what I think is the most surprising form of captivity, because we think of religion as being at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

Whoever would have thought that Jesus would want to set us free from religion? Isn’t religion meant to be good for people? If there is no religion, there can be no church and surely God could not possibly want that? Why on earth would Jesus want to set us free from religion?

This is the third in our present series, "The Truth about Freedom" in which we are trying to make sense of what Jesus said, when he was talking to a group of believers in John chapter 8 and he said to them, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free."