Rabbi Schneider — Fascination
Shalom, beloved ones; my name's Rabbi Schneider. Welcome to this edition of Discovering the Jewish Jesus. I'm excited today as we continue our journey in a series that I'm calling, Capturing God's Heart. And today we're gonna be looking at one of the most exciting verses in the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah, 33:3 , where the Lord says, call upon me and I will answer thee, and show thee great and wondrous things that thou knowest not of.
That Scripture just thrills me. But before we actually get there, I just want to re-cap where we're at and why we're calling this series Capturing God's Heart.
I find that many people look to God to be like a magic genie. They don't really know God's character. They're not really seeking to know God's will. But rather, they're looking to God to just answer their selfish prayers.
Many people look to God the same way that they would look, beloved, to a magic genie, rubbing the lamp, expecting the genie to come out in a fairy tale of course. And then them just asking the genie for the three things they desire most in life, whatever those things are.
But to walk with God, beloved ones, requires knowing his heart. It requires knowing what's important to him. It takes an understanding of his will. And only when we position ourselves in a way that we know God's will and his character can we really capture his heart.
Jesus said that he had come to do the will of the Father. In fact, we hear him praying, not my will but thy will be done. And do you know Yeshua warned us that in the last days before his return, there would be a great rise, he said, in false teachers.
One of the ways, beloved ones, we know the false teachers is if the gospel that they're preaching is man centered. If it's all about man, if people are relating to God in a way that they're using God just to fulfill their American dream or they're using God just to be someone that will help them achieve all that they desire to in their life without first asking God what's your purpose for me, what do you want me to do with my life, knowing that they're created by him and for him.
Beloved, unless we understand that it's first about God and not first about us, we don't understand the real Gospel. And so in this series, Capturing God's Heart, we're looking at the things that move God's heart.
And we're particularly examining prayers that we can prayer to God knowing that the prayers that we're praying are acceptable to him, because they're in accordance with his will and character.
And then knowing, beloved one, that the prayers that we're praying please God because we see in Scripture that they resonate with his character, that they capture his heart, we can be confident as we're moving forward in his grace that not only are our prayers being heard, but that our prayers are being answered.
So with that said, I want to go now to the Book of Jeremiah today, chapter number 33, and I'm gonna begin reading in verse number 2.
Thus says the Lord who made the earth, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name, Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.
I love the King James. The King James words it:
Call to Me and I will answer thee and show thee great and marvelous things, that thou knowest not of
Of course I'm paraphrasing just a bit there, but the idea is that if we believe in God and call upon him, and if we're truly believing him to show us things that we're not able to perceive in the natural world, the Lord is gonna open up mysteries for us to be able to see what we can't see in the natural, to go where we couldn't go in the natural, to experience what we can never experience in the natural world.
And I don't know about you, beloved ones, but that excites me. You see, when we're children, we have a great sense of adventure, and everything is new. Some of you remember as a child, even being outdoors and how the animals were so, just exciting for you, and how going places and experiencing things for the first time, it was just so wondrous.
And life was all an adventure as we were experiencing things for the first time. But some of you can relate that as we aged, the adventure of life began to diminish. It began to become more and more like, I've been there and I've done that.
And the things that so once captured our hearts, I remember for example, when I was a young person, I used to go looking for frogs, and snakes, and I would look at all the animals, and look at the grass, and smell the scents of outside.
And every summer for me was like an endless summer, and it was all a brand new experience. But as I aged, I had experienced some of those things so many times that each year that went by, some of the wonder of it began to wear off.
And so what do we do to get back that sense of wonder? What do we do to get back that sense of fascination, that drama? You know what we do, beloved? We go beyond the natural into the supernatural because in the supernatural it's always new.