God's Strength

The following was originally a reflection given at Boon Church's Praise Night on 6/19/09

Hey everybody, so I want to talk to all of you about the God I believe in and focus on his strength. What’s so amazing about strength? To be impressed with strength is to witness someone accomplish something that you cannot do. Well, what did God do?

Here’s just a sampling, in Genesis God said “Let there be light”. When we think of light in the universe we think of stars. Let’s look out our modest star. In the day it’s a tiny dot, it is doesn’t look very threatening and just provides us with light and we like being 93 million miles away from it. But here are some scientific stats about our sun: it has a surface temperature of 5500 degrees Celsius, it’s heat and light are generated through massive fusion reactions from its core and it has the mass of 332,946 earths. Up close the sun is a ferocious beast! And there are even bigger ones in other parts of the universe. God created that. Can you make a sun? Thought so.
If that doesn’t impress you then God made Chuck Norris! My point is God is limitless and the universe and what we think we see is small in comparison.

What impresses me most about God’s strength is his spiritual and emotional strength, his ability to conquer death and love a creation that does not love him back. It says in Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

For those of you who are here and curious about Jesus and Christianity, here’s the gospel message in a nutshell. We failed. We deserve death. Someone else took what we had coming to us. For every single sin the penalty is death. That penalty doesn’t change. It’s pass//fail. That’s God judgment and justice. Jesus Christ, God in the form of a sinless man, took that punishment for the whole world, every single person past, present, and future, over two thousand years ago. Since most of us are Asian here, let me play on a stereotype and introduce some math. Yes…math. Sinning once already equals death multiply that by the amount of people who have lived through all time and who have yet to live and then multiply that again by the amount of sin a person commits in his lifetime. How much punishment did our God endure? How many deaths? That’s waaaaay…over 9000! Or 9000 thousand-thousand!

Then to rise again and call to a world that does not even love Him back, a world that uses his name as a form of swear. The pain Jesus goes through to say “I love you” while knowing he may not hear it back. What kind of strength does it take to mean, and to say it to so many people?

This is the God worthy and deserving of our worship. Psalm 28:7 says “The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song.” I’m telling you! Jesus Christ isn’t a chump and He can be your strength because through Him we find eternal life, we find everlasting love, and we see the limitless potential of the one true almighty God. We worship a God of strength!

-Tony Wong