When I was a kid someone came up with a new idea for entertainment - not making hieroglyphics, no - it was called three day movies! If you're old enough to remember this, I hope you're enjoying your senior citizen discounts, you'd go to the theater and they'd hand you these glasses that looked like cardboard sunglasses and you'd settle in to watch the movie, but not for long - especially if it was a monster movie. You see, the monster would start walking towards the screen and then right out of the screen and practically into your face! Of course, if you took those glasses off it was just a flat old screen again and a flat old monster. But when you had those glasses on, you saw things that you otherwise would miss!
Well, I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "4-D Glasses."
Now, sometimes people will ask me, "Where do you get the ideas for the analogies you use on the radio?" Well, today's word for today from the Word of God is part on the answer, Proverbs 24:32. "I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw." Here old King Solomon, what a wise man, he says, "I go out looking for lessons in the things I see. I apply my heart to the things that I see around me all day." You see, he has got his glasses on to see the hand of God in every day stuff. There's an old hymn, remember, "This is my Father's world I rest me in the thought," and then the second verse, I love it, it says, "Heaven above is deeper blue, earth below a deeper green, there's a brightness in each hue, Christless eyes have never seen."
If you know God as your Father, because you put your trust in Jesus as Savior, this is your Father's world! He's working all around you all the time, every day, and you can see Him, you can learn from Him, if you put your glasses on each new day - your four dimension glasses to see that God dimension that is working all around us.
If you've been sort of moping around lately it's probably because you've lost the perspective that David said made each day joyful. Psalm 118:24, "This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it." Now, who made this day what it is? You go, "Oh, my boss, man, my family made this day, my mate, my bills, my health, my 'to-do' list makes this day what it is." Sorry! You're stuck in the boredom of a three-dimensional world. This is the day that the Lord has made, so you do what David and Karen Maines call "going on a God-hunt every day," looking for the Lord in the events of your day, the conversations of your day, the traffic jams, the delays, the surprises, the people, the chores. Moses saw the Lord in a desert bush! Balaam heard God's voice through his donkey! Levi met Jesus in the middle of a work day in his office! That's where praise comes from, in the middle of the crummiest day. You're not looking at just your circumstances, you're looking for your Lord at work, in your phone call, in an accident that was avoided, in a word of encouragement, there's the Lord in that little child, there He is speaking through that powerful storm, in the geese going by overhead, through some unanticipated help in your life. You find yourself thanking God often throughout the day, and you lose the complaining.
Too many times we have our God confined in our theology and our beliefs - the religious compartment of our life. But when you put on your 4-D glasses you start to walk with your God throughout your day, you see His fingerprints on things you never saw them on before, and God becomes real to you!
He wants to show Himself to you in all kinds of real stuff in your day - but like me in that movie theater as a kid, the view will look pretty flat unless you put your God-hunting glasses on. And then the scenery of even the drabbest day comes to life because your awesome God is all over it.