Introduction

Every generation has heroes. Every generation has people we look to who have made it. In our generation, one of those people surely has to be Tom braided, a seven-time Super Bowl winner and a shoe in for the Hall of Fame. He's one of the people that we look to that has completed everything that society has asked him to complete. It is the one that we look to to see that he should be satisfied in what he has accomplished. And yet, he said this in a 60-minute interview, "Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think that there's something greater out there for me? I think there has to be more than this."

This is not just success talking. This is restlessness. This is not just his story. It's ours, too. Because we all have something we think will finally make us feel like we've arrived. Something we hope will prove to others that we're enough. Maybe that's our job, something in our relationship, our appearance, our parenting, and our performance. But no matter how far we climb, that feeling still lingers. It whispers behind each of our winds. It echoes through all of our failures.

And so this morning, I want to ask us a question that might haunt us, a question that we don't ask out loud. And it's our big question this morning.

Big Question

How do you measure up?

How do you measure up? That hunger to be enough, to measure up, to silence your inner critic is something that all of us feel. What would it take for you to feel like you're enough, to feel like you've made it? Is there enough money? Having enough children. If your children get into the right school or get the right sports scholarship, maybe it's not with your children, but being someone, becoming someone that people admire, getting the right promotion, marrying the right person, having the being able to retire at a certain age or to retire to a certain place. But who is the judge of these? Who is it that we're trying to please? If it was us, if we're just trying to please ourselves, then we would have been able to do that, but it isn't. Even when we hit the goal, the goal that we've set out to accomplish, we don't feel secure. We feel anxious or empty or hard.

Hungry for something more. The question that we are left with is, who are you trying to measure up to? That restlessness isn't new. It's just dressed differently. This is an ancient feeling that we all have. In ancient times, in ancient world, it was a moral question. It was, what do I need to do in order to satisfy the gods? But because, of course, we're in an enlightened society, we don't talk about that anymore. We push that to the side. And yet the feeling remains. We have the consistent desire to become something. This is something in all of us. We feel this drive to become something, not to stay as we are, but to be something more. For some of us, it's to feel like we're attractive enough, for example. That might be a feeling that you have. It's something that has no end. The question of, Am I attractive enough? Well, the question would be, For who? Well, maybe to find someone to marry. But even if you find someone to marry, that feeling is still there. There is no one who can affirm you enough, no person who can give you that feeling of security, of feeling worthy.

What happens is that we have invented an image of ourselves that we think we should be, and then we enslave ourselves to it. We are to become, in some sense, our own God, to measure up to that, to please it. But the problem with doing that is that we alone know how rotten we are. We alone know all of our inner thoughts that disgust us, all of the things that we're glad no one else knows about us. In trying to become our own God, we realize that we cannot atone, we cannot make right the wrongs that we've committed. There are no sacrifices, no rituals, no resumes, no amount of wins can make us feel clean. So the question is, how do you measure up?

Fortunately, the Bible has answers for us. So keep your Bibles open to Habakkuk Chapter 1, as we see these two movements in Habakkuk.

Outline:

1. Habakkuk's complaint

2. God's God's response

Or what do you do when God's justice feels delayed? And then what does God actually require of us? As we look to this first one, this passage teaches us that Habakkuk asks God to execute judgment against evil.

But as we'll see, in asking God to act, Habakkuk finds himself exposed. Because if God is truly just and holy, who among us can stand in his presence?

Series Overview

We're starting a series, a three-week series, where we're looking at the core essentials of the gospel. It's something that I'd like to do every January as we start a new year, to be grounded in what the gospel is. Over these next three weeks, we will look at this week, the Holiness of God and what he requires of us. Next week, we'll be looking at the depth of our sinfulness and our inability In week three, we'll look at the cross and how Jesus saves sinners who cannot measure up. This is an attempt for us to see the gospel clearly. This week, we're going to be looking at the Holiness of God, not just as an attribute, but as a standard. Habakkuk might feel like a weird passage to go to, and yet, as we see, it pulls no punches. It shows us that God sees is evil, and especially the evil in us. Habakkuk answers the question, what does a Holy God actually require of us? And so let's look at this first section,

Habakkuk's Complaint

What do you do when God's justice feels delayed. Habakkuk is prophesying before the final days of Judah's fall and capture by Babylon. This is a time in Israel's history when Israel is divided into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. The northern kingdom, and this is where it gets confusing, the northern kingdom in Israel is also called Israel. The Southern kingdom was the more, and I say this with an asterisk, more faithful. And yet during this time, Judah, the Southern Kingdom, was about to fall. He looks at the moral collapse of his own people. Violence, injustice, and idolatry to plague the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And Habakkuk is begging God to do something. That's why it says that this is a complaint to God.

But God responds. He says, I'm doing something here. I'm sending the Chaldeans or sending the Babylonians. Habakkuk is grieving the sins that he sees in Judah. He's asking... He sees that God is telling him that he's going to raise a foreign army, one even more wicked than That's what we see in verses 15 and 17. So if you would just look at that for me. This section is confusing.

As Habakkuk is complaining to God, he switches who he's talking about. At first, he addresses God, and then in 15 and 17, he's talking about the Chaldeans, the he, or the him in 15 and 17, or the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the people who are about to conquer Judah. When he says he brings up all of them with a hook and he drags them out with his net, the he in that sentence is the Chaldeans. These people described are brutal, proud, and godless. Their economy is based on fishing, and that's why this is what the complaint is that they worship their drag net. They offer sacrifices to it. These people worship their own power, not the living God.

What you really need to understand about this section is that it's part of a complaint where Habakkuk is saying, There is evil in the world that is offensive to you, God. Please do something. Habakkuk is pleading with God to act with justice. It's the same cry that we make when we look around at the world and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't measure up to what's right. Or when we look at our own lives and we know that justice is deserved.

In doing this, this complaint, in doing this outcry to God, he does something remarkable. He affirms some amazing truths about God. Even if Habakkuk is confused, Habakkuk does not accuse God. He anchors himself in what he knows to be true about God's character. And that's where we turn now. Look at verse 12 with me. We're going to look at that first half of the verse. Are you not from Everlasting? O Lord my My God, my Holy One, we shall not die. This is a model of faith under trial, under fire, under tribulation.

Habakkuk does not interpret God through his own set of circumstances. He's not taking his own worldview, his own lens, and imposing that on who God is. He sets out with this complaint and says, I know who you are, and I don't want to get this wrong. Habakkuk does not begin with defiance. He begins with worship. It's not a denial of suffering, but it's confessing that God is a covenant God, that he is faithful to do what he says he will do. Habakkuk is complaining, yes. But look at how he approaches God, framing his complaint in the nature of who God is, guarding himself from seeing God incorrectly.

Rather than shrinking God down, to make him easier to deal with. Habakkuk does something amazing. He lets the full weight of God shape who and how he talks to God. The second part of Habakkuk1:12, he says, "O Lord, you have ordained them as judgment, and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof."

This isn't just a poetic statement that Habakkuk makes. When he says, O Rock, he's declaring, You are still my foundation. You are still the thing I'm standing on. I'm confused. The world may seem like it's falling apart, but you are the thing that I will hold firm to.

The other part of this verse is the name that Habakkuk uses to declare who God is. He says, O Lord, it's all capital letters in your Bible if you look at it. In verse 12, it's important this name. This is the covenant name of God. This is the I am. This comes from Exodus 3:14, where God is meeting with Moses in the burning bush,

"Moses asks God, What shall we call you? And God says this. God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, said, Say this to the people of Israel."

I am has sent me to you. This is God revealing himself to, to Moses, to humanity. This is the first time that we get God's name, and he tells us who he is. This is the name that God gives us to call him, the name Yahweh. It's the Hebrew word to be.

Yahweh is not just a name. It is a revelation.

It tells us about who God is, that he is self-existent, not dependent, and not derived, that God just is. That's why he says his name is I am. Not I will be, not I have been, but I always am. This is a mystery at first. It's hard to comprehend because we're dealing with the infinite part of who God is, that God never came into existence, that he will never cease to be.

At first, this answer that we see in Exodus of what is your name? Kind of seems like a dodge. It doesn't seem like a genuine answer. It doesn't seem like a real name. And yet this is the name that God uses 6,000 times throughout scripture. It's revealing something about God to us. He's showing us who he is.

And it's okay that he's a mystery, that this idea of God never having a start date, never having a beginning, always being there and being eternal. It's okay.

Because if God were small enough for us to understand him, he wouldn't be big enough for us to worship.

God is eternal. God is unchangeable. He always has been this way. He always has been, and he always will be. He was eternal before the creation of the world, and that he is not in space. He's not just out there. He's distinct from his creation. The thing I love about the name of God is it tells us that this is who God is and that this is who God will always be.

It's also the covenant name or the name of his covenant faithfulness. When he tells us his name here in Exodus, he's telling us that he's near to us, that he cares for us enough, cares enough for us to keep his promise to us. The way in which scripture reveals God's name reveals who God is to us. Reveals that he is holy. The word holy is a word that we use a lot in church, but it's a hard word for us to understand.

The idea of something being sacred or holy or set apart is a foreign idea in our culture. We don't have these spaces set up in our world anymore. The idea of God's Holiness can feel distant. So I want to take just a minute to define it for us. God's Holiness is all of who God is and all of what he does. God's Holiness is all of who God is and what he does.

I want to say just for a second, this sermon is on The character of God, the nature of God. This is the hardest thing to do in 30 minutes, and in fact, it's impossible. We will not cover the breadth and width of God. We could be here for 30 years, let alone 30 minutes, and we won't cover it. God is infinite. That's part of who he is. And so if you're feeling part of this going, Man, I feel like he's missing part of who God is. Yes, I absolutely am. We're focusing on God's standard, the standard that is within himself, his Holiness, the standard that we can't get to.

In defining God's Holiness, it's important to be precise. And this is a general definition. And if you're sitting here going, I think that we could be a little bit more precise. I want to give you this theological from the book definition, so that way you don't email me later. Okay, sounds good. Here we go. It's a little confusing, so bear with me. Holiness is his transcendent fullness, his worth, and the beautiful harmony of all his acts with that worth. Do you guys understand that? You guys track it with me? It's okay.

Holiness is all who God is and what he does.

Holiness is all who God is and what he does. It's all of God's attributes, all of his actions brought together, not in conflict with each other, but in perfect harmony. It's the idea That God, God's mercy, his kindness, his wisdom, his justice, his Almighty power, and his truth are all formed in his Holiness. They're all part of his Holiness. They're not distinct. It's the doctrine of the simplicity of God. It's not that God is somehow simple or a simpleton. But what it means is that we can't divide God. He's not a pie that we can cut into pieces. We can't take a piece of a piece of his justice, a piece of his kindness.

God doesn't operate in sections either. He operates in all of these things together at once all the time. They're part of who he is, and they're not in conflict. God's wrath and his mercy are part of his Holiness, and they don't contradict each other. God's justice and his grace work together, not against each other. God is perfect. And all of these things are part of that perfection. That perfection means that God is good, God is righteous, and he's the one who defines what is good and bad. And that means that we don't evaluate God by our own standards. God does not conform to what we believe is just, what we believe is right. We must be the ones to conform to his justice, to his holiest, to His righteousness. And that's what we see in Habakkuk1:13. That's what Habakkuk talks about in verse 13. He says, "You who are of pure eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he."

This is where we begin to feel the weight of that righteousness. God is not just eternal. He's not just unchangeable. He is pure, so pure that he cannot even bear to look at sin. He's too holy to overlook it. This is not just bad news for Babylon. It's not just bad news for Habakkuk or bad news for For Judah, this is bad news for every human being on the face of the Earth throughout all time in history. God cannot look at evil. So what does this mean for the sins that we justify daily, for the things that we go unconfessed to the people that we're closest with, the things that we hope no one will see, the things that we hope no one will notice. This is the starting for us as we answer the question, How do I measure up? Not by looking at ourselves, but by looking at God, who is too pure to even look at evil. This passage really digs into the truth that it's important for us. It's too important for us to miss how perfect God is, how pure he is, that God will not allow sin to go unpunished. God cannot look at wrong. He hates evil and sin. It is so ugly and repulsive to him that he can't stomach to be around it.

And this challenges a view of God that we have often. Often we look at God and we think about Jesus. I think we often think about this picture. I don't know if you've seen this picture. We see meek and timid and mild Jesus. He looks like he needs us to stick up for him. He looks like he's soft on sin. He looks like he would say, Don't worry, it's not a big deal. But that's not the picture of Jesus that we get in Revelation, the one who his best friend could not stand before. He falls down as if he's He said, God must hate sin. He will punish sin. He will not say it does not matter. God's love is directly tied. His love what is good is directly tied to his hatred of evil. If God is to love something good, to give mercy, it has to be tied to how much he abhors evil. The more that we love God's purity, the more that we will grieve our sin as we become more and more like him. Evil is the opposite of God, and that's what we see in this passage.

God's Response

And as we look to God's response, we'll ask this question, what does God actually require of us?

God answers Habakkuk, but not in the way that we might think or might expect. He doesn't offer a detailed explanation to Habakkuk or an emotional reassurance. Instead, he gives a vision, a statement. He says, Habakkuk, write this down. This needs to be told to other people. Write it down on tablets because I want it to be permanent. That's what he says in Habakkuk2:2. He says, Write the vision, make it plain on tablets so that he may run who reads it. This isn't a private insight that he's giving to Habakkuk. This is public, something solid, permanent, invisible that he wants all of Israel to be able to see. Habakkuk2:3 says, "If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not delay."

I think many of us don't like to wait. And Habakkuk is reminding us, especially when we're waiting for justice. God's saying his justice will come, but it will come on his time, but it won't be late. It will be perfect. Then we come to one of the most important sentences in the Bible, Habakkuk2:4, "Behold, his soul is puffed up It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith."

That verse, half about pride, the other half about faith, becomes the dividing line for two types of people. Those who rely on themselves, their own goodness, their own power, their own plans. That's what the Bible calls puffed up. That's what God calls puffed up. And then there are those, because they've seen that they cannot measure up, that they've seen God's standard and they realize there's no way that I satisfy that. There's no way that I measure up to that. These people live by faith.

This is the second half of that that becomes the foundation for everything that Paul writes in the New Testament about salvation. In Romans 1, Galatians 3, Hebrews 10, they all look back at this moment. The righteous, the justified will not live will not live by works, will not live by the things they see in the world that they can measure up to. They will live by faith.

Martin Luther would later say that "this one verse opened the gates of paradise for him. He would say, I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy of God, justifies us through faith. Thereupon, I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise."

Now, here's what this means for us. The problem isn't that we haven't measured up, that we haven't become self-actualized, that we haven't reached our potential. The problem is that we can't. We cannot measure up. Not to God's standard. Biblical faith is not some vague idea in a general idea of God. It is looking outside of ourselves to someone specific who has already measured up for you. And that is the gospel. That we are saved not by measuring up, but by admitting we can't and trusting in the one who measured up in our place.

Main Idea

God's perfection sets a standard that no one can reach

God's perfection sets a standard no one can reach. God's Holiness sets a standard that we can't reach. And yet we try, we try over and over again. No one can reach this alone. All of humanity is desperately trying to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. Well done. All of us want to be known. All of us want to be accepted. And yet we can be known and accepted by people around us.

There is a longing to be accepted and known by God himself. That's why we try to exhaust ourselves in performing, trying to be good enough, smart enough, successful enough. And even when we get there, even when we cross the arbitrary finish lines in our life that we set for ourselves, we always think, What's next? We become like Tom braided with three Super Bowl rings going, I think more and more would be good. We become like Solomon, who on his 300th wife goes, You know what? I think 301 is going to be the ticket for me, right? I think that's a guy who didn't have honest friends around him. Dude, 301 is not going to be it for you. It's not just ambition. What we have is a spiritual hunger. And that hunger is older than you. It goes back to Eden. It's etched in our souls. It's part of what it means to be made in the image of God. That we long to be known and accepted. We long to measure up, to be okay in God's eyes. And this is why we preach the gospel. This is why as a pastor, I'm committed to preaching the gospel to you as offensive as it may be, as offensive as saying, all of you are sinners in here, each of us, all of us, me included.

We are all sinful people in here. I'm committed to this. I will not be a pastor who preaches self-improvement, who preaches morality alone. I don't preach against morality, but I'm not going to preach just morality. Because if God is as holy as Habakkuk tells us, then any message that tells you just to be better, to try harder, either waters down who God is or tries to hide how broken we are. And here's the irony. It's only when we give up trying to earn it, only when we finally rest in God, that's when we can stop measuring ourselves, that we can try to stop measuring ourselves against other people because we've been declared righteous through Christ. Moralistic messages go one of two ways. A message that says, Try harder. If you just have a little bit more faith, you can do it. It leads us to pride or despair. It leads us to say, You know what? I am good enough. I have done that. I see those things, and, Yep, I am good. Or we look at ourselves truly, we see God's righteousness, and we see that we can't measure up. But the gospel, it meets us in the middle.

It says, Yeah, you know what? You aren't good enough. There was one who is good enough for you. His name is Jesus. How do we then change the way we live right now? Because a faith like this isn't passive. It isn't one that just... It's not one that we leave in the seats as we leave here this morning. It's not vague. It's not an idea that we just agree with. It is truth that invades every fiber of our being, transforms who we are from the inside out. So what is a life that rests in God's righteousness looks like?

Application

Let God be God

It leads us to our application. Our two points of applications. The first is this, let God be God. Our instinct, especially when life is painful or unjust, is to make God smaller, to make him more manageable, easier for us to wrap our minds around, our arms around. We want God, a God who affirms our expectations, who fits our logic, who doesn't make us feel uncomfortable. But the real God, the God that we see in Habakkuk in all of the Bible, refuses to be boxed in, refuses to be tamed, refuses to be made smaller.

We like to make him safer. We like to make him a little bit less holy, a little bit less offensive, easier to follow, easier to ignore. But Habakkuk won't let us do that. God's word won't let us do that. It clings to the truth of who God is. Even while Habakkuk is wrestling with it, he grounds himself in who God is. We must stop trying to edit God and learn to worship him as he has revealed himself in God's word.

Live by faith, not by perfection

That leads us into our second point, live by faith, not by perfection. If you've been crushed by perfectionism, Discouraged by your inability to do enough. Tempted to fake it. Tempted to try to measure up so that way someone else would affirm you, desperate desperately trying to cling to some validation that the world can give you. This vision that God gives Habakkuk is for you. Whether you feel like a failure or you're exhausted from trying to look successful for people. This passage offers relief. The righteous don't live by effort. They don't live by image or legacy. They live by faith, not in themselves, but in a God who is intensely holy, perfectly just, and who, by sheer grace, justifies the ungodly.

How do we let go? How do we let go of this feeling like we have to measure up? How do we stop playing the game that everyone else is playing in our world, trying to justify ourselves, trying to feel good enough? By what power can we be set free from this? It is only by the power of the cross, the power that promises that we will not be seen as ourselves as sinners, but we will be seen as Jesus, the Son of God. 2 Corinthians 5 says this, For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. On the cross, Jesus took all our sin and shame. He was treated like us. He was told that he didn't measure up. He was condemned or damned to hell. He was told that he wasn't enough. The Father had to treat Jesus like us in order to treat us like Jesus. God's perfection sets a standard that no one can reach. And yet we can be okay with not measuring up. We can leave here today being okay with not hitting the benchmarks the world has for us because Jesus measured up for us.

He became the measurement for us. We couldn't keep the law, so Christ became the law for us and died so that we could have new life set free from the law in him.

Let's stand and pray as we prepare to sing our closing song. Would you stand and pray with me?

Father God, we thank you for who you are. We praise you that you are holy, that you are just, that you are perfect, and that your standard is perfect. God, you are so big, so infinite, so righteous, that you are worthy of our worship. And we are, we rejoiced in that truth. We rejoiced in the reality that you are not small enough for us to wrap our heads or wrap our minds around that we cannot make you small for us. But help us to live in that tension, to live with that discomfort. God, let us boldly go before your throne, trusting you. God, let us move forward in this new year, knowing who you are and knowing who we are in you. It's in your name we pray. Amen.