08/14/2025
Just a recap of last night here at Kids Club:
Lesson Focus
The prophet Ezekiel was privileged to experience a vision from God that gave him a glimpse of God’s glory. Isaiah and the Apostle John had similar visions. In all three cases, the men of God reacted with complete awe as they saw God’s glory. God alone is truly awesome!
Key Passages
Ezekiel 1:1, 1:4, 1:26–28; Isaiah 6:1–5; Revelation 1:12–16
Memory Verse
1 Peter 5:10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
Awestruck! That is what Isaiah, Ezekiel, and John were—filled with awe in the presence of God’s glory and holiness. What happened to them? The wonder of what they saw left them weak, humbled, contrite, and facedown before the holiness of God. Awe is a word that is not very common in Western culture, but one of its forms can be found everywhere. “This cheeseburger is awesome!” “That movie was awesome!” “So-and-so is an awesome actor!”
Really? Do those entities really deserve the description “awesome”? Merriam-Webster defines awe as “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime.” A cheeseburger did that for you? If so, you have turned the cheeseburger into something that it shouldn’t be. God, however, should rightly inspire awe in us, and the things he does or has created might do the same. You may have experienced awe at a sunset over the mountains as the colors explode through the clouds, or at the birth of a child. Remember the awe you experienced at salvation or during moments of fellowship with God. It is God and his wonderful works that should inspire such feelings in us.
If we use a word like awesome to refer to everything around us that is remotely better than average, we risk losing an appreciation for the distinctive nature of God and confusing unbelievers when we refer to him as awesome. Surely, when we sing of the awesomeness of God, we are not comparing him to a cheeseburger, so maybe we could find a different word for the cheeseburger and reserve the word awesome for the One who truly is and his works that truly are.