Christians hold this truth to be precious. It’s important for teens to understand that there is a category for ideas that goes beyond reason but is not irrational.

I reiterate these words each week that we preach through this series. “Even though we can’t understand God fully, we can understand him truly.” By zeroing in on the ways God cannot be fully understood, we recognize how unique God is, and we see idolatry for the insanity that it is (Daniel 4).Ģ.

However, picking and pasting the parts of God we prefer and the parts we easily understand lead us to a papier-mâché God made in our own image. Grasping for equality with God is the essence of idolatry – worshipping creation, rather than Creator. Teens (like all humans) want to bring God down to their level. Here are seven reasons I have chosen to focus on God’s incommunicable attributes, and why I think they’re important for teens to understand. God is not like us, but that’s a very good thing. God is self-sufficient and self-existent. So in this series, once a week we have begun to unpack a different way God is unlike us. But God’s incommunicable attributes are true things about God that can never be true of us. In my ministry, we recently began a series called “None Like Him.” In this series, we walk through several of God’s “incommunicable attributes.” Incommunicable means “unshared.” We share some of God’s attributes – like His love, goodness, and graciousness – just in finite ways. If God really is beyond us then, at some point, our questions have to stop, our minds will fail us, reason will have to be bedded down, and we must simply worship. If our gut-reaction is to always have quick answers and pat justifications we, by default, do dishonor to the God we worship. Mystery is something that Christians, and especially teens need to find precious and not threatening.

Jen wilkin attributes of god