”Let us get it fixed in our minds that this glory of Christ in his divine-human person, is the best, the most noble and beneficial truth that we can think about or set our hearts on.”
John Owen, The Glory of Christ, 30.
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Fighting false glory.
The glory of God is the grandest idea that the human mind can think about. It will be the only subject we will study in Heaven. The depth of glory as a subject is the depth of God himself. It can never be exhausted. It can never be totally grasped. It is more and more satisfying to our souls. It is a magnificent privilege to be invited into the world of God’s glory.
But men are at war with glory. This is a war not of bullets and bombs. This is a war of priorities and values. The glory of God boldly asks us: What do you love the most?
A love for God is different from all other loves. There is no greater love that can captivate our hearts. We may struggle to stay faithful through the trials and temptations of life, but the overwhelming desire of our heart will be to return to God, and to find our comfort, our meaning, our purpose, our holiness, and our hope in him alone.
The powerful work of sin tries to move us to love God and to love our sin at the same time. Churches and pastors who teach the prosperity gospel embarrass those who are faithful to the Gospel of holiness by teaching that you can be full of pride and self-promotion, you can be greedy for more and more money, and you can live any way you want, and God will love and forgive it all, as long as you ask Jesus into your heart. For them, Christ never becomes more precious than gold; Christ is never sought above fame; and Christ is never more important that personal success. False glory leads to a false faith. And you can be sure: false faith always disappoints.
The glorious church will not be self-promoting. It will not promise material wealth to those who become members. It will seek to nurture faith, not use people. It will focus on the value of the gospel and the cost of discipleship, not the esteem of the individual and cheap grace.
Sin takes every aspiration of men and it uses them as competitors for God’s glory. Sin convinces whole generations to change the meaning of key ideas and themes within the Gospel, and they redefine terms like “salvation,” “new birth,” “sanctification,” “justification,” and the rest. But then it gives rights of entry to the church to those who believe very little of the content of the true Gospel. Sin would want to believe in Jesus, but deny his sinlessness. Sin would believe in Christ, but deny that he rose from the dead. Sin would invite us to trust in Jesus, but hold that there are many ways to God, and that Christ is only one valid option.
Or it can be very subtle. Sin can take faithful people and plant in their hearts the desire to become famous. It can take a pastor and make him into a rancher (meaning that he just herds the people, but doesn’t care for them individually). It can take success and inflate the soul so that the people become proud of their accomplishments for God even when they verbally and publicly ascribe all their success to God. But secretly they think they did it all themselves.
Personally, sin can take modest spiritual growth and turn it into a desire to control others, or to become hungry for praise or position. It can turn reading the Bible into a dreaded and exhausting discipline, rather than it being the means of joy and worship for a lifetime.
False glory must be guarded against, fought hard with, and it must be defeated. Every church will struggle with false glory, no matter how wonderful the worship, how uplifting the messages, how incredible the music. It makes every church worse. It robs God of his rightful glory and it exalts man too much. It must be defeated.
Day by day, hour by hour, we must keep central in our minds that God alone is the center of all we do. That nothing we do, nothing we can plan or create, no program or activity, no advertisement or campaign, can create success. The only success is that the Lord will add daily to our number those who would be saved.
The glorious church must pursue the glory of God in everything we do. We must be careful that God is the sole and exclusive focus; he is the cause for every blessing; and he alone is our reward.
Promises to God’s enemies and friends.
“Let all your enemies perish, LORD;
But your friends will be like the Sun that rises in its might.”
Judges 5:31
The Hebrew of Psalm 65:2 reads, “To you silence is praise, O God.”
Every form of worship needs time, room for contemplation. We need time to think. When there is too much talking, too much music, and too many distraction, we can’t focus on God effectively and we cannot worship as we should.
When worship is true and life-changing, it will lead up to the point when speaking is insufficient for the Subject of God and even really good music becomes unnecessarily intrusive. For us to think about God we need periods of silence.
Teaching and proclaiming the Word of God are essential to Biblical Worship. But silence is needed, too. Silence is a recognition of God’s presence and it is a specific time set apart to think of him without distraction. But with no silence in the service, the teaching doesn’t have a chance to be received into the mind or the heart. Thousands of words in a sermon demand time to take in — to process. We need silence to sort through all those words. Quiet Please.
Silence is missing in most contemporary worship services today. Worship has become performance. The service can resemble a rave or a rock concert, filling every second of the event with words and sound from beginning to end. Screaming guitars give you no chance to contemplate. They drown out thoughts. The service is designed only so you will feel something. But silence is needed if you are to think.
Silence gives the words we have heard in proclamation “room” to inform and challenge the heart, and to be embraced by our will. This takes some time. If there is no gap, no break, no opportunity to collect ourselves in worship, we miss most of what could have been revolutionary and life-changing in our approach to God. Silence gives space for the contemplation of God and it can prepare us to hear his holy Word.
The Psalmist felt that silence was an offering of praise to God. Praising God with our silence may be the key to acknowledging God and entering into his powerful presence. Without silence, we may be entertained by what we hear, but we need the space that silence creates, to be alone together with God.
Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.”
Silence may be our best reply to God when our sins are exposed by faithful teaching. It may be the only thing that we ought to do when our sins are laid bare. We make no defense, offer up no excuses, we know that there is no adequate justification for our sin. We just stand silent before God in a knowing quietness. We know who God is and we know who we are and what we have done. Then we choose at that moment to be silent — utterly quiet because any word or song would be an intrusion upon God’s presence in that moment of pure and glorious worship. We have nothing left to say. Silence is all the praise that remains. This is extreme worship.
Praise can be silent. But it’s so hard for us to be quiet! We demand a word, “Somebody say Something!” Our sins SHOULD stop our mouths from speaking, or singing. As we are confronted with sin, God moves us toward silence in confession, and he teaches us and comforts us when we are silent and broken.
Sadly, it is sin that wants to break the silence. If even a little gap in the barrage of noise and words is given to us in a worship service, we quickly get uncomfortable. We get fidgety. We get distracted and find anything else to focus on (cell phone, the people whispering next to us, the crying baby, or the soft and distracting music that is being played over the prayer or the preaching). We aren’t use to silence.
But we get precious little of it today. Silence is almost completely absent in young churches. Silence is almost never experienced by young worshippers. Respect for God’s holiness demands silence from us. Sin wants us distracted, unfocused, or in an emotional riff.
Silence allows us room to think of God, and to contemplate him. It gives us time to capture what God has said. It allows confession to move to the heart so it becomes far more than simply repeating religious words. It takes descriptions of God so we can reckon with who God is. Confession — deep, and real — comes most beautifully when we are silent.
There is a need to recover silence in worship. Those who plan and lead worship should include times to be still within the service. We need fewer words and less distraction. So we can turn our silence into praise.
Silence is praise.
How Glory makes us better.
Glory silences the bragging self-congratulating pride of people. Worship ought to take our thoughts off of ourselves, if just for an hour or so. It considers the nature, the attributes, the perfections of God, and in that glimpse many benefits are set free to work in very personal and even confrontational effect.
The majesty of God is instantly humbling. And it moves us to admire, to extol, even to drive us to God with wonder and then to measure ourselves by that glorious vision of God. The goodness of God ought to expose our sin, but more, it should lead us to a love of the perfections of God, and call us to honor our Savior for his sinlessness. If we allow these splendors to do their work in us, there may result a yearning for the help of God that we might live as we ought.
No vision of God can leave us unaffected. Every perfection in God is worthy of worship. Seeing God gives us a clarity about ourselves that is acquired in no other activity.
True worship is self-less. It seeks God alone. It desires to ascribe all glory in a singular focus. To God be the glory forever (Romans 11:36; 16:2; Philippians 4:20; 1 Timothy 1:17).
Soli Deo Gloria.
The church is the servant of God. God is not the servant of the church. Measuring the church by how much we enjoy it, or what it has done for us, or by how much we like the people, or how much we agree with the focus and mission — they all miss the mark.
We would hope that people might be helped, healed, moved toward maturity, taught, and helped to live more holy lives. But that is not the focus. That is the result of knowing God and of being in the presence of his glorious Son, by the Spirit he has given us.
The church exists for the praise of God and for the evangelization of the world. It does not exist for the benefit of the people. The church is for the praise of the glory of the grace of God. The people of ancient churches saw their lives as absolutely expendable if the Gospel would be spread by their sacrifice. They would never have made a decision to be part of a church because of the benefit to them. That would be utterly alien to them. It would have been denounced as a fundamental misunderstanding of what the church is as the Body of Christ.
The glory of Christ is not focused on meeting the needs of people. His glory is accessible and it is transformative in the lives of those of us who meet him and serve him. People who love God continually offer our lives to God to do with as he pleases — not as we please.
Therefore we must get away from such ideas as choosing a church because of what it does for me. Looking for a church that I enjoy. Wanting a church with programs. Desiring a church that does this or that mission or outreach. Rather, we should seek a church that brings us to maturity; that challenges our sin; that teaches us about the character and nature of God; a church that gives us the whole of the Biblical message; and especially, a church where the glory of Christ is preeminent and where the glory of Christ is in conflict with anything that might seek to diminish or lessen his glory directing and empowering our lives.
Simple Questions to ask:
Am I in a church for my needs to be met, or because God is glorious and deserving of all my love and praise?
Does the gathering of the church result in the honor and praise of God; or in addressing the needs of people?
God’s people are ministered to most when they engage in the praise of God and in loving him with everything they have and are.
Who is serving Whom? We are serving God. And in serving and loving him, we are made more holy, and more whole.
Who is serving Whom?
Finding Happiness in 2013.
It is a terrible lie. Over and over we hear that we should measure the quality of our lives by the number of blessings we receive or do not receive. We are told that more blessings will make us happier. We sometimes believe that we will become miserable if we don’t get what we want. The is what the world tells us. And it is a lie.
The world bombards us with the myth that we need SOMETHING or some event or some amount of money, or some car, or some relationship, to make us happy. But that is not Christianity, unless that Someone is God.
The Christian faith teaches that no matter what God permits or directs into our lives, we can still be happy in that and through that experience. We can be blessed in any situation and in every circumstance, even if it leads us to death.
Do not the hardest experiences Christians go through leave us with the most blessings? Can’t we learn to be be content even with poverty, if we have Christ? Can’t we delight in his approval when we have sacrificed for his Kingdom? Can’t we trust in his provision for the future and not worry or fret or be afraid because we struggle with money or relationships? He has something in store for us that is greater than riches, better than health, and more precious than the love of any human being.
The tests of faith that come to us all prove the validity of our faith. God isn’t seeking to destroy us. But he is determined to refine us.
To have a blessed New Year, Do This: Have all your happiness, all your blessedness to be found in God alone. Not in any other person. Not in any thing you desire. Not in any experience you long for. You can be happy. You can be happy every day, every moment, all year long. You can be happy for as long as you live. No matter what happens.
Happiness comes from trusting God. And in nothing or no one else.
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
(Romans 8:38-39 ESV)
Glorious Savior Church 