Category Archives: Philosophy of ministry.

Bible Study, Philosophy of ministry.

Paul’s testament to Timothy

1. Purity in teaching and doctrine.

The Christian faith is more that relationships. It is also a relationship with the truth and with true doctrine. Doctrine has been confused with sectarian arguments and man’s opinions and we are programmed to give a wince or a groan when the subject of doctrine comes up.

Doctrine ought to be the essential truths of faith, not those matters that create Christian denominations. Doctrine would be the principles about God that would distinguish a true church from a cult, a true follower of Christ from one who was sincere and sincerely wrong on matters that have to do with eternal life and true godliness. Doctrine would distinguish a Mormon from a Christian by means of the doctrinal differences between the two. For example, the Mormons believe that there are many Gods and that there are a multiplicity of universes. They believe that some of those living as human beings will one day become Gods of their own creation. They also believe that they will be co-equal in being and divinity with Jesus Christ. Christian doctrine says there is one God, who lives eternally in three Persons (one in essence, and three in personhood). Christian doctrine teaches that God is eternally different from human beings. People are created, God is uncreated because he existed forever. We worship Jesus Christ, according to Christian doctrine, we do not become equal to him in our essence. He is a member of the Trinity, the Second Person of the Trinity (which makes up the One God) and we can never assume the being of divinity. We may share the personal attributes of God (kindness, love, patience, forgiveness, and the like) but this is mimicry, not consubstantialis with God (“having the same substance as”) which the Mormon’s teach. 

In our day there are many doctrines in the Christian faith that set us apart from other faiths. We believe that only by faith in Jesus Christ our Savior is there forgiveness and new life. We believe that Christ died for our sins and that all who believe in him will be rescued/saved from the wrath to come. We believe that Christ was both a human being and the Second Person of the Trinity, and he died on the Cross, was in the tomb or three days, and rose bodily from the dead. We believe that Christ is alive today and that he prays for us. These and many more doctrines are critical to the Christian faith. 

Some matters of faith are not doctrine in the sense that they define the Christian faith. One such secondary matter, it seems clear, is the matter of baptism. You may stop attending a church is they taught that Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, but you might not break fellowship with a Church of with believers who attend it over the issue of baptism. There are wonderful Christians on all sides of the baptism question. They answer the question as to whom should be baptized very differently. Some baptize children of believers, some only a believer after conversion and a credible testimony. We may disagree about who should be baptized but we would not say that those who practice baptism differently from our church have ceased to be Christians. They have a disagreement on this secondary matter that would not rise to the standard of doctrine (as we are defining the term here). 

1 Timothy 1:3-7, Paul warns Timothy not to teach any other doctrine that what he had been taught. The New Testament is the corpus, the standard of teaching for the Christian Church. Add to that the Old Testament, and there is the corpus for the time before Christ appeared, and the record of God dealing with his Covenant people, Israel, through blessing, provision, Law, prophets, exile, sin, restoration, hope, promise, and fulfillment. 

2. For you. What you believe matters in whether you are forgiven or not. What you believe determines your salvation. What you believe affects your life, your choices, your moral compass, your sense of accountability, how, whether, and where you serve God or not. What you believe determines your view of the church, of other believers in Christ, and your own relationship with God. What you believe affects your friendships, your marriage, your work, how you raising your children (avoiding the word “parenting”), how you live, and, last, how you will die. Pretty important, I’d say. 

Paul warns against speculation in 1:4. Speculation is when you come up with something that is not definitive and you believe it to be true, even though there is no clear and strong basis for it. Many secondary doctrines are not definitive because they are speculative. They have the principle Number 1, plus principle Number 2, and they derive the startling conclusion that there were only two of every kind of animal on the Ark. But they didn’t read carefully that Noah was commanded to bring 7 specimens of the “clean” animals, not just two of them. Not reading the whole story can bring us to make statements that aren’t true, when part of what we say has a connection to the truth, just not all of it. Another kind of speculation is when we come to a question about which the Bible is not clear (evidenced by many faithful interpreters having disparate interpretations of the passage), and we offer our conclusion, which must be our speculation because there is not enough evidence in the text to resolve the matter. 

Do not go beyond what is written (1 Corinthians 4:6). As enticing as it presents itself, we must not speculate where the Bible is silent. That would be going beyond what is written. We must, at points say, “I don’t know.” Richard Pratt noted that we are not able to understand all of Scripture, he suggests, because it teaches us humility when we face the limits of our understanding. Doctrine is one thing, speculation is another. We need to know the difference. When a person teaches with authority something that is merely speculation, we should remind hem of 1 Timothy 1:4. The end should be the teaching of the doctrines of the Christian faith as the stewardship we have received from God, and which he expects us to fulfill.

People can swerve (1 Tim 1:6-7) from the truth. They can teach wrong doctrines about how people should live their lives. The lists of prohibited sins are repeated through Paul’s writings (1 Corinthians 5:11ff.; 6:9ff; Galatians5:19ff; Romans 1:28ff; 13:13; Colossians 3:5; Ephesians 5:5; 2 Timothy 3:2f., and in our section 1 Timothy 1:8-10). 

3. The goal is love, 1 Timothy 1:5. This love is described and with a “pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.”  The goal is not merely to be loving, but to have a love that is tied to other virtues (pure heart, good conscience, and sincere faith.” The Christian faith has bee characterized as the religion of love — that God is love, that we love one another, all we need is love. But the way the love of the Christian faith characterizes itself is far from “love” alone. It is a definitive kind of love, a love of substance and character. 

4. The foremost sinner. Paul describes himself in a couple of places in the later section of 1 Timothy 1 as the foremost of sinners. He had been (ὑβριστήν, from which the word hubris comes, overweening pride. That was Paul. Was Paul the worst sinner in the history of humanity? That is the implication of ὑπερεπλεόνασεν, the only use of this word in the New Testament, meaning that grace “overflowed” for him, it abounded exceedingly to Paul, because he was the foremost, the πρῶτός (the “protos” or prototype (1:15), the worst there was). To emphasize the point, he repeats himself in the next verse (1:16).
The point was that if God could save Paul, the worst sinner, he could show mercy, use him as an example, “to those who were to believe in (Christ) for eternal life” (1:16).

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Philosophy of ministry.

Mimicry.

Don’t look to others.

How much do I give of my life to God? Just as much as he, or almost as much as she? What will our church create in program and mission? Will we become like the “fastest growing church in America,” or something else, something better?

Don’t look to others human institutions to see what a church should do or how it should be run. Don’t look to people to see how much you should value or think of God or how much you should love him.

When it feels like everyone is imitating the popular, the famous, the models and successful, what could be wrong in that?

We are painfully incapable, it would seem in this day of mimicry, to be able to do anything without comparing ourselves to others. We buy a car because he bought one. We watch a TV show because they watch it. We buy a cell phone because our friends have one. We shop here, vacation there, decorate our house, eat gluten-free (for no reason), vote for this political party, all because she does. We are alarmingly addicted to other people, even, and sadly, especially in our life with God.

Our addictive culture can’t keep from looking at others to determine how much, how deeply, how consistently, we should love, worship, serve, or sacrifice for, God. This mimicry deeply impacts how we live our life with God. We adopt Christian lingo, worship in ways that are really pretty silly. Then we praise successful, best-selling writers who are idiots and congratulate ourselves that we become, through an embarrassing act of self-doubt and false faith, like other people who are popular, famous, or influential. Stop it!

Instead, look to God. Don’t measure your godliness by what others do. Don’t congratulate yourself that you are just like others whom you admire. The bar is set far too low. You praise yourself much too easily. Godliness is not mimicking other people, it is being like Christ.

Doing what others do is a form of selfishness. You protect yourself by making easy choices, walking in line, saying what others say, becoming like THEM. It betrays the truth, and it substitutes any authentic life with God for follow-the-leader. It exposes an alarming lack of creativity and insight. Doing what others do is the road to judgment not glory.

Don’t look to others. Look to God. And in that perspective, and apart from what any other human being does or says, make your decisions and live your life for God completely.

Breaking the bruised reed

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Bible Study, Philosophy of ministry.

Redeeming Prayer

Redeeming Worship means that we do the things we ought to do, and that we don’t do the things we mustn’t do when we come to worship God.

When we turn our hearts, our eyes, our minds toward God, worship should become God-centered. All that we do in worship is about God, it is for God, and it is constrained by God’s direction for the event. There is perhaps nothing more arrogant, nothing exceeds the presumptuousness of one who determines what he will do in worship as an act of praise or in a design to give God glory, and doing so without  considering what God has said about how he should and must be worshiped. We, like the followers of Aaron at the foot of Mt. Sinai, melt our gold and contrive our devices and concoct our forms and our limericks, we silence the voice of God, melt out golden bobbles into an altar and dance merrily around the Golden Calf, thinking all is well, because it is done is in the name and for the sake of worship.

Praying to the Golden Calf

Our worship doesn’t fail so miserably as the Israelites, but we are prone to the same kinds of sin. We substitute what God has commanded for actions that we have invented. We are quick to dismiss the confession of sins as too obtuse or old-fashioned and our sins are unconfessed before our holy God. We set aside the reading of God’s Word because our focus is on new believers or seekers whom we hope to reach for Christ, and we starve believers in the pew and leave them spiritually emaciated, like those in the death camps, scarcely skin and bones, spiritually, because we have chosen to entertain or dazzle rather than to strengthen, feed, inform, mightily comfort in trial and sorrow, or fully prepare for battle those who are Christ’s.

First prayers

The content of the prayers in Ephesians opens a door into the spiritual life of the Apostle Paul. Some have said that a man at prayer is the most accurate representation of the condition of his soul and it is a point at which he is the most honest and the most God-focused.

Ephesians 1:15-17 — It was their faith in Christ (1:15) that moved the Apostle to pray for the people to whom he is writing (Ephesians was probably a circular letter to many churches in the Lycus Valley of Asia Minor, so there were many church-recipients of this letter). Their faith in Christ was the beginnning point of his prayers for them. We should pray differently for people who are Christians than for those who are not. Our prayers for Christians must be about the knowledge of God and our need to grow — “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened”  … “the hope to which he called you”  ‘the riches of the glorious inheritance”  “the greatness of the power at work in you” — all these prayers were for those who believed. The prayer was so that they might understand and walk in the great provisions that God has given them.

When people come to Christ, often all they know is that Christ died for their sins. They may not know that God desires for their hearts to be enlightened, for their minds to be instructed, for the greatness of power to be experienced, within their very lives. But to these ends, Paul “makes remembrance of them” in his prayers. He not only knows about them, but he chooses to remember them in prayer.

The pastor’s duty is to teach and preach, but it is also to pray. To remember to pray for his people. The pastor who does not pray for his people ought not to pastor them. This would be like the shepherd who allows the sheep to go hungry or to be eaten by wolves, who allows any other flock to envelope his own, or to permit thieves to take the sheep to expand their own flock.

The good shepherd prays for his people. He prays for them to know God, to know about God, and to walk with God. He prays that they might be given the Spirit of God to teach, to reveal, to open the Word of God. And he prays that the people of God would live by the power that raised Christ from the dead, and not in their own failing power.

The pastor prays honestly for his people. The Law of God exposes the thoughts and the intentions of the heart and the pastor knows their sins because he knows his own, as Scripture informs us.

But the prayers are not purely theological, dealing only with matters of heart and head. The majestic prayers in Ephesians lead us to live for Christ. “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” These prayers for good works come from the Apostle of Grace. Paul prayed for the truth of our life with God to be translated into our daily life with God and how we live for God. There is a context for these good works — they were “prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (2:10). The workmanship of God, making the dead alive — teaching them about their spiritual riches and the certainty of their life with God forever (“inheritance”), this workmanship was given to us by grace, through the Spirit, so that our lives would be lived in these truths, in these realities, and in this power.

What a horrible waste to have the power of the resurrection poured into our lives, working in us a redemption that takes away all our sins and then to live in utter defeat, to know no peace, and to never experience the provision of God, the life of God, or the passion for God. That our lives would never be touched or changed or corrected or helped or made right because we are “his workmanship,” would be a tremendous failure.

Ephesians 3:14-21. Pulling the main verbs out of the prayer, here is a simplified sentence from this prayer:

“I bow my knees before the Father … that he may grant you to be strengthened with power by his Spirit … that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith … that you may have strength to comprehend … and to know the love of Christ … and be filled with the fulness of God.”

This is very different from praying for traveling mercies for MaryBeth and Homer as they go back up to Ohio, or Aunt Judy’s broken finger. Intercession and petitions are part of our prayer-life, but they only make sense after we have appropriated the grand gifts of God for our lives. When we are filled with the fulness of God, then when we turn to pray for Aunt Judy, we will pray for much more than for her broken finger, but for her heart to be filled, for her life to be dominated by the Spirit of Christ within, that she might comprehend the dimensions of the love of God. How much better our prayers are, when we first pray for the grander themes, the higher aspirations, the glorious content that God desires to pour into our lives. Then we are his workmanship. Then we can know and be filled with the fulness of God.

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Philosophy of ministry.

Redeeming worship

Worship is connected to the glory of God. If worship is aimed at another goal or target than the glory of God, it has fallen into a form of idolatry. Worship is not to entertain or delight an audience. It should be the expressions of praise and adoration, love and submission to God who alone is worthy of worship, from his children. Worship is not measured by what we gain from the experience, but by the content of our praises, the fullness of our focus upon God and on God alone, by our self-emptying in his presence, and above all, by the degree or measure by which we are motivated by the grace of God to enter into such a wonderful exercise. Worship is a sublime privilege.

Worship is shaped by our view of God. What we think of God; what we know about God; what we stake our lives on about God — and worship is an application of all these operations, focusing them into the experience of worship.

Much worship in the modern church fails because there are no qualifications for those who are invited to worship God. Seekers are asked to join in worship. Those who do not know God are invited along with every Christian to come into his presence with praise, to worship and bow down before the LORD our Maker. But such worship is, by definition, diluted (perhaps even deluded).

When a true worshiper comes to offer praises to God, and that Christian comes into the place where worship is offered with others who have no faith, no interest, there is no commonality, no agreement, no understand of the grand design and purpose of worship. There are a 1,000 different reasons for people to be in the room, and most which have little to do with ascribing praise to the Glorious God and our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Such diluted purpose is confusing to the unbeliever and it is a harm to the true Christian.

Worship is for Christians only. Others may be invited to come and see, but they cannot, by the definition of worship, offer their praise and thanks for the grace of God, for the work of Christ, or for the many promises of the Bible to those who believe. Such confusion about those who qualify for worship is killing worship. Christians must redeem worship as the prerogative of believers alone.

We fall and we fail at worship.

The worship of God is a high and pristine aspiration. It is, in this life, something that we do incompletely, with mixed motives, we enter into it imprecisely and with inadequate understandings. We bring our preconceived notions, our previous experience with “worship” (as in “Worship is at 11 am Sunday Morning,” or “be a part the worship team” ), and therefore everyone has prejudices, longings, expectations, and ideals in mind when we think about worship or take steps to engage in it.

Worship is to be directed toward God because it longs to be worthy of him. But no matter how much we try, no how much we plan the experiences of worship or have numberous teams working and developing worship themes and goals, our worship in this life will always fail. We will fail in the sense that our words are not adequate, our love for God is not sufficient, our lives lived do not echo his majesty, our faith is not full, and our holiness is not like God’s.

So, with these constraints, our worship while we are still living on Earth will never meet the goal of the glory of God. It cannot be adequate, for we are humans offering praise to God. It cannot be worthy of the God who created the Universe, who redeemed us by Jesus Christ, or who gives us new life and hope by faith in him. We are just people. He is God.

Of course, worship, like everything in the Christian life, must be conducted by the grace of God and by faith in him. No worship will be perfect, but it should be God-focused. It must be a celebration of his grace toward us who believe. Worship, though we “lisp and stammer” in our offerings of praise (we don’t say what we should, and what we do say is insufficient and flawed), by Jesus Christ is acceptable to God.

Worship is not a place for invention. Worship is not an event where people come up with whatever they desire to give to God, just because they want to. Worship is essentially and always guided, constrained, and filled with content from the Word of God.

The Critical Question.

The most important question by which a worship service is measured is: What role and importance does God have in the service of worship? Is God absolutely central in all that is done? Are the songs offered to God? Are the prayers offered to God, and are they filled with praise and adoration, thanks and honor to God for what he has done? Can people hear from God in the worship service? How is the Word of God read and explained to God’s people? Is worship, from beginning to end, about God?

Unbelievers will tire quickly of “only talking about God all the time in worship.” Christians will love to talk with God, hear from God, offer God praise, and sing to God offering honor and glory to him. Unbelievers what to see what God will do for them. Christians want to understand more about who God is and they desire to know more and more of his will for their lives.

Worship for an unbeliever is a very different experience than the worship that a Christian offers to God. One is centered on God, the other is centered on themselves. One wants to know God, the other wants to know what God will do for them. One is learning how to live for God supremely and in all choices, the other is negotiating with God to do the least possible so they get the greatest return from God. The Christian comes to be in the presence of God. The unbeliever comes so God can be in their presence. Where is God in the worship service?

Worship is for God, but it benefits us who worship.

Christians are blessed by God when we worship him. He is pleased with us, he delights in our praises, and he accepts our offerings of praise and thanks when they are given by grace through faith.

Ephesians 1:3, God blesses us “in Christ with every spiritual blessing.” This is the resource from which worship wells up from within us. We have these resources of spiritual blessings, the truth about God, the revelation of Jesus Christ, the fulness of the Holy Spirit. We have the promises of God, the record of the miracles of God. We have the accounts of how God has revealed himself in history to real people, here on the Earth, and we know that the principles that Scripture teaches are true because God has affirmed the power, the truth, the accuracy, and the transforming potential of the Word of God. We are blessed with every spiritual blessing. All that God wants to give us, we have!

Ephesians 1:4, “He chose us … that we should be holy and blameless before him.” To be before God is to be in the position of worship and praise. It is to be in a relationship of close proximity to God.

Ephesians 1:6, Grace is introduced as “his glorious grace” by which he has blessed us in the Beloved (that is, in Jesus Christ). Grace is central to all access to God. When we are talking about salvation, it is through grace. When it is walking with God (as in Galatians) it is by grace. When we are talking about ascribing to God all glory, it is by grace that we do this.

Ephesians 1:7, We have “redemption” “in him” “the forgiveness of sins.” Worship must include what God has done for us. It must describe the forgiveness of sins. All access to God must deal with human sin. He is sinless, we are sinful. How can sinful people come into the presence of a Holy God? Answer. By Jesus Christ and his grace and redemption by which we can come. Worship is one way that we come into the presence of God.

Worship essentials.

Worshipers must be faithful people. Ephesians 1:1, “faithful in Christ Jesus” is the description of the Christians Paul was addressing. Our faithfulness today is just as central and important as in that day.

Are we: Believing, trusting, living in Christ Jesus, forgiven and forgiving, filled with grace and living by faith, and does the Spirit of God dwell within us?

Is worship grace-centered in all that is done in the name of “worship.’

Is worship God-centered from beginning to end?

Is the content and subject matter of worship found in the Word of God? Do we use the language, the words of Scripture in our worship services, or are we only hearing from man in the name of worship?

Summary.

Worship is about the glory of God, “to the praise of his glory” Ephesians 1:13. Worship says the words that bring glory to God. We teach people about the glory of our God. We believe that God is glorious. We labor diligently and at cost of our lives and time, for the glory of God.

Worship is adoration, it is an act of love to God. We worship God supremely because he loved us and invited us to love him. Worship is about love.

Worship is giving God his worth. In one sense we always come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). But worship calls us to something higher than we can reach, something greater that we can do, and to use words that we cannot express, yet. It is the aspiration within us that we might worship God by grace through faith, that we attempt it. Our insufficiencies in worship are more than compensated for by the greatness of his grace toward us who believe.

Worship is about God. It is designed for God. It is to bring us close to God. And in that closeness, we are overwhelmed and deeply and profoundly blessed by God. His delight in us, his love for us, in worship is turned to praise from us to him.

God is the only reason for worship.

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Philosophy of ministry., The Word of God in the life of the believer.

The Strong and the Weak

Surveying key issues in Romans 14 and 15. Strong and Weak Vs Faithful.

Paul gives instructions to those who are strong to be kind to the weak, in Romans 14:1. Then in Romans 15 (after a little summary) he tells everyone to get along for Christ’s sake.

When reading the instructions to the “strong” it was very easy to think of all those “weak” people out there and to conclude that the duty of the strong (like me or perhaps like you) is to put up with “them.” But it is interesting that Paul never defines who the strong ones are and who are the weak.

Have you not noticed that sometimes we are strong and sometimes we are very weak? Paul seemed to know that people who think they have it together have to be given a stringent reminder to be kind to people who don’t.

Is it not true that when we fail, and act like a weak person, at that moment we depend on the “strong” to put up with our non-sense? We depend on the strong, whoever they are, to cut us slack, to bend over backwards, to give us grace, and to be quick to forgive us, when we are full of ourselves?

Romans 14:19, “So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual up-building,” and you could add, “no matter who you think you are.”

Paul zeroes in on faith as the test of how we may consider what makes up strength and what makes up weakness. When you are living by faith, when your choices are informed by faith, when you are expressing your faith verbally and in the way you live, then that is good and acceptable. You can be weak (in the way you act and in your understanding) but if your faith is true and your heart is given to God, others can put up with you. It is when you don’t live by faith and when you fail to believe God’s promises or trust his Person, that you get into trouble, and putting up with you at that point in your life is a waste of light and power. When you are faithless, even the strong can’t help you and they shouldn’t.

Paul’s instructions don’t give the weak permission to act like jerks. His wisdom doesn’t give the strong permission to overlook stupid and gross sins in those who are “weak.” There is a place of commonality between strong and weak and that place is our faith.

The church today seems too concerned to incorporate people into their system and programs, into their way of thinking and their alien god-speak and other strange dialects that we hear being spoken among the religious, and not concerned enough about teaching people who truly and savingly believe in Christ to simply get along with each other with true and unvarnished love.

We are called to accepted one another like Christ accepted us (see Romans 15:7, “Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”) The strong want the weak to shape up. The weak are tired of being left on the outside.

Those who have been purchased by the blood of Jesus are accepted by HIM. The command is simple: If Christ received you, receive each other. This is a picture of the Church that Jesus is building.

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Philosophy of ministry.

The surprising connection between glory and joy

Everett Harrison’s wrote an article on Glory in The New International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. This article happens to be a summary of his Ph.D. thesis on “Glory” and one of the richest resources in print on the glory of God. Harrison points to the connection between glory and joy, he writes:

“Quite naturally glory is closely associated with joy. The two elements mingle in the experience of the shepherds at the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:9f, 20) and in the acclaim given Him at the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:38) as well as the Savior’s expectation of return to the Father (Hebrews 12:2). Likewise the prospect of future glory evokes in the saints the response of joy (Romans 5:2; 1 Peter 4:13; and Jude 1:24).” (NISBE, Volume 2, 1982, p. 482.)

Glory and joy

Glory may seem to be some glimmering light from the Holy of Holies or the shouts and songs of the redeemed in Heaven. But to see glory as the source of great joy in those who experienced the presence of Christ in his day during the joyful entry of Christ into Jerusalem, and by the future glory that shall be experienced together with all those who are redeemed, and, furthermore, to know that the joy of Christ before the Father is part of the renewal of the glory of the Son and the reunion of the Trinity in the Heavenly place, all prove the wonderful and God-filled principle that glory always brings joy.

Glory is the root and foundation of all the joy we experience in Christ. It is the glory of God that celebrates the victory of Christ. It is glory that brings us to study and then to appreciate the person of God. It is glory that presses the work of salvation into our human hearts and makes them alive and able to praise and worship God. And it is glory that assures us of the truth of Christ’s rule both in us and soon over all persons and things and so we know that our future is to be filled and absolutely defined by the glory of God.

The joy we experience in Jesus Christ is a glorious joy because it is rooted in what God has done and in who he is. We are doxological (glory-centered) in all our worship. By glory we remember that our joy is not generated within the heart of man, but from God. It is not something that we possess in ourselves at all, but by Jesus Christ we are filled, as if by miracle, with the glory of God.

True joy is always linked to the actions of God; it is derived from what God has done and what he will do. By the work of glory there is absolute confidence in the work of Christ in the past, so we sing with the shepherds and angels, “Glory to God in the highest …” And we look at the work of Christ on the Cross and with much greater appreciation and far more insight that those shouting “Hosanna,” we who believe now know who the Savior is and we see that his coming to redeem was the most glorious act in all of eternity.

How can we not have joy when we read of his coming to redeem us? We understand more of his work and we now see with far greater detail the implication of his death for our salvation, and we are driven by its importance and glory to shout for joy at the display of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, especially as it shined forth in the Redeeming Cross of Christ. The Cross was the grandest display of the glory of God and therefore it is the most precious and articulate source of our joy in God. Nothing exceeds it.

The question then could be raised, If we have little joy, what do we lack? The answer is: We lack glory. If our joy is failing or fading, the way to remedy that joylessness is to study the glory of God.

When glory is grasped and when our minds understand and our hearts retain even small aspects of the glory of God (which is all we can contain), glory changes how we see everything. When glory is seen by faith we are filled so much with the work and the person of God that glory’s child — the joy of God — comes with inexpressible fullness to overwhelm our lives with a glorious joy. We cannot experience true joy apart the glory of God entering into our lives. Glory and joy are inseparable.

We fail to be joyful when we neglect or ignore the glory of God. Joylessness is a deficiency of glory. But remember, it is not joy that we seek. It is glory. It is glory that brings us joy. When we study the glory of God, we do not need to be reminded to be more joyful. We are given joy as an overflow of all that makes God glorious.

Seeing the glory of God makes us joyful. And it is always so. Glory brings us to joy.

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Philosophy of ministry.

Thinking about God’s glory.

The word that is used for glory in the New Testament is doxa. It comes into English in doxology, a word of glory, or a word of praise. Doxa comes from the verb meaning “to think.”

A person may be good, even noble, but if you don’t learn about that person, and think about their choices, their moral character, and their impact on people, that wonderful person may never have made any impression on you. Unless you learned about them and thought about their actions, their character, and words, they would have no impact on you whatsoever.

It’d be like you’d never heard of Mother Theresa. Her service to the poor and her wise and courageous words to the most powerful people in the world (regarding the evil of abortion), were astounding. The impact of her life on thousands of poor lepers and indigent poor in Calcutta is so filled with love and compassion that it shook the world. But if you’d never heard of her life and never contemplated the impact of her life she’d have no impact on you. It would be as if she didn’t even live, as far as you are concerned.

God isn’t glorious just when you think about him. He is glorious if you’d never been born. But it is through thinking about God, and this thinking is necessary and it is important, that the glory of God has its impact in your life and on you as a person.

When you hear about the love of God, you must take some time to think about the importance of that aspect of God and how it should impact and direct your life. If you learn about the mercy of God — how he forgives sinners and loves people in spite of what they’ve done — it would be crucial for you, in the light of this information about mercy, to take the fact of your sin and to align that fact against the incredible promises regarding the mercy of God toward sinners. At that point, the mercy of God becomes more than an interesting fact, it becomes a principle within your heart, your mind, and it impacts the way you live. But it becomes important, a point of glory in your life, when you think about it.

Glory comes as we “contemplate” God. God’s Person and his moral perfections and actions all occurred apart from our physical observation (in 99.999% of the cases), yet all of them can change our lives, inform our worship, and inspire our greater holiness when we think on them and understand who God is and what he has said and done. We need to study God.

Our culture labors to keep people from thinking about God. The culture wants us to be entertained, distracted, or exhausted by recreation or labor, every moment we are awake. If we are distracted, entertained, or exhausted, there is no room in our lives to think. Godly people of old would take time to contemplate, to think, on God. They would see thinking about God as one of their most important spiritual exercises. Today, we listen to everyone else but to God.

For a little exercise: Read Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (ESV).

Taking time to think on these virtues that are derived from God, will have a powerful impact on our lives, “and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:9).

Taking time to think about God.

Think about God. Think about what God has done. Think about what God has said. Think about who God is in his moral nature and by his holy virtues.

This is how we see God as glorious. Apart from thinking, God is still absolutely glorious, but we miss his glory completely and we are spiritually impoverish.

Our thinking must not be unfettered and ill-focused. It is through the Word of God that our thoughts are directed to what can be known about God. Studying, reading, and contemplating the Word of God is the beginning, the middle, and the end of our learning about God in this life.

Think on these things.

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Glory of God, Philosophy of ministry.

From Glory to Worship

And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’” (Luke 4:8)

Jesus’ command is very hard to bear. The exclusionary command to worship and serve only God sweeps away human (or demonic) ambition, pride, and our insatiable hunger to be first. Jesus didn’t say, “Worship God alongside other people and all your possessions and ambitions.” His words point to a new, a greater ambition for believers in Christ: to place God first with no second in view; to have him and no other (cf. Luke 14:33); to have him with nothing of equivalent value—and there to learn that God’s glorious presence in our lives defines, evaluates, judges, and potentially redeems, every other love and longing we have. To know God is to gain everything we had longed for and to lose everything we had cherished in place of him (cf. Matthew 13:46).

From More Glory, W. Thomas Warren.

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Philosophy of ministry.

Glorious worship

Worship in the glorious church will bring people into the presence of God. It will not bring God into the presence of people. Worship is adoration and honor. It is hearing the commands of Christ and falling on our faces in obedience to them. It is yielding ourselves to the will of God, as Christ did, and seeking support and help from our brothers and sisters to walk in it.

Worship hears from God. This would mean that worship is filled with God’s Word. We read and hear God’s Word and we receive it. But more than that. We obey the commands of God that we have heard, especially regarding what worship is and what it demands of us.

My mentor, Harold O.J. Brown (Protest of a Troubled Protestant), wrote about worship connecting the people of God with the meaning of what God has commanded us to do in the worship experience. He was puzzled that “religious language” carries so little weight in peoples’ actions in worship or in their lives more broadly. For example, when you hear in church, “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker” (Psalm 95:6), one who was unfamiliar with the Christian faith might think that this phrase would effect an action on the part of God’s people. But after that Psalm is read, no one, not one person in the room, kneels. No one moves or does anything at all in response to that specific command. They do not understand nor do they perceive those words to be a command at all. They do not see that God’s people should  actually do something with their bodies and with their knees. That admonition in the Psalm is perceived by the dull-listening worshipers simply as religious talk and we all have learned that no one does what the preacher says. The words do not carry any import into the lives of the worshipers. They have missed the meaning of the text altogether. There is no expectation that the Word of God would be translated into the obedience of those who worship God and that it would have the power to drive a person to their knees.

How different, if at the reading of Psalm 95, and when verse 6 was read, that there would spread over the entire congregation the creaking and shuffling noise of people taking their knees,without instruction, without being prompted to do it. They did so because the Psalm called the worshipers to do it. The most appropriate, the right and proper thing, would be to drop to our knees. That is what the glorious church would look like.

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definitions of glory, Jesus Christ makes God's glory known, Philosophy of ministry.

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.

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