CHRIST SANCTUARY - 25 September 2022
In His last few hours on earth / our Lord said a few words / that are
of tremendous importance / one of which is His impending glory
And I want to approach the subject in a different way than I normally do
First / I want for us to try to grasp the concept of glory
Then I want to explore the reasons why God desires to be praised
Finally I want us to see the glory of Christ / in the light of the cross
I wonder if you have pondered much over what’s called the “glory” of God?
The word “glory” comes from the Latin word
“gloria” meaning“fame” and “renown”
The Hebrew word for glory is the word “kabowd” which means “weight”
We say of an honourable person: “His word carries weight”
When someone thinks little of you “He takes me lightly”
So God’s glory is Who God is / in terms of
the gravity / magnitude / enormity / of all His perfections
We mustn’t look at God’s glory as simply another one of His many attributes
No! God’s glory is the display / of all of His attributes
You could say the glory of God is the sum weight
of love / grace / wisdom / kindness / righteousness justice / wrath / mercy / patience / holiness
God’s glory speaks of His majesty / grandeur / splendour
worth / beauty /majesty / radiance / purity
God’s glory is the perfection / of all of His attributes put together
So rightly - the Psalmist calls Him the “King of glory” / Psalm 24
- Paul calls Him the “Father of glory” / Eph 1:17
- James refers to Jesus / as the “Lord of glory” / Jas 2:1
- Luke calls Him / the “God of glory” / Acts 7:2
God has got to be glorious
An inglorious God / would be a contradiction in terms
If God isn’t glorious / He would necessarily be
disreputable / paltry / dishonorable uncelebrated and unsung
You wouldn’t fall down and worship such a god
for such a being wouldn’t be God
Incidentally / God cannot become any more glorious than He already is
He cannot be more glorious in twenty years time
Otherwise it would mean that He is now less than perfect
Unlike the heretical teaching of Open Theism / God does not change
We rightly speak of God’s immutability
God cannot be God without His glory
Whether a man has honor / he remains a man / If a man is stripped of his
honor because of some grave moral misconduct / he remains a man
The same with a king / If a king should appear in public without his crown
his regal ornaments / royal robes / he would still remain a king
But God / without His glory / would cease to be God
Thomas Watson the Puritan said that it is better for kingdoms to collapse
better for men and angels to be annihilated
than that God / should lose / one beam of his glory
It is not that God / is more of God / because of His glory
as if His glory / is a kind of an appendage / added to Him
No / Rather God’s glory is an innate integral part of His being
God’s glory is inherent and intrinsic to Him
To highlight His glory / God contrasts it with the glory of the world
And what / does God compare our glory to?
Grass! / 1 Peter 1:24 “All flesh is like grass
and ALL ITS GLORY / like the flower of grass
In God’s eyes our pivotal crowning glory is at best
like the flower of grass something frail and ephemeral
I mean who stops and takes a second look at the flowers of grass?
– the glory of engineering –the Titanic / Hadron Collider
– the glory of architecture –the Taj Mahal / Eiffel Tower
– the glory of sculpture / Michelangelo’s Moses
– the glory of music – Johan Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion
Now / all that put together / in the eyes of God / is but a dandelion ball
one puff of a frail breath / and it’s all gone!
And that’s 1 Peter 1:24 / “all its glory / like the flower of grass”
But God’s glory / will not fade away
not with time / not with eternity
And further / God is supremely committed / to the glory of His Name
God works all thing out / to manifest His glory
Here’s just some quick examples from the Bible
God saved the elect / and He damned the reprobate
for His glory He chose us and predestined us
to the praise of his glorious grace Ep.1:4,5
He created us for His glory / He refers to us
as people “whom I created for my glory” / Isa 43,6,7
Isaiah / tells us that God divided the waters of the Red Sea
so that He would make for Himself a glorious name
and gain for himself / an everlasting renown / Is 63:12-14
He tells us that the reason He raised Pharaoh up
so that “my name may be proclaimed in all the earth” / Rom 9:17
Even when God delays judgement / it is for His glory “For the sake of My name I delay my wrath and for My praise I restrain it for you . . . For how can My name be profaned?” / Isaiah 48:9-11
Right down to even when He answers prayers / He does so for His glory
“Whatever you ask in my name / this I will do
so that the Father may be glorified in the Son” / John 14:13
In fact / the glory of God / is the one reason why we even exist!
It's right there in the Westminster Shorter Catechism
“The chief end of man is to glorify God / and to enjoy him forever.”
Now right here / we stumble upon something that has troubled and stumped a good number of people
And it’s this Not only is God crowned with glory / but repeatedly
He urges us / nudges us / appeals to us / to glorify Him
Flick through the pages the the Bible / and you will find
that this desire of His seems unquenchable / even voracious
C.S. Lewis tells us that before he came to Christ / one of the problems
he had in believing the God of the Bible was that he found
in the Psalms this nagging demand from God / that we praise him
He said / it painted a picture of God as a vain woman
who wants to be complimented all the time
So / here’s the question: Why does God appear to be so full of Himself
He wants us to be humble / but He wants to be exalted
He wants us to be abased / but He wants to abound
People have questioned:
if this desire of God / is symptomatic of some moral deficiency
Is God egotistical / does He have a poor self-esteem / a fragile ego?
With all His clamouring for praise / it’d be easy to think of God as
self-conceited / vain and narcissistic
Just why is God so relentless / in His desire to be glorified?
There are four reasons why God seeks our praise for His glory
FIRST / When God get us to glorify Him
He is not full of Himself in any negative sense of the word
If I am self-exalting / it would be detestable
I remember Piper saying something like
“If I were to command all of you to bow before me
honour me / praise me / worship me / you would all stand up ]
and leave immediately / and you should
You’d think I’m sick / and I’d probably be”
But not so with God / when He desires your praise
If God should stand here / in Person / and say to you
“I’m here to reveal to you / my splendour and my glory
and I’m doing this / so you will fall down / and worship me”
He’s not suffering from a delusional fantasy of grandeur
or any psycho-pathological condition / like megalomania
See / when God says I am splendorous and glorious
He’s not neurotic or deluded / for the simple reason
that He IS immeasurably splendorous / and breathtakingly glorious
God desires that we glorify Him / because IN TRUTH / HE IS
the Person of the highest / most infinite worth
If God / out of false modesty / turns around / and exalts someone else He would be exalting someone of far lesser worth than Himself
In that instant / He would become an idolater / Why?
Because He would be putting someone less worthy than Himself / above Himself
If He did that / He’d not only be idolatrous / He’d also be unrighteous
Because He’d be robbing the very One
who alone / rightly deserves the highest praise / namely Himself
So that / is the first reason for why God seeks our praise for His glory
For the simple reason that He IS
immeasurably splendorous / and breathtakingly glorious
and most deserving of the glory He seeks
SECOND / God seeks to be glorified / because He rightly brooks no rival
There is an an attribute of God / that we don’t often hear spoken of
either out of ignorance or fear that it might be misunderstood
I am talking about the jealousy of God
When did you last hear someone talk of God as a jealous God
And yet clearly / jealousy is an attribute of God
“I / the LORD your God / am a jealous God” Ex.20:5
“You shall worship no other god
for the LORD whose name is Jealous / is a jealous God” Ex 34:13,14
But why would God be jealous? / Isn’t jealousy a destructive trait?
Let me put it this way
* If God is not One / but many
* If all along the Greeks and the Hindus were right / that there exists
a whole pantheon / of hundreds of gods and goddesses
* If true religion were not monotheistic / but polytheistic
then no single one of those deities
could rightfully be jealous of you
and vie for your sole / exclusive worship
At least not until one of them survives / a cosmic celestial war
to prove himself or herself the most powerful of deities
But true religion is not polytheistec / but monotheistic
There is only ONE God
The Shema declares it boldly
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God / the LORD is one” Deut 6:4
And Isaiah puts it bluntly: “I am the LORD / and there is no other
besides me there is no God” / Is 45:5
God is uniquely in “a class by Himself”
both in terms of His ontological existence and His moral purity
And because God is one
He can demand / Indeed He ought to demand our sole worship And rightly
He ought to be jealous when we give our worship to one / lesser than Him
If a husband sees another man flirting with his wife
he is rightfully jealous
Because only he / has the right to flirt with his wife
To be jealous for something that rightly belongs to you right/good
Paul calls this “a godly jealousy” / 2 Cor 11:2
Jealousy becomes a sin
only when you desire something that isn’t yours
In the same way / glory / praise and honour / belong to God alone
And He is rightfully jealous / when that is given to idols
So the second reason why God seeks to be glorified
is because He rightly brooks no rival
There is a THIRD reason / why God persistently gets us to glorify Him
There is a hint of this / in Isaiah 42:8
It is interesting that / as soon as God says “My glory I will not give
to another” in the very next breath / He identifies for us
what it is / that’s competing with Him / for His glory
As soon as He says / “My glory I will not give to another”
He says “Neither my praise / to graven images”
What’s that! / idols!!
God knows that your idols will compete with Him for your worship
Now of course there is not a single idol-worshiper / here in this room if idol-worship is rigidly defined as burning incense and bowing down to a god made from some odd pieces of bronze or brass or wood
That’s crass / and you’re all too sophisticated / for that
And the essence of idolatry / is rather straightforward
It’s saying to God “I know what will satisfy the desire in my heart
And it is not You! / You are not it!”
See when God says “My glory I will not give to another / Neither my praise
to graven images” / He knows that we all have stuff lodged in our heart
that we deem more enchanting / more alluring / captivating than Him
We ascribe supreme worth to them / They absorb our devotion
Paul puts it bluntly: “We have exchanged the glory
of the immortal God for worthless idols” Romans 1:23
Someone rightly said that the entire message of the Law and the Prophets
can be summed up in two words: “No Flirting”
Ligon Duncan says “The whole bible / is given
to a full-scale assault on idolatry
Now if it is this serious / we need help / to sniff out who our real god is
In a sense / it is fairly easy / to identify / Who your “god” is
Your god / is who or what / your heart quietly craves and longs for
Your god / is whatever you sacrifice your time / money for gladly willingly
Your god / is anything / anyone / you believe
can satisfy and nourish / the longing in your soul
Your god / is whoever you turn to for comfort /when you’re in distraught
for security and refuge / when your world is shaken
Your god / is anything that would cause you to bleed inside when you lose it
Your god / is whatever turns your crank / the reason you live
Archbishop William Temple / uses what he calls the solitude test
What do you most think about / in your solitude?
When you lie in bed / and you’ve nothing pressing to be thinking about
what’s the one place your mind goes to
effortlessly like a default setting
What do you daydream about?
Now that / whatever it is / is your “god” / your true first love
You may say you love God / till the cows come home
but Jesus puts it plainly / He said: “Tell me where your treasure is
and I will tell you / where your heart is”
What’s your daydream?
See / atheism has got to be exposed / as a myth / There are no atheists!
Everyone has a god / the human heart is incurably religious
The drive for worship is incorrigible / Everyone glories in something
The only question is “Who is your God?”
So the third reason why God seeks to be glorified / is because He knows
how idolatrous the human heart is / that only when we make Him
our glory / will we be saved from idols
FOURTHLY / There is a fourth reason / why God seeks our praise and it has everything to do with glory
Let me put it this way / Have you not noticed
that we are seldom gratified / even if things go well?
We sense a nagging ache / something fidgety / restive / twitchy and edgy
a homesickness in the heart
a languishing yearning that won’t go away
We know its there / even though we can’t pin it down
It’s like / there is like a deep undertow to everything we experience
beauty makes us restless when it should calm and settle us
the love we experience with our spouse / gives us a tender ache
our lives looks dreadfully mundane
in relation to the grandeur of our dreams and hopes
We’re looking for something / someone / to sooth our unfulfilled longing
Karl Rahner says / that in life / all symphonies remain unfinished
We are like a Grand Canyon / without a bottom
Your heart / is a bottomless abyss / a yawning chasm
with insatiable longings
And the hole only grows larger / as nothing ever satisfies
And that / is a sure-fire recipe / for all sorts of addictions!
Andre Agassi the great tennis player writes in his biography
"I've been cheered by thousands / booed by thousands
but nothing feels as bad / as the booing inside your own head
during those ten minutes / before you fall asleep"
But why is Agassi this badly afflicted? It's the reason why you and I are this badly afflicted
We’re all hardwired for glory / we’re glory junkies
We’re all looking for the “wow moment”
We’re looking for that / which is endlessly soul-stirring
But looking for that is really looking for “glory”
And bottom line / looking for “glory” / is “looking for God”
This explains / why we’re enthralled and mesmerised
by splendour / majesty / beauty and transcendence
One commentator / compares our unfulfilled longing
to a kind of a cosmic nostalgia / for the garden / we were once in
where we were clothed in glory
But ever since then / we’ve only been putting on fig leaves
The writer of Ecclesiastes nails it down
He says: “[God] has set eternity in the human heart” / 3:11
See / beavers don’t need anyone to teach them how to build a dam
bees don’t need anyone to teach them how to make honey
In the same way / you don’t need anyone to get you
Lewis says: It’s the music you were born remembering
Keller says You’re looking for a song you remember but you’ve never heard
It's your homing beacon
But let’s get it from Paul / Paul says:
“We were “prepared beforehand for glory” / Rom 9:23
Part of the reason we’re so restless
is that congenitally / we’re overcharged / over-built for this earth
But what a waste of a life
Made in the image of God / we scrounge around the junkyards of life
scavenging for all that trash and trivia
we think will satisfy our existential hunger
Made in the image of God / made to find our glory in Christ
we’re mucking around with froth and bubble
we’re content with counterfeit glory / we go for glory in neon tubes
The prophet Jeremiah saw this very early / and with astonishing clarity
He said “My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me / the spring of living water
and have dug / their own cisterns broken cisterns
that cannot hold water” / Jer 2:11-13
A broken cistern is a compelling imagery
of disenchantment / futility / and barrenness
Now / that’s the story of my life / and undoubtedly your life too
When you look at it this way / you will come to see that the reason
God so doggedly gets us to glorify Him
is so that / we will not exhaust ourselves / chasing the wind
He know that only when we behold His beauty / and transcendence
will we make Him our priceless Treasure
and receive satisfaction for our nagging homesickness
Now let’s move on to my final point
And I want for us to take a look at the glory of Christ
Speaking of Jesus / the writer of Hebrews says / He is
the radiance of the glory of God and
the exact imprint of his nature / Heb 1:3
John tells us / “The Word became flesh / We have seen his glory
the glory of the one and only Son” / John 1:14
This side of heaven / the only way you get to see the fullness of God’s glory
is to see Jesus
Of course you may see God’s glory in creation / but there it is muted
Only in looking at the Person of Christ
will you see the fullness of God’s glory in Him
Out text tells us that when Jesus was eating His last meal
He told His disciples / that someone was going to betray Him
Then Judas stood up / left the table / and closed the door behind him
Now how very privileged we are / because we get to eavesdrop
on what our Lord said to the disciples / after Judas left the room
It’s in our text / John 13 / He said:
“Now is the Son of man glorified / and God is glorified in him”
This is most baffling / Here’s a man who knows he has less than 24 hrs to live
He is aware of His imminent death / but He is also aware
hat He is on the cusp of being glorified
The cross may be the epitome of shame
but our Lord will turn it into the epitome of glory
He will offer Himself as the Lamb of God
who takes away the sins of the world
For that He will be glorified
He will have His blood shed / so His elect could be saved
For that He will be glorified
He will crush the head of Satan / the one who had the power of death
For that He will be glorified
He will put death to death through His death
For that He will be glorified
He will bear the wrath of God and satisfy God’s justice
For that He will be glorified
If you must locate / the one single place
where God’s glory can be seen most clearly / it is on the cross
Because there / in the death of Jesus / we see His holiness / love / grace
righteousness / mercy / justice / sovereignty / humility / wisdom
When Jesus prayed: “And now / O Father / glorify Me together with Yourself”
He was praying that His death on the cross / may put God’s glory on display
and cause the world to marvel at His beauty and grace
He knew that when He is glorified / the Father is glorified
He was dethroned / so that we might be crowned
He was defrocked / so we might be robed
He was given a stalk of reed / so we might be handed a sceptre
He wore a crown of thorns / so that we might wear the crown of victory
He was booed / so that we might be applauded
He was impeached / so we might be pardoned
He was made defiled / so we might be purified
He stooped / so we might be raised to glory
Now / when you let this reality sink in / and drive your life
* when you stopped glorying in anything but the cross
your heart will find repose / true rest
* when you find your glory in God
instead of trying to find it somewhere
you will be healed / of your endless cravings
your heart’s deepest longing will be met
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