A Good Church Glorifies Christ
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Glory is when God’s works are displayed in our walk
Glory is when God’s works are displayed in our walk
Have you ever experienced something so incredible you literally lost words? As in you couldn’t explain it?
Has something ever happened to you that kind of wrapped you up in it and instead of you holding it, it felt like it held you?
Now I know I’ve been telling stories about our trip to Germany and Italy and many apologies but I’m still recovering so there are a few left in me.
We landed in Berlin and from there we drove to Wittenberg. Wittenberg is the place that Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses, a big paper, to the door of the Castle Church, starting the Protestant Reformation. Even if you have never been to church before your life has been impacted by that moment.
And I was in that very city. I woke up the next morning and it was like Christmas morning. All I wanted to do was to go and walk the streets. I bundled up and walked outside for about an hour, just looking at the city sights. I turned a corner and started making my way toward the Castle Church. And I walked and didn’t have words. I tried taking some pictures and video, in order to capture what I was experiencing but it was all, to me, overwhelming.
People talk about experiences like this, that overwhelm them, in terms of the sublime or even surreal.
But Sometimes if they are really serious they will use the word glorious.
Glory is the word that you use when you don't quite have a word that fully describes what you're experiencing. But it's beyond description. It is glorious.
Have you ever been in a situation that you don’t have words for? That is larger and bigger than you? That is folding you into it and not the other way around?
Glory assumes there is something larger than ourselves that we get accepted and folded into. If something is to be glorious then it is larger than us. To experience any form of glory is to be folded into it, not to direct it.
When we talk about a church glorifying in God, we are a community of people entering into His world. We enter into His means and His forms.
We don’t somehow become conductors of God’s glory, we enter into it. We experience it on His terms.
This matters
It matters because while we may experience things all the time that we don’t have words for that are incredible, that kind of experience can also run the other direction. Meaning that there are things in our lives that don’t make sense, that are too big because we don’t necessarily want them.
Maybe sickness or finances or relationships are too big to manage. And these are things that are stunning as well. But when they stun they hurt.
Christ helps us to find our way through them. To navigate those things that are too big. And as He does we find that there is always something more glorious than we have previously experienced, and it is always found in Christ.
But we can’t get there on our own. We will need to see how He walks this individual from the “why” to the “how”
This then isn’t an individual action. It belongs to the church. To those who follow Christ together in locality.
Our stories collect and corroborate one another’s and point to the same bigger than us picture. We tell that story as the practice of giving glory to God.
To Glory in God is to enter into HIs activity and work. To honor Him for who He is.
It is a verb. It describes our worK. When we give God glory it means that we say He is the One responsible for our security and safety.
But God’s glory is a noun. We glory in God but God has His own glory. It is His nature. So when we talk about God’s glory it is a noun, it is who He is. The OT refers to God’s glory as His presence. The translation of glory is “weight” The weightiness of God. The heaviness of God. His Kabod.
So God’s glory is His presence. It is His own nature.
To glory in God is to enter into that presence. To participate with Him.
We are going to look at a passage where we see this happening. We see the glory of God in Jesus and then we see an individual giving glory to God.
To Glory in God is to participate in His activity
To Glory in God is to participate in His activity
As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
This is a great case study in understanding how and why a good church glorifies God.
Because we will see that Jesus Himself takes all sorts of angles and issues in this story and He bundles them all within His glory, so much so that every answer has to pass through understanding the glory of God.
But to begin let’s look at the presenting issue.
The man’s blindness.
IN ANE when someone had a disability it was assumed that there was a form of sin somewhere, that the individual deserved it either from his family or because of himself. The disciples are asking a question everyone would have had.
Whose fault is this? Was it his or someone eles’s? There are asking more than simply whose fault was this but moreso, why did this happen?
And in that case the disciples are asking a question that everyone asks. Why did this happen.
Because everything was an issue of merit. If you or your family did something wrong, then you would pay for it later on. We would call this retribution or even using Eastern Religious terminology, Karma.
But the question that they ask, the question on everyone’s mind, isn’t the way JEsus answers.
We always want to know why. We are curious people. We point and we ask. And then we think that we know exactly what happened and why it did the way it did.
The disciples look at say, this man is blind. Obviously it is either his or his parent’s fault.
We think we understand all the reasons that something is the way it is. And it is even worse today. We have better science now so may not blame parents but we will find some gap in our understanding and google it until we feel better.
HEre’s the problem with what happens here. When everything is a matter of merit or of fault, we can’t really get anywhere. We can’t behave out of our own problems or we can’t behave out of our families problems. We just live in a cycle where we just point fingers at everyone else.
And we never answer the question, what purpose is there in this?
When we blame we never get the very thing we are hoping for: purpose.
SO Jesus answers and when He does He goes above blame. He gives purpose. He writes that God will show up in power through it.
Please understand that Jesus is not saying that this man’s blindness is simply a platform for the power of God. Again, look he is removing a sense of who caused this.
He is saying that it didn’t come from sin but that God would make meaning from it.
That God’s power would be displayed. His activity and work would be known.
What if whatever you perceive as weakness is is actually a display of Gods glory?
What Jesus is saying here is that this man’s perceived weakness is actually the very vessel in which God’s power will be displayed.
The disciples would have passed right over that being an opportunity for God’s glory
We often pass right by opportunities for God’s glory.
The very thing that you think has no meaning because it is weak or it is painful is the very thing that God can display His glory through.
And when we give God glory, we participate in God’s power. We say that there is something bigger than I can act in happening here. God is using the very thing that I thought would have no use.
This is why a good church glorifies in God.
Because even when things go wrong, we want to participate in God’s glory to turn that around.
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Even when people are disinterested in Christianity, or they think religion irrelevant, we are still a display of Gods power.
To give glory to God is to participate in and with Him.
Glory is that which is unmistakably God. So when we give glory to God, we participate with Him, that means we experience His power and character and we point back to Him.
Giving Glory to God means that we can only make sense of our story in Christ.
Giving Glory to God means that we can only make sense of our story in Christ.
The man is healed from HIs blindness. The meaning is given. Christ displays God’s glory in and through this mans weakness.
But it causes all sorts of issues. The ruling class did not like that this happened. They weren’t sure why it was that he was healed. And specifically who healed him.
So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
Everyone in his community can’t makes sense of what has happened.
He was blind and now he could see. What did it mean.
They ask about Jesus. They want to know what kind of person he is. He is trouble. HE is a sinner. That much they know.
And the reply from the previously blind man is excellent. “I’m not really sure who he is. I only know that I was blind. I met this man Jesus. Now I can see.”
That is the working out of God’s glory in a life.
There are a lot of things I don’t know. But I know that when I met Christ things began to change. When I encountered God, things began to change.
Your story, if you are following Christ this morning, is a story of the glory of God in a life.
If you are a Christ follower this morning there is a real sense in which our stories don’t fully make sense unless our stories are found in Christ.
We experience peace when we shouldn’t
We love when others have given up
We have experienced otherworldly mercy
and grace and love
We can persevere because we know who our heavenly Father is and where we are going.
We long for a heavenly home but can rest in Christ now.
Because we live otherworldly lives, we practice alien things like rest and peace.
This is God’s glory coming through
Because the only reason it’s true is because of Christ.
He makes it true.
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
We in Christ are a letter about what that life is about. Your story matters. Because it is about the God of the Universe who loves HIs creation so much that He would die for us to give us a chance at life. You are marked with the value of the Creator.
You are a living letter and record of God’s glory.
As the church we are a living letter and a record of God’s glory
That’s why it matters first that we give God the glory
We will talk about how we love and show mercy and understand and support one another but in order to get our navigation right we have to understand it all starts from God’s glory.
And we remember that the church is imperfect, we don’t have it all together. Which is why mercy is so necessary. We don’t show the glory of God through perfection but rather through pointing.
In our blindness and our weakness we point to God’s activity.
Glory is maybe more about unconditional pointing than skilled perfection.
Glory is maybe more about unconditional pointing than skilled perfection.
Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”
It is the work and glory of Christ that brings this once blind man into belief. He experiences all these things that are larger than Him, healing, kindness, redemption. And in so doing, what other choice does he have?
Who is he so I can believe in HIm?
That is how good Christ is.
When we experience His glory, we participate with God. We recieve from God but then we partner miraculously with Him. We become a part of what He is doing. Our story fuses with God’s story.
The call of the church is to live in the glory of God and to give glory to God, honor to Him, by participating with Him in such a way that our stories only make sense in light of who Christ is.
That is who we want to be as a church. That our story as a church would only make sense in understanding who God is.
That our love for one another and for our community would be supernatural.
That is giving glory to God who is glorious.
If you have ever wanted to live into something larger than yourself, living for the glory of God satisfies that.
We are going to take communion now. This is a way that we participate in God’s work and His story.
We are welcomed to His table. We are invited to remember who Christ is and what He is done.
The table is open to those who have said yes to Christ. To those that are saying yes to Christ. Even if you haven’t before, you can say yes to Christ now. To share in the table.
It is a representation of His body which was given for us and His blood which was spilled for us
We participate with Him in taking part of the table. We give glory to God by taking communion.
When we take communion we say that our lives only make sense in Christ.
Take some time while you are in line.
Reflect on your own story.
## Where have you seen God present?
## Where do you see God present?
## What part of your story only makes sense in light of the work of Christ?
Pray
Then for Apostles Creed
Changed Christian to catholic.
Why .
It is an older more original translation.
Catholic in this sense means universal. We profess belief not just in our church but in the entire universal church that professes Christ.