The Church Exists to Glorify God
What is the Church? • Sermon • Submitted
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· 36 viewsGod has redeemd the church in order to glorify himself.
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
What is the Church Series
The Church is the assembly of the redeemed
The Church is the unified body of Christ
The Church exists to glorify God
This is really not a sermon about the church; it’s a sermon about God
The election is in two days. There is a lot of angst and tension with this, and a lot to wonder about regarding what will happen and what the state of our country will be moving forward.
Swirling around this is the question of how a church ought to even relate to all of this. If we are not thoughtful and careful, we can get this really sideways.
One, because we may end up mistaking the glory of our earthly national identity for the glory, goodness, and infinite worth of God himself.
Two, because we may end up thinking that there is one path moving forward that glorifies God and gives us hope for our future, and another path that doesn’t.
It is worth, then, getting at the question of really the fundamental reason for the church’s existence - why does a church exist, what is really our core mission and purpose?
How do we begin to answer that question? With an exceedingly high view of God.
A high view of God is at the core of how we live out our faith in response to Jesus’ love. A low view of God results in all kinds of wrong theology and practice.
I believe that an exceedingly high view of God and his glory and majesty will help us see our current circumstances in their right context.
Hence, the title of today’s sermon, “The Church Exists to Glorify God”
I. God’s glory is everything that sets him apart
I. God’s glory is everything that sets him apart
What is “glory”?
Biblical words for glory
OT = a few words, main one is כָּבוֹד (200+ times)
Many potential translations: glory, honor, importance, weight, beauty, goodness, wealth
This word has at it’s core the meaning of “heavy” - that is, significant, weighty, important
Glory is whatever makes something praiseworthy
Isaiah 6:1-3 The whole earth is full of the glory of God
1 In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!”
NT = δοξα
glory, honor, praise, brightness
Working definition of glory: The glory of a thing is it’s unique characteristics that set it apart from others
Isaiah 10:18
18 The glory of his forest and of his fruitful land
the Lord will destroy, both soul and body,
and it will be as when a sick man wastes away.
Assyria’s “glory” is it’s forests and fruitful land
This is one thing that makes Assyria uniquely good compared to other nations
What sets God apart? What is God’s glory? It is all of who he is.
He is the creator who stands distinct from creation
He has created the universe, galaxies, stars, nebulas, black holes, dark matter, things on a scale of grandness that we cannot even comprehend
He has created things so small and intricate and complex that we can’t even perceive them: molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, quantum particles
He is the only uncaused, independent being
Everything in the universe is dependent in that it depends on something else for it’s very existence
God is independent; he exists independently of anything else, uncaused
He cannot be measured, understood, contained, evaluated or held accountable to anyone else
He is the sovereign ruler of all things whose power, majesty, and authority are unmatched and unchallenged
He is perfect in his character and the source and standard of all goodness
He is perfect love, the source and standard of all love
He is perfect justice, the source and standard of all justice
He is perfect wisdom, the source and standard of all wisdom
There is no one like him - the scriptures cry out “who is like him” over and over
God’s glory is a short hand way of referring to all of his infinite goodness, beauty, love, justice, wisdom
The reason I say all of this is to just try to get it out of any of our heads that we can somehow stand in a place of control or critique over God - we do not decide who he is
It is critically important that when we think about God, the things we think actually need to correspond to the reality of who God is
God is not whoever or whatever we think he is or want him to be
God is not like us or anything we have imagined
Psalm 50 - God is THE judge, and he says to the wicked man that his biggest mistake is that “you thought that I was one like yourself.”
God is who he is, and our thoughts about him either correspond to reality or they don’t
If they don’t, then we have simply created a god in our own image and decided to worship that
This is why A.W. Tozer, in THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE HOLY, writes, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
Right now, when I ask the question, “who is God and what is he like?” whatever the answer is deep in your being, that is the single most important thing about you.
What we believe about God determines how we think and perceive everything else.
Problem: God is so transcendent, so holy, so beyond us, that were he not to reveal himself to us in terms that we can understand, we would be completely incapable of knowing him at all. This is at the heart of what it means for God to “glorify” himself; it means to reveal himself in his true glory, to pull back the curtain for us and reveal to us just how good, true, wise, powerful, just and wonderful he is.
II. God desires to glorify himself in in all things
II. God desires to glorify himself in in all things
How does God reveal and glorify himself?
General Revelation:
Creation
Psalm 19:1
1 The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
In creation, God reveals his power, creativity, sovereignty, and eternal nature
Human conscience
Romans 2
Written into human nature is the awareness that there is such a thing as right or wrong
Special Revelation - the particular ways in which God reveals himself in particular times and places to particular people
The main mode of this is of course the Bible, which is the record of God’s special revelation through human history
Why does God do this? Why does he reveal himself?
Because he desires to glorify himself, and will not share his glory with another Isaiah 42:8
8 I am the Lord; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to carved idols.
Why are we uncomfortable with this?
Because we (rightly) think it’s wrong for people to be self exalting; the Bible teaches as much, right? But what is it wrong for people to be self exalting but not God?
Those who seek their own glory are often insecure and inauthentic
Ayn Rand called self exalting people “second handers”
People who live “second hand” from the praise and compliments of others
The businessman who boasts of his shrewd business practices that have made a lot of money
The person who studies simply to let you know how much they know about things
The person who constantly fish for compliments
These are people who don’t have basic self confidence and security, so rather than do things for the sake of doing the thing itself, they do things for the sake of creating and protecting an image or facade
We don’t like second handers; we admire people who have basic self confidence and don’t feel the need to solicit as many compliments as possible
People that are self exalting are unloving - they care about their own glory at the expense of others.
But God is not weak, insecure, deficient or unloving: why then does he seek to glorify himself?
God desires to glorify himself because he loves us
If God is truly infinitely loving, beautiful, just, kind, powerful, and majestic, what would be the best thing he could give to a creature whom he loves?
The only possible answer here is: himself.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity: “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
If God is perfectly loving toward us, and he is in himself the being of greatest worth and beauty and wonder and goodness, it would be profoundly unloving of him to withhold himself from us.
This is why in both the Old and New Testaments, the greatest glory that a person or people can have is to belong to God
Israel’s glory was that they were God’s treasured possession and people among all the nations; the greatest thing about Israel was that she belonged to God
There is no higher glory for human beings than to belong to God himself. There is no higher glory for you than to belong to Almighty God. The problem for us is that we have all, every one of us, rejected God and his glory, substituting it for things. Enter Jesus.
III. Jesus is the pinnacle of God’s glorious self-revelation
III. Jesus is the pinnacle of God’s glorious self-revelation
Problem: Every human has rejected God and substituted his glory and goodness for something else, and this is idolatry is at the root of all sin.
A.W. Tozer - “Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is - in itself a monstrous sin - and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness...a god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.”
This is what the prophet Jeremiah was getting at when he records God saying: Jeremiah 2:13
13 for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water.
Your idolatry in choosing something else over the glory of God is tragic in two ways
You have rejected God as the source of all goodness and beauty
What you have chosen instead of him doesn’t even work!
So God, in his desire to glorify himself and reveal himself to humans, is dealing with more than just our ignorance and inability to comprehend his supreme majesty: he is dealing with sinful, idolatrous hearts that are bent away from him in on ourselves.
Enter Jesus, the supreme revelation of God’s glorious goodness
Hebrews 1:1-2
1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
Hebrews 1:3-4
3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4 having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
What is this saying? That Jesus is the ultimate self-revelation and glory of God
The nature and character of God - Jesus is God become flesh, the fullness of deity crammed into a human frame - when you look at Jesus, you are not looking at simply a great moral teacher, you are looking at the radiance of the glory of God. You are looking at God himself.
The redemptive purposes of God: God’s work to redeem his broken world finds it’s culmination in the person of Jesus, and God’s greatest means of glorifying himself is seen in the gospel
In the perfect life of Jesus which he then offered as a substitution in our place so that by faith in him, his perfect righteousness might be counted to us, and our idolatrous sin might be born by him on cross
Through his grace, then he creates a people, a body, of those who by faith in the his finished work upon the cross have been reconciled to God
IV. The Church Exists to Glorify God
IV. The Church Exists to Glorify God
As we have said, the church is the assembly of the redeemed people of God and the body of Christ
Therefore, the church was called into existence by the glorious act of God in the gospel
The church exists because of God’s glory, his goodness, his infinite love and beauty and wisdom and justice
The church exists to make known God’s glory, his goodness, his infinite love and beauty and wisdom and justice
1 Peter 2:9
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Why does the church exist? That she may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called her out of darkness into his marvelous light”
To make known to a broken world the surpassing, infinite goodness of almighty God.
To glorify him by participating in his effort to reconcile the world to himself in the gospel.
The church’s fundamental reason for existence is to glorify God, and EVERYTHING else flows from that truth
How does the church glorify God?
Through our gathering to worship God together
Through singing songs
Through the preaching of the word of God
Through the giving of an offering - when we give our money, it is a demonstration of God’s supreme worth - to believe that to contribute to the ministry and gospel witness of the church is so much better than using that money for whatever I would rather do with it
Through the taking of communion
Through our lives of obedience to and hope in God, even and especially when it entails something we don’t want to do
When you obey God when it’s hard and when it’s painful, you show his surpassing goodness because you demonstrate that you trust him more than yourself to make the most important decisions in your life
When the church obeys Jesus, we demonstrate to a watching world what he is like
This sword cuts both ways: the world assumes that the church is reflective of what God is like - a church displays to her community what God is like, for better or worse
This is why we don’t want to do anything as a church that would give people the wrong idea of what God is like
This is why we want to love one another as Jesus has loved us, serve one another as he has served us, bear one another’s burdens, sacrifice for one another, submit to one another, delight in one another
This is also why we practice loving church discipline when people are in unrepentant sin - because we do not want a watching world to get the idea that Jesus doesn’t really care about whether people are walking in sin or not
When you hope in God despite the pain and suffering and uncertainty of life, you show his infinite beauty and goodness because you are demonstrating that HE IS ENOUGH for me, even when facing extreme pain and sorrow.
This is of ultimate importance for us this week: will we hope in God and trust in God and have confidence in God regardless of what happens on Tuesday?
Church, God will be glorified no matter what happens on Tuesday. Why? Because his glory is not dependent upon who sits in the white house: he is our hope, he is our joy, he is our future, he is our God, and there is no one like him, nothing that can stop him, nothing that confounds him, nothing that frustrates his plans and purposes.
If you believe that God’s ability to do whatever he wants to do is somehow going to be compromised one person or another sitting in the white house, then you have an exceedingly and tragically low view of almighty God.
Through the proclamation of the gospel
When you tell people about what God has done on their behalf in the person and work of Jesus Christ
When you invite people to respond to God’s kindness and grace in the gospel
Deschutes County has around 200,000 people living in it; of those, 74% claim no religious affiliation
That means there are, give or take, 150,000 people who have no idea of the infinite goodness of God toward them in Christ and the surpassing value of knowing Jesus
And as we are devoting so much time and emotion and energy to political angst, those 150,000 are hurtling on toward a eternity separated from the glory of God
Conclusion/Application Questions
Conclusion/Application Questions
The Westminster Catechism, a list of questions meant to help Christian grow in their understanding of God, starts with this question: What is the chief end of man? The answer to this question is: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
We glorify God by enjoying him! But finding in him our ultimate joy and delight, our great treasure.
So what about you? Is God your greatest treasure and your ultimate hope? Has the coming election dimmed your faith and lowered your view of God? Can you say no matter what happens on Tuesday, “he is my hope, he is my rock, he is my great treasure, he is my ultimate joy.”
Does your life glorify God? Does it make known his goodness? What areas of your life don’t glorify God?
Does the way you spend your time glorify God? Does the way you manage your money glorify God? Does the way you treat your family glorify God? Does the way you relate to your neighbors and coworkers glorify God? Does the way you represent God in the world glorify God?
As a church, a main question for us is how do we best glorify God in all we do? Are there any ways in which our church needs to grow in this? Absolutely!
The Church exists to glorify God
Transition to Communion