The Christian Mind and Glory #2

Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people God's Word. Today Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time. So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in The Truth Pulpit. So with everything that we've already said here this morning in the past half hour, if we just stopped there, if we just stopped there, we could walk out and rejoice at the goodness of God, rejoicing in the security of our salvation, and being overwhelmed with praise and thanks to God lost in wonder and praise. But that's only part of it.

There's so much more to come. You see, your essence, your nature, your status, your position as a child of God is settled. It is final. It cannot change. I'm speaking to Christians here this morning. But yet what Scripture teaches us is that our present position as a child of God is only a down payment. There's a greater glory that is guaranteed to us by the fact that we are children of God now. We're children of God now.

Nothing can change that. We don't have the fullness of what God intends for us to enjoy in our salvation here in this life. There is a greater glory. Oh, beloved, grab hold of 1 John 3, 2, and everything in your life will completely radically change if you've not grasped this before. This verse contains the key to seeing everything in life and eternity differently. John says, look at it there again with me, what we will be has not yet appeared.

Notice there's a time reference change. He talks in the present tense at the beginning of verse 2. He says we are God's children now. Present tense. This is the status we enjoy.

Incredible status. Praise be to God for what he's given to us as children of God. But then he pivots to the future. What we will be, future tense, what we will be has not yet appeared.

So now, having thoroughly dealt with the present, now we look forward to the future and say, what's the outcome of being a child of God? And John says it hasn't appeared yet. John's an apostle.

He doesn't even know what to say about it. He says, but we know this much. Look at there in the middle of verse 2. I want every one of you to look at your Bible right now and look at 1 John 3, 2. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him because we will see him as he is.

Two things there. We are going to be transformed into another condition. We're going to be glorified.

We will be like him because, number two, we will see him as he is. This staggering truth here in verse 2 takes us to a completely, to just an eternal realm that all we can do is kind of stand in our tip, like a little kid trying to look into the cookie jar that's just a little bit too high for him. And you're just kind of standing on the toe trying to look and see what see what the goods are that are in there. We're something like that standing on our spiritual tiptoes here, looking forward to something that we that we smell the aroma of the fresh baked cookies. We smell the we smell the heavenly aroma of something really good, but we can't quite see it just yet because it's out of our reach here in this earthly body, in this earthly realm. But we have the aroma of glory wafting through the atmosphere with what we are reading and seeing and contemplating here today. It's a staggering truth taking us to another realm. Jesus Christ will one day return from heaven.

Acts chapter 1. The angel said Christ is going to return just like he went up, so he's going to come back visibly to all the earth. He's going to appear in the world with great glory and power. When he does that, we as his people will see him with physical, literal sight. Our faith will become sight. And when he comes, we'll see him.

And what will that be like? Well, Scripture gives us, it pulls back the curtain just a little bit to just draw us in with this greater sense of anticipation. What will it be like to see Jesus Christ in his glory? Let's look at a couple of passages. Matthew chapter 17. Matthew chapter 17. In the transfiguration. Matthew chapter 17, verse 1.

After six days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them. And his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.

You want to know what it's going to be like when we see him? Somehow it's going to be blindingly glorious. So that looking into the sun today will be a diminished picture of what it's like to see the glory of Christ. You say, well, I can't even look at the glory of the sun without it blinding me. And you're saying it's going to be something greater than that? Precisely.

In as much as the created entity, the sun, is lesser than the creator who made it. Verse 3. Behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with him. Peter said, Lord, it's good we're here.

If you wish, I'll make three tents. And Peter didn't know what he was saying. He was so overwhelmed by the glory that he had seen that he just started babbling theological nonsense about creating equal tents for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. Verse 5. He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them and a voice from the cloud said, This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.

Listen to him. When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, Rise and have no fear. What's it going to be like to see Christ in glory when he appears? Well, it's going to be something greater than anything we've seen on earth because we can't look at the sun.

We can't look at the sun in eclipse without going blind. And so we're going to see something greater than the sun, S-U-N. And when we see it, it's going to be a glorious something like white representing the fullness of purity and cleanness and majesty and holiness and in any other condition than as a child of God, it would be terrifying to see. Verse 6. The disciples heard the testimony of God, This is my beloved son, and all of it just caused them to fall on their faces and they were terrified. What we're going to see when we see Christ would be terrifying to the natural man.

A grandeur of glory beyond anything that we could compare. And yet, and yet, because we're children of God, when we see this, there's going to be a sense of Christ saying, Rise and have no fear. I don't know, beloved.

I don't know. I don't know how you can look into something that's greater than the sun and yet because of the work of Christ and the acceptance of God and adoption into his family, we'll be there without fear. It's going to be something like that. Turn to the book of Acts, chapter 7.

And again, I'm not pretending for a moment that the things that we're saying here give us any kind of a complete picture. These are just whispered hints of what the glory will be like. You remember when Stephen was stoned after he rebuked the hard-hearted Jewish leaders in a brilliant speech in Acts, chapter 7. Acts, chapter 7, verse 54. Maybe one day the Lord will give me power to preach in such a way that people want to stone me.

That would be cool. Acts 7, verse 54. Now when they heard these things, they were enraged and they ground their teeth at him. But he, meaning Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. He saw something of the glory of God. He saw something of the glory of Christ. He saw Christ. The scroll of heaven is pulled back.

The curtain is pulled back. He opens up and somehow with Spirit-enabled vision, he sees Christ in heaven standing at the right hand of God. And the stone drained down and he entered into that presence. Seeing Christ in glory will be something like that.

So it will be such a complete enveloping of our vision, complete enveloping of our awareness that nothing else will matter by comparison. There's probably a sense in which Stephen didn't even feel the stones as they were hitting him for the sake of the greater glory that captured his mind. How about Acts chapter 9, verses 3 through 5. This is when Paul was on the road to Damascus. The Lord meets him. Paul is converted and world history began a new course. Acts chapter 9, verse 3.

Now as Paul went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.

But rise and enter the city and you will be told what you are to do. Whatever the glory of God was, when the unconverted Saul saw it, it forced him to the ground. He recognized that he was in the presence of something greater, something majestic, something he was in the presence of the Lord himself. There was this clear understanding in his mind that he was in the presence of deity. It overwhelmed him and he fell physically prostrate before the vision.

And he could only cry out, what shall I do, Lord? And so you pull these together, the transfiguration, Stephen and Paul, and we see that this will be overwhelmingly great, something that the unconverted man cannot process in his own mind. This is beyond human capacity to grasp. There will be a blinding reality to it. And yet, because we are children of God when we see him, it will be something that we see without fear. The eternal Son of God, the one who loved us and gave himself up for us on the cross, the one who created the worlds, the one who will still bear the scars of the nails in his resurrected hands and in his feet, the one who loved us with this great love that we've been seeing here this morning, somehow we're going to see him face to face. When that happens, nothing in this life is going to matter because that's going to be so transcendently great that everything else will fade by comparison. We don't have the words in this flesh to describe it, to assimilate it in our minds, but we have this, we have enough. We have enough biblical hints of it to realize that it's going to be something transcendent, something exhilarating, something magnificent, something to which the best pleasures of this life is refused by comparison to that transcendent vision of seeing Christ. If all that God gave you, if God only created you for one moment to be able to enjoy that, he will have given you a gift far beyond anything that you could have ever imagined or deserved.

If you could just see it for a moment, it would be a blessing beyond measure. Go back to 1 John 3. And yet, he's not just going to let us see it and then leave us there and move on to something else.

It's not as though we're going to see this and then move on to better things. There's nothing better than seeing Christ face to face. Somehow when we see him, go back to verse 2, somehow when we see him, it's going to change us. We are going to be transformed, transfigured ourselves. Look at it there in the middle of verse 2.

The simplicity of the language betrays the magnificence of which he speaks. When he appears, we shall be like him because we will see him as he is. I don't know. What's that going to be like, beloved? I have no idea.

I have no idea. But somehow this glory of the transfiguration, somehow this glory that blinded the Apostle Paul, somehow this glory that ennobled Stephen in his martyrdom, somehow that glory, somehow Christ is going to share that with us so that we partake in the nature of that. We will not become God, perish the thought, the creature will never become uncreated, so we're not going to enter into the deity or essence of God, but somehow we will share in his holiness and in his resurrected glory. Christian, this is your destiny.

This is the outcome of it all. To be a Christian is to have this outcome without exception. And in between, between God saving you and this outcome where you are made like Christ because you see him as he is, in between connecting those two magnificent dots is the development of a Christian mind which loves these truths, which seeks to understand them and increasingly sets your hope on that outcome and on nothing else and finds your complete and final and ultimate and exclusive satisfaction in that. That's what it means to have a Christian mind, is that you love and hope and yearn for this outcome more than anything else in the world. And if God withholds other blessings that your heart desires for, you're okay with that because the supreme surpassing blessing has already been given, and it's just a matter of entering into possession of it. Look at 1 Peter 1.

1 Peter 1. We'll just look at verse 13. This is all over the Bible. And the only reason we miss it is not because God hasn't said it.

We miss it just because we're looking for other things in Scripture in our earthbound affections. 1 Peter 1, verse 13. Therefore, preparing your minds for action, preparing your biblical mind, your Christian mind, prepare your Christian mind for action, and being sober-minded, here it is, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Set your hopes, set your affections, set everything you want, conform the desires of your heart so that they are all united on this one single outcome of the grace that will come to you when you see the Lord Jesus Christ face to face when he's revealed in all of his glory.

That's what you're to do. That's how God's given you a mind? You're a Christian? That's how you're to use your Christian mind is so that it develops and fixes your heart on the grace to be revealed to you.

I've often quoted this, and I won't stop quoting it, but Martin Lloyd-Jones says this. He says, do you know that you are destined to see him as he is? Blessed, glorious vision to see the Son of God in all his glory face to face, you standing and looking at him and enjoying him for all eternity. It is only then that we will begin to understand what he did for us, the price he paid, the cost of our salvation.

The great doctor continues, oh, let us hold on to this. Shame on us forever grumbling. Shame on us forever saying that the Christian life is too hard. Shame on us forever halfheartedly worshipping, praising, and loving Christ and his glory. You and I are destined for that vision glorious. We shall see him as he is face to face.

End quote. We won't take time to turn to these passages, but if you want to look at other passages, Job 19, 25 to 27, Philippians 3, 20 to 21, Colossians 3, 4, Revelation 22, 3 to 4, all speaking about the transformation that will take place when we see our Redeemer face to face, when faith becomes sight, when something brighter than the sun becomes that which we partake in rather than shrink back from. To think, beloved, don't lose sight of what the whole context of this is, to think that God in his mercy, in his kindness, in his love, prepared you to enjoy that when you were helpless, a sinner, and an enemy of his. What kind of love is that? How great is this God? How kind is this God? How magnificent is he?

How good of a father is he that he would bestow this blessing on us when we were rejecting him and that he preserves and keeps us for it in the midst of our half-hearted worship and our half-hearted living for him? How good is he that he will carry us through to that into the end? There's no measure.

There's no yardstick long enough. There's no ocean plum that goes deep enough to measure the height, the depth, the breadth, the width of the love of God upon us. It's a glorious, crushing weight that elevates us to heights unknown. Now, just briefly, I never want to leave this mental realm when we enter into it.

I never want to. The only reason we have to move on is because it's what Scripture does. It propels us on. You see, we contemplate these things. We set our hope on them, and then we realize that there is a consequence for life that remains while God leaves us in this flesh. That brings us to our third and final point, our glad response.

There are practical implications to this hope. 1 John 3, verse 3. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Do you want to know if you're a Christian? The question is whether having heard these magnificent things, your response is, I want to be more like Christ now. I want to grow in grace now.

I have a responsibility that I embrace to grow in my sanctification today. Because look at it there in verse 3. If you don't care about your spiritual life, you're not a Christian. Full stop. Because Scripture says right here, in the context of being a child of God with this future hope, it says if you're a child of God and you have this hope, what's the outcome?

What's the result of that? Verse 3. Everyone who has this hope, everyone without exception, everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself as he is pure, and realizes that there are biblical responsibilities that come with a biblical hope.

There are no exceptions. This is the way it works. And however faltering our efforts may be, there's something in the heart of every true believer that says, I want to grow. I want to be more like Christ. I want to obey him. I want to live a life that expresses my gratitude for his mercy, kindness, goodness, patience, and grace. How could I do anything else, the believing mind thinks? And so I want to grow in this grace that he has given to me.

Everyone. The true teaching of Scripture, true understanding these things brings a bright dividing line between the redeemed and the lost and makes it much more difficult to live in a shadow, to live in the shadows of ambiguity here. Scripture doesn't leave this for ambiguity. Scripture says this hope is real, and the one who has this hope pursues sanctification. By the way, we'll pursue sanctification as we return to the Sermon on the Mount next year and the next calendar year.

And everything we need to know about sanctification will be found in what lies ahead there in the Sermon on the Mount. Here John's just saying, everyone who has this hope does in fact respond to it. Now hope, we've said this many times, hope is not a vague wish that something will come true. In the New Testament, hope is a confident expectation grounded in the sure promise of an omnipotent God. Everyone who has this hope about seeing Christ, and this hope is something that is confident. We expect this based on the promise of God and based on his power and his faithfulness so that as we stand here together today, those of us that are in Christ, we have no doubt about this outcome.

We're confident of it. It has to come to pass exactly as God's Word has said that it will be. And if we are in Christ, it means that we will share in this and so that we delight in it, not because we're going to be good enough to earn it in the end.

No, it has nothing to do with it. Our hope is grounded in the fact that our God, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, says this is what I'm going to do for everyone who believes in me. We say, I believe you.

I trust you. I can't wait. And so Christ is coming, and our glad response is to grow in grace in the meantime. Beloved, that inseparably joined response, we have this hope and the inseparably joined response of wanting to grow in grace, that is the capstone of a Christian mind.

That's the capstone of it all. We look beyond this world based on all the doctrine that is revealed to us in Scripture. We look beyond this world to the hope that is the outcome of what God has given to us in Christ. And we lay hold of that, and then we pull it back into this life and say this is how I must respond. The Christian mind looks to the end of the world and beyond to brighter things to come, and then with a renewed heart says, I want to live for Christ afresh here today.

It sets aside lesser things to focus on the pursuit of sanctification. Beloved, turn to Titus chapter 2. We're going to end on that text. That text is in my notes.

Titus chapter 2. But my dear friends, my dear, dear friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to emphasize something to you as we come to this closing, as we come to these closing matters. This great hope that we have in Christ, this great understanding of our position as children of God, our position and appreciating our position as children of God, this great future hope that is ours in Christ to see him face to face and then to turn to pursuing afresh a life of purity in Christ and biblical thinking and biblical living. Beloved, understand these are not side issues that we're talking about here today. This is not something incidental. This is not an academic consideration of what happened when Jephthah made his vow in Judges chapter 11. This is not an incidental consideration about whether there are gaps in the genealogies of Scripture or not.

Those things have their place. But the things that we're talking about now, being a child of God, having a great hope and pursuing sanctification as a result, these are not incidental matters. These are the fundamental reasons why we exist as Christians, is to know God, to know Christ like this, to long, to fix our hope on seeing him, and that's the outcome of it all, and to live a life in response that recognizes the comprehensive sovereignty and lordship claims of Christ and not to resist them, not to play games with them, not to play these games of saying, I want Jesus as Savior, but I don't care if I have him as Lord. Out on the thought, out on the blasphemous thought that so many have published, if Christ has done this and we understand it, then we want all of him, and we don't want to try to parcel it up so we can justify and continue in sin in our lives. Out on the thought.

So these aren't side issues is my point. Our position, our hope, our response, this is why we exist. Titus chapter 2, verses 11 through 15. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. Now look at what the result of salvation is. Beloved, look at what having a Christian mind leads you to do, okay? I have not given you extraneous things here this morning.

I've not given you obscure things and rooted in original language stuff that you can't seek out for yourself. This is all on the plain pages of Scripture where you can read it and see it for yourself and see the truth and force of it in your own heart. And there's no excuse for that not being the result in any one of us. Titus chapter 2, verse 11. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. So there's our present response. Verse 13, waiting for our blessed hope, there's the future, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

And then Paul gives this command to Titus, which is the responsibility of every preacher of the Word of God and the authorization for biblical teaching, declare these things, exhort and rebuke with all authority, let no one disregard you. Beloved, are you in Christ? Is that your position? Do you have this great hope fixed in your heart?

And are you living accordingly? That's why Christians exist. That's the outcome of a Christian mind. Let's pray together. Father, we love you and praise you for all of your goodness. Bring forth new life to those who have heard these things and recognize that they're not Christians.

Draw them by your Spirit to the Lord Jesus Christ. For the rest of us, Father, we thank you to be children of God. We thank you for the expectation to one day see Christ face to face, to see that blinding glory without terror or fear.

And we ask for your help to live accordingly while we wait. In Jesus' name, amen. That's Don Green here on The Truth Pulpit. And here's Don again with some closing thoughts. Well, my friend, thank you for joining us here on today's broadcast of The Truth Pulpit where we love to be teaching God's people God's Word.

And I just want to send a special invitation to you. If you're ever in the Midwest area, come to see us at Truth Community Church. We're on the east side of Cincinnati, Ohio. We're easy to find, easy to get to. We have services at 9 a.m. on Sunday and 7 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday evening for our midweek study. You can also find us on our livestream at thetruthpulpit.com.

That's thetruthpulpit.com. But we would love to see you. And if you do happen to be able to visit us in person, do this if you would. Come and introduce yourself to me personally. Fight your way through the people and tell me that you listen on The Truth Pulpit and that you're here visiting. I would love to give you a word of personal greeting. So hopefully we'll see you one day in person at Truth Community Church.

You can find our location and service times at thetruthpulpit.com. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.