Grounded in God's Glorifying Grace

It is grace...listen...that chose you. It is grace that called you. It is grace that justified you. It is grace that sanctified you. It is grace that will glorify you. It is all grace, grace, nothing but grace from eternity past and the sovereign counsel of God to eternity future.

It is grace. Heaven. It's the last and greatest chapter in the story of God's love for believers. It's the pinnacle of what Bible scholars refer to as glorification. Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur begins a fascinating study on the subject of glorification. He calls his study, When We All Get to Heaven. Now to get started, John, what would you say to that listener? Maybe it's the typical listener who understands that heaven is marvelous to think about. He looks forward to it, but he still wonders, How will I benefit from studying this concept of glorification?

What difference does this make for me and my family and my day-to-day responsibilities here and now? To quote the Bible, He that has this hope in him purifies himself. Good answer. Yeah. When you have the hope of heaven, when you set your affections on things above and not on things on the earth, it changes everything in your life.

It changes absolutely everything. When your affections are in heaven, your treasure is in heaven, Jesus said. Your Father is in heaven. Your Savior is in heaven. The saints are in heaven. The apostles are in heaven.

The prophets and the believers of the past are in heaven. Your family is there. Your name is there.

Your room is there. You are a citizen of heaven. You are a stranger and an alien in this world. That is so basic to understanding that I need to live as a citizen of heaven, as a citizen of the kingdom of God. And I think one of the reasons that there is so little of that, even in Christianity, is because Christians have become caught up in trying to make this life in this world better. I mean, how many messages are people preaching on that?

You know, preaching on how do you solve your problems and how do you get over your anxiety and how do you get over your trouble and how do you find joy and et cetera, et cetera. And they're just kind of rearranging the little pieces of your life to sort of manufacture a temporary peace and ability to survive. When what ought to happen is that you're lost in wonder, love, and praise, that your heart is in heaven because everything that matters is there in heaven. You have waiting in heaven an inheritance that is undefiled and is already laid away for you. It cannot rust.

It cannot deteriorate. And one day you will receive that eternal inheritance. That ought to be the full preoccupation of a Christian. And I would put it simply, the more heavenly-minded you are, the more value you have while you're still in this world. We're going to look at that in a series when we all get to heaven. That's right, friend.

That truth is at the heart of the series. The more heavenly-minded you are, the better you understand the glorious future that Christ has in store for you, the more you'll love Him today. So join John now as he begins his look at the amazing day when we all get to heaven.

We have come to the culminating element in salvation and that is the great doctrine of glorification...glorification. And whenever I talk on this, I am reminded of a trip a few years ago to Kazakhstan, and some of you will remember this. It took a rather long journey, it's about a thirty-five hour flight to get there and changing planes in various locations across the earth. Finally arriving there about seven o'clock in the morning on a Monday and I was greeted in the airport by some gentlemen there in Almaty in Kazakhstan who said, All is ready at the conference and it will begin as soon as we get you to the church. This is pretty typical for over there and so I exited the airport into a rickety van which is also pretty typical and off we went to the church and it was packed with sixteen hundred pastors from Central Asia for the first pastors conference, church leaders conference in the history of Central Asia in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.

They had come from many, many places. The church was strong in that part of the world because that's the area where the communists exiled all the pastors and the Christians they wanted to get rid of in Russia. They sent them there and, of course, they went there, preached the gospel and planted churches. And as a result, the church was strong. This was the church that seeded the sixteen hundred, I think fourteen hundred and sixteen hundred came. It taxed all their capability to feed everybody but it rained all week and they were cooking soup in the church yard and the more rain, the more soup.

That's the way it worked. And the boiling pots, those big ones that you boil a missionary in, you know, those really big ones, they just kept filling up with rainwater and they'd throw more salt and pepper and a few more potatoes and we had a great week. My responsibility was to teach on the doctrine of the church. And I was to teach on the doctrine of the church for six days, Monday through Saturday.

And that in itself is a daunting task but a great subject and I began to teach, of course, through a translator and pour out my heart on Monday and Tuesday and got through Wednesday and I was defining all I knew to define about the church biblically and the leaders called a special meeting on Wednesday night. And they pulled me into the meeting and the translator said they have a great concern. And I said, what is it? They said they want to know when you're going to get to the good part. This is not good news. This is three days and I haven't gotten to the good part yet.

That's a little discouraging. I said, what is the good part, if I may be so bold as to ask, what is the good part? They said the good part is they want to know about their future. They want to know what God has prepared for them that love Him. They want to know what is to come in the future for the church of Jesus Christ.

I understand that. They were exhilarated beyond description to find out that what I taught them from the Bible is exactly what they had believed even though we had never met. They had been reading the same Bible and drawing the same conclusions and it was a great time of thrill for all of us. There should be a stampede for books on heaven. There should be literally a storming of the gates any place where heaven is the subject. People should be buying up every tape and every CD available that describes the life to come. That's where we're going.

That's where we're headed. That's why we were saved. I want you to turn to 1 Peter chapter 1.

There are a lot of places in the Bible that relate to this subject, but I want to grasp this wonderful verse 13 in 1 Peter 1 as a starting point and a focus. First Peter 1, 13, Therefore gird your minds for action, pull in all the loose ends in your thinking. Another way of saying, get rid of extraneous thoughts. Jettison what is trivial.

Nail down your mind. The language here is metaphoric. People wore tunics and when they went into action, they had to put a sash on, pull the tunic tight. When soldiers did it in battle, they would pull the four corners of the tunic up through the sash, turning it into a kind of mini tunic so it wouldn't encumber them at all. You get into any kind of a battle, any kind of action and you've got your dress blown in the breeze, you're in serious trouble. It can be used against you. And so you tie down everything tight.

That's the language that Peter intends for us to understand. Pull in everything tightly. Start thinking seriously. Keep sober, simply not in the physical sense avoiding what inebriates you, but think about the things you ought to be thinking about. Think about the things that matter. Cut everything out of your thinking that isn't important and it comes down to this. When you've pulled in all the loose ends and you've done away with all the debilitating trivialities, and when you begin to think clearly about priorities, you will fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The main verb in this verse is fix your hope and it is a command.

Look to the future. Hope differs from faith only in this sense that hope extends faith into the future. Hope extends faith into the future. It is believing what is to come as promised. Faith accepts what God has done.

Hope acknowledges what He will do. And you notice the word completely there, unreservedly, fully, perfectly, consummately. Clear your mind of anything that encumbers clear thinking and fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

This is a life focus...this is a life focus. It has implications in verse 14, even to your obedience and not being conformed to the lusts which were yours in your ignorance before you were saved. It shows up in your desire to be holy in your behavior, as verse 15 says. Or as verse 17 says, in conducting yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth. You largely live your life in view of this hope.

The Bible is clear on this subject that this is where we are to have our focus. We have a hope, says Hebrews 6.19, that is an anchor to the soul. This is a profoundly important statement. Your soul is anchored by your hope. That is to say, what you know to be true about your future because God has promised it, is what anchors your soul. It is this hope that gives you security. It is this hope that gives you steadfastness. You're anchored by this hope. You're secured by this hope. You're held tightly by this hope. It prevents you from floating around in a milieu of doubt and questioning because you know what God has promised and you've fixed your hope.

Completely on that promise for a glorious future. If you back up a little bit in 1 Peter chapter 1, you have that hope described, starting in verse 3. In verse 3 it is called a living hope. It is that...a living hope in the sense that it is a hope for life to come. It is a hope that we will have eternal life. Blessed be, verse 3, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As Christ died and is alive, so shall we though dead be alive. Our hope is a living hope.

And what is the character of that hope? It involves, verse 4, an inheritance which is imperishable. It cannot ever be destroyed.

It is undefiled. It can never be scarred or marred or stained. It will not fade away, that is no amount of time or circumstance can ever diminish it in the least. And it will never be taken from us and given to someone else because it is reserved in heaven for you. God has prepared for those that love Him a future and it involves life, resurrection life, life after death. It involves an inheritance, an inheritance that is so vast we are said to be joint heirs with Jesus Christ and He is the inheritor of everything that God possesses. It is an inheritance which cannot be destroyed. It cannot be defiled.

It cannot be diminished and it cannot be directed to someone else. It is for you and you are protected by the power of God through faith. You can never lose this hope because you are being continually protected by the power of God through the faith that He has given you which does not die. And you are headed toward a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. You are headed toward a salvation in its fullness that will be revealed in the end.

The language here is just staggering. Verse 9 says it again, you will obtain as the outcome of your faith the final salvation of your souls. In the meantime, there is some suffering. He says in verse 6, for a little while if necessary, you're distressed by various trials. All this does is vindicate your faith. All this does is verify your faith. All this does is prove your faith.

And I've said that and it's so important for us to understand. One of the reasons that it is so good to have trials is because when you survive them, that is proof of your saving faith. I don't know about you, but I want a faith that's proven and tested.

I want a faith that I have a confidence in that it is a true and saving faith. And so, trials prove faith. When you go through the trial and you survive the trial, you then know the faith was real. And then that faith which survives every test becomes more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire. It's more precious than anything to have a tested faith because it secures your confidence in the salvation that God has given you being an eternal salvation through the gift of a lasting and permanent faith so that you know...look at the end of verse 7...that you will be found in the end at the revelation of Jesus Christ, offering praise and glory and honor to Him. Even though you don't see Him, verse 8, you love Him, though you don't see Him now, you believe in Him, you're already rejoicing with joy inexpressible and full of glory and some day, as verse 9 says, you will receive obtaining the outcome of that faith, the final salvation of your souls.

You will receive what the end of verse 11 calls the glories to follow. So Peter starts out this wonderful epistle celebrating glorification, the great truth of the fulfillment of a living hope. Now with that as a background, I want you to understand that this is the culmination of everything in the gospel. And it does concern me that there is an immense amount of emphasis on the doctrine of justification. There's an immense amount of interest in the doctrine of regeneration. There's an immense amount of interest in the doctrine of effectual calling. There is an immense amount of interest in the doctrine of particular redemption. There's an immense amount of interest even in what I call human inability, or the doctrine of depravity. But there seems to be so little definitive interest in the great reason for all of that, which is the final and most glorious of all doctrines, the doctrine of glorification. We can get so worried about taking a view of the future that we avoid it all together just for the sake of being irenic.

We have diminished our interest in this great reality of glorification. Now I'm not going to belabor the issue you find all throughout the teaching of the New Testament, an emphasis on the wonderful future that God has prepared for us, the hope that He has given us of glory. In fact, Paul says in Romans 5, 2, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And I wonder sometimes whether Christians really do rejoice in that. Everybody seems to think that the Christian life is about tweaking our experience here to sort of manipulate it into the max comfort level instead of being lost in the wonder of what is to come and content to suffer whatever needs to be suffered here in order to have our faith proven because it endures the trial so that we can live confident in a true and saving faith, having been granted to us by the grace and power of God and rejoice in a clear and unwavering hope for an inheritance that is promised to us. The benefit of trials then is they allow you to live in maximum confidence that your faith is the real thing and your hope the true hope. Now when we talk about the future and glorification, we can talk about it from a practical standpoint, the effect that it has on us. But I want to talk about it from a different angle, if I might.

I want to talk about it in a way that I think is really at the very foundation of understanding our glorification. Look back at verse 13, gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit. Now notice this, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Now what strikes you about that sentence? He doesn't say, fix your hope on heaven. He doesn't say, fix your hope on Jesus Christ. He says, fix your hope on grace. Fix your hope on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Well that is just a great truth. We have a promise of an eternal inheritance that cannot be destroyed, that cannot be diminished, that cannot be marred or scarred, that cannot be redirected. We have the promise of an imperishable glorious future in the presence of God. We have been given a true and enduring and proven faith so that we know that one day all that God has promised will come to us, that hope becomes the anchor of our souls through all the issues of life.

It has massive implications to how we conduct our lives, how we view things in this world. But Peter says, don't look at it, at least for this moment, as what it's going to bring to you. Without understanding this, that it is as much a gift of grace as every other aspect of your salvation. Your justification is certainly by grace, you didn't deserve it.

Your sanctification, that is the goodness of God and the work of the Spirit in you to conform you into the image of Jesus Christ and overpower and overrule your sin is a work of mighty prevailing, enabling, purifying grace. But when we think about heaven, for some reason we don't necessarily think of it as the greatest and the culminating element of grace. When people discuss heaven as they do on rare occasions, you often hear people say, I don't know, I think we're going to be surprised who's not there.

Have you ever heard people say that? I think we're going to be surprised who's not there. I don't think that will enter into anybody's mind. Other people say, I think we're going to be surprised who is there. I don't think that's going to be the big shock. I think the big shock is going to be that I'm there.

That is going to be the shock of all shocks. We will be eternally overwhelmed with ever-increasing wonder at the reality of the kind of grace that would allow us to be there. Here I rejoice in the unmerited sovereign grace of my election, I rejoice in the unmerited unearned sovereign kindness of God in my effectual calling. I rejoice in the grace that justifies me and the grace that regenerates and ransoms and converts me. I rejoice in the grace gift of faith to believe the gospel. I rejoice in the ongoing grace that sanctifies and gifts me and enables me to serve. But I don't think my rejoicing in those things even comes anywhere remotely close to the rejoicing that I will experience when I see what glorifying grace gives me. And it will be grace. And I think the stunning reality of heaven will definitely be that I'm there.

And I don't know how I'm going to think in my glorified condition, but if there's any vestiges of John MacArthur from here, the first thing is going to be shock and staggering, overwhelming wonder and the immediate thought, how in the world did someone like me ever end up here? Fix your hope completely on that grace. It is grace...listen...that chose you, it is grace that called you, it is grace that justified you, it is grace that sanctified you, it is grace that will glorify you. It is all grace, grace, nothing but grace from eternity past in the sovereign counsel of God to eternity future in the sovereign and glorious presence of God. It is grace.

Thanks for being with us. Along with teaching each day on the radio, John is a pastor, he's an author, and he's Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. He's titled our current series, When We All Get to Heaven. Now as we dig into these messages, you're going to see the importance of focusing on your future heavenly home, what it's going to be like, how you'll relate to others there, and let me encourage you to keep listening and, for your ongoing study, get a copy of the entire series.

The title again, When We All Get to Heaven. If you'd like the three-CD album, maybe to put in a friend's hands or to donate to your church's library, call us toll-free, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. And if you'd like to download all three messages from When We All Get to Heaven, they're available free of charge exclusively at gty.org. And friend, thanks for remembering that the support of listeners like you helps keep John's verse-by-verse teaching available free of charge to people around the world. That includes this broadcast, heard on more than a thousand stations every day, as well as online resources and the many books or CDs that we give away by mail each month. If you'd like to support this ministry, mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412, or call us at 800-55-GRACE, or go online to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson reminding you to watch Grace To You television Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings for Channel and Times, and then be here each day next week for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.