It could be that the Northern Lights were putting on a fantastic display right outside your window and you wouldn't know it if your eyes were closed. But if you looked outside, you would likely want to share what you are experiencing with everyone in the household. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why it's similar with God's glory. When we see it, we want to share it with others. Alistair is concluding our study in the book of Jude. It is our knowledge of him that then shapes our praise, which is our second word, doxology. Doxa is Greek for glory.
Hence, doxology. And hymn writers have often been able to encapsulate for us large areas of truth, not least of all about God and his glory and power and so on, and done so often in a way that allows children to learn it in their smallness. It's no surprise to any of you that hymns have underpinned so much of my understanding of God since I was small. And Horatius Bonner, the lesser-known brother of Andrew, before he was ordained into the Free Church of Scotland, which was a Psalms-only church—they only sang metrical psalms—before he was ordained into that, he taught Sunday school. And when he taught Sunday school, he wrote hymns, because he decided that some of the tunes might be better and the words might be clearer. He wrote some six hundred hymns, one of which really challenges the way many of us come to the opportunity of praise.
How do we come? Well, thinking about ourselves, perhaps preoccupied with ourselves, wondering just what this is going to mean to me, the question is the entirely wrong question. The question is, what will this matter to God? Will it be a declaration of his glory, his majesty, his dominion, his authority? And the hymn begins, Not what I am, O LORD, but what Thou art. There's the starting point.
Not what I am, but what you are. Tis what I know of thee, my Lord and God, that fills my soul with praise, my lips with song. There's a direct correlation, as we learned last Sunday, that what engages our minds then stirs our hearts and challenges our wills. And so the hymn writer says, Let's start where we need to start. It is about you, Almighty God, your glory, your majesty, and so on.
Not about me. And so help me in this regard. Now, of course, in the Bible, God has given us our own hymnbook, and we have a hundred and fifty of those songs in the Psalms. And I want you to turn for a moment to the psalm that I read in Psalm 29, because I think we can be helped by following David's line.
Psalm 29 begins in the heavenlies—begins in the heavenlies—where David says, Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings! Ascribe to the LORD, glory and strength! Ascribe to the LORD, the glory due his name!
You see, it's quite amazing, isn't it? Heaven is a place of worship. Ascribing glory to God is essentially acknowledging this aspect of God in his essence. Because, really, in essence, God is glory. And so the psalmist says, Okay, heavenly ones, okay, angels, ascribe to the LORD, heavenly beings. Somebody asked me a question two weeks ago about the hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, and particularly the line which reads, Angels help us to adore him, ye behold him face to face. I think that that line—but I can't say—probably came from Psalm 29, because that is exactly what David is saying. He calls on the angelic beings to ascribe glory to the LORD. And we need help in that, and who better to help us?
Now, let's be very clear. We cannot add to the divine glory. We cannot increase in any sense the inherent glory of his being. But that's why that verb is really good, isn't it? It's better even than give.
I mean, it means essentially give, but it's better than give. Ascribe. Ascribe to the LORD. We're not giving him glory. He is glory. We are ascribing glory. We're saying, You are glory.
You are. Now, he goes on—and we're not going to expound on this psalm, you'll be delighted to know—but he goes on in verses 3 through 9 to make the point that God's glory is not only on display in the heavens, it's on display on the earth. On the earth. In the brightness of the heavens, in starlight or in sunlight. The heavens declare the glory of God. In the heavens, we see something of God's invisible qualities.
Remember Romans 1? His invisible qualities, his eternal power. These things have been understood, says Paul, from the beginning.
How could they be understood from the beginning? Because he manifests his glory in his creation. And you will notice the repetition of the voice of the Lord.
That's why I read it as I did. The voice of the Lord, verse 3, verse 4, verse 5, verse 7, verse 8, verse 9. Now, what is he doing here? Well, either in real time or in reflection, David has experienced, if you like, one of these great thunderstorms that has come out of the Mediterranean. And as it has come surging out of the Mediterranean and moving across Lebanon, and all the proud cedars of Lebanon standing there as created by God, he breaks them!
He breaks them! And so the psalmist says, On earth as it is in men, your glory is being displayed. I don't know about you, but I thought about it a great deal yesterday afternoon, depending on where you were, when those thunderclaps began. And boy were they loud! And I said to myself, There you go again! There you go again! You say, What an idiot!
Don't you understand science? Of course I understand it a wee bit, but the reality is God made the world in such a way that the thunders made that sound, that the lightning shone like that. And this is simply a magnificent picture of its reality. That's why the psalmist is so helpful. The hymn writer does similar when he says, Heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green. There's something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen. You see, because we're spiritually dead, we don't see. We see ourselves.
We see our own interests, our own plans. But we don't see his glory until our eyes are opened. Well, the psalm actually begins, for those of you who are Latin scholars, with Gloria in excelsis and ends with Pax in terris. The LORD sits enthroned over the flood, the LORD sits enthroned as the King forever. May the LORD give strength to his people. May the LORD bless his people with peace.
Yeah, we come through the floods, we come through the storms, but the God who brings us through the storms is the God who's in control of the storms, and he's the God who's able to bring us peace. Now, that means, however, since we're still under the heading, doxology, that when it comes to our praise, we do not design our times of praise for unbelievers. People often come to me and say, Well, why would you sing a song like Sweet is the Work, My God and King? The average person off the street, they don't think about My God and King and Sweet is the Work, and what are you on about, sacred rest and so on. I care that they don't know, and I care that they might come to know.
And I'll tell you how they'll come to know when they hear you singing it and meaning it. But if they hear us just stumbling, bumbling around as if somehow or another we wish it was moving on to something else, it's probably very unlikely that the glory of God will be revealed in our praise. It's for this reason that we honor God's name, that we treat God's name with reverence. Our orthodox Jewish friends do not even use the name of God. They don't write it down. How vastly different from some of us who use it as a means to punctuate the end of a sentence or to react to an event of life.
No. We worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. We bow down before him, his glory proclaim.
And in doing so—and this brings us to our third and final word—in doing so, we are making his glory known to the world. Which brings us to missiology. What is missiology? Well, it's the story of Christian mission, its method, and its purpose. It's a kind of new word, isn't it? Missiology. We understand missions.
But I liked it, because I wanted an O-L-O-G-Y as a third word in any case, so it fit perfectly. In a sentence, here you have it. The ultimate goal of evangelism is the glory of God. Oh, you say, I thought the ultimate glory of evangelism was to get as many people converted as you possibly could.
Mm-mm. No, the ultimate goal of evangelism is God's glory. God created a world in which both wrath and mercy would be displayed. And in Romans chapter 9, you have this amazing statement, which again takes us back into the domain of last week.
But in Romans 9 and in verse 22, Paul is writing, and he says, What if God, desiring to show his wrath, wrath, and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory? That God's glory is over all the earth. And it is the purpose of God that when our knowledge of God issues in our worship of God, then that will frame the way in which we live our lives in the world of God—first of all, in our own little lives. We all have to go somewhere tomorrow, whatever it might be, or the next day, and so on. And in that little world in which you and I live, we have a measure of influence, don't we?
And the influence that we bring to bear is in a context which, by and large, is a world that is focused on itself. It's focused on pride. It's focused on achievements, depending on how up the offices you are.
What floor are you on? Do you have a corner office? Whatever it might be. And people walk around as if some are another. I have achieved all this. I am very good at this.
You should meet me, and you should hear of me, and so on. And it's all just selfishness, ultimately—not to diminish people's qualifications, but it's the posture, the mindset. You gotta say to these folks, You couldn't even blink your eyes, were it not for the grace of Almighty God.
You wouldn't have enough synovial fluid in your knees. You would be walking around like this through the whole world, were it not for God's mercy to you. Why are you like that? And then the question is, Well, you seem a bit like that yourself.
And the dagger is there, isn't it? For now we've begun to strut. No, worshipping the Lord in the beauty of holiness means I come humbly. I come as one who needs mercy. I come as one not pretending to be something but relying entirely on someone—not someone seeking to attach any evidences of glory to oneself but to recognize that that belongs to God alone. You see, every one of us this morning is either a mission field or a missionary. We're either the mission field, having never actually come to trust in Jesus, or we're in a missionary. I think some have never actually come to believe entirely in Jesus because of pride. Just pride. Jesus addressed the Pharisees in his day.
It's recorded in John chapter 12, and he says of these individuals, they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. Perhaps you're an eminent physician. Perhaps you're a scientist. Perhaps you're a businessman of some influence. Perhaps you're a lady of great skill.
And you're so concerned that your CV is not tarnished in any way at all. Yes, you're orthodox in your understanding. You wouldn't say there is a God and there was a Jesus and so on, and you show up that that's where you're stuck. You love the glory of your peers more than you're concerned for the glory of God. You see, when what we know about God invades our lives to unleash our tongues of praise of God, then in our little world it will be obvious. In our church life it will be obvious.
Absolutely obvious. I was thinking this week about 1 Corinthians 14 when I came to this point, and I was remembering what Paul says in those great chapters in 12, 13, and 14 of 1 Corinthians, and he's talking about, here is the assembled church, and people come in. And if they come in and certain things are going on, they will react in a certain way. He says, listen, if the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you're out of your minds?
Okay. But if all prophesy and an unbeliever or an outsider enters, he is convicted by all he is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are disclosed.
How does this happen? It happens in speaking out the Word of God—revealing God's glory in God's Word. And in singing out the Word of God, what do you care if your bank manager thinks you're a nut because of the way you sing? He's supposed to think you're a nut because of the way you sing, because he cannot understand what has happened to you.
And if he asked you on a Tuesday, for goodness' sake, tell him, I used to be like you. I knew the words. I heard the lyrics. I listened to the melodies. But I just jingled the change in my pocket while it was all going on. I used to say to myself, whoever those people are, they're into it, and they're crazy. But now I'm as crazy as them.
Why? Because the secrets of my heart have been disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare what? That God really is among you. That would be the declaration. He didn't say it was a great talk. He didn't say there were nice people. He said the glory of God was there.
It almost stopped the service, I think, at one point. But listen. Nobody's gonna fall on their face before God if our attempt at the worship of God is little more than one hour in all the hours that are ours in a week. You see, it's our theology which must drive mission. Our theology. Otherwise, why go to the end of the earth?
What would you do that for? Psalm 95. Psalm 108 verse 5, I should say, Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 96. The psalmist helps us with all of this.
We draw this to a close. Listen. O sing to the LORD a new song! Sing to the LORD all the earth! This is not just a necessary interest. No. Sing to the LORD, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day, declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples.
Why? For great is the LORD and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the people are worthless idols, but the LORD may the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him.
Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. I think it was C. T. Studd who, in listening to these things being expounded, he said to himself in an amazing piece of spiritual logic, If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice that I could ever make for him could ever be too great. There is an inherent logic in that. It's theological. This is who God is, and this is what God has done, and his glory is to be extended to the heavens.
So why is it that the work of missions is largely contained, that ninety-five percent of the people who know Jesus are stuck in the United States of America, rather than out in the world? Oh, a few strange people might go. Every so often I keep meeting people that say, Hi, I haven't seen you in a while. He said, Oh, no, I retired. I said, You did what? He said, Yeah, I retired. I said, How old are you? He said, Sixty-one. I said, Man, I should get a job like you.
And I met another guy just outside Hartwood in Chagrin. He told me, Yeah, I didn't see you. Oh, I said, I'm usually in Starbucks. I said, How do you keep doing that? He said, Because I'm retired. Oh, how old are you? I'm sixty-two. Wow! What are you gonna do with the rest of your life?
What are you planning on doing with the second half, for goodness' sake? He's gonna sit in Starbucks, check your stocks, sit around? Listen! Those of you who are mature and are vertical and taking nourishment, there are opportunities for you throughout the world in all kinds of ways. And the reason you would be there is because of who God is and why God came and what God desires.
That's the great privilege. But listen, you will never lead souls heavenward unless climbing yourself. You needn't be very high up.
But you must be climbing. And if you doubt what God is doing, then just go to the final book of the Bible and listen as the writer gives it to us. After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number. From every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. And the angels, a la Psalm 29, and all the angels were standing around the throne, around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. So let the Amen sound from his people again. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.
Alistair returns in just a minute to close today's program. Now along with hearing Alistair's daily Bible teaching, I hope you're taking advantage of the books we recommend. These are books we have carefully chosen each month to help you gain a deeper understanding of God's Word. We purposefully select a wide variety of books over the course of a year. We include devotionals, topical books, books written by historical authors like Charles Spurgeon, J.I.
Packer, other Puritan writers. We also make available children's books and how-to books. For example, we recently offered a booklet about how to memorize scripture. If you request books each month by the end of the year, you'll have a great library, 24 new titles in it. And a great way for you to get all 24 of the books we offer here at Truth for Life is to become a truth partner. When you sign up to give a monthly donation of $20 or more, you can request all the books we make available. You don't need an extra gift.
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It's titled Future Proof—How to Live for Jesus in a Culture that Keeps Changing. Now here is Alistair to close with prayer. Father, thank you for your Word. Thank you for the privilege, Lord, of the morning hour. Thank you that we can be here. Thank you that we don't stay here.
We go out into our little worlds. But when we're together, we want, Lord, to ascribe glory to your name. And we pray that you will quicken us, show us your glory, visit us, for we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. I'm Bob LaPine. Hope you'll join us tomorrow as we begin a study in the book of Ephesians by looking at the purposes and uniquenesses of the spiritual gifts each of us has been given. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
