Our Scripture reading and our sermon text for this evening comes from Psalm 145, verses 10 through 13. Psalm 145, verses 10 through 13. Hear the Word of the Lord:
“All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you! They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power, to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds, and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations.
[The Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works.]”
This is the Word of our God. May the Lord bless the reading and the preaching and the hearing of His Word this evening. Would you please pray with me?
Our Father and our God, as we turn the focus of our hearts and minds and attention to Your Word, we praise You, Lord, and thank You that You are always faithful and always good, that Your Word is true in all it declares, and that we Your people, Lord, are most helped and most hopeful and most blessed when we hear and heed and live according to the Word of God. We thank You for the centrality of the preached Word and are reminded this evening, Lord, of how Your Word, when faithfully preached, touches hearts and lives and grows us, Lord, in our relationship with You. And this evening, we pray to that end – that You would bless and that You would use Your servant as I stand in this pulpit, Lord, a frail and weak and sinful man, and yet called to preach Your Word and trusting in Your power and grace at work in my life, I pray Lord, this evening, that You would bless and that the Word of the living God would go forth in power and truth and boldness, conviction, and that we Your people, Lord, would be impacted and changed and convicted. Lord, we thank You for Your Spirit who indwells us. And this evening we are reminded, Lord, of our need for Him to work in us, to illumine our minds, to illumine our hearts to give us understanding. And I pray that You would do that tonight and You would bless us as we gather together in this place. I pray for even the one who may be here this evening that doesn’t have a relationship with You, that Lord, You would work, You would change hard hearts, and that You would draw people to Yourself through Your Word. Again, Lord, we thank You for this time and we turn it over to You. We rest in Your faithfulness. We know that You are present and we pray that You would be with us tonight. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Well good evening, everyone! It’s good to be back in Jackson. It is good to be back in this pulpit and to be able to preach God’s Word here. It has been awhile since I was last here. I left Redeemer where I served as the senior pastor for eleven years and I am now serving a congregation, a PCA church in Miami, Florida called Old Cutler Presbyterian Church. And I have actually not been back to Jackson, except one brief time when I took my son up to Ole Miss and we came into Jackson, I have not been back for seven years. And so it’s good to be amongst friends. It’s good to see many folks here who are dear friends. It was good to worship at Redeemer this morning and reconnect with a number of folks there. And it’s good to be here in a presbytery that had such a profoundly important influence on my life. And so praise God. Thank you for the invitation, David. Thank you for thinking about me and inviting me to be here tonight.
The topic of the sermon that we’re going to be talking about this evening is about God’s glory alone – Soli Deo gloria. And the reason for that is of course because it’s appropriate but also David sent me the order of the service. And as I was looking at the order of the service and looking at the way we were moving through each of the solas, I realized that all of those solas ultimately point us to a profound and important and fundamentally significant conclusion. And that is, that it is all ultimately about God’s glory. A way of thinking about this would be this. I mean what is our ultimate authority? Well the answer to that is our ultimate authority is God’s Word alone. How are we saved? Well we are saved by God’s grace alone, through God’s Son Jesus Christ alone, through God’s gift of faith to us alone, faith alone, and ultimately all of that leads to a profoundly important conclusion, which is it is all ultimately about God and about God alone and not primarily about us.
Now one of the things that we know because this world is broken and fallen and full of sin, is that this world that we live in does not acknowledge God’s glory. And I would even submit to you that at times, many of us who profess Christ, who know God, we as well don’t live fully to His glory. And sin is subtle and it is incredibly deceptive. And at times, what can end up happening is that we think we are living to God’s glory when in fact we are not. Right? We’re not. And the church of the living God needs to be constantly reminded of what it means to be all about His glory.
Over 25 years ago – and you are, I am certainly aware of this document – The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals put forth a document called “The Cambridge Declaration.” And “The Cambridge Declaration” is organized around the five solas. And in it, one of the things that they were attempting to do was to draw the church back – 25 years ago, 26 years ago – back to understanding the centrality of God and how important God is to what we are to be about. And then in one of their statements they said this, that, “The loss of God’s centrality in the life of today’s church is common and lamentable. It is this loss that allows us to transform worship into entertainment, Gospel preaching into marketing, believing into technique, being good into feeling good about ourselves, and faithfulness into being successful. As a result, God, Christ and the Bible have come to mean too little to us and rests too inconsequentially upon us.” This was a challenge to the church 26 years ago – to call us back to Biblical Christianity, to call us back to the historic faith. And what we have seen and we continue to see to this day is in so many ways just the opposite of that. We need to be reminded over and over and over again that what life is really all about is the glory of our great God.
Now as we turn the focus of our attention to this text, Psalm 145, which is David’s final psalm, David here says some things that I think are profoundly important for us, so significant for us to understand to help us to really begin to dig into what God’s glory is and what that should mean to us. And so there are three things that I want to draw to your attention from this passage as we consider God’s glory alone. And the first is this – that when we begin to understand God’s glory alone, it defines our existence. The second is that it directs our ambition. And the third, is that it declares our God. So God’s glory defines existence, it directs ambition, and it declares God.
God’s Glory Defines Our Existence
Now let’s take a few moments and think about each of these as we look at the text. The first one is this. It’s this idea that God’s glory defines our existence. And what I mean by that is just the simple idea that all of existence, all of existence is for the glory of God. Now earlier in the service tonight we used the Westminster Shorter Catechism question number one which is so beautiful because it’s so concise and it’s so memorable, but it speaks so clearly about what we are here for. “What is the chief end of man?” It is “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” It’s helping us to understand a basic fact – that our end, our telos, our goal, all that we are about is God’s glory and God’s glory alone. But it’s not just that we are about this. Everything is about this. The 18th century theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, he wrote a book that is entitled “The End for Which God Created the World,” and he’s using that word “end” in the same exact way. It’s the telos, it’s the goal. And think of the title again. What is the goal for which God created the world, the world? Not just us, but the world. We could put it in the form of a question. What is the chief end of the world? What is the chief end of everything, of all that exists? It is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That’s what everything is about – God’s glory.
Now it’s interesting when we look at the text at what David says in verse 10. He makes a statement that “All your works shall give thanks to You, O Lord, and all Your saints shall bless you!” Notice the second part of this where he says “all Your saints.” It’s this idea the saints are those set apart. Some translate the Hebrew here as “all the godly; all the faithful.” David is actually speaking to the congregation of Israel or the covenant people of God and you understand that by God’s grace through Jesus Christ we have been made a part of that covenant people, right? So what is he saying? He says “all the saints” – this would include all of us here tonight who profess the name of Jesus – “all the saints bless You.” It’s reverential praise. It’s exalting the one, true and living God. It is bringing Him glory. David is reminding us of something incredibly important – that this is what we are here for.
But he doesn’t just say that, does he? If you notice the first part of it, it’s almost as if what David is doing here is he’s going wide and then he’s becoming narrow because he starts out at the first part of verse 10 by saying, “All your works shall give thanks to you,” and then he comes down to the saints. But he starts out with the works. Now what is he talking about when he says this – “All of your works”? Well that’s clear and made clear from the end of verse 9 where he says, “All that He has made.” All that God has made. Meaning all that God has made, all Your works, all of creation, all that exists was made for Him. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” And everything in it is to glorify Him because everything in it belongs to Him, because everything in it was made for Him. And this is part of the reason why – and you know this famous quote from the 19th century Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper when he said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ who is sovereign over all does not cry, ‘Mine!’” This world belongs to Him. It’s His. And everything it is for His glory and praise.
But as you know, we today live in a post-Christian, western world. And because of that, what we have seen more and more of is what the world looks like when God’s weightiness is removed from it, when people are unwilling in any kind of way to acknowledge it or to acknowledge God’s will, God’s way. And therefore what we see is a world that is inverted, a world that is on its head. At my church in Miami, right now I’m preaching on the Sermon on the Mount and I’ve entitled this series on the Sermon on the Mount, “The Right-Side-Up Kingdom.” And the reason I’ve entitled it “The Right-Side-Up Kingdom” is because the world is the upside down kingdom! It’s a world turned on its head. And here’s what you see, and we witness this – just turn on the news. Just look around. The more that we are seeing the removal of God and the sense of God’s presence in this world, the more we see an inversion of things that right is wrong, that wrong is right, that good is evil, that evil is good. And the more destructive everything becomes.
The Protestant Reformers, they got this big vision of God and because of it, because they understood that all was to be for God’s glory, everything – us, everything was to be for His glory – because of it, it’s interesting to see the profoundly important things that they were able to do to influence culture and society that they were good and a blessing to others. The Reformers weren’t perfect. None of us are. But getting this big picture of God, it led to some things that were far reaching in their influence on society – things like public education and hospitals and civic and economic betterment, Protestant work ethic, a revival of music and the arts. All of these things because they saw God and His glory over all. That helps us to understand something that I think the church can easily forget and that is that God’s glory isn’t just about being in these four walls. It presses out through us and it impacts, it influences this world because this world belongs to Him.
You know, I am very thankful, and I am always reminded of the Gospel song, “Soon and Very Soon,” that God sent Jesus into this world not simply to redeem you and me as individuals, but to set the world aright. And one day, my brothers and sisters in Christ, all that exists will bring Him glory and praise, without hindrance, without exception. The Reformers saw that and they leaned into it. And because they did, they shaped the world. We must lean that direction as well. God’s glory alone defines existence.
God’s Glory Directs Ambition
But that leads to the second thing that I want you to think about. And it’s directly connected to the first and it becomes more specific to you and me. And that is how God’s glory direct ambition. Now when we think of ambition most of the time, and this is right that we do this, we think of something that is sort of self-centered. And the reason for that is because ambition has gotten so influenced by sin. And so we think of an ambitious person as a person that’s maybe only thinking about “number one,” only thinking about themselves, only thinking about winning, only thinking about getting over. Ambitious people are typically people that are, you know, we may avoid a bit. But ambition can also be thought of in another way.
Several years ago, an author and former pastor by the name of Dave Harvey, he wrote a book. I actually read it when I was pastoring here in Jackson and used it with a group of men in a study group called “Rescuing Ambition.” And in it, what he is trying to get at is what drives us and what should drive us. And he talks about things like this, just giving examples – What is it that makes an Olympic athlete train for years for just participating in one event? Or what is it that makes a person that maybe is in a successful career and job give that all up in order to start their own business? Or what is it that would cause a sculptor to, day in and day out, month in and month out, go into a studio and chip away and a block of stone? And his answer to that is what ambition ultimately is. And I want you to listen to what he says because he grabs ahold of something that I want us to get tonight. He says this. He says, “We consciously pursue what we value. It’s not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather”- and listen carefully to this – “we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, and then we pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize and pursue is part of our essential humanity and it is the essence of ambition.”
Now consider what he’s saying – that we perceive, we prize, and we pursue. Now what is it that causes ambition to go askew? It’s what sin does, right? And so as a result of sin, we perceive and we pursue that which is not of God. We pursue other things and make them of God or give them the value of God. Or we pursue ourselves. But this idea of perceiving something, prizing it and pursuing it is exactly how we are made. It is exactly what life is about and it’s exactly what God would want – that we perceive His value, that we perceive His words and that we pursue it with all that we are. That’s what it means to glorify Him.
And so then if we ask ourselves, “What would our ambition be, what would our primary ambition be if we really are God-oriented and God-centered?” David goes on in this text and he talks about one of the things I think we have to think about. This is in verses 11 and 12. So he says “they” and the “they” he is talking about are the saints. So he is talking about those who have been set apart to God. “They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom and tell of your power, to make known to the children of man your mighty deeds, and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.” This reminds me of something that Jesus would later say and we all know these words. What are we all called to seek first? What? God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness and all these other things will be added to us. David is helping us to understand something – that if God is ultimately central in our lives, if God is being glorified, if vision for God captures our hearts then our ambition is going to be His kingdom. His kingdom! The glory of His kingdom! And we are going to want to tell it and live it and show how beautiful it is because it has captured us!
You know, in the Protestant Reformation, the Reformers were pressing against this notion of how the church and the pope were central to everything, right? And so there was this papal centrality. And so what the Reformers were basically communicating was this idea that it’s not ultimately about the pope or the church and its tradition; it’s ultimately about God and His Gospel. That’s a very important distinction to make between what they were dealing with and what we are dealing with as we think about any idea of a reformation of our hearts and a reformation of the world that we live in today because what we are dealing with isn’t a church papal centrality; we’re dealing with a me-centrality. And it really is all about me. And this is why we look at the world and we see some of the things that we see here where the individual becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth. And so it’s all about that individual’s sort of perception of my little “t” truth because there is no capital “T” Truth. There is no objective Truth. There is no absolute Truth. There is only us and our little “t” truths. And so my little “t” truth can say whatever I want it to say. I can define myself however I want to define myself. I can determine my identity however I want to determine my identity because I am the arbiter of truth.
You know, I mentioned a moment ago that I am preaching on the Sermon on the Mount and I’m telling you, here’s part of the reason I am doing this – because I want to remind our people that yes, it is true that we are saved by the wondrous grace of the Gospel, yes it is true that we are sustained by the grace of the Gospel, yes it is true that there’s not one single thing that we can do outside of the power and the working of the Spirit of God in our lives. But here is something we must hear. We are formed by God’s will and kingdom. Here’s something that I see happening in the church. You know me-ism isn’t something we can just look at and go, “Oh wow, the world is like that,” it is, but how often are we?
And I’ll tell you two ways that this gets into our midst. One is by understanding church and thinking of church as based on my preferences. It’s what I like and don’t like. That’s why we see so much church hopping because we have utterly defined the church around that – what we like or don’t like and not around what God says in His Word. But I will tell you something else that I think is dangerous and I think this in particular is a danger within our tradition right now, and this is, I think it’s me-ism. I really do. I think this is what has happened. The centrality of the individual – it’s this idea that you can hold to the Gospel and it’s somehow detached from the kingdom. That you can hold to the Gospel and it’s somehow removed from God’s holy standard. That you can hold to the Gospel and it’s removed from God’s will. That the Gospel therefore becomes this sort of thing that sort of makes us feel good, yes, and we talk about, “What does it mean to be in relationship with God through Christ?” but it ultimately gets down to, “What is it that makes us feel good?” because what we have done is we have taken the Gospel and we have turned it into therapy and not that which brings us into a kingdom.
Something that David is declaring here and reminding us of is this basic truth. The universal reign of God over all things – not my reign, not your reign, not anybody’s reign, but the universal reign of God Almighty. And you, by God’s wondrous grace, have been brought into that reign and God is saying to all of us, because we belong to Him, “This is what it is to mean. This is what life is about. This is who you are. This is what glorifying Him is all about.” And it’s not determined ultimately by you or by me. God’s glory directs our ambition. And I think for all of us it’s an appropriate question to ask. “What is it for us?”
God’s Glory Declares God
And that leads to the third and final thing. And this one is interesting. God’s glory declares God. As soon as you hear that, that God’s glory declares God, if you’re thinking you’re probably going, “That seems obvious and redundant, both of those!” Right? Obvious and redundant. So then why am I saying it – that God’s glory declares God? Well I’m touching on an idea that I think at times we can miss. It’s this notion of focusing on God’s glory and thinking of what God’s glory is and thinking of God’s glory in terms of our response to Him – that if we understand who He is that we are going to respond in a particular way. And yet, if we’re not careful, what can happen is that we end up talking about God’s glory and ultimately what we’re talking about is ourselves, what we do and what end we pursue.
But here’s what we have to understand – that God’s glory is about God. God’s glory – let me say it this way, to be redundant – it is about the God-ness of God. That God’s glory is about His weightiness, His brilliance, His character, His attributes. David VanDrunen, who is a theologian and author, he has a book out in part of a series called “The Five Solas.” And he wrote the final one on God’s glory alone. The book is called “God’s Glory Alone: The Majestic Heart of the Christian Faith and Life.” And in it, he says this. “Soli Deo gloria has much to do with our Christian moral life.” And it does. It’s what we’ve been talking about. But then he goes on and he says this. “But Biblical integrity demands that we first reckon with how the glory of God is truly about God Himself.” The glory of God is about God Himself.
And it’s interesting to see what David does in this psalm because he talks about what we are to do to glorify Him and to praise Him and to be about His kingdom, but then he turns the focus in verse 13 and he just says this – “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations. [The Lord is faithful” – and I am reading this even though it’s not in all the manuscripts; it’s in the ESV – “[The Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works.]” What is David declaring there? He is just basically declaring God, God’s eternality, God’s kingdom, God’s power, God’s dominion, God’s covenant faithfulness, God’s kindness – God! And here’s the thing, until we obtain a bigger vision of the glory of God, how wondrous He is, of His beauty, of His majesty, of His glory, we won’t get the rest. We won’t.
I’m going to tell you a little bit about my journey and my journey towards Presbyterianism. I didn’t grow up Presbyterian. I actually didn’t know what a Presbyterian was. When I was a kid, I couldn’t have even said the word “Presbyterian,” but I did grow up in the church. And I grew up in a church that preached the Bible. I grew up really between Methodist and Baptist. My two grandfathers, they were the greatest influence on my Christian development, my two grandfathers were leaders in the church. One of them was a Bible-believing Methodist minister and the other was a Baptist deacon who was a significant leader in his church. And what’s so funny about my journey, if you were to visit my hometown you would see this and probably giggle because it’s funny – those churches are probably 100 yards apart and they’re actually set up like this. There’s a church, this is Bethel United Methodist Church and this is my grandfather who was the pastor of that church. And then there’s a church right beside it called Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, and there’s the other grandfather that lived right there. He could just walk back and forth, which is what I did, and I was in those two churches.
I didn’t know much theology at all, but God, when I was a young man and he called me, I thought, He had just called me into ministry and I wanted to go to school and study. And I ended up – and this is how God’s providence works and this is how this man is standing before you today as a Reformed Presbyterian minister – without any knowledge of anything Presbyterian or anything theological, He led me to a Presbyterian college to study the Bible and study theology. It was there when I realized that I did have a theology, I just didn’t know it. And it was Arminian to the core, right, which typically, unless you are taught, that is what it’s going to be, and it was. So I am in this school that is teaching the Reformed faith. It’s teaching what we would hold to dearly. And I hated it. I mean, I hated it. I couldn’t get my head around it; I couldn’t figure out how in the world this could be what God was like.
Until something happened. And here’s what it was. It wasn’t that a professor had put together so articulately the doctrine of election and I was like, “Got it!” That wasn’t it. It wasn’t anything like that. There was an older gentleman who had come back to college. He was a Vietnam vet and he was in his 40s or so when he came and he took a liking to me and he decided to disciple me. And he discipled me – and this is what got it for me – he discipled me with J.I. Packer’s, “Knowing God.” “Knowing God.” And what happened was this. I grew in my knowledge and vision of God. God became more glorious. God became more wondrous. God became bigger. And as a result of that, what happened? All the other things fell in place. If God is that big, of course election is true! If God is that big, of course sovereignty is true! And that’s what I want for all of us, that from the bottom of our hearts we would be able to say and to sing to the praise of God, “To God be the glory, great things He has done!”
Amen. Let’s pray together.
Our gracious Father and God, we thank You and we praise You for Your Word and for this time in it. We pray that You would help us, Lord, to have this bigger vision of You and who You are, that You are indeed glorious in all ways, that we would understand what that means, Lord, to believe that, to trust in You, and to live for You. We long for Your glory to be seen by all. We see, Lord, how wickedness is manifest in this world because we don’t know You, and we do pray, Jesus, come. We long for that day when there will be no opposition to Your glory and honor in this world. And Lord, we seek that even now. Work in us, work through us. Make us, dear Lord, about You and only You. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.