GOD'S GLORY

[0:00] Let's pray. Lord, indeed, would you make us ready to hear you speak to each and every one of us and meet us at our point of need today. In Jesus' name, amen.

[0:14] When the people of God look into the word of God and see the glory of God, the spirit of God transforms them to be like the son of God.

[0:25] When the people of God look into the word of God and see the glory of God, the spirit of God transforms them to be like the son of God.

[0:37] The Gospel Coalition defines God's glory as the magnificence, worth, and grandeur of God's perfections. God communicates his glory through creation, providence, and redemptive acts.

[0:53] Well, as we look into our passages, we are going to anchor our thoughts on the corresponding verse by Paul in Corinthians. And we all, with unveiled faces, contemplate the Lord's glory.

[1:08] We are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord who is spirit. This verse has been described as one of the most hopeful, compelling, and inspiring verse in the Bible.

[1:23] Well, we need this these days, wherever we are, of hope and inspiration. What a testimony we would have been able to give if we had been present at the Transfiguration.

[1:36] It would have been the experience of a lifetime. Or if we had been present at Moses, coming down from Mount Sinai. These were great experiences, and they were overwhelming to the people who were present.

[1:50] I heard someone preach on the Transfiguration, and they asked the congregation if anyone would like to have been there. Well, one person put up their hand, rather bravely, I thought, because the way the question was loaded, it was clear that this was not to be the expected answer.

[2:08] The preacher explained we don't need experiences, and that was a bygone age. That was for the acts of the apostles, for the apostles, so don't let's get above ourselves thinking we can have experiences.

[2:21] Well, we do understand that these experiences of Sinai and Jesus on the Mount were exceptional. But lack of direct experiences and sharing of testimony is, in part, I believe, the reason for the decline of our church national and churches.

[2:43] A good testimony of those who have been unveiled and live in the freedom that Jesus gives will give glory to God and will demonstrate the reality of God living in their lives.

[2:55] Can you imagine the testimony of Peter, James, and John after being part of the Transfiguration? But yet, in verse 36, we read that the disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen at that time.

[3:15] And the time has to be right for us to share with other people personally. We need to read the room, as it were, where we meet people, we don't know where they are in their spiritual journey.

[3:27] So we want to know where they are before we start telling them they need Jesus right away, or tell them of our wonderful spiritual experiences. Many are embarrassed talking about their faith and their spiritual lives.

[3:41] I remember one church member years ago saying to another member, Well, my faith is a very personal faith, a very personal matter. And the other person replied, Well, that's the opposite of what Jesus said, because he said, Go into all the world and share the gospel.

[3:57] But in our passage, I don't record, it doesn't record that Jesus told the three to be quiet about what they'd seen, but they were anyway at that time. And we read in verse 32, They saw his glory.

[4:11] Can you imagine? I mean, they saw God's glory and they didn't tell anyone at that time. Now we know there are wacky churches that do experiences, and that can be a dangerous thing if people just look for the experiences for their own sake, and not for the good and the glory of God.

[4:31] And you would think with all the experiences that the children of Israel had, all through the desert, all the deliverances, deliverances, that this radiant supernatural Moses happening, that they would have drawn closer to God.

[4:44] But instead, despite all the experiences, we know that their living felt far short of God's will for them. And so that's why Moses was up Mount Sinai, to receive instruction to pass on to God's people.

[4:58] And so we read verse 32 in the Exodus chapter, Moses gave them all the commands that God had given him. But we shouldn't be hard on the children of Israel, as they were living under the law and not under the spirit, because we have so much more than they had.

[5:17] Our spiritual measure is much greater. So the commands for God's people are here in our first passage under the Old Covenant, but in our second passage, there was a command for God's people under the New Covenant.

[5:30] Verse 35, This is my son who I have chosen, listen to him. That meant listening to him through his word. The law was given by Moses in the Old, but Jesus turned it into a living word in the New.

[5:47] And we remember a very famous verse in John 1, 17, For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Moses represented the law and Elijah the prophets in the transfiguration.

[6:02] Jesus is the one who, though he completes everything, the word is alive in us as we let the spirit speak to us and through us. Because when the people of God look into the word of God and see the glory of God, the spirit of God transforms them to be like the son of God.

[6:23] So God, though, doesn't do what he has commanded us to do. We know the saying probably, Pray as if everything depends on God, and work as if everything depends on us.

[6:35] It's important to know that this experience of the transfiguration came while Jesus was praying, and possibly for a long time. The more we do spend time in prayer with our Heavenly Father, our expectation of his spirit will work in our lives, and our lives will grow in the spirit.

[6:57] Because the supernatural should be natural for the Christian. I first read that, Jackie Pullinger, some of you might have read it too, it was a book maybe, I don't know, 40 years ago when she was out in Hong Kong, I think it's called Chasing the Dragon.

[7:13] It's very worthwhile reading that. So she says the supernatural should be natural for the Christian, because God is a supernatural God. And because we believe in a supernatural God, we should expect the Holy Spirit, his Holy Spirit, to be working in our lives.

[7:31] Maybe in less sensational ways, but still God-given ways. And you know, we may see God's hand guiding us supernaturally to visit someone, even though we didn't know until we got there the reason why.

[7:44] We just happened to call on someone, and they said, that's amazing that you came, because I was just thinking about you just now. I once ran a friend. I hadn't seen that often, and I wasn't going to ring her, because I thought about her.

[7:58] And then her name kept coming into my mind, all that evening. So I thought, well, I maybe should ring her. And she was so glad, because she had to have someone go with her the next day for dental surgery, and no one else could go.

[8:13] Which was surprising, because she had a big family and a lot of friends, but for whatever reason, nobody could help her. So was that a coincidence? No, I believe it was a God incident.

[8:23] I had no real reason to be thinking of her three or four times in an evening. I believe the Holy Spirit led me to do that. Well, that's an experience. We're not trying to compare, though, these kind of experiences to transfiguration.

[8:38] But there are unique times when we feel God's presence more strongly, which we can't explain. Perhaps we've read or heard the same scripture three times in one day, maybe read it in our daily readings.

[8:50] We might hear it on the thought for the day, and we might come up again in a Bible study we go to. Or we might be healed of an illness perhaps suddenly. Or if not suddenly, God sends the right medic at the right time who had special knowledge.

[9:05] And I've heard so many people these days, they've said, the doctor that treated me was a Christian. These are amazing things. And also, we're healed of these things, but supernaturally, we may be healed of a bad attitude towards someone.

[9:19] It's not natural to want to forgive our enemies. That only comes about supernaturally. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

[9:31] So there's no radiant bright light, no razzmatazz, but just the quiet working of the Holy Spirit within us. And any move of the Spirit can be frightening to people, just as the people were afraid when Moses came down the mountain, and they were fearful at the transfiguration.

[9:47] But the Holy Spirit of Jesus emboldens us and takes away this kind of fear. The comforter, the word comfort, as you probably know, comes from come with and forte strong, to make strong.

[10:02] The Holy Spirit makes us bold and strong to do the kingdom work for God's glory. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. It trips off the tongue, doesn't it? But the glory is not for us, but for God and those we affect whenever his kingdom work is done by his Spirit working through us.

[10:22] So we see in verse 32 in our New Testament passage, it was only when the disciples were fully awake that they saw his glory. The glory had been there all the time. And we may miss God's Holy Spirit prompting us when we are not fully awake to the fact that God is already working.

[10:40] His glory is in unseen ways. So, with open face, beholding us as in a glass, sorry, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

[10:59] The word changed is the Greek word metamorpho. The word meta, the idea of an exchange, and I like that idea, is not just a sort of adding on something to us, it's a taking away of our weakness.

[11:14] And God exchanges it for his strength. The appearance of Jesus' face changed also in Luke's passage and the appearance of Moses did in the Old Testament passage.

[11:27] And that's what happened when God's glory was displayed. And for a brief time, Jesus took on an appearance more appropriate to the King of Glory than a humble man.

[11:40] And Moses did not know that his face shone. Of course, Moses was the meekest man in all the earth, it tells us. Well, Spurgeon states, we read only of two men in the Bible whose faces shone like this, Moses and Stephen.

[11:54] Both were humble men. And Spurgeon says, I'm afraid, brethren, that God could not afford to make our faces shine. We would grow too proud.

[12:06] It needs a very meek and lowly spirit to bear the shinings of God. Someone wrote, I dreamt I saw my name in lights and spoke your word for all to hear.

[12:19] I dreamt my name was recognized by people far and people near. But I have come to understand, like David long ago, that humble service in your house is still the greatest dream a heart can hold.

[12:34] Thus keeps us from pride. The Old Testament had a glory, but it was a fading glory. The new is permanent. The disciples immediately recognized these men who appeared in glory, Elijah and Moses.

[12:49] And they didn't get introduced, it seems. So that gives us a little bit of evidence that we will also be able to immediately recognize people in heaven. There won't be the name tag.

[13:02] We won't need name tags. We see Moses and Elijah also appeared in glorious splendor. What did they talk about? They talked about Jesus' departure, which he was about to bring fulfillment to the law in Jerusalem.

[13:19] And it would be great to have mountaintop experiences, but the real glory happens in the real world. God's glory is still at work. Because after they came down the mountain in that passage, we read in Luke, Jesus started to operate in a total situation of unbelief in the land about the healing of the demon-possessed boy.

[13:41] the glory of the mountain was soon dissipated coming down to earth. And we could say that some are in a state of shock because the glory seems to be leaving our churches national throughout the land, with so many shutting.

[14:01] And you know, people hark back to the glory days of the 50s, but they weren't really glorious days because the apparent strength of numbers in our churches was displaying nominalism probably more than the glory of God.

[14:16] And then suddenly and gradually, sorry, gradually, and then suddenly our churches have crashed. Ernest Hemingway was asked how he became bankrupt.

[14:28] He replied, gradually and then all at once. A bit like my bike. So like the bankruptcy of Hemingway, spiritual decline often happens gradually and then all at once and the glory seems to have gone.

[14:48] When Eli's daughter-in-law was lying in childbirth and dying in childbirth and she named the boy Ichabod, which meant the glory has departed and she was so sad the glory had departed from Israel.

[15:02] the news that the Ark of the Covenant of God had been captured was so upsetting it set her off in labor. She had far more integrity, it seems, than her husband Phineas who had dishonored God by his unlawful worship.

[15:18] Imagine calling your child Ichabod. I think she's an example of someone who cared more for the glory of God than the fact her husband had died. she'd given birth to a son and she was dying.

[15:32] She was upset for the glory of God leaving Israel. And while it was so commendable that she was distressed at the state of Israel given her situation you'd have thought it was the last thing that she would be thinking of.

[15:46] But you see the spiritual state of God's people had become nominal in those times too. Psalm 85 is a wonderful psalm if you want to do some reading for your Sunday afternoon is a hopeful psalm.

[16:00] It says I will listen to what God the Lord says. He promises peace to his people his faithful servants but let them not turn to folly. Surely his salvation is near those who fear him that his glory may dwell in our land.

[16:19] It's a lovely psalm 85. So our land may have had a Christian ethos but there was a distinct lack of the fear of the Lord or a lived experience in the reality of God.

[16:34] It just became normal not to talk about the faith. And I didn't grow up in an era or a church where people talked about their faith. There was no testimonies given in my church.

[16:46] Nobody talked to me about the atoning blood of Jesus. And so we see our national church we see the spiritual bankruptcy has come gradually insidiously and then it seems all at once like Hemingway's bankruptcy.

[17:05] The glory seems to be departing. The Herald has had a series of articles how majestic buildings in Glasgow have crumbled and quite often they are visiting family.

[17:15] and from being in regular use and maintained the buildings have closed and no one buys them. Even though some may be listed buildings they are still left to rot and eventually the building collapses after a gradual decline.

[17:34] And the term they used to describe that they said it's the neglect of our built heritage. And we just get used to it. We get used to that as a new normal. And I walk under the scaffolding which has been up for a decade around the Egyptian halls in Glasgow which are listed.

[17:50] And this just becomes normal. It had been there for decades. But we can see then the parallel neglect of our spiritual heritage. And few notice the glory of God disappearing from the temples of our land.

[18:04] So far so depressing but we must be a people of hope. We must be a people of hope. And I wasn't at the conference myself but there were 200 ministers at the conference.

[18:15] on Thursday and they are living in hope as well. And they were given a vision by the minister from Stornway, Tommy McNeil. And so they are enthusiastic and wanting to see the glory coming back to God's church.

[18:31] And there are churches throughout the land that are going forward but there are many that still don't understand how this could possibly have happened. however we do claim the promise of 2 Corinthians 3 and we who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory are being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is spirit.

[18:59] But it will only happen when the people of God look into the word of God and see the glory of God. the spirit of God transforms them to be like the son of God.

[19:11] Let's pray. Lord God we do thank you for your love and your faithfulness and your mercy despite our sins and our shortcomings and our weaknesses and our frailties Lord that you love us and you want the best for us.

[19:24] And Lord we would want to see our land become again the land of the book. A land where people would discuss your goodness to them. People where they would share what you have done for them.

[19:35] People would willingly give testimony. Where people would start to flock to church because they realise their lives are empty and they're missing out. So Lord may you work through each and every one of us here today.

[19:47] Would you inspire each and every one of us to examine ourselves to see that we are doing your kingdom work and for your glory. In Jesus name. Amen.