[0:00] It's about 12 years, roughly, since I met the most famous person that I've ever met. Some of you would have heard me tell this story before, and so it's a great story.
[0:11] So listen, when I say we met, what I mean by that is he waved at me. And when I say me, it could have been the person standing beside me, but I claim it was me.
[0:26] See, I was in Sacramento, California for a conference. At the end of the conference, a small group has decided to go and grab some lunch in this mall off the convention center before we hopped on a plane to come back to Sydney.
[0:38] And as we walked out from the convention center into the mall, I immediately noticed two black SUVs parked there. And what I noticed was the fact that one of them had a submachine gun pipe just sort of sticking above the dash, and the other one had a shotgun sticking just above its dash.
[0:59] And each car had a couple of guys in them with black suits and white shirts and black ties and black sunglasses. And so it was either a Men in Black 3 being filmed or it's Secret Service, is what I was figuring.
[1:16] And the fact that they had these dangly things from their ear and they were constantly doing this, kind of gave it away from my mind as a Secret Service thing. So I decided that I'm going to grab a front row seat to see what was unfolding.
[1:30] And hopefully it wasn't some kind of raid or something was unfolding, but something more important. Like what I was hoping the whole time I was in Sacramento was to run into the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
[1:44] Now Arnold, this was at the height of his political power, if that's what you can call it. He hasn't been famous necessarily for being a great politician.
[1:58] He's more famous for being one of the greatest actors of all time, in my opinion. And I wasn't disappointed.
[2:08] I'm sitting there, front row seat in the mall, barricades around and chomping on a burger. And I got my face down when I hear some murmuring going on over here, over in a bit of a distance.
[2:26] And I'm like eating my burger. And I look up and there he is, like literally 50 metres away from me. The greatest actor of all time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, walks out of a slightly more high class restaurant than I was sitting at.
[2:42] We're surrounded by Secret Service guys. And there's me and a friend of mine there chomping on our burgers. We both immediately jumped up onto our seats, like a couple of teenagers at a Bieber concert.
[2:57] And just out, hey, Arnie! The thoughts of our voices. And this is it. He turned. We had his attention at that moment. He turned and he looked at us.
[3:10] I mean, he looked at me, is what he did. He looked at me, as did the Secret Service. Looked at me at that moment. And it's like one of those things that, you know, you're thinking, you know, what do I say next?
[3:23] You know, I've got his attention. What do I say next? And both of us at the exact same time just yelled out, I'll be back! That's it. That's all we could think of.
[3:35] And to mark this personal milestone, I quickly fumbled, you know, grab my camera to take some photos of this moment. And so we've got these photos and there's Arnie.
[3:46] See the pole there? And the blue suit? That's Arnie disappearing behind the pole. And the next one's a bit clearer because the next one, you can just see his face poking out from behind the tree.
[4:00] That's it. And I thought, well, yeah, look at these photos. That's not good enough. So I ran around the block thinking that I will run up to Arnie and, you know, get a photo with him, which halfway around I thought, I'm not sure how that will look with the Secret Service, me running straight at Arnie.
[4:20] But I got around there. It's quite a long block, actually, it turns out, in America. I got around there and he'd gone. That's all I've got of this momentous moment. And I remember it like it was yesterday.
[4:34] I'm sure he doesn't. Our culture, particularly the Western world, has this weird fascination with celebrity. Recent survey in the United Kingdom said that something like 69% of teenagers wanted to be famous more than anything else.
[4:55] Of those surveyed, something like 70-something percent of those said that they wouldn't know how they would become famous, but they figured things like Britain's Got Talent or, you know, one of those shows will be their sort of road to fame in some way.
[5:15] You know, I could play the spoons better than anyone else or something like that. But reality TV has become so, so popular because in our psyche, the reason why it's become so popular is because it holds out the promise that any average schmuck can be famous for virtually anything.
[5:37] You can get on TV for virtually anything. That's why reality TV is so, so popular. Now, the first famous person in the modern sense, and I use the word modern loosely here, was Alexander the Great.
[5:54] Leo Baudry, a professor of English at the University of Southern California, he's the author of the book, The Frenzy of Renown. He writes about Alexander the Great.
[6:06] Not only did he want to be unique, but he wanted to tell everyone about it. And he had an apparatus for telling everyone about it. He had techniques for doing famous things and recording those famous things.
[6:19] He had historians, painters, sculptors, gem carvers follow him wherever he went to record his exploits. Now, we don't need to employ those people nowadays because we've got things like Instagram and Facebook and selfie sticks and that sort of stuff where we can record and show the world anything we do at any particular time.
[6:46] And the more likes you get, clearly, the more people like you, apparently. Our renown is a major goal in life.
[6:56] Every one of us, in one way or another, wants to leave a mark, be known for something significant, be regarded highly or as an expert in a field. May not be worldwide fame, but if we can get that, that'd be brilliant.
[7:09] May be famous in a country, famous in a city, have a street named after you. Relatives of Nat has got a park named after him.
[7:20] A park. And there's a big ceremony, local council, big ceremony, named this park after him. He had two albums of photos showing everyone this park that's named after him.
[7:32] It's just a suburban park, you know. Well, I mean, I haven't got one named after me, but, you know, a park? It might just be that we want to be the best person, the best in your family at something.
[7:43] It might be that you want to even get a plaque on church. I read a few of the plaques this afternoon around the church. Or just simply ensuring that you're remembered by someone.
[7:56] You see, the default position in our human hearts is to make a name for ourselves. It goes right back, beginning of the Bible, in Genesis chapter 11. We want to pursue our renown, our reputation, our glory.
[8:14] And here we come to the end of this series on Here We Stand. We've been reminded of what has been rediscovered in the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. What has been passed down to us is five phrases.
[8:26] To bring it to a close, we're focusing on the end of it.
[8:43] And indeed, I would say the purpose and the goal of all things, and that is the glory of God alone. All the glory, all to the glory of God, this one, the fifth one, is to be understood as the glue that holds the other four statements in place.
[9:05] It's the center that draws the other four phrases into a grand unified whole. It's the logical implication of the other four statements.
[9:16] Simply put, the fact that salvation is by faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, without any meritorious contribution on our heart at all, ensures that everything is for the glory of God alone.
[9:31] You see, when we remember and celebrate the Reformation as we've been doing over the past four weeks and a bit, ultimately, what we are remembering and what we are celebrating is the exaltation of the glory of God.
[9:49] That's what we're remembering in this 500 year anniversary. The glory of God is implicit in the sheer being of God, which is where I began this series and where I'm going to end this series.
[10:01] And it's explicit right throughout the teaching of the Bible. Now, what is interesting is that as we've gone through the previous four, we've said Christ alone, not Christ plus.
[10:14] Grace alone, not grace plus. We've gone all the way through the series. Because there was a distortion in the 16th century Roman Catholic Church in its teaching and those things.
[10:25] And yet, when you get to the glory of God alone, the Roman Catholic Church did not have glory of God alone plus. There's no added here. They believed in glory of God alone.
[10:40] And yet, there's a danger. The danger is, you can use all the language of biblical Christianity, and yet the center of it becomes all about me.
[10:59] Christianity can so easily slip into being about my need for salvation and what God is doing for me.
[11:11] It's about me. And John Calvin saw it in his day. In 1538, the Italian cardinal Satelli attempted to win back the city of Geneva, back into Roman Catholicism and away from the Reformation, the Protestant faith, which they had shifted into.
[11:36] And they had rejected Roman Catholicism, moved into the Protestant faith, and so Satelli is trying to win the whole city of Geneva back. And he wrote this massive piece of work for them.
[11:47] And in the introductory section of his paper to the city council, he wrote this lengthy piece extolling the preciousness of eternal life before he got to quite vicious criticisms of the Reformation and of John Calvin in particular.
[12:06] And Calvin was asked by the city council. Calvin wasn't in Geneva at this point. He was asked by the city council to write a response to Satelli in the autumn of 1539.
[12:22] And he wrote it in six days. Such was the incredible mind of Calvin. He blitzed this guy in six days.
[12:33] Martin Luther, who was 25 years older than Calvin and the instigator of the Reformation, read this piece of work from Calvin. And his only comment on it was, this is a writing with hands and feet.
[12:48] And Calvin's response to Satelli established him as the reformer of Europe. In his response to Satelli, he didn't begin with priestly abuses.
[13:04] Didn't begin with transubstantiation. Didn't begin with papal authority. The issue of first importance for John Calvin was the centrality and the supremacy of the majesty and the glory of God.
[13:24] You see, Calvin saw in Satelli's piety a fundamental error. He wrote this to Satelli. You see, Calvin's main contention with Roman Catholicism was that you can take true language and you can skew it so badly that it loses its whole meaning.
[14:11] Calvin aimed to do something very different. He put this before Satelli as a better way. He says, And that is the central meaning and the end goal of the Protestant Reformation.
[14:35] The recapturing and exalting the glory of God. And I want this church to be a church where the dominant aroma and the sound and the feel and the expression is the preciousness of the weight of the glory of God.
[14:59] If we're to sit within this heritage. So let's get a glimpse of it. I want to take it there. I want to go to a familiar passage.
[15:11] You've heard me say this before. Go back. Go to Isaiah chapter 6 in your Bibles. If you haven't got a Bible, stick your hands up and help us to come and get you a Bible. I want to have it in front of you right here, right now.
[15:23] Isaiah 6. And we're going to start at verse 1. I want to get from here seven glimpses of God in these first four verses.
[15:38] This glorious God. Try and paint a picture, a very brief picture, but a picture of the magnificence of God and why He is worthy of all glory. Firstly, first picture we get of the seven glimpses, God is alive.
[15:52] In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne. So Isaiah gets a vision of God. And in the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah died as the most powerful man in the world at that time.
[16:06] In the year that he died, Isaiah gets a vision of God alive, seated on a throne. Uzziah's dead. God is alive. Psalm 90 verse 2 says, You are God.
[16:28] You are God when this universe was spoken into existence. He was a living God when the Great Wall of China was built over its history.
[16:39] He was living God when in 1966, Time magazine put on its front cover the title, God is dead. He will be the living God 10 trillion ages from now.
[16:52] There's not a single head of state in the world right now who will be ruling in 90 years, including Donald Trump, even though he probably thinks he will be. In a brief 120 years, this planet will be populated by more than 10 billion brand new people who are not here right now.
[17:15] And all 7.52 billion of us who are alive right now will vanish off the face of the earth, just like King Uzziah did. But not God. Never had a beginning.
[17:28] Never had a end. Therefore, it depends on nothing at all for his existence. He always has been and always will be alive. That's the first one. Secondly, we see that God is authoritative.
[17:39] Verse 2. I saw the Lord seated on a throne. You go through the whole scope of Scripture and there's no vision of God whatsoever where you catch a glimpse of him plowing a paddock or cutting the grass or shining shoes or filling out reports or loading a truck or nothing like that at all.
[18:00] Every vision of God is him seated on a throne. All is at peace. He's at total control. And the throne is his right to rule.
[18:16] You see, we do not give God authority over our lives. He has it whether we like it or not. And I think that few things are more humbling. Few things give us that sense of the raw majesty of God as the truth that he is utterly authoritative.
[18:32] After him, there is no court of appeal beyond him. He's it. Thirdly, we see that God is all-powerful. He not just has all authority, but he's all-powerful.
[18:46] The throne of his authority is his right to rule. His power is his ability to rule. I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted.
[19:03] You see, that God's throne is higher than every other throne. Signifies his supreme power to exercise his authority. There's no opposing authority that can nullify any of his decrees.
[19:16] What he purposes, he accomplishes. What he decides, he does. Nothing can get in the way of that. But as Isaiah says, as God says in Isaiah 46, verse 10, I make known the end for the beginning from ancient times, what is still to come.
[19:30] I say, my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please. To be gripped by the all-powerful sovereignty of God is either marvelous because you know it's for you or it's terrifying because you know he's against you.
[19:47] Indifference. Just means you have not seen him for who he is. The sovereign authority of the living God is a refuge full of joy for those who are his in Christ.
[20:04] Fourthly, we see that God is magnificent. I saw the Lord sit on the throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. The picture here is, imagine a wedding ceremony where the train of the bride's dress sort of, you know, dragged a couple of meters behind her.
[20:26] But imagine the picture here is of the train that fills the aisles and the seats of the choir lofts and the pulpit.
[20:37] And the whole cathedral is filled with this cloth, which is all one piece. And you see, what it is, the fact that God's robe fills the entire heavenly temple means that God is incomparable in his beauty and his splendor.
[20:57] It's indescribable, his beauty and his splendor. The fullness of God's splendor shows itself in millions of ways. His magnificence and his splendor spills over into excessive creative beauty.
[21:16] It's what we see in the wonder of creation all throughout this universe, from the tiniest atoms to the depths of the ocean to the furthest reaches of the universe. And we keep exploring and exploring, exploring those things because it just never ends.
[21:32] God's glory, his magnificent, his splendor never ends. And we marvel every time we find something new. Fifthly, we see this God is revered.
[21:46] Above him were seraphs, each with six wings, two with wings. They covered their faces, with two, they covered their feet, and with two, they were flying. It's not really clear what these strange six-winged creatures with feet and eyes and intelligence actually are.
[22:03] But according to verse 4, When one of them speaks, the foundation of the temple, which is heaven itself, shakes. So, it's really helpful to see these are not chubby little babies with little fluttery wings floating around God's ears kind of thing.
[22:24] There are no puny, silly creatures in heaven, only magnificent ones. And the point is that not even these creatures look upon their creator God and feel worthy to even leave their feet exposed in his presence.
[22:43] As good and as great as they are, untainted by human sin as they are, they revere their maker with great humility.
[22:55] And when an angel, you look at the Bible, an angel appears to a human, they normally begin their dialogue with the human with fear not.
[23:08] Because that's exactly what you do if one of these things appeared to us. They're not chubby little babies. They are awesome creatures. But these angels hide in holy fear and reverence in the presence of their God.
[23:25] Six, we see that God is holy. Let me try and capture the sense of verse 3. And they were calling to one another, holy, holy, holy, holy is the Lord almighty.
[23:45] It's not a holy, holy, holy. It is a definite, emphatic, loud declaration of who God is.
[23:57] You see, the possibilities of language carry the meaning of God. To carry the meaning of God eventually kind of run out for us.
[24:10] The word holy, if you like, carries us to the edge. It carries us to the brink. And from that point on, the experience of God is beyond our words.
[24:20] His holiness is as far as you can get. Every effort to define the holiness of God ultimately comes winding back by saying, God is holy simply means that God is God.
[24:38] You see, the meaning of holy is to cut or to separate from. You know, that is a holy thing can be cut off or can be separated from common use.
[24:49] Earthly things, people are holy as they are distinct from the world and devoted to God. But what happens when you get that definition and you attempt to apply it to God himself?
[25:06] From what can you separate God to make him holy? The very godness of God means that he's already separated from everything that's not God.
[25:19] God exists in a different way than we exist. We, his creatures, exist in, as does all of the universe, exist in a dependent, derived, finite, fragile way.
[25:40] God, our creator, exists in an eternal, self-sustaining, necessary way. Now, necessary in the sense that God does not have it within him to go out of existence.
[26:01] God's exact opposite to us.
[26:18] You see, we, by necessity, age and die because it is our present nature to do that. God necessarily continues forever unchanged as he always has, as he always will be.
[26:37] The God of the Bible needs no support system. I survive on a support system. I'm hooked up to a support system. I got an insulin pump and I'm pumped up with pseudoephedrine and other things right now.
[26:53] You see, God is one of a kind. In that sense, he is utterly holy. But when you say that, nothing's said anything more than he's God.
[27:06] God has life in himself. He draws, he's an ending energy from himself. He's not connected to anything else. He draws it from within himself. He is the absolute reality beyond which there is just simply more of God.
[27:22] His being and his character are utterly undetermined by anything outside of himself. He is absolute. Everything else is derived from him. All life flows from him. All existence flows from him.
[27:33] His holiness determines all that he is and all that he does. But it's not determined by anything or anyone. Call it his majesty.
[27:44] Call it his divinity. Call it his greatness. Call it his supreme value. Get to the point and language runs out. Unless he gives us more language to help us describe him.
[27:58] And that brings me to the seventh and final thing we learn from God. God chooses to communicate who he is.
[28:11] Because without what he's revealed about himself already, this side of the brink, we would not know him at all. He chooses to communicate who he is.
[28:23] And that is, holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory. Verse 3. God's glory is the revealing of his holiness.
[28:40] That's what glory is. What is... God is glorious means that God's holiness, that is, his divine character and his divine being, has gone public.
[28:53] He's displayed it. He's revealed it. He's communicated. Verse 19 says, The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands.
[29:05] Day after day, they pour forth speech. Night after night, they reveal knowledge. The created order is God making himself known.
[29:21] His character and his being. And unless he reveals himself, we would not see him for who he is. The universe displays his glory.
[29:33] And when God reveals his glory to his creatures, the response of his creatures is to give glory to him.
[29:44] Even the trees clap their hands. Even the stones will sing out and declare his glory.
[29:59] And that is what the creation was made for. Declare his glory. Let me just want to close out this first point a little bit.
[30:12] We'll make another point. The Reformation motto of glory to God alone cannot be reduced to just a call for moral action.
[30:23] That is, we Christians should pursue all activities for the glory of God as our only supreme end. Now, there's nothing untrue about that statement.
[30:34] That is a true statement. There seems to be something a bit imbalanced about focusing this grand motto of everything to the glory of God alone exclusively to being about Christians acting for God's glory.
[30:52] It produces this awkward and ironic result that glory to God alone becomes centered on me bringing glory to God.
[31:03] Because me centered, again. Now, on many occasions, the Bible calls Christians to give glory to God in their worship. And a couple of places it exhorts Christians to do everything for the glory of God.
[31:15] We're going to look at that in a moment. But more often, though, the Bible appeals to God's glory as the way of describing God, especially as he reveals himself.
[31:27] Glory to God has much to do with our Christian moral life. But biblical integrity demands that we first reckon with how the glory of God is truly about God himself.
[31:42] While God's glory should indeed be Christian's chief motive and goal in all conduct, we must remember above all that glory is the Lord's and that in all his works, he glorifies himself.
[32:07] It's about him. And that response is exactly the right response according to Habakkuk 2. The Lord is in his temple.
[32:20] Let all the earth be silent before him. In reverent awe. Now, it probably shocks us to think that God's goal for all things is his glory.
[32:34] That is, he's designed everything for his glory. All history is history because he determines it. He speaks it and makes it history. So everything is about his glory.
[32:46] And we think it sounds a bit like divine egotism. Which it would be true if it was me designing all things for my glory.
[32:57] If I designed everything, St. Paul's Chatswood, for the glory of Steve Jeffrey, start calling it St. Steve's instead of St. Paul's. And you'd be right. It is egotism because I am not worthy of glory.
[33:12] But this is the biggest issue for us. We live for our renown. It's the heart of sin. The heart of sin is exchanging the glory of God for lesser glories where I'm at the centre.
[33:28] Where I create God in my image. That's at the heart of sin. But for God, it actually points not to divine ego, but in fact to divine love.
[33:43] You see, God doing everything for his glory is the foundation of his love for us. God's glory and our joy are not two separate ideas. They are intimately connected. To glorify God is to respond to his glory.
[33:57] And you cannot glorify God without engaging with his glory. And the New Testament writers, and more than engaging glory in terms of the created order, because the New Testament writers proclaim that the supreme public display of God's nature, his character, his power, and his purpose, that is, his glory, the supreme public display of God, is there in the person and the role of God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
[34:30] In John chapter 12, verse 41, verse that you would just skim straight over, unless you just pat your face in Isaiah 6, this is what John writes.
[34:43] Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him.
[34:55] The magnificent picture of the vision of the throne room of God and God sitting on his throne that Isaiah sees, it's recording Isaiah 6, what he saw was Jesus.
[35:07] He saw the glory of God. He saw Jesus sitting on that throne. And Jesus radiates, reflects, mirrors, displays the character, the purpose, and the power of God.
[35:18] The magnificence of what went public in Jesus was the plan and the work of grace, whereby Jesus saves sinners by laying aside his glory and becoming a mockery for us.
[35:38] Laying aside his renown and becoming a mockery for us. His commitment to his glory is the foundation of his love for us.
[35:50] It's just mind-blowing that the way God seems most delighted to glorify himself is by enabling his treasured people to enjoy him in the glory of his new creation through the shaming of his Son, who holds equal glory with him.
[36:13] Through the finished work of salvation achieved in Christ alone, by grace alone, that we grasp through faith alone.
[36:24] God's desire to glorify himself in all things sweeps us up into a plot whose unending finale leads us into his presence where God is supremely glorified in our glorification.
[37:04] God does, however, call us to respond to his glory. His glory revealing by giving him glory. And the first and most basic way we glorify God is by putting our faith in Jesus Christ alone.
[37:21] You see that in 2 Corinthians 1 and into 2, that putting your faith in the Lord Jesus is glorifying to God.
[37:32] That is, responding to his glory revealing by putting your dependency on this God.
[37:45] To give glory to God is to reckon God to be what he is, to rely upon his power and his faithfulness and his plan of salvation in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the first way and the first starting point in bringing glory to God.
[37:59] God is glorified in faith because he is honoured as the all-sufficient one who can meet every need. That's the first.
[38:10] Secondly, and seemingly primarily, the way that we as Christians glorify God is worship.
[38:24] This is one activity that the Bible associates far more than any other in glorifying God. At its heart, corporate worship ascribes all glory to God alone.
[38:37] We can glorify God in a multitude of ways, but the Bible indicates that nothing we do delights God more than calling upon his name with sincere hearts, declaring that all glory belongs to him.
[38:57] Now, I'm referring here to a distinct, specific activity. It's where we set aside other tasks and we set our minds and our hearts fully upon our God in order to receive his word and to respond to him with prayer and song because he reveals his glory to us through his word.
[39:21] You receive his glory and we respond to that by bringing glory to him in prayer and song. Now, that specific activity can be in private. It can be in families. It can be in a community group and it's especially in the corporate worship gathering of the church.
[39:39] And if I might say that your commitment to that will be an indicator of whether you are living for your glory or for God's glory. Now, a third way in which the New Testament speaks of Christians glorifying God is glorifying God in all that we do.
[39:58] That kind of just covers everything else. Deb read out 1 Corinthians 10 for us and it's probably the most famous text calling us to glorify God in all things.
[40:11] So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Now, Paul mentions eating and drinking here because earlier in 1 Corinthians 10 and in fact in 1 Corinthians 8, he dealt with this controversy about Christians, whether Christians are permitted to eat meat sacrificed to false gods or not.
[40:30] It was an issue in Corinth at the time. And Paul teaches here that Christians have a broad range of liberties in Christ, but he warns them not to use those liberties to trample on the consciences of other Christians who may disagree with them on that issue.
[40:50] And then they can, verse 25, sorry, 1 Corinthians 10, eat everything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience.
[41:02] But they should follow an even more fundamental principle and that is the very verse before, no one should seek his own good, but the good of others.
[41:17] See, Paul's point in 1 Corinthians 10 31 becomes evident in the next two verses straight after that. In all activities, including the divisive issues of meat and drinking and we should, 1 Corinthians 10 32, not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks, or the church of God, even as I try to please everyone in every way, for I'm not seeking my own good, but the good of many so that they may be saved.
[41:49] See what he says there? Paul says, encourages us to glorify God in all things by seeking the good of others. For the ultimate goal of seeing people saved to Christ and the church strengthened.
[42:08] Put it another way. See what he's saying there is? Live in such a way that you do not pursue your glory. Live in a way that you are centered on other people rather than being centered on you.
[42:28] Other person centered, not self-centered. And John Calvin wrote, we never truly glory in him until we have utterly discarded our own glory.
[42:45] And is that not the problem when we live for our renown? I was nine years old when I got my first taste of fame and glory.
[42:58] Got a taste of it and frankly, I loved it. It was a PSSA soccer match. Our game was in overtime. All the others, it was a big sporting complex.
[43:09] All the other games had finished. Overtime, it was a nil or draw. All the other games had finished and everyone had got onto the waiting buses.
[43:21] There was three buses there taking our school back to its school. And we were in the opposition's quarter and they were locked in a soccer scrum.
[43:33] If you do not know what a soccer scrum is, watch underage soccer. It's where a ball gets caught in a bunch of group of kids and they just kick and kick and kick and kick and hope the ball goes somewhere. And I learned early on as an eight-year-old, I'm now nine, that getting to mix the scrum, it doesn't work.
[43:54] Stand to one side. And I became a prolific goal scorer because I understood that the ball would eventually come out of the scrum and if I'm standing there by myself, I got a free-range kick.
[44:04] Prolific goal scorer. I had scored four goals that season. It was big. I'm standing there. Buses are waiting. The ball comes out to me and I just went boot.
[44:18] Straight over the keeper's head and straight into the goal and as it hit the back of the net, the referee blew the whistle. It was full time. My team surrounded me and attempted to do an awkward sort of lift off the field because they've seen that done on TV and fortunately they didn't drop me.
[44:38] The three bus drivers are tooting the horn. Kids are hanging out the windows and I walked onto the bus in that moment and I got a hip-hip-a-ray from the whole bus, cheered, patting the back.
[44:52] That day, I was the centre of the world. Eight-year-olds wanted to be me in that moment, in my school. People, kindergarten kids, I'm sure, wanted my autograph.
[45:05] It was the biggest moment of glory for me and it lasted about a day, the rest of the day. 39 years later, I still remember it and I can guarantee no one else would.
[45:23] In fact, I'd be lucky if those kids even knew my name. I don't know their names. I'm pretty confident they don't know mine. Our glory fades so easily and you would not have even known about that moment of glory unless I told you about it.
[45:43] And that's what we do, isn't it? It fades and so we just keep putting ourselves in the centre of the world again and again and again, recognising me and making sure that you identify who I am and know my because the glory fades.
[46:03] It's pretty sad. I've got to think back 39 years to try and remember a time. But the glory fades. One day, you're the centre of the world when you're the bride walking down and it all ends when the next wedding comes.
[46:22] The joy, the euphoria doesn't last and yet the default setting of my heart is I want to keep pursuing it. I want to keep pursuing it and it never satisfies.
[46:38] The magnificent God of this universe has a glory that never fades. We are like grass, we're like the flowers of the field.
[46:51] We come, we go but His glory endures forever. And this God has revealed His glory most clearly to us in the Lord Jesus and what He has revealed to us in the Lord Jesus is that He loves us, that He knows us and that in Christ He has given us a name, a status, a renown that will live on forever in Him.
[47:26] And that revelation and that hope and that status means that we're being set free from this crippling pursuit of our glory and enabling and He's enabled us to live for His glory and be glorified forever.
[47:44] And therefore, as we stand in 500 years of Reformation heritage, we individually at St. Paul's and as a church, we abandon the pursuit of our glory, we embrace this salvation that is in Christ by grace through faith, and together we make it our purpose to know Jesus, to treasure Jesus and to represent Jesus for God's glory and the joy of all people.
[48:19] for God's glory for God's glory and that's to the doctrine of God's glory and that's for God's glory and that's a true of all people and that's дал of all people that are and that's this that's who