Thine is the Glory

Welcome to the Timeless Truth podcast, a resource of The Village Chapel in Nashville, TN. In season 5, Pastor Jim will lead us through a study of The Lord's Prayer.

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Transcript

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Speaker 0:01

Welcome to Timeless Truth with Pastor Jim Thomas, a resource of the Village Chapel in Nashville, Tennessee. If you don't have a church home, for those in the middle Tennessee area, we'd love to have you join us for worship in person every Sunday at 9 and 11 a.m. Or if you live outside of Tennessee, join us at 10 a.m. for our online live stream. We're grateful you've joined us this week as we continue our study of the Lord's Prayer. And we pray these studies will help us think more biblically in every category of life so that we might be formed into the likeness of Christ. Now, here's Pastor Jim.

Pastor Jim 0:37

So we're walking line by line through the most well-known, the most often prayed prayer in human history, the Lord's Prayer. We're coming toward the end. We've got this episode and one more yet, and I'm very excited about both of them. But before we get into today's episode, would you join me no matter where you are or what you're doing? And you can keep your eyes open if you're driving your car or doing something outside or whatever. But would you join me and let's pray the Lord's Prayer together? Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen and amen. Well, thine is the glory. That's the thought, the phrase, the line of the Lord's Prayer that I'd like to talk about just a little bit today. What is glory? Well, our English word glory kind of you could describe it this way, it means splendor, magnificence, beauty, honor, or renown. I like the way Paul Tripp says it in his book, Do You Believe Everything That Exists is a finger that points to God's existence and glory. Well, that's true. The evidence is as far away from us as the estimated 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. But the evidence is also just as close to you and me as the 130 million rods and the 7 million cones within each and every human eyeball. Those rods and cones are called photoreceptors. And they're a key part of how your eyes detect light and then convert that into a form that your brain can use. So you can tell distance, shape, color, those sorts of things. All that we can see and the equipment through which we can see anything at all are not a happy accident, but rather the complexity and beauty all point to the glory of an intelligent designer. We call God. As part of God's creation, the only proper response is to recognize God's glory and to praise God for the gift of life and the gift of faith through which we come to know Him and through which we offer Him our heartfelt thanks and worship, sometimes summed up in the word praise. And that is to say, for thine is the glory. Jonathan Edwards was an 18th-century American revivalist preacher, theologian, and philosopher. Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most important and original philosophical theologians. Here's what Edwards had to say about the glory of God and how central it is to all thinking about God's purposes in creating everything in the entire universe, the stars and your eyeballs. Quote: God values the overflow of his glory, and when other beings respond to it properly with praise and adoration, he created the world to be an arena where this can happen. Each of these things can be considered the ultimate ends God had in mind when he created the world. And indeed, that's from Jonathan Edwards' book, The End for Which God Created the World. A great read. Highly recommend it to you. We are all longing for some kind of connection with the one who made all of that and all of who we are as well. Left to ourselves, we cannot discover the infinite God, but thankfully, God has not left us to ourselves. For thine is the glory. His glory is everywhere. It's reflected in the stars and the heaven, yes, it's also reflected in the different elements of our bodies, as we've said, but in the beauty of nature around us that we see here on planet Earth as well. The sunset, the sunrise, the mountains, etc., etc. His glory is everywhere. Between the 19th and 20th century, there was a man named Andrew Murray who authored some 200 books and tracks, and he spent 60 years of ministry in Dutch Reformed Church, in a Dutch in a Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. I've quoted from his book, uh Abide in Christ several times here on Timeless Truth. And here are some of Murray's thoughts on God's glory. Listen to this. And by the way, this will be in the show notes, so you can reflect on it a little bit later on your own. Those are accessible through the villagechapel.com website if you can't find it on the platform through which you listen to or watch this podcast. But here's Murray and his thoughts on God's glory. Nothing can cure you of the desire of receiving glory from men or of the sensitiveness and pain and anger which come when it is not given. But giving yourself to seek only the glory that comes from God. In other words, we are addicted to the affirmation, the applause of others. And nothing's going to cure us of that except for giving ourselves to seek only the glory that comes from God. Murray goes on to say this: let the glory of the all-glorious God be everything to you. You will be freed from the glory of men and of self, and be content and glad to be nothing. Out of this nothingness, you will grow strong in faith, giving glory to God, and you will find that the deeper you sink in humility before Him, the nearer He is to fulfill the every desire of your faith. That's from Andrew Murray, his book Humility, again in the show notes if you're interested in reflecting on it just a little bit more. I think it's just a brilliant commentary on what's happening inside of us and how we really were designed for God's glory, not only to see it, but to experience his glory in our relationship with him. Murray encourages us not to continue as addicts of affirmation, especially affirmation that's fleeting and fickle, the kind that you get from this world and and uh all that is in this world. Um he encourages us not to adopt also a merely utilitarian view of God, a way to see God just for what we can get out of him, uh, or or what thing we can get him to do or or just have the world stop doing or something. Um but rather Murray encourages us to see our lives, our identity, everything we do, all the culture we make, music, paintings, whatever, writing, all of it as a pointing to God's glory. For thine is the glory, we pray. A seventeenth century English Puritan named Thomas Manton, uh, who was a clerk in the Westminster Assembly and also the chaplain to Oliver Cromwell once said this Let me press you to take the Word of God as your rule, the Spirit of God as your guide, the promises of God as your encouragement, and the glory of God as your end. And by that he means your your purpose, the the the meaning, the reason you live, God's make it God's glory. I think that's right. For thine is the glory, we pray. Well, there's so much more that could be said about the glory of God. Um but I'd like rather to close out today's episode praying uh for us as regards our lives and the glory of God. And then I want to encourage you uh one more time to be praying the Lord's Prayer each and every day before your feet hit the ground, um, each and every day as you go to sleep to uh to take this beautiful, wonderful, uh deep and rich prayer and not only memorize it, but pray it as we have done uh at the beginning of each episode here on Timeless Truth. In closing today, I pray that each moment of this day we, each and every one of us, would look for ways to bring more and more glory to God's name in our work ethic, in our relationships, in the experiences that we pursue. May Jesus be glorified, may our Father be delighted, and may the Holy Spirit, uh, with his still small voice, be our teacher, our comfort, and our guide in Jesus' name. And for his sake we pray. Amen and amen.

Speaker 10:43

Thanks for listening to today's study. Take a moment to leave a review and share this episode with friends and family. You can stay connected by signing up for our newsletter or follow us on social media. At the Village Chapel, we believe God's word is unique in its source, timeless in its truth, broad in its reach, and transforming in its power. For more resources or to support our ministry, visit our website, the Villagechapel.com.