Today I want to touch on some Biblical concepts that may be harder than most to accept and discern. Immediately, if you're reading this, you most likely fall into one of three camps. The first is someone who may read this, yet completely disaffirms the Word of God. This post may be the hardest for you to read, but at the conclusion of it, should you chose to, and I pray you don't, you may throw it all away as useless religious rhetoric. The second is the person who may read the Word, and know Christ as their Savior, but allow their flesh to deny the truth of the scriptures below through the simple denial of the text. The last is the person who reads what is written below, struggles with them, finds truth in them, and in truth finds comfort. Wherever you land, here we go.
God is ALL about his glory. In fact a God who is all about himself, to me, is the best news that I have ever heard. Looking at myself, and the rest of humanity I am hard pressed to find much that should be made much of in ourselves. A God who enjoys perfection, even if it is the perfection of himself, sounds much more appealing.
Self-glorification is seen everywhere within our depraved, retrograding culture. We see it on the television, the evening news, the wife on an extensive shopping spree and on ESPN. Unfortunately we walk a fine line when we allow our perception of the world to shape our theology. Because we want the world to be about us, we want a God who makes much of us. We want the cross for us, we want Heaven for us, and we want blessings for us. This is NOT to say that God doesn't want good things for us, because the Word unyieldingly works against that notion. It is only to state that we have a misperception about how we are made much of. We are made most of, when we make most of the glorified God of the universe.
Here's a simple misconception I think the church has engrained into me: Christ died for ME.
Now to clarify, that statement does indeed hold some truth, so I want to define what I mean quickly.
"Yet he saved them for his name's sake, to make his mighty power known." (Psalms 106:8 ESV)
"I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins." (Isaiah 43:25 ESV)
"I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven for his name's sake."
The overarching reason Christ died is for the glory of God on high. More than the cross was for me, the cross was for God. Since I grew up a church kid, this was a radical understanding for me to come across. I, as a four year old, sat in the Sunday school room with the cardboard cutouts of Christ on the cross and was told by a loving teacher that God loved me so much that Christ died for ME. Yes. But if we stop there we enter into a self centered, self loving theology that produces glory-less lives.
Here's what these truths have done for me.
All of a sudden, sin becomes a whole new game. Quite possibly sin in the past was approached from the angle of grace. Grace had been extended to me at the point of the cross, and because of that grace I could not lose the salvation I had been granted. Christ came to abolish the law, and legalism, and the rules of which once needed to be followed. I found within myself a terrible understanding of the love of God which told me that my sins were already forgiven. All of the above is scriptural, and veritable, yet unfinished. By simply extending all of the previously mentioned statements out to my flesh, the truth was allowed to be distorted to the point that I found a license to sin, while covered by grace. The entirety of Romans 6 would passionately work against this type of mindset, but the fact that it was written within the text gave me confidence that I wasn't the only person in history to struggle with it.
In light of the fact that Christ died for me that it may glorify the Father threw my understanding of sin out the window. All of a sudden I realized that I was covered by grace, yet to walk in his glory. It's as if the sky was grace, yet the sidewalk was his glory, of which I was to spend every moment of my life walking on. With each and every sin, I take a step off of the sidewalk, and while still under grace, completely damn the reason of which Christ had saved in the first place. Grace can be misused; glory can not.
To bring this to some sort of functional conclusion, I beg us, myself included to take our eyes off of ourselves. To retreat from our room of mirrors that we live within.
"The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not in moments of self-satisfaction, but self forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness in pathological." (John Piper)
Should you be a skeptic, I challenge you to look within yourself. Can this world truly be about you? About us? I vehemently believe that the simple grandeur and magnitude of things would prove otherwise.
Should you be a believer, you may have fallen into the same trap that I, and many others have in regards to the abuse of grace. May he lead you to an understanding that most of this has little to do with you, and much more to do with him. We are loved; we are saved; and we are known. For his glory. May we never forget his sovereignty.
"bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, WHOM I CREATED FOR MY GLORY, whom I formed and made." (Isaiah 43:6-7)
May the Word move in you, and through you.
To Him be the glory.
-Matt Allen
