Text: Psalm 115:1

My purpose for this message: To make God’s fame the most important objective of our expansion.

Delivered: Jan. 3, 2010

 

Year 1 of “Growing for God’s Glory”

 

PRAY.

Turn in your Bibles to Psalm115:1.  Saturday is President Richard Nixon’s 97^th birthday.  My dad will turn 82.  And 2 years ago on Jan.9 we settled on the field across the road.  That was the beginning of a dream to build a new, larger, and more serviceable facility some day. 

A plan for that “some day” is well under way.  On Thursday night, all the elders, ministry team leaders, pastors—as well as CONNECTION group shepherds, will get their first look at blueprints—as well as an invitation to join this three-year journey.

Look at the banner: for the next 3 years our annual “year of” theme will coincide with the capital campaign theme: Growing for God’s Glory.  Which will also be the focus of my next 11 sermons.  (Revelation after that!)

This capital campaign is a campaign to raise capital: money.  A lot of it.  In some organizations, if you raise the money for the project, that alone makes you a success.  A church is different.  I’ll get to talking about money sometime next month but first we’re going to tackle some other things that really matter—which are vital components of an authentically growing church—things which matter more than money. 

READ Scripture.  You don’t need to look far to find where our campaign theme grew out of.  Keystone’s purpose statement, our reason for existing: to glorify God.  But while we get the “growing” part of “Growing for God’s Glory”, what’s God’s glory?  “Growing” makes sense to everybody who ever taught in a crowded classroom, staffed the crowded nursery or waited in line for a restroom.  And, we’ll think about “growing” when we see equipment moving dirt and the building start to go up. 

But what does it mean when we say what we’re growing for is “God’s Glory”?  Who even uses the word “glory” today?  I have a friend who says “gloooorrrrrryyyy!” when something amazes him be really doesn’t mean anything by it; It’s just an expression.  Hardly anyone uses the word “glory" in everyday language. 

Except God.  282 times in the NIV, and it’s adjective form (glorious), 50 times.  The Bible makes it a big deal.  Psalm 115:1 tell us several things about glory:

1.      It can go to people

2.     It shouldn’t, it belongs to God;

3.      Glory is God’s by right because of His love and faithfulness to His Creatures. 

What we mean by God’s glory is the fullness of who He is and what he does.  It’s His magnificence, His perfections, the majesty of His presence, it’s the awe-inspiring work that He’s done—and is doing.  It’s what overwhelmed Isaiah when he saw him, what made Peter babble on the Mount of Transfiguration when He saw Jesus in full glory.  It’s what makes a person go “AHHHH” at what God’s done and who He is! 

“Oh my God!” is a throwaway expression today that probably borders on blasphemy, because it means nothing.  Yet it was worship if Moses said it when he got a peek at God’s glory, or saw God drown the entire Egyptian army.  “Oh… My… God!!!”

God’s glory.  And when we glorify Him, we’re just pointing to his glory, just drawing attention to it.  We don’t expand His glory by anything we do or say.  Is is no more awesome when we draw attention to his glory, or no less awesome if we fail to.

Many Sundays as a boy, at the close of the service I remember my father start singing this song and then we’d all join in:

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below;

Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

It’s called the Doxology.  Comes from the Greek word the NT uses for glory: doxa.  Each line exclaims doxa to God; glory: He is worthy of praise.

Which is not my natural bent.  I seek my glory more than His.  My glory more than yours.  I deserve the credit for that idea—not him.  My wife or my peers or my church should recognize me for my perfections, my magnificence, my presence.  (I know you’re not like that but maybe the person beside you…?)  We crave words of admiration and trophies, and awards and recognition and promotions and titles and…  To us be the glory…

So what the psalmist prays is unnatural: Not to us O Lord, not to us; but to your name be the glory…  We’re going to build something across this back road one day.  We’ll spend several million dollars and it’s going to be bigger than this, more attractive than this, roomier than this, nicer than this.  And the most natural thing in the world will be for us to go by and say, “That’s our church.  We built that.  Isn’t it impressive?  We raised couple million dollars and built that.  Look at all that parking area.  Come inside and see how big our lobby is.  Even has rest rooms on both floors!”

Glory to us; when you build something it’s the most natural thing to think.  We did it, we put ourselves on the map.  We…

But that road is a scary one and it is lined with demons.  READ Genesis 11:1-9.  In Genesis 1:28, God gave Adam and Eve instructions that they and their race were to spread out around the world, fill it and take charge of it.  They did.  But after the flood, it was like starting over.  So as Noah’s tiny family emerged from the ark—the only people left on the earth, God told them the same thing (Genesis 9:1): spread out and fill the earth and take charge of it; subdue it.

They had a better idea: let’s all stick together, work together to build something memorable; make a “name” for ourselves.  And so an ancient skyscraper, a ziggurat—a tiered pyramid soared into the sky—maybe it was a temple to other gods, maybe it was nothing more than a monument.  God came along and said “Oh no you don’t,” confused their languages and suddenly the supervisors couldn’t understand the engineers and the workers couldn’t understand the supervisors and the materials men didn’t know what size stones to cut…  And it all fell apart.  As they had trouble speaking with all men, they divided into groups in which they could understand each other.

All this the result of “Let us make a name for ourselves.”  Let’s go back to Psalm 115:1.  Not to us O LORD, not to us, but to your name be the glory.  We confess that as a church we exist to glorify God.  God Himself said in Isaiah 43:7 that He created us all for His own glory.  You, me, each of us.  He wants us to make much of Him.  Since He is the only perfect being in the universe, totally righteous and without even a hint of sin, and wonderful beyond telling, then His wish that we make a fuss over Him is not pride, but is proper because His righteousness, wisdom and glory rightly urge us to make much over Him, to praise Him, to loudly point to His acclaim. 

And everything we are and do is also for His glory.  Including, constructing a church building.

Will it be some sort of monument to us, putting Keystone Church on the map, give people a chance to say, “Look how big they’re getting; used to meet in a bar, now look!”? 

Or will it give people a chance to say something like, “I wonder what kind of God those people worship?  They are feeding hungry people in the community; teaching little children the good news about Jesus Christ.  They are sponsoring missionaries in their communities and around the world.  They are teaching men to kindly shepherd their families, teaching people to read, or, helping the unemployed find work, or training a new generation of elders, pastors and church leaders, or teaching women to be godly wives and mothers.

In 1 Peter 2:12 the apostle said: Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.  In other words, what we do, is not meant to win accolades for us, but for Him; not meant to point people to Keystone Church, point them to Him.  If we build and the church grows numerically, if we build and widen our outreach significantly, if we build and see increasing numbers of people come to Christ, increasing numbers of people rejecting stagnation and actually growing, those are feathers in God’s cap, not ours.

How do we know if we’ve succeeded at glorifying God?  When people are responding not just to us, but to our God.  That’s what happened at Pentecost.  Babel was reversed as linguistically different people could suddenly understand one another.  The people were convicted of their rebellion against God and converted.  Peter and the other apostles were not the stars of this new movement: God was. 

 

Concl:

In Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery is the Tomb of the Unknowns: they house the remains of an unidentified soldier from WW 1, one from WW 2, and one from the Korean conflict.  The epitaph reads: Here rests in honored glory an American Soldier known but to God.  Nobody knows who they are.  Nobody knows what they did, what heroic actions they took before they died which may have saved the lives of a dozen comrades—or turned the tide of an entire battle.  No one will ever know.

The credit doesn’t belong to them.  The sacrifices these men made was not for personal recognition or aggrandizement.  That’s why if you generously donate a million dollars to the building project, we won’t name a wing after you.  It’s why we are a bit reluctant here to make too big of a fuss over people who have gone above and beyond in their service.  It’s to His glory.  As for us, we will say as Christ admonished us: We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.  (Luke 17:10)