Glory to God

Father, having sung your praise, we come to these precious, tender moments when through the voice of a mere man your voice is heard. And so we pray that you, by your Spirit, will be our teacher—that you will free us from every unhelpful, distracting influence and grant that we might hear your voice and in hearing it obey. For Jesus’ sake we ask it. Amen.

Can I invite you to turn with me once again to 1 Timothy and to the sixth chapter?

There are two occasions here in this first letter of Timothy when Paul breaks out in a moment or two of spontaneous praise. (At least, I say there are two which are immediately detectable. We might be able to say that there are more.) In each of the two identifiable cases, the issue has to do with the appearing of the Lord Jesus. The first of these comes in 1:17, when he has made reference to the epiphany—when he has referred to the fact of the glorious appearing of the Lord Jesus,[1] who “came into the world to save sinners.”[2] As he writes of this, his spirit apparently rises within him, and he says in verse 17, “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” And then it happens again as he’s drawing his letter to a close here in 6:14, as he refers to the glorious “appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ,” whom he said is going to come as per God’s appointed calendar and timescale. It is God, he says, who will bring this about in his own time. And once again, this disclosure gives rise to a spontaneous burst of praise as he provides for us what is a most masterful and lovely doxology.

Now, it is clear that it is simply out of the abundance of his heart that his mouth is speaking. You read this, and you say, “I wonder where it was that he got such language, such phraseology, to employ in a moment like this.” You see, for example, if somebody said, “I want you to take seven phrases and use them in praise and honor of God; now, just give them to me immediately out of your lips right now,” what would you say? And what you would say would be the product of what you have imbibed over the years—what has been inculcated into your thinking.

And so you have this converted Jewish man who had known the benefits of the instruction à la Deuteronomy 6. His parents would have taught him the things of God and the things of the law when they walked along the road, when they lay down, and when they got up.[3] And then on the Damascus Road, as he walks along that road, he encounters the risen Christ, and suddenly, all of the richness of his heritage as a Jewish boy becomes wonderfully clear and plain. And now, as he offers worship and glory to God, he employs all these things that he would have known since he was a wee boy. “God is the only Potentate; he is the only Ruler. God is immortal,” he said. “God is blessed. He dwells in unapproachable light. He is worthy of our honor. He is worthy of our praise. He is the immortal God, and he is the invisible God.”

You see, nobody can ever give voice to that kind of thing in a vacuum. And that is why it is imperative that we instruct our children as they are growing about the great verities of Christian faith: so that as their tiny, malleable minds begin to form, they will be constrained by those essential truths of Scripture. They will come to understand that thoughts of God and talk of God is not somehow or other superfluous or extraneous to their days, but indeed, it is what they will know of God that will give significance to all of their days.

Now, this is something to which we have to keep anchoring ourselves again and again. Because at first blush, we tend to look—I know I do—at phraseology like this and think that perhaps it’s time to move on to verse 17, where there is something of a more pressing and practical import to be considered: “Command those who are rich in [the] present world not to be arrogant.” Well, we understand the need for that, and to that we will come. But the fact is, we do a great disservice not only to the Scriptures but also to ourselves when we are tempted to think that thoughts of God are somehow unrelated to life, and particularly unrelated to our lives—to our laundry, to our family, to our study, to our lab, to our commerce, to our recreation, to whatever dimension of life. The lie of the Evil One is that that is a matter that is somehow distanced from everything that is representative of reality. And in point of fact, the instruction of Scripture comes to turn our thinking the right way up and brings us face-to-face with the God of Scripture, who, as Paul mentions him here, is clearly not a cosmic principle, nor is he a figment of the imagination, but he is a self-announcing and self-disclosing sovereign person. Who is God? God is self-announcing, self-disclosing, and sovereign.

Now, that is vastly different from notions today, where God is whatever we conceive of him to be. As someone has cynically put it, when God created the world, he made man in his own image; and when man fell into sin, he determined that he would return the compliment to God, thereby conceiving of God in man’s own image.[4] And the problem that many of us face is either that we never think of God or that the God of whom we think is not the God of Scripture—a self-disclosing, self-announcing God, a God of revelation—but is either simply some higher force, some cosmic notion, or some personal recreation.

The problem that many of us face is either that we never think of God or that the God of whom we think is not the God of Scripture.

Now, there is no subject, loved ones, that is so able to humble us where we need to be humbled, to enlarge our minds when they’ve become puny, to comfort our souls in the midst of great difficulty—there is no subject that is able to do this in the way that a devout consideration of the existence and attributes of God will do.

Now, for the moment, I know that many of you are processing what I’m saying. And some of you are saying, “Well, maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I’m not sure. He seems to be keen on this idea. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong.” You are all kinds of levels. I hope, before we sing our final hymn, that you will be totally convinced that the great, pressing urgency of your life is contained here in 1 Timothy 6:15–16.

I want to say three things by way of exposition and three things by way of application. And I want to use words that we have previously used in another context as headings, purposefully, in the hope that it will simply reinforce times when we have made similar considerations.

God Is Powerful

He introduces us to God here, “the blessed and only Ruler, the Kings of kings and Lord of lords.” When we think about God as he is revealed in Scripture, number one, he is powerful. Powerful. He is, here, “the only Ruler.” You will notice that. If you have the King James Version, he is the “Potentate,” which is, of course, a potent word; it emerges from potent. And it is a striking statement of the exclusive majesty of the creator God. The powers of earthly rulers are derived from him, and they depend upon him. But earthly rulers have no right to rule save that God in the mystery of his providence determined that they may.

Now, we reinforce this all the time by turning to Isaiah 40, and why should today be any different? If your Bible is open, turn to Isaiah 40, and as you have this notion, “He is powerful,” in your mind, let’s just underscore it.

Isaiah 40:12, speaking of God: “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand?” Now, just take your hand for a moment, and cup it, and look at it. And ask yourself, “How much water can I get in that little hand there?” Not a lot. Hardly enough to wash your face with. And it always goes through your fingers, and you have to get it loaded up again. What an amazing picture of the power of God! Think of the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the North Sea, the Straights of Magellan—think of them all from geography. Think of all the vastness of those waters. And the writer says, “And God is so powerful, he is so immense, that he is able, figuratively, to pick up all those oceans and hold them in the hollow of his hand.” I say “figuratively” because when it talks about God having a hand, it is an accommodation to our way of thinking, because we know that “God is … Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”[5] So when it says he is able to hold them in the hollow of his hand, you ought not to think of a hand that would be big enough to hold all of the oceans in the world, because that’ll make you giggle a little, or it’ll mess you up. You won’t be able to conceive of a big enough hand. The point is that the principle is there: God is powerful in this way.

“Who … with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?” The people come around your house, and they measure things. Some of them are good; they can do it by eyesight. Others pace it off every so often. Some do this thing where they know from their wrist to their elbow is so far—I don’t know how they do it all. And sometimes, they’ll say, “Well, I think that’s about x inches, and so if we do that and that and that and that…” And some use these gigantic, big tape measures that go forever. And they just—they hook them on the one end, and then they go walking, and they do all that stuff. I love that stuff! I don’t have anything to measure, but I love it.

You know, and I mentioned I love it in the first service, and somebody gave me this in between the services. I don’t know who gave it me, but I said, you know, “I’d like one of those things that you can put on your belt and look like a workman.” And here I have it! Look at this! With a digital printout—I mean this, this thing is unbelievable! But I got no use for it. I don’t know what to do! I mean, I got to give this back to whoever gave it to me. I only use a ruler for underlining my notes. I don’t know what to do. But even this thing—it’s got twenty-five feet. Big deal! You couldn’t measure much for that. He measures the heavens!

You ever mix concrete? “Who … held the dust of the earth in a basket[? Who] weighed the mountains on the scales … the hills in a balance?”[6] Fifteen: “The nations are like a drop in a bucket; they[’re] regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.” He looks, as it were, at the British Isles, and he says, “Pfft!” Verse 23: “He brings princes to [nothing]”; he “reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.”

Now, loved ones, coming out of a week in which our view of ourselves has increased dramatically and our view of God will have been eroded significantly, we have to sit down and reprogram ourselves all over again. We’ve got to recalibrate. That’s one of the reasons for the Lord’s Day. It’s a recalibration process. Because when you go out, and you bounce over everything for another seven days, and it all works against you, you need to come back and reset the mechanisms. And one of the ways in which we do is to ponder again the fact that God is powerful; he is “the only Ruler.” That’s why in Romans 13, Paul says, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there[’s] no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”[7] He, then, is the only absolute sovereign. He is the only one who is perfectly independent. He exists in self-sustaining life. He derives life and energy from himself. He derives life and energy from himself.

Now, some of you are going, “Okay, well, yeah, that’s a heavy thought, and does it really matter?” I’m going to show you how much it matters! He derives life and energy only from himself, unlike any other part of the world. All created things run down—even the Energizer batteries. But the Creator does not run down, because he is eternal; he is infinite; he is not limited by time or space. That’s why we crown him the Lord of time, or

    the Lord of the years,
The Potentate of time,
Creator of the rolling spheres,
[And] ineffably sublime.[8]

And he gives little hints of this throughout the Bible. He calls to Moses in the wilderness and attracts Moses’s attention with a bush that is burning. What’s so dramatic about a bush that is burning, particularly in the wilderness? Bushes burn in the wilderness all the time in that kind of intense heat. Ah, but this bush burnt, and it wasn’t extinguished,[9] because God had it burn for as long as he chose for it to burn. And if he wanted it to still be burning, we could go find the place in the wilderness, and it’d still be burning. The only reason it stopped is because he decided it had fulfilled its function.

Now, when you find yourself dragged into services on the Lord’s Day feeling weary and feeling weak and feeling impoverished and having had a heavy-duty dose of secular nonsense flushed through your brain, you need a devout pondering on the fact that God is “the only Ruler.”

And he is “the blessed … King of kings and Lord of lords.” Think of all the kings you’ve known: Henry VIII and all those other ones, kings all lined up. Line up all your kings (and your pawns for that matter). But line up all your kings, and he kings them all. Line up all your lords, and he is lording over all the lords.

Do you wear a designation on your sleeve at work? Do you have a sign on your door? Do you wear one of those little badges on your lapel that announce your position? “Manager”? “Vice President”? “Ruler”? That’s okay! You earned that! “Sergeant”? “Corporal”? “General”? Fine! Do you know what is on the garments that Christ wears? Revelation 19:16 will tell you. Speaking of him, he says, “‘He will rule [the nations] with an iron scepter.’ He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.”[10] How foolish of earthly rulers to forget! And how dreadful the implications of such forgetting!

Nebuchadnezzar stands as a classic illustration of man bent to his own glory when, in Daniel chapter 4, we read of him walking in the grounds of his royal residence, and getting up, and standing on the roof of his palace in Babylon, and saying to himself, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” And “the words were still on his lips when a voice came from heaven, ‘This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar: Your royal authority has been taken from you.’”[11]

“Pardon? Who said that? And whoever said it, maybe you would need to pause for a moment and remember who you’re talking to. I am King Nebuchadnezzar! These are some of the wonders of the world! They happened on my watch! This is my palace! This is my deal! I am the king!”

“Yeah, I understand. But I am the King of Kings. And Nebuchadnezzar, I’ve got news for you”: “You will be driven away from [your] people[; you] will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like cattle.”[12] Nebuchadnezzar, you think you’re tough? You’re going to crawl on your belly.[13] You think you built a ship that will never sink? Watch it. You think you’re in charge of your own destiny? Bite your tongue. You think you’re a big shot in your organization? You think you’re the smart guy in the church? You think you’re the significant one? Hold your tongue. “Nebuchadnezzar, you will be in that position till seven times pass by for you until you come to acknowledge this: that the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men, and he gives them to anyone he wishes.”[14]

He is King of Kings. He is Lord of Lords. He is the only Ruler. He is the Blessed One. Makarios is the word that is used. He is happy. And on what basis is his happiness? He is happy and content in himself. For this God whom we worship, he needs no one, and he needs nothing, and there is nothing which can impair his infinite happiness. “Well,” you say, “then he is totally different from we are.” That’s exactly right. For we wind down (yes, we do), and we fail (yes, we do), but he is immortal. And that is an indication not only of his power but also of his perfection. And that’s the second thing I want you to note. I’ll spend less time on it. I need to hasten on.

God Is Perfect and Praiseworthy

He is powerful: only Ruler, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Blessed One. He is perfect. That’s the significance of the statement at the beginning of verse 16: he “alone is immortal,” in the sense that his immortality is intrinsic to his being.

If you know your Bible well enough, you will know that in just a few verses, in 2 Timothy 1:10, Paul tells Timothy that life and immortality has been brought to light through the gospel and that in Christ we become immortal. In point of fact, even the heathen have an immortality to them, because they will live forever—but not in the presence of God. But the distinction is this—and the reason he says he “alone is immortal”—is that while a believer discovers immortality from drinking at the fountain of life, God himself is that very fountain. And he is not only immortal, but he dwells “in unapproachable light.” Like the sun, we need it to see by, but we cannot look into it, because it’s too intensely brilliant. In the same way, we cannot look into God. Hence we’re told, thirdly, that “no one has seen” him or “can see” him. He is immortal, and he is invisible.

Now, when you think about God’s invisibility, you can only but assume that Paul has in mind the scene in Exodus chapter 33 where Moses asks God to show him his glory:

And the Lord said [in response], “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, … I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”

[And] then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. [And] when my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. [And] then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”[15]

Now, loved ones, when we begin even just to get an inkling of this wonder of God who is transcendent, it points to triviality at any point in our experience, not least of all in our worship. You see, because if your notion and my notion of God is that he is simply somehow an extension of myself—he is, as in the book [Habits of the Heart], “Sheila’s God.” She says—Sheila, one of the characters in the book, says—“I have my own little God. I call it Sheila. And my religion is called Sheilaism.”[16]

Well, there’s a huge difference between that and this. But if we live with this, then when we come to worship and someone says, “Come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord [our God,] our maker”[17]… Do you ever—do you worship and bow down in your heart as you drive your car? I hope you do. I hope you regularly kneel before God in prayer as an act of subjugation before him, as a reminder that when I kneel down in prayer, it is only God, by his grace, that will ever allow me to stand back up on my feet again. Before we’re too quick to dash off into the practicalities, to charge to the bookstores for another how-to book to try and fix that and try and fix the next thing of our lives, we’re charging past the very place where the answers to our dilemmas are first catered to.

He is powerful, he is perfect, and he is therefore praiseworthy. “To him,” he says, “be honor and might forever. Amen.”

Not to us be the glory that’s due your name,
Not to us be the power that’s yours to claim,
Not to us be the praises, the high acclaim,
Not to us but to you, O Lord.

See, the first call of God to those whom he has made is a call to bow down and worship him. Honor and power and might and majesty are the sole prerogative of he who is the only Ruler, immortal and invisible.

Knowledge of God Changes Our Mentality

Now, having said that—and I can’t do justice to that; I feel my own impoverishment in speaking—let me make three points by way of personal application. And let me do so by reminding you of this—by painting a picture.

Imagine that you’re walking down a road somewhere—let’s say in Europe. The scene I have in mind is like one of those little French villages where, as you walk along the road, the street level is actually above your head. It’s about fifteen feet. So it’s like there’s a two-story deal, like in Chester in England as well. And people can sit up here, fifteen feet above where you are as you walk, and they’re on the balcony level. And as they look down from the balcony, they can make comments on the people who are walking on the street. And they can say, “Oh, he walks funny. Oh, I wonder why he walks alone. Oh, I wonder where he’s going. Oh, I wonder about this, and I wonder about that.” And from the perspective of the onlooker, all of the questions and the potential problems are theoretical. But if you are down on the path, the questions are intensely practical. They are not issues of idle speculation; they are issues of immediate application: “Am I walking alone? At what point will I turn off this path? How am I doing? Am I on time?” These matters are all of great significance. They are of significance to the traveler in a way that they are not of significance to the onlooker.

Now, when you think about that in relationship to thinking of God, some of us are idle in our speculations about God. We are, if you like, balcony dwellers. We have all these questions that we never have answers to, and we like just to throw them out from time to time. They are idle, and they are ultimately futile—especially when we realize that although we like to assume we’re on the balcony pontificating, we’re actually on the street and in great need. And therefore, what I know of God is not something that I’m going to articulate in a theological paper. What I know of God has to make a difference to every aspect of my life. And indeed, it is that knowledge of God which transforms life, and it is that ignorance of God which makes life empty. Why do you think men and women live in such futility? Why do you think they are paralyzed by such fear? Why do you think they roam from place to place looking for something to answer the deepest longings of their hearts? Because they do not know God. And someone has told them, “You don’t need to know God! You know, knowing God—that’s, like, you know, way at the end of the line, you know.” Nah, it’s right at the very beginning.

Let me share with you now, in conclusion, just how much it is a part of life. What you and I know of God determines how we think. How we think. Or if you want it in a word, mentality. Mentality. How we think about what? How we think about absolutely everything.

How we think about history, for example, is directly related to what we know of God. When we take Isaiah 40, and we lay that out as the template, and we use that as the platform for our understanding of the movements of men in history, then it provides a wonderful antidote to the stupidity that is provided for us on a daily basis via the media. Now, not all media is full of stupidity; please don’t misunderstand me. But the prevailing drift of the media is atheistic. It is godless! And therefore, it reports the news from a humanist perspective. It reports the news from the position of godlessness. And you sit and listen to half an hour of godlessness that is interpreting for you the great movements of time, at least as they are suggested: what is happening in the Middle East, what is happening in Ireland, what is going on in Bosnia, and so on. And the way that we receive this information is largely filtered through an atheistic perspective.

Therefore, how do stop yourself from going insane? How do you prevent yourself from burying your head in your pillow and crying yourself to sleep? What is the antidote to this? It is a knowledge of God: “O God, I know the news tonight at eleven o’clock was horrible, but you’re powerful. O God, I know that the circumstances that were just described to me appear to be absolutely paralyzing, but O God, you are absolutely perfect, and you have never yet made a mistake. There is no ruler in place in the whole of the world that is not there but by your divine appointing. Therefore, I can lie and go to sleep in my bed.” I can view history, I can view adversity, in a totally different way when I see it in the light of God.

That’s why when the twelve guys go to spy in Canaan—and you can read it for your homework in Numbers [13]—you remember they’re sent up to spy out the land, and they come back down, and ten of the guys say, “Stay away from there.” Why? “Well, there’s giants up there; there’s difficulty up there,” and so on. And they’re all agreed on that. Nobody disagrees with that. But Joshua and Caleb stand up and say, “We should certainly go up there and take this land!”[18] Why? Because there are no giants? No, but because God is powerful. Why? Because there are no difficulties? No, but because God is perfect. You see, “some”—as the song says for children—“some saw [the] giants, big and tall,” and “some saw [the] grapes in clusters fall,” and two “saw that God was in it all.”[19] And it changed their mentality.

Christianity is mind-altering! Make no mistake about it. It is a radical shift in the way in which we view the world. It turns our upside-down worlds the right way up, and now we look upside down to the world because it is upside down. You ever do that thing on a Sunday afternoon when you’re bored? I’m not talking about in the last couple of months for me but—in case I gave that impression, although I’ve probably done it in the last year—where you’re bored, and you lie on the floor in the dining room, and you look at the ceiling for long enough to the point where you imagine that you’re actually on the ceiling, and the ceiling is the floor. Do you ever do that? Please tell me you do. And you stay there long enough, you can almost convince yourself, you know, that you’re on the ceiling. But you’re not.

Christianity is mind-altering! Make no mistake about it. It is a radical shift in the way in which we view the world.

And you go through your days in our secular world, and the whole drift of the worldview will rearrange your head for you. You have to talk to yourself in the car. Believe me. You’ve got to talk out to those bumper stickers. You drive up behind; it says, “The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.” Start preaching right there! “What a load of nonsense! That’s absolute rubbish! I know that’s rubbish!” The people’s going, “Why’s he talking to himself?” But that’s rubbish. God created the heavens and the earth, and he made us stewards of it. Don’t give me that New Age nonsense on the back of your car. I got to completely get my mentality right here.

You see, young people, they don’t read their Bibles. They don’t think. They don’t study Christian doctrine. We don’t give them a framework in which they can view life; we give them a couple of little notes, quotes, and anecdotes about how they trusted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and as if that was the whole answer to everything! The great testimony of the New Testament is not people walking around explaining that they trusted Christ as their personal Savior—which is imperative to do; you understand that—but it is testifying to who God is and who Christ is and who the Spirit is. And they’re testifying to the veritable truths that are out there and beyond me. It’s not a story about what happened inside of me; it’s a story of what God has done out there. Because you go back to your friends and give them what happened inside of you, they’ll tell you they just had a conversation with an angel, and it was amazing what happened inside of them! And then you’re going to say, “But what happened inside of me was better than what happened inside of you,” and they’re going to say, “No, it wasn’t.” What are you going to do at that point?

See, that’s not where we go. We’ve got to go like Paul in Athens: “Hey, listen, I noticed that you’re a little confused about these things. You got a thing to an unknown God. Well, let me tell you that the one that you worship as unknown, he’s the creator of the universe. He made everything. He established when people live, where people live.[20] He is powerful, and he is perfect, and he is praiseworthy. And he changes my mentality about history and about adversity.”

You see, when David showed up at the battlefield—remember, when Goliath was doing his thing? And all his brothers were lost in the crowd, and Goliath is coming out in the morning, going, “Come on, somebody! Fight me!”[21] And they’re all going like, “Hey, uh, excuse me, I got to go the bathroom here. I’ll be back in…”

And then someone said, “Well, why don’t you go out and fight him?”

“I’m afraid to. Why don’t you go?”

“I’m afraid to.”

And suddenly a shepherd boy comes, carrying cheese and bread for his brothers, and he’s going amongst the crowd. He says, “Anyone seen my brothers? I come from the hill country,” and eventually finds his brothers.

His brothers are like, “Hey, what are you doing here? We’re big, tough soldiers, you know. We got the stuff.”

He says, “Well, if you’re that tough, why don’t you go kill that guy?”

“What? No, we just come out here, and we stand every morning. That’s what we do. We’re kind of the standing army.”

“Well,” David says, “then I’ll go fight him.”[22]

What was that? Presumption? No, perspective. He says, “God’s perfect. God’s powerful.” And he walks out in front of him, and Goliath says, “You come out to me like you’re dealing with a dog, with sticks and stones?”[23] David says, “I’m going to cut your head off and feed it to the starlings.”[24] And he did.

Why don’t we shake Cleveland for Christ? ’Cause we’re a standing army. We just stand. We need a few Davids: run around amongst the group; remind us that God is powerful and God is perfect.

Knowledge of God Changes Our Activity and Security

My time is gone. The second thing I wanted you to notice is that it changes not only the way we think (that’s our mentality), but it changes everything we do (that’s our activity). Why do we worship? Because God is powerful and he’s perfect and he’s praiseworthy. Why do we come on the first day of the week? To remind ourselves of that. We don’t come here to get our ticket stamped. This is not chapel at college. No one’s checking you in, checking you out. God has established in the great cycle of life that we would have one day in seven in which we could lay aside all other considerations of work and the things that press upon us, and we could devote ourselves to the fact of the wonder of who God is, and that that in itself would bring a semblance of reality into our lives.

When we understand this, it changes what we do—our worship. It changes the way we do our work. We don’t go back to work on a Monday saying, “Oh, well, we had a Christian time yesterday. Now we got six days, and then we’ll try and have another one.” No, Herbert says,

  Teach me, my God and King,
  In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
  To do it as for thee:

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  A servant with this [cause]
  Makes drudgerie divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
  Makes that and th’ action fine.[25]

Such a knowledge of God not only changes my mentality (how I think), not only changes my activity (what I do), but changes the level of my security: who I trust. Who I trust.

You see, the great challenge—and with this I want to draw this to a close—the great challenge in my life (I wonder if you share this) is to learn somehow to refuse to view anything that comes into my life apart from God’s disclosure of himself. To refuse to view anything that comes into my life apart from God’s disclosure of himself. All of my fears arise when I look at my problems apart from God. I don’t know if you would agree with that. All of my fears arise when I isolate my problems and I view them apart from a God who is powerful, perfect, and praiseworthy. But when I put back that he is powerful, perfect, and praiseworthy against my predicaments, then my predicaments don’t go away, but my perspective changes.

One of my buddies in Scotland, I got such a thrill yesterday listening to him sing as I drove in the car. He was singing with a jazz band—a Dixieland jazz band with a Scottish accent. I got to play it for you sometime. But as I drove back from Painesville, he was singing, “Oh what fellowship, oh what joy divine, leaning on the everlasting arms.” And then he sang, “What have I to doubt, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms?”[26] And if I had time to tell you his testimony—of how he was a drunk, and in all of his fame as a musician, his life was going down the drain… And as I drove in the car yesterday, he was ministering to my soul. He, my disciple, is teaching his teacher as I drive in the car, thinking, “How am I going to do this? And how will I fix that? And what am I going to do with the next thing? I can’t make it to Wednesday! I’ll never make it to Wednesday! I can’t even make it to tomorrow morning.” And you build the whole thing up in front of you. It’s like you built the Eiger in front of you on 271 South. And his little voice comes: “What have I to doubt, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms?” But if I ain’t got no arms to lean on, then I have every reason to fear. You see, it’s an amazing wonder, it’s the law of God’s providence, that those who fear God should have nothing else to fear, and those who do not fear God become slaves to a thousand fears.

Let me give you one verse to take away with you into the week. I’ll just give it to you. I’ll tell you where it is; you can find it later. It’s in Deuteronomy 33:12, I think it is. Yeah. This is what it says: “Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him.” Here’s the security: “For he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders.” “Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders”—a tremendous picture of security.

Those who fear God should have nothing else to fear, and those who do not fear God become slaves to a thousand fears.

When Sue and I were traveling these last couple of weeks, we saw a lot of different things, but we were in one small place, standing in the street, and both of us noticed this at one and the same time: a guy on a bicycle—a young man on a bicycle. He had long hair. That wasn’t what was striking, but he had a dog with him. That wasn’t ultimately what was striking; it was where the dog was. The dog was lying in between his shoulder blades as he sat on the bike. So, if you imagine: I’m him, this is my bicycle, and here’s my dog, and his head is here. The rear view is that my dog’s back is lying in between my shoulder blades, and his hind paws are down like this, and his tail is in between. And without a word of a lie, in front of his head were his paws—not simply hanging on the guy’s shoulders, because his head was on his shoulder, but his paws were crossed in front of him like that. And Sue said to me, “That’s amazing that a dog would be that trusting—especially on a bicycle when it’s moving through the streets.” The dog never skittered, never moved; it just rested. And twenty minutes later, somewhere else as we walked: same guy, same bike, same dog. Same thing: “Man, look at that!”

In the next hour or so, we came face-to-face with the bicycle, the guy, and the dog—not by plan, but we were on a boardwalk, and who’s coming? I said, “It’s the guy and the dog!” And up he comes, and he stops to talk to another fellow, whom we had engaged in conversation. And the dog is just like this. And Sue said to the guy, she said, “It’s remarkable that a dog would allow you to do that and would rest so contentedly. Have you had it since it was a puppy?” “No,” said the guy, “I got him when he was quite old. But I rescued him from the pound, and he’s trusted me ever since.” And I said to myself, “That’s that verse in Deuteronomy 33. That’s the story of Paul.”

Oh! I never told you—and you want to know: What kind of dog was it? Right? A pit bull! Without a word of a lie: a pit bull! “Oh,” I said, “a pit bull!” For isn’t that the story of Saul of Tarsus? A pit bull breathing out fire and slaughterings and murder,[27] rescued and placed between the shoulders of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. How did he endure these beatings? How did he go through these shipwrecks? How did he stick it in all those nights in the jail? He had a different mentality. It changed his activity. He lived in total security. Because he understood that God is powerful, God is perfect, and God is praiseworthy.

Do you know God? Fear him, and you will have nothing else to fear.

Let’s pray:

Father, out of all of these words, I pray that you will get glory to your name—that you will instruct us and teach us in the way we should go. Forgive us, Lord, when we think more of ourselves, are preoccupied with our own predicaments. And thank you that we know that you know about this. Lord, change the way we think. Transform the things we do. May we trust you, and may we give you glory for the wonder of all the things you’ve done. For Jesus’ sake we ask it. Amen.

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[1] See Titus 2:13.

[2] 1 Timothy 1:15 (NIV 1984).

[3] See Deuteronomy 6:7.

[4] Commonly attributed to Voltaire.

[5] John 4:24 (KJV).

[6] Isaiah 40:12 (NIV 1984).

[7] Romans 13:1 (NIV 1984).

[8] Matthew Bridges, “Crown Him with Many Crowns” (1851).

[9] See Exodus 3:2.

[10] Revelation 19:15–16 (NIV 1984).

[11] Daniel 4:30–31 (NIV 1984).

[12] Daniel 4:32 (NIV 1984).

[13] See Genesis 3:14.

[14] Daniel 4:32 (paraphrased).

[15] Exodus 33:19–23 (NIV 1984).

[16] Robert Neelly Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985), 221. Paraphrased.

[17] Psalm 95:6 (KJV).

[18] Numbers 13:28–33 (paraphrased).

[19] “Twelve Men Went to Spy on Canaan.”

[20] See Acts 17:22–26.

[21] 1 Samuel 17:10 (paraphrased).

[22] 1 Samuel 17:32 (paraphrased).

[23] 1 Samuel 17:43 (paraphrased).

[24] 1 Samuel 17:46 (paraphrased).

[25] “The Elixir,” The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 640.

[26] Elisha Albright Hoffman, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (1887). Lyrics lightly altered.

[27] See Acts 9:1.