Tag Archives: glory of god

Trust His Heart

Bible Study, , ,

TRUST HIS HEART

“Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped His feet with her hair). So the sisters sent word to Jesus, ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ When He heard this, Jesus said, ‘This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may also be glorified through it.'” John 11:1-4 NIV.

Jesus was faced with something He had never experienced before. Lazarus was no stranger to Him. He was a member of a family whose home was like a second home to Him. In the past few weeks He had spent much time there, using it as a refuge from His adversaries as He moved in and out of Jerusalem before His final Passover.

There was a strong bond between this family and Jesus. Mary had expressed her faith and adoration by anointing His feet with her costliest treasure — her alabaster box of spikenard, worth an entire year’s wages in Jewish terms. Jesus must have felt comfortable in their home. He knew He was always welcome and He was always provided for when He stayed there with His disciples.

His miracles had always been done to strangers or casual acquaintances at the most, but now His beloved friend, Lazarus lay deathly sick. His illness must have been much more than a common cold since the sisters felt the need to send for Him. Jesus’ response shows us that Lazarus was dying. What was He to do? His natural response would have been to set off immediately so that He could get to him before he died.

Yet Jesus said and did something unusual. Instead of leaving for Bethany right then, He remarked to His disciples, ‘Lazarus won’t die. This is about God’s glory and mine as well.’ What did He mean? Once again Jesus put this crisis into perspective. What appeared obvious in the circumstances was part of a much bigger picture — God’s glory — and it was Jesus’ role to act within what God was doing, not what would have been His natural inclination.

Every situation, even if it touched someone as dear to Him as Lazarus and his sisters, was no cause for panic. He had to see it from His Father’s point of view and act within the Father’s will. There was always one guiding principle that showed Jesus what to do — whatever brought the greatest glory to the Father.

When He and His disciples met a man born blind, He used it as an opportunity to reveal the Father’s mercy by restoring His sight as a sign, especially to His opponents, that it was the Father’s desire for people to have 20/20 spiritual vision by believing in Him. The miracle triggered a debate that exposed the blindness of the Jewish leaders who vehemently defended their claim that they could “see”.

Jesus was now faced with the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of His ministry. He had raised others from the dead, not recorded by John but by the other gospel writers, but never a person whose body had already been decaying for four days. But that is still to come…

His disciples must have been puzzled by His attitude. He seemed quite casual about His friends’ urgent message. First He seemed confident that Lazarus would not die; then He made no effort to hurry to his bedside. What was going on?

“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when He heard that Lazarus was sick, He stayed where He was two more days, and then He said to His disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea.'” John 11:5-7 NIV

Isn’t that a strange way to show His love?  Are we not also face with the same strange response from God? We cry out to Him in our crisis and He says nothing and He does nothing! It is almost as though He deliberately turns a deaf ear. What is He doing?

God is never deaf to the cries of His beloved but, like Jesus He sees the bigger picture. There was a great lesson for the two sisters in His action as well as revelation of who He was that impacted them and their brother far more powerfully than healing Lazarus would have done.

He is calling us to trust Him; to trust His love, His power and His intention which is much bigger than anything we can imagine.

Glimpses Of The Great God: Day Three

Devotion, , , ,

DAY THREE

 Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu,

and the seventy elders of Israel went up

and saw the God of Israel. 

Under His feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself. 

But God did not raise a hand against these leaders of the Israelites;

they saw God and they ate and drank.

The Lord said to Moses,

 “Come up to me on the mountain and stay here,

and I will give you the tablets of stone,

with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction…”

When Moses went up the mountain, the cloud covered it,

and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. 

For six days the cloud covered the mountain,

and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses

from within the cloud.

  To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like

a consuming fire on top of the mountain. 

Then Moses entered the cloud as he went up on the mountain.  And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. 

Exodus 24:9-12; 15-18

 As we move through these descriptive Scriptures, keep two things in mind, that these descriptions come from human understanding and that we are being exposed to the awesome majesty of God which is beyond human description.  Allow yourself to be caught up in the atmosphere of the presence of God and of those around the throne who were overwhelmed and overawed by the glory of God.  We are learning to pray to the God who is revealed in Scripture so that we can develop a realistic appreciation of who He is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glory of God

Pastor's Desk, ,

Dear Family

My family and I were driving back from East London a few nights ago, and I happened to glance up at the skies through the sunroof. The air was crisp and the visibility perfect. What I saw literally took my breath away (causing my wife to lecture me about keeping my eyes on the road). The sky was indescribably beautiful – plastered from the one end to the other with a display of stars unlike I had ever noticed before. Wow! My mind raced to Psalm 19 which says “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

“The heavens declare the glory of God….” What is the “glory of God”? Well, probably many answers would be correct, but I share the following option with you. For me, the glory of God is simply the indescribable, indefinable beauty of His spirit. Not an aesthetic or material beauty, but the beauty that oozes from His character, the very essence of His being. So, as I gaze at the heavens’ declaration, I humanly understand something of that beauty, complexity, wonder, majesty, weight, etc of who God actually is. Moses understood this as God’s goodness, and yes, it is that as well. But who can actually verbalize the glory of God – this eternal glory that is manifested in so many different ways, in so many attributes that He chooses to reveal to us?!

And the wonder of wonders is that the all glorious, Almighty God, chooses to cover us and even infuse us with His glory! The Psalmist in Psalm 8 says of man that God has “crowned him with glory”. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:6,7 “ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” And again in Colossians 1:27 “…Christ in you, the hope of glory…”

All around us, all over us, and even in us, the awesome beauty of who He is. Why not pause a while to celebrate the glory of God – who He actually is? Eish!

Paul