Guinness & the Glory of God

Hey, I'm in Dublin, Ireland right now at the Guinness storehouse, the Guinness factory. So much history here in all of Ireland, really. But in Dublin, you can see the remnants of this old Christian civilization.

It's impossible to escape from it. You see the churches, the buildings, the businesses created by Christians who were forward-thinking. They were all completely future-oriented. I mean, as a matter of fact, in Christian civilizations, you can see that often they would build their churches, and it would take 400 or 500 years to build a church.

I mean, they would pass the labor and the dream down to the next generation, knowing that it was their great-great-great-great-grandchildren that were actually going to end up worshipping in this completed thing.

And behind me here is the Guinness storehouse. It's where Arthur Guinness began his business. And it's a really interesting story, actually. Arthur Guinness was a believer in Jesus Christ. He loved God.

He believed in the gospel. And the underclass in Ireland at the time was being devastated by hard liquor. Gin was a problem. All the hard liquor was destroying the underclass. And so Arthur Guinness wanted to create something that would be ultimately good for people, that would be difficult to really abuse in the same way as a hard liquor.

And so he created a Guinness as a means to essentially bless the underclass, create something amazing. And he did it. The remnants of this legacy stand behind me. And what's amazing is just how forward-thinking Christians were at the time, building civilizations, leaving legacies for generations deep.

Arthur Guinness, when he was given a $100 gift in a will of his godfather, he invested that money into a business and he signed a 9 ,000-year lease. A 9 ,000-year lease for about $45 a year. And so that's still all around me to this day.

And what's amazing is just the mindset of Christians in history. You see, again, in Ireland, the remnants of an old Christian civilization, Christians who were forward-thinking, they were future-oriented, they thought about the future, they thought about next generation, they thought about the legacy they were leaving for their grandchildren.

And so they built and they labored. They weren't thinking the way that we do now today in the West as evangelical Christians. They weren't thinking about just the next two years or three years or five years, hoping that at any moment we would be whisked away and Jesus would return.

And they were thinking in terms of 9 ,000 years away. They were trying to establish a gospel culture, a culture that was centered around Jesus and the biblical worldview. And when they built, they built in terms of 9 ,000 years into the future.

It's really amazing. If you look at the Apostle Paul's timeline in 1 Corinthians 15, he says some important things. He says Jesus, he died, he rose again, and he says he's reigning now. And he says right now, Psalm 110 .1, he is reigning and he must reign until he's placed all of his enemies under his feet.

And then he says this, after every enemy is defeated, then, then death is defeated. So the resurrection occurs, according to Paul, in the timeline of history after every enemy is put under Jesus' feet.

And so Christians in history actually believe that. They thought about the future in terms of the reign of Christ, the gospel, and legacy. They thought 9 ,000 years into the future. And so when they built, they built to reflect that.

They built in such a way as they thought this needs to be here for a very, very long time. And so you see all of that behind me. You see the idea of dominion and legacy and the future built into the world.

It's really amazing. If you think about paganism, paganism thinks in terms of cycles. If you think about atheism, atheism thinks in terms of chaos. All is chaos, time and chance acting on matter. But Christianity is linear.

It thinks in terms of the future and a goal. And for Christians in history, the goal was not to escape. The goal was to build. The goal was to bring the kingdom and let it expand through our efforts. Not just efforts in terms of quote-unquote spiritual things, but efforts in terms of business, legacy, the things that we establish in the world.

And that's what all this is behind me. It's the result of the Christian worldview.

That's what this is.

This is a blessing to the world as a result of the Christian worldview. And so what I hope, my prayer is that our generation of believers, particularly believers in the West, would get back to that ancient way.

The ancient way of thinking in terms of Jesus reigning and ruling, Jesus conquering the world with his gospel, and Jesus calling us to actually be faithful in everything we do. To actually do what we do to the glory of God.

Whatever you do in word or in deed, do all to the glory of God. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all of your might to the glory of God. This is an example of that. We need to get back to it.