SUNDAY SCHOOL: Soli Deo Gloria

Welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day Sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith. All right, so the glory of God is not a doctrine among the others.

The Glory of God as the Center of Theology

It is the doctrine that gives weight to all others. Soledad Gloria, to the glory of God alone, was not just a phrase that the Reformers uttered, but it was the telos, the end of all of their theology.

It was their aim, it was their banner, it was the culmination of every sola, it was the center of every creed, it's the goal of every breath of human life. And this doctrine confronts the deepest lie in the human heart that we are the point, that we are the ones who are, that have agency over God.

From Eden onward, man has been bent inward seeking to make much of himself instead of much of God. But the gospel, when it saves us, it turns us outward. It rescues us from our self-absorption and it reorients us back to the majesty and the glory of God.

Psalm 115 .1 says, not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory. It's an excellent verse for trying to understand what glory is, glory is God's, not ours. And the entire Reformation was an act of recentering the church, recentering leadership, recentering people on this concept that we don't exist as an end unto ourself, we exist for God, we exist for making much of him for his glory, and it was a recentering of bringing the church away from popes and relics and back to the throne of heaven.

To glorify God is to recognize his weight, to reflect his beauty, to rejoice in his supremacy. The word glory, actually, in Hebrew, is a word that's pronounced kavod. In Greek, it's doxa. And the meaning of both of those terms in their original language is heaviness.

So when you talk about the glory of God, you're talking about the weight of his worth. You're talking about the significance of his majesty. You're talking about how God is supremely valuable. Like, we talk like this today, when someone important comes in, and we say that they have great weight, great significance, great value.

Those are all terms of weight. You'll see it in the Old Testament scriptures where God shows up at Mount Sinai, and the people feel like they're being pressed and crushed by the glory of God. It's because its weight is so much that they can't bear it.

And even then, God's being gracious and holding back, because if he weren't holding back, then it would have squeezed them like a tube of toothpaste. And yet, they survived it because God was being gracious to them.

But the question I want us to ask today is, how did this rally cry for the glory of God actually emerge in the Reformation? What provoked the Reformers to reassert God's glory as the goal of life and as the heart of all salvation?

And with that, I want us to turn very briefly to the history, and then we will turn to the biblical case for it, and then we'll turn to the practical application. That's our goal today. So to understand why the Reformers cried out, soli deo gloria, we must first understand what was going so terribly wrong.

And we've talked about this a little bit over the last couple weeks. In the centuries leading up to the Reformation, the Church had become the center of European life, but not in a holy way. Instead of pointing people to Jesus, it was pointing people to itself.

The Roman Catholic Church was teaching that salvation was coming through systems and through priests and through mass and through confession and through penance and through relics and through pilgrimages and indulgences and all of this scaffolding of religious buffoonery.

Grace was no longer a gift, but it was a product that could be purchased. Forgiveness was nothing more than what a few coins in the bottom of a coffer could buy you. Souls could be sprung from purgatory with a single golden coin as Johann Tetzel marketed in the German province.

At the heart of all of it was a kind of power and a kind of lust for pride and for materialism that had infected the Church. The glory of God had been swallowed by the glory of the ecclesia. And this was not accidental, it was systemic actually.

The Pope claimed to sit as the vicar of Christ on earth. The sacraments were treated as a kind of magical, carnivorous channel of grace. Sorry, got excited and kicked my little chair that's underneath my pulpit today.

The Bible was locked away like we've talked about in Latin. It was inaccessible to the average person. And the Pope, or the people, were illiterate, fearful, and dependent upon the Church as the dispensary of merit to them.

If the person was not in good relationship with the Church, then they lost all access to grace because the Church claimed to hold grace as a sort of treasure chest on behalf of Mary and Christ and the saints.

And the only way that that grace could be dispensed is through the will of the Church. So if you were not in good relationship with the Church, you were damned to hell. That was essentially what happened.

The Church replaced Jesus as Savior. Now, we would say today that you should be in right relationship with the Church, of course. You should be committed to a local church, absolutely, but we don't put the Church on the cross as the Savior.

And that was what Rome was doing. This is the world that Martin Luther stepped into when he posted his 95 Theses in 1517, and Luther's motivation in that was not to try to start a revolution. He was trying to call the Church back to God, and he was trying to start a conversation, and the conversation did get started.

But the system didn't bend, so God broke it. And he broke it so that after that, the Church would recognize that salvation belongs to the Lord, not popes, councils, priests, or human tradition. Now, to teach that truth clearly, solido gloria, the Reformers returned to the ancient practice of catechizing, which was a wonderful return.

It was actually, in fact, I think, why the Reformation spread so greatly in the centuries that it did, because the Church actually went back to catechizing children and developing the next generation for faithfulness.

The Catholic Church wasn't doing that. Remember, they were giving their masses in Latin, a language that the people didn't even speak. So the parents weren't discipled, therefore the children weren't discipled, therefore everyone was reliant upon Rome.

That was sort of the quid pro quo relationship that they had created. So Luther started this out by creating what he called the smaller catechism, which was written for parents in order to teach their children the Gospel at home.

Read it, it's a wonderful little catechism. It covered the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer and the Sacraments. Luther wasn't the only one. The Heidelberg Catechism came out in 1563 and it offered a more pastoral tone to Luther's tone, and it had a Gospel-centered structure where it began with the misery, the redemption, and then the gratitude that we have as a result.

And it opened with one of the greatest lines in all of catechetical history, which is what is your only comfort in life and in death? And the answer to that was that I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, that I am not my own.

That line actually captured my heart in seminary. I didn't know what catechesis was when I went to seminary. I'd never heard of it. I was sitting in the office trying to figure out what classes I was gonna take for that semester, and I realized that the professor that I had signed up for had taken a job at Trinity in Chicago, so now I didn't have the class.

So I had to figure out what class I'm gonna take. And the only one that was available, because I guess I drugged my feet, was catechesis and creeds, and it was something like that. And I was like, catechesis, what is that?

That's gonna be the most boring class ever. And I read the Heidelberg question one on week one of that class, and I fell in love with it. And then I started discipling with it. I started meeting with men and showing them this catechism.

And that's actually how Derek and my friendship really got going is at Genesis, at the church we were at then. I started meeting with Derek every week at Panera to talk about the Heidelberg catechism.

And that was, what was that, 12 or 11 years ago, or something like that. So that was sort of the seed, the ground with which Derek and I, our friendship even really got going. So catechisms were a big deal.

Calvin wrote a catechism as well, in order, he called it the children's catechism, in order to disciple the children. And that was a massively important feature. Now meanwhile in England, the reformers, or the Reformation took a little bit of a rockier path.

King Henry VIII, if you know anything about him, broke from the Pope, but he didn't break from Roman doctrine, he broke from the Pope so that he could get an annulment for his marriage. Because he thought his wife was the problem, actually it was Henry VIII that was the problem.

Queen Mary tried to reverse everything by burning Protestants in order to restore Catholicism. Elizabeth I came along and she offered a compromise, which gave the Puritans a little bit of a window in order to do one of the greatest works that I think has happened in church history, which is the writing of the Westminster Confession of Faith, or the Westminster Assemblies.

And they were commissioned actually by the government at the time, by Parliament, to work on this work so that they could have an orderly and well systematized system of faith. Now, the Puritans at that time weren't trying to leave the church, they were just trying to reform it.

And there was different things that were going on at the time that they were trying to reform. I thought this was very interesting. At the time, there was a book called the Book of Sports, which encouraged games and recreation to be done on the Lord's Day.

The Puritans refused. To them, worship was not a suggestion that the state could mandate, but it was an offering to a holy God. And they believed that the glory of God must govern every part of the Lord's Day.

So, of course, the Puritans said that no recreation and no sports on Sunday. Now, whether they were right or wrong, the glory of God was their focus. Now, eventually, many of the Puritans were driven out, either silenced, persecuted, or imprisoned.

But they stood their ground, and in 1643, as England descended into civil war, Parliament called them to come together and write the Westminster Confession of Faith, which I mentioned just a moment ago.

At the heart of all of this was a singular conviction that man is not the center of the story, but God is. And because God is, then we must focus on magnify His glory above all else. He is the reason for which we exist.

That's why the Westminster Shorter Catechism begins with, what is man's chief end?

Amen.

At the bedrock of what it means to be human is to glorify God. And I love the fact that they included to enjoy Him forever. People will accuse the Puritans of being killjoys. Right there in the very beginning of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, they said you should have enjoyment.

It just needs to be rightly rooted. It's enjoyment in God. So they weren't killjoys. They just were focusing their joy towards the Lord. All right, any questions on the history? That's a really fast flyover of things, but there we go.

Yes, sir. What was the point?

So that was just like the everyday life, week to week services or anything like that?

Yeah.

Yeah, and they participated because the church held the keys to the kingdom. So whether they understood it or not, they had this kind of mystical view that the words of the Latin spoken over them, even though they couldn't understand them, would be efficacious in some way to bring some measure of grace into their life.

But yeah, that was what they were doing. And they were coming there because they had to sit through the mass in order to partake of the communion. And the church taught them that communion was necessary for salvation, because if they didn't take it, then they could not get rid of their sin.

So through baptism and through the Lord's Supper, the Catholic church was saying, if you don't do this, you're damned, because your sin will actually condemn you. Which is true, your sin will condemn you, but it's Christ who dies for your sin on the cross, not every week having to take communion in order to rewipe the slate clean, as it were.

So it was a kind of grace plus merit that was going on. Good question.

Just in a very tragic place, you know, how they can read it, whereas when they attended church before,.

It was all in Latin. They couldn't even understand the words if it was spoken.

So trying to find the grace of God, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, the way that that happens is not instantly. It happens over centuries. So you have, really, over five or 600 years, what Rome did was they took a doctrine that was built upon the scripture, and then they built a doctrine on top of that.

But it's one doctrine removed from scripture. It doesn't find its root in scripture. It finds its root in a doctrine. Then they would build a doctrine on top of that, and then a doctrine on top of that.

Before long, you have the scaffolding that goes out from the Bible where it's 27 layers removed from the Bible. But they could say, well, it's all derived somehow in this intricate system of interpretation.

So that's how you get to things like purgatory, or that's how you get to things like Mary's perpetual virginity. Like, they're building out like that doctrine on top of doctrine instead of going back to the scripture for everything.

Yes, that's exactly what it is. I didn't know that term for it, but yeah. Any others? So what does the Bible say about soli deo gloria? Well, it says a lot. We can trace the doctrine through scripture.

We already mentioned one in Psalm 115.

Shannon.

Okay.

I knew you were doing that. I just wanted to be silly. All right, no passage shouts louder than Ephesians 2, eight through nine. By grace you have been saved, and that is not of yourself, it is the gift of God.

Not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. So if anyone is gonna get the glory, it can't be you. Because you can't boast because you did nothing. It wasn't your works. No one can save themselves.

It must be God external to you, pouring out his grace on you, which means that God gets all the glory in your salvation. And that's one of the things that first attracted me to Reformed theology, is that Reformed theology, R .C. Sproul once called it the big God theology, or big sovereignty theology, or big glory theology.

Because Reformed theology is seeking to put all glory, all honor, all renowned upon God, and none on us. And that's the right position. We talked about this a couple weeks ago with a word called monergism.

It's a Greek word that comes from two Greek words, mono and ergo, which means the working of one. And your salvation is the work of one, not two. It's not you and God participating together. It's God doing the work of your salvation alone, by himself, not you participating, not you contributing.

Because salvation is by grace through faith and not of your works. So that's a very important passage when it comes to the glory of God. Paul says in Romans 3 .27, where then is boasting? It is excluded, he says.

It's excluded. We can boast in nothing but God, that's it. Because our salvation is not a cooperative effort. Romans 4 .2 makes it plain. If Abraham was justified by works, then he would have something to boast about, but not before God.

The point is obviously clear. The gospel doesn't leave any room for human bragging except for in God, God alone. Psalm 3 .8 says salvation belongs to the Lord, which is a great passage. I love that if you were to, I don't know if this is true, but I think it's close.

If you were to look at all the verses in the Bible and open up to roughly the middle of the Bible, you would end up in Jonah 2 .9, roughly in the middle of the Bible. Jonah 2 .9 says salvation belongs to the Lord.

So at the heart of just the weight of evidence in biblical revelation, you have this astounding passage of Jonah in the belly of the sea monster. And in case you look at me cross-eyed there, the word actually does mean sea monster.

It doesn't mean whale, which is interesting. Look at it in Hebrew, you'll find out. But from the belly of the sea monster, Jonah cries out, salvation belongs to the Lord. So it's a wonderful thing. Revelation 7 .9 completes this and says salvation to our Lord who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

So from the beginning of the Bible to the very end of the Bible, it is attributing glory to God, salvation to God alone. And what is God's purpose in all of this? God's purpose in salvation is His own glory.

Think about Psalm 23, right? It's a wonderful psalm. The Lord is my shepherd, okay? If you stop there, then the Lord seems like He's really interested in us. The Lord's my shepherd, He likes me, okay?

I shall not want, He's gonna give me all that I need. He's really into me. He leads me besides still waters. Like, don't tell me that the Lord's not into me if He leads me besides still waters. He's holding my hand, He's taking me to pretty places.

He loves me. And then you ask yourself, why? Why does God do that? Well, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He restores my soul. He leads me by the still waters for His own name's sake.

That's what it says. For His own name, for His own glory. So everything that God does is for His own glory. Romans 11, 36 says, from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever, amen.

This is sort of a crescendo of biblical theology, which means that everything that you look at is from God and for God. Which means that there's nothing that's not. Isaiah 43, six through seven. Bring my sons from afar, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.

So look around at us. We were created by God, for God, to the glory of God.

Amen.

Ephesians one makes this undeniable. It says it three times in verses six and 12 and 14. To the praise of His glory. So not only are we made by God, for God, unto God's glory, but every word or every praise on our lips must be for His glory.

Because we are magnifying the one who is most magnified. Now remember, I listened to a sermon one time on this and John Piper pointed out something that I thought was really good. He said that, doesn't it seem selfish that God would want us to just sit around all day long and magnify His name?

Doesn't it seem a little narcissistic? Like if you and I made a group of people sit in a room and just praise us all day long, we would either, we'd be a narcissist. But the question is, how is God not culpable of that accusation?

That's a question. Right, right, because if you, Adam, asked all of us to bow down and worship you, you would be asking us to participate in a lie. Because you're not worthy. When God tells us to worship Him above all things, He's asking us to participate in the truth.

Because He actually is that worthy. He actually is that valuable. So it would be God lying if He didn't require us to glorify Him above all things. And if God lied, then He could not be God. So therefore, God must have us glorify Him.

Not to make it about me or anything, but I intend to, it's true.

A hundred percent. Adam, you said this really well before Sunday school about our glorying being tied in with.

Oh yeah, yeah, the Lord's chief end is to glorify Himself and to enjoy Himself forever. He has done that in His triunity from before the foundation of the world. And out of the outpouring of that, because the Lord didn't make us out of any need or want in Himself, He made us out of the outpouring of His own glory and enjoyment and love within Himself.

And so obviously, our chief end, our main goal, is to reciprocate that. Because that is what's best for us. That's the purpose of our creation in the first place.

Right. Another way to say that, Niki, is did God in all of eternity glorify Himself? Yes. Did God glorifying Himself produce maximal, infinite joy in the triune Godhead? Yes. So God glorifying Himself produced maximum joy.

So therefore, inviting you into that is inviting you into His triune, maximal joy.

Yeah. Yeah.

First Peter 4 .11, the apostle raises the bar even higher. He says, whoever serves is to do it as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies, so that all things, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.

Paul makes it and brings it down to its most base level in 1 Corinthians 10 .31. Whatever you do, whether you eat or whether you drink, do it all to the glory of God. This idea of glorying God is not a minuscule concept in the Bible.

I mean, I'm just, I'm like a stone right now, skipping across the pond. There is so much that we're not covering, but really the whole Bible is held together by this. I remember reading in a couple different biblical theologies, and maybe you've never heard that term before, and you're like, all theology should be biblical.

Well, yes and amen. But biblical theology is a little different than systematic theology. Systematic theology is taking all of the verses about one topic and making a system of that topic. Biblical theology is tracing one topic in order from Genesis to Revelation.

It's showing the story arc of a topic. I read several biblical theologies that all agreed that the central unifying principle that holds the entire Bible together is the glory of God. Honestly, there's very few that would even dare to offer a unification principle other than the glory of God, because it's just so clearly stated that all things are to him, for him, and through him, and for him, and all, yeah.

Any questions? We can keep going, but I feel like the point is clear. Any questions on that?

One that's always been good for me is Isaiah 48, 11. Just that, for mine own sake, even for my own sake while I do it, for how should my name be polluted, and I will not give my glory unto another?

Yeah.

The Lord is jealous for his own glory.

Right.

Ultimately, when we put, or ascribe, or glorify anything other than him, we're violating the very first commandment in idolatry.

Yeah.

I think it was Matt Messina who taught me this, what I'm getting ready to say. There's a difference between jealousy and envy. Jealousy is not a sin in the Bible, because jealousy is a passion for what's yours.

And envy is a passion for what's not yours. So God can be jealous for his glory, because it belongs to him. God cannot be envious, because envy is sin. Now there are ways to be sinfully jealous, but with God, he is not sinfully jealous ever.

He is always perfectly, righteously jealous for his own glory. Another passage is Habakkuk 2, 14, which is, it tells us what the end for the world actually is. For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the water covers the sea.

That's a promise. Now how is the world going to be filled with the glory of God as the water covers the sea? Is it like in Star Wars? Never seen it, so I think this is true of Star Wars. Is it like a force?

Is it like some kind of magical energy that just hovers over the earth? That's what that means? What does it mean that God's earth will be filled with the glory of God as the water covers the sea?

It'll be filled with the truth. God is most glorified in the worship of him, which is the act, the ultimate act of glorifying God, ultimately.

Right. So that'll be trees and rocks and water and people, all worshiping God. So if you, and this is why I'm post-millennial, if you ask yourself what does the world look like that is glorifying him in every square inch of it, it's a world filled with people who worship God.

It's a world filled with people who glorify him. And if you look around at the world today and you say, well, here's a place where God's not being glorified. Well, here's a place where God's not being glorified.

Then what you can say is that the world has not yet attained to the promise for which God has given it. And then you have to ask yourself, will God end the world short of fulfilling his promise? And of course that is no.

And if that's true, then we must believe that God is going to have such a substantial victory on earth that all people glorify his name.

Amen.

The Practical Meaning of Soli Deo Gloria

All right, let's go to some practical, how about we do a discussion on this? Just, I think this would be helpful and we don't have a lot of time, so we'll do it quick. How is God's glory practical?

I point to God.

The reason why I'm like this is because of him.

Amen.

That's good. Yes, sir.

As a practical application, just tying back to something you said at the beginning, like the system that the church set up that it wasn't about God, it was about the church that still persists to this day.

When you have a reformed person, or at least someone who's raised in a reformed system, they convert to Catholicism. More often than not, I've never heard of it any other way, they talk about being converted to the church.

Not anything to do with God or anything, just converted to the church.

That's true, I hadn't thought about that, Ken. I've heard that too. That's interesting. For me, it's similar to Belushi. It's a kind of mindfulness. I may be the only one in this room, I doubt this is true, though, I think we probably all are like this, where I can be mindless quite a bit when I take an inventory of my life.

How much mindless things do I do? How much autopiloting do I do? How much unintentional, unthoughtful, disconnected sort of living do I actually contribute to my existence? And the glory of God reminds me that I'm supposed to be mindful in those moments, that I'm doing this not on autopilot anymore, I'm doing this because God is worthy.

And to me, that is the most practical thing of God's glory that helps me is being mindful of my purpose. And when I fall short of that, it helps me repent.

Yeah, I think even hidden in Philippians 4 when Paul talks about the secret to contentment, to be content in all things, I think is ultimately to realize that God works all things together for his purpose, for our good and for his glory.

And so to know, even if you don't see the good in whatever it is, the situation that you're faced with, the circumstance, the challenge, or even the blessing that ultimately it's for his glory and for our good.

Amen.

And too, I think part of in life as Christians when what we want is something that we know is honoring to the Lord and having to live in the season before we get that, if we ever do get that. But if that is, if we know like marriage, let's take marriage for instance, waiting on marriage.

Marriage we know is something that would bless the Lord, we see how great that could be, but waiting to find that in that season, finding contentment there and realizing that the Lord has us in that season for a reason and being patient.

And that is definitely something that I think most all Christians struggle with at some point.

Yeah.

Winters in New England. When will it be over, Lord? I'm not married.

I'm single.

It's a type. Yeah, that's good, Shannon. And that's true of any situation or any season where we're discontented.

Yeah.

Because in that season to just wait and utilize it in a way that you're more prepared than somebody else and you just fell in marriage maybe would be.

That's so good. I'm gonna now play off the idea you played off, Adam. It's really helpful to use your season, whatever your season is, for God's glory and for your good. If you did that, it would eliminate complaining and whining and belly or navel gazing and all of those things.

When we go through hardships, our default mode is grumbling because we can't imagine how this situation we're walking through could be for our good. And then we also can't imagine how it could be for God's glory.

And slowing ourselves down and saying, okay, God is sovereign. He's not going to give me any situation that doesn't bring him glory. And because I'm in union with Christ and now I get to participate in the glory of God, he's not gonna give me anything that's not for my good.

If we'll slow ourselves down and remind ourselves of that, then we actually can be the kind of people that rejoice in our suffering, that rejoice in our pain or our diagnosis or whatever it is. That's why Christians historically have been able to, like Paul in prison, praise God in his chains or like James and John praise God after a beating or like there's a beautiful story in Fox's book of martyrs about a mother who is getting ready to be murdered for her faith and her child is starting to cry because the child's watching it happen.

And she rebukes the child in a very sweet way. And she says, my dear, don't you cry. This is for the Lord's glory and we rejoice. And when I read it, I had tears in my eyes because it's a very moving scene, but she's right.

But how often can we never slow ourselves down enough to actually think that way?

Yes, ma 'am.

Yeah, amen. Not about us, but for us, yeah. All right, well, let's pray. Let's close out our five solo series. Again, there's much more we could have covered, but we hopefully you got at least a taste of the doctrines that launched the Reformation.

So let's pray. Lord, thank you for today and thank you that you are worthy of all of our glory and honor and praise. Lord, help us today as we come to church and as we enter into your house, let us enter into this place singing for the glory of our King, who is this King of glory?

The Lord God Almighty strong is his name. Lord, help us as we enter to enter with joy and to enter with hearts that are delighted by you and let us glorify you and even leave glorifying you. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.