Doxology

Well, this morning we complete what is the Lord's Prayer perhaps in a form most familiar to us. Arguably, we completed the Lord's Prayer last week, as I'll explain in a moment. We come to these words here in v. 13 in our translation.

For Yours is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever. Amen. Now this, of course, is not a petition. This is what is often called the doxology. This is the doxology of the Lord's Prayer. And for most of us, especially those of us who grew up attending a church that recited the Lord's Prayer, at times growing up from season to season, as part of our church's liturgy, we would recite the Lord's Prayer together.

And it's the familiar form of the Lord's Prayer. In fact, as a young boy, I couldn't put together a lot of the words, but I could always nail the doxology. For Yours is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever.

Amen. Now some of you, perhaps, looking at your Bibles, even on your lap this morning, you're stumped. Because I'm reading these words, and perhaps you have a translation where these words are not present.

Or perhaps you're looking at your Bible on your lap, and you're looking at Matthew 6 .13, and you have these words, but they're in big black brackets. And most likely for all of us, if we look at Matthew 6 .13, and we look at these words, we'll at least have a note saying something like the oldest manuscripts do not contain the following, or contain these words.

Or sometimes N-U comma M do not contain these words, which is a fancy way of saying some of the oldest manuscripts that have been collected and put forth. Translations, of course, are governed by translation committees.

And translation committees come across from time to time a passage like Matthew 6 .13, where there are early and very prominent manuscripts that have variants, slight variations, or more significantly, have omissions.

Maybe you have old witnesses, old manuscripts that lack a certain verse, or old manuscripts that possess a verse that later manuscripts do not. And this is what we call textual criticism. This is not something unique to Christian scripture.

This is what is true of all ancient documents. If we have ancient documents, we have copies of copies of copies. One of the things that we believe as Christians is that God's word is inspired by his spirit.

It is a perfect word and an errant word that's given to the people of God by inspiration of God himself. Therefore, it's a divine word. It's a word that bears the authority of God upon it. Yet we recognize also that we rely on the providence of God.

The providence of God that across millennia has preserved his word. One of the ways he's preserved his word is through varieties of copies of manuscripts. A transmission of preserving his word from the very beginning that corroborate the faithfulness of God to preserve all that he has declared, all that he has inspired.

So again, translation committees and what we call textual criticism is something that is a challenge, but it should not be seen to be a threat. Very important we establish that. And I'm gonna take some pains to move through this quickly so that you don't have to take too many pains to endure it.

I don't want a sermon to devolve into a lecture. Simply want to explain why your Bibles may or may not possess the rest of Matthew 6 .13. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

Is present in many old copies. Scholars for centuries, long even before the Reformation have collected and collated manuscripts. And we have a way of ranking them or dating them that puts them within the earliest.

And generally speaking, the closer they are to the original writings, the more weight and the more authority they bear. So you may have 1 ,000 copies from the Middle Ages and only several dozen from the first few centuries, but those several dozen have a lot more weight and authority than the multitude that come from a much later time.

There are broad numbers of copies of manuscripts that contain these verses and some very ancient witnesses as well. It's important to say. In fact, in weeks past, I've mentioned the Didache, a very early document that was circulated among the early Christians.

This is in a form contained within that. These words, for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, are possessed within the Didache. However, it's a different form. And actually, when you look into this, you realize there's about six major variations on this verse.

So some witnesses don't have it at all. Some have power and glory. Some have glory and power. Some have kingdom and glory without power. The versions diverge over time. By the time you get well into the later centuries, it seems to be a lot more unified and commonplace.

And the present form that we have it as we're looking at it this morning is really what's possessed throughout much of the later centuries of the church. But the two most significant copies we have, the two most complete and earliest copies that are almost the gold standard of what we hold to be the closest to the autographs are called the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus.

Again, bear with me. We're gonna get through this. I'm ripping off the Band-Aid as quick as I can. Neither of those manuscripts contain this verse. It's very significant. Added to that, when we have early church fathers, the earliest church fathers, working through the Lord's Prayer, if we think of Origen or Tertullian or Cyprian, they don't mention this at all.

They don't mention the doxology. They just have the verses that we were looking at. Now later on, you do have it described by church fathers like John Chrysostom. When he interacts with the Lord's Prayer, he interacts with this doxology.

A general principle of textual criticism, again, not unique to Christianity, but for anyone that deals with ancient documents anywhere, anyhow, a general principle is that a shorter reading is preferred over a longer reading.

It's a lot easier to explain why something would be qualified or elaborated or enlarged than it is why something would be lopped off. Now if you have something of doctrinal consequence, a later scribe might say, eh, I'm just gonna miss that.

Or maybe it was an accident and they skip over it. So that's a general principle that a shorter reading is preferred over a longer reading. And again, that's really stemming from the question, what would motivate a scribe to miss these words?

It could be an accident, but the same accident wouldn't happen hundreds and hundreds of times. What would cause a scribe to take away words, or on the other hand, they're not taking away anything, it was never there, it was something later added by a scribe, and so you have to weigh the question, what would motivate the taking away, or what would motivate the adding in?

Now we call this a doxology for a reason, and to my mind, that is the key word. This is a doxology. That is the key word to understand this issue. It seems that from the earliest times, the Lord's prayer was received by the church and employed in worship.

So not only was this a prayer that was prayed privately by the Lord's disciples, but corporately by the Lord's disciples. And in times of ancient worship, they would often come together and recite the Lord's prayer.

And as was true of ancient worship, as was true of prayer in general, whether public prayer or private prayer, when you concluded a prayer, you included a doxology. This would explain why there's so many variants to verse 13.

Again, some having kingdom, some not having kingdom, some transposing power or glory. And it seems perhaps the most likely explanation for why the ancient manuscripts do not possess this verse, but later manuscripts do, is later manuscripts are preserving a doxology that became commonplace for ancient worship.

In other words, when the church recited it, if they recited what they received from the Lord and they concluded as they would have all prayers, they would conclude with a doxology. At some point, that doxology entered into the manuscript traditions.

And so perhaps it was included, again, because it was being read by the church. And so a scribe copying the Lord's prayer, taking that common doxology would have added it to it, just like we might take scripture and that add a little doxology or a little prayer or a little exclamation at the end.

And this gets presented to the church so the church can have it in terms of its public worship. And that carries through the subsequent centuries. Now along these lines, it's generally agreed that probably this doxology was composed from a number of verses, but the key among them would be 1 Chronicles 29, where David is praying to the Lord and he says these words, beginning in verse 10.

Blessed are you, Lord God of Israel, our father. Why would ancient Christians pick up on this prayer of David from 1 Chronicles 29? Well, what is the Lord's prayer? What in Latin we call the paternoster, it's the our father.

And here's David praying in the Old Testament, our father. And notice some of the language that's going to be repeated. Blessed are you, Lord God of Israel, our father.

Forever and ever, yours, oh Lord.

Does that sound a lot like the doxology? Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory. Yours, oh Lord, is the greatness, the power and the glory. The victory and the majesty for all that is in heaven and in earth is yours.

Yours is the kingdom, oh Lord. And you are exalted as head over all. So you can see why ancient Christians would have taken this and we have many forms of doxologies that were used in the ancient church and they often were comprised of various passages from the Psalms or the Prophets or the Epistles.

And they use these as liturgical forms of doxology. So again, to be decidedly brief, and we're taking the plane in for a landing now, the internal and external evidence makes it very difficult to argue that the remainder of Matthew 6 .13 was originally part of the Lord's prayer in the Sermon on the Mount.

From the earliest times, they were, as with all ancient prayers, most likely a form of doxology. It was added with the amen when people prayed privately or publicly. Now even John Calvin himself, the great Geneva reformer, recognized that Jerome had not included this doxology from the Old Latin.

And so he says, although this does not exist in the Latin copies, it accords so well with the whole of the prayer, we cannot think of omitting it. And that's essentially my approach to you this morning.

I recognize that there's a far likelier explanation of why it's not original but was included later. And though the oldest witnesses do not contain it, it accords so well with the very heartbeat of the Lord's prayer that we should not omit it, not as we actually unpack what's contained in this doxology, because we find this doxology to be thoroughly biblical.

And of course, it's very fitting for us to take a doxology and sort of conclude our time in the Lord's prayer with the great doxology to God's glory, and that's all we're going to do together this morning.

So if you have all these burning questions, lay them aside, don't be so distracted by Old Latin and Jerome and unseals and all that stuff. Put that on the back burner. Talk to Ryan after the service, don't come to me.

I've dealt enough with it this week. But let's talk about doxology. That's what we wanna do this morning. Well, what is doxology? The word doxa in Greek means glory. It's a word of glory, a word of glorification.

That's what a doxology is. And when you become sensitive to the fact that the ancient believers would often, not just conclude a prayer or the end of a letter with a doxology, but sometimes just almost mid-sentence they'd break into a word of glory.

We saw that on Sunday night, says Ian Hamilton reminded us at the end of Romans 11, which is essentially the conclusion of his whole argument spanning from chapter one. Paul takes a big step back and he's just so amazed with the plan and purpose of God's salvation, he just has to break into a word of glory.

Oh, the debts and the riches and the wonders, that's essentially a word of glory. And when you recognize that this is often something, the scriptures, not just in the Old Testament with the prayers or the prophets, but also in the New Testament.

So of course, Romans 11, 36, as I've mentioned, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever, amen. And he's not done his letter yet.

It's just a doxology, a word of glory.

Later in that same letter, Romans 16, for God alone wise be glory through Jesus Christ forever, amen. Galatians 1, 5, to whom be glory forever and ever, amen. Again, that's Galatians 1. So even sort of right at the beginning, when you hear amen, keep reading it, it's not done yet.

This is just a word of glory. This is just saying amen. Ephesians 3, 21, again, not Ephesians 6, but Ephesians 3, 21, to him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever, amen.

Philippians 4, 20, again, now to our God and Father be glory forever and ever, amen. 1 Timothy 1, 17, not five, not six, one. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise be honor and glory forever and ever, amen.

Not just Paul's writings, Peter, both in chapter four, verse 11, and in chapter five, verse 11. To him, that is to God, be the glory and the dominion forever and ever, amen. A very early letter from Jude.

To God, our Savior, who alone is wise, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever, amen. These are all just skating across the surface of biblical doxologies. Words of glorification that we can easily breeze past.

And when we breeze past these statements, when we view them as just nice little window dressings, nice little packaging, we miss the doctrinal heartbeat that they contain. The problem with doxology is the problem of well-worn phrases.

They're so well-worn, so often used, that they become devoid of meaning and substance. And so it's good for us to spend some time unpacking doxology together this morning. It's a danger with Christianese.

We use the words so much that we don't know how to define them. People, some of you even this morning, are gathering in with us, and you're just cutting your teeth on the Christian faith, and you're learning Christianese.

You didn't know it, but you're learning Christianese. There's no Duolingo app for Christianese yet, but every week, you are learning Christianese. You're using words you've never used in your life before you started coming to church.

Words like faith and redemption. And if you asked us to define those words, we might go, well, faith is faith. Redemption is redemption. And so you don't even ask, you just go,.

Yeah, redemption, faith.

And pretty soon, we're all using the same words, the same phrases, we just, we don't really understand or articulate what they contain. In other words, we've been singing hymns about God's glory this morning, doxological hymns, all glory, loud, and honor.

And perhaps we've sung hymns along these lines hundreds, if not thousands of times, but do we actually understand what we're singing about? Do you actually know what it means to bring glory to God? Well, the biblical writers did.

They possessed a conscious bent to the supremacy of God's glory. So first things first, we have to define terms. What is the glory of God? Why was it fitting to conclude prayer, to conclude worship, to mid-sentence with something profound break into a word of glorification to God?

What is this glory? Well, it's no easy task to understand the significance of glory, but boiling down all the various nuance, you get something like this. Glory is weight and light, weight and light. You shouldn't think it's so luminous that it doesn't have real crushing substance.

But you think it's something, you shouldn't think of it as something so dense and powerful whose gravitational pull is beyond even a black hole that it's not glorious and it's almost ethereal luminous.

It's a glowing weight. It's a weighty light.

That's glory. That's kabod.

We see this, for example, in 2 Corinthians 4 .17, for our light affliction, which is but for a moment is working in us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. You could almost translate that, the weight which is glorious.

Glory is weight. Weight is glory. That's the significance. C .S. Lewis preached a tremendous sermon on this very idea,.

The weight of glory.

It's a good use of your time later this evening if you have some time to read C .S. Lewis on the weight of glory. Of course, as a noun, glory implies honor, splendor, worthiness. The glory of God is not exactly a reducible attribute of God, but as all the attributes of God are true of the very essence of God, and in a sense, all that God is and all that God does is glorious.

God is glorious. It's the brightness, the radiance of who He is. That's glory. It's a demonstration of His power and His greatness unfolded in His acts of creation and providential reign. You think of, perhaps, the transfiguration when the three disciples are brought up to the cleft of the rock and pressed into it as Moses was in the ancient days.

And here, rather than the afterglow of the Lord passing by, the Lord Jesus is eclipsed before them in blinding light. And they can hardly contain the sight. And that's just a spark of the glory of Jesus Christ.

An earthly spark that faded out as quickly as it burned. So what is the true unveiled glory of Jesus Christ? Again, something so luminous that it burns everything in front of it. Something so weighty that nothing can withstand its crushing weight.

All of this brings us to really the first of three points, three points this morning, and the first point is this. God has a prerogative for His glory. God has a prerogative for His glory. What's a prerogative?

We don't use that word very often. A right, a privilege, an exclusive claim. That's a prerogative. God's glory is not at the top of the chain that descends all the way down to our lesser glory. God's glory is in a class all to itself.

There is no glory like the glory of God. There is no one who can lay claim to the glory of God,.

But God.

Now this will be balanced out by the third point we come to this morning is that God is pleased, nevertheless, to make us partakers of His glory. We shouldn't begin there with participating or partaking of His glory.

We should begin with the fact that His glory is exclusively His own, and it's His prerogative. All that God does is to glorify Himself. How did we begin our time in the Lord's prayer in Matthew 6? We were essentially asking God to glorify Himself, to bring honor to His name, to establish in advance His kingdom, so that His will would be done on the earth just as it's done in heaven.

When you pray in that way, you're praying for God to glorify Himself. That is God's prerogative to do so. You think of the mighty host of angels surrounding God, and you remember that just taking one of those angels, if they so happen to be a destroying angel.

You think of the effect of an angel like that over, say, the mighty gathered army of the Assyrians, and that's just one angel. One peerless being who's fit to be in the presence of God, and in light of that, sheer power then multiplied as a countless house surrounding His throne.

And you realize with all of that power, unimaginable power and glory and light for these peerless, sinless beings who are fit to be in the very presence of the Creator God, they don't add an ounce to the glory that He already possesses.

You see all the world leaders, maybe you watch some of the live stream of the Pope's funeral over the past several days, and you can tell who's receiving honor, who's receiving glory. And in a sense, when you see, say, leaders from the G20 Summit all flocking like obedient ducklings to the President of the United States, you get a quick snapshot of who actually has the leverage in that situation.

Who's looking to shake the hand or catch the smile or can we please talk about tariffs?

Do you have a minute to spare?

And you get a sense that for all of these world leaders, some on very ancient soil, some from nations who have antiquity stretching back for centuries. You think of a place like Italy and the history possessed within that, and you get a sense that that retinue, that surrounding of all these worldly dominions, as it were, paying homage, giving deference to a world leader, that all adds to that world leader's glory, doesn't it?

The symbolic token of their honor adds to His honor. The way that they seek to show glory adds to His glory. That's true of men. That's true of the kingdoms of men. That is not true of God. God is glorious in and of Himself, intrinsically, unchangingly,.

Immeasurably, eternally glorious.

We don't add an iota to it, never could we.

God is glorious.

Again, the biblical writers had a conscious bent to the supremacy of God's glory. It causes the psalmist to cry out, "'Who is like You, O Lord?'. "'Your glory is such that we rob Your glory "'just to bring attention to it.

"'Who are we to ascribe anything to Your name? "'So glorious are You.'. "'To even speak to it is to veil it. "'To even praise it is to, as it were,.

"'bring it to a low condescension.

"'Who is glorious in this way?'. "'God is glorious in this way.'". God makes all things unto Himself so that He would be glorified in all things. If you read, again, the logic of Paul, and we're gonna look at some passages from the beginning of 1 Corinthians, we probably don't have time to unpack 1 Corinthians 15, but there Paul is looking at God's prerogative.

To be all in all,.

That God in all things would be glorified. That's the very heartbeat of Paul's theology. We recognize in this way, in the whole logic of Romans, that men are without excuse for not giving glory to God.

This is what is owed to God, not because of what God will do for you, but because of who God is in and of Himself. Intrinsically, God has an exclusive right, an exclusive claim, a prerogative to glorify Himself.

That luminous weight, that heavy light, the fullness of His nature, His attributes, in and of themselves as He reveals them working out across time in creation. God's glory is the full weight of His infinite fullness.

How full, how weighty is God? Infinitely so. Therefore, His glory is an infinite glory. Trillions of years with all the expansive powers of a fully redeemed body will never allow you to somehow turn the very edge of where God's glory finally ends.

God's glory is as infinite as God is in Himself. God's glory is the fullness of His nature, His attributes, His perfections. And again, when we're thinking about His prerogative, He does not share this glory with another.

Now again, the third point is He does. He makes us partakers of His glory, but we begin here with His exclusive claim, His exclusive right to glorify Himself in all things. 1 Corinthians 1, you see your calling, Paul writes, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called.

God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty. He's chosen the base things of the world and the things which are despised, God has chosen.

You almost, Paul's like, no offense. He's talking about you.

He's talking about me.

The foolish, the base, the weak.

The easily neglected, the fickle. God has chosen to unload and fulfill all of His precious promises of redemption in and through them, why? So that no flesh will glory in His presence. So even the fact that we are made partakers does not detract from this first point.

God has a prerogative to glorify Himself. He chose us in the marvel of election, in the marvel of sovereign grace, He chose us so that no flesh could boast in His presence. That all knees, all tongues would confess, He alone is glorious.

And so it's written, he who glories, let him glory in the Lord. Now when we understand and we begin to place this over on the sort of pages of scripture, we realize that actually doxology is a wonderful way to understand the biblical story as a whole.

In other words, again, it's not just Christianese, it's not just a phrase that you can breeze past, it's not packaging. It contains, as I've said, the very heartbeat of the biblical story. Because you realize, essentially, the biblical story is about the intention of God to glorify Himself in creation.

And redemption. Redemption being made necessary by the fact that God's glory had been corrupted through the fall. When we say God's glory has been corrupted through the fall, we mean the result of sin, the result of mankind's fall into sin.

And what that meant for image bearers who were made to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, to now actually make idols and build a rival counterfeit kingdom. And to rob God the glory that belongs to Him and to Him alone.

So you realize the biblical story can be understood just with this one word, doxology. The glory that God intended, the glory that was corrupted through the fall, the glory that God restored. The glory of all that He has promised when He brings that full redemption over all of the earth as far as the curse is found.

And our favorite phrase here at GRBC, at least for the time being, when grace restores nature. So the second point is really this corruption of God's glory. Coming off the heels of God's desire to glorify Himself, His own right, His own desire to do so, we have to ask, well, what does that have to do with us?

What does it have to do with a bunch of people sitting in a room in Berry on a Sunday morning in April 2025? Well, at the most basic level, not just here, but of all times in all places, it has everything to do with us.

Again, the shorter catechism, a question one of the Westminster variety. For many of us, it's the only catechism question and answer that we know. What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

It's the highest goal of humanity. This is what we were made for. Philosophers have spent millennia at the deep question of the meaning of life. If you're an eight-year-old paying attention to me this morning, you have solved the riddle that have kept philosophers sleepless for millennia.

What is the meaning of life? To glorify God. That is the meaning of life. And to glorify God is to enjoy Him forever, as Piper famously has said. We're talking about the highest goal, the highest achievement, the highest attainment of human life.

The whole point of humanity, the image bearer, the heart of the matter, the constitution, the sine qua non, the why of existence is that God would be glorified by us, in us, and through us. When God made us in this way, He determined our character, our ambitions, our motives, our relationships, our interactions, our use of time and possessions, and every single aspect of our ordered lives would naturally, effortlessly, responsibly glorify Him.

The fall corrupted and distorted all of that. Now those very same things, rather than ascribing glory and bringing joy and enjoyment to humanity, have the very opposite effect. This is Paul, you know, don't take my word for it, take Paul's word for it.

The beginning of Romans. Although they knew God, they did not what? They did not glorify Him as God. You see, for Paul, understanding the story of the fall and redemption is understanding the issue of God's glory.

You begin with the chief end of man, and then you can understand what the fall meant for humanity, the sinful condition of the world around us. Sinners today, although they know God, repress that knowledge, they don't glorify Him.

That's the chief end of why they are. They became fools. They changed what? They changed the glory of God into the likeness and imaginations of corruptible men. So you see the corruption of God's glory as it was intended to be reflected in and through us.

Paul is saying that man now, corrupted by the fall, worships and serves the creature rather than the creator. In other words, man glorifies himself, glorifies the things that come from his hands, the things made in his own image, rather than recognizing he must glorify God as one who's made in the image of God.

Man without God worships himself. And in trying to glory in what was never meant to be glorified, fallen man inevitably finds the world to be empty. Idols never pay. The fig tree is always barren. That long, pleasurable, sweet taste of sin becomes a road rushed headlong toward destruction.

Of course, nothing in this life could ever satisfy those who were made to inhabit the very glory of God. It is a fool's errand. And wise are those who are open to actually see the foolishness of trying to find your everything in a world whose form is passing.

Because nothing less in the glory of God is our fullness. We were made for the glory of God. We were made to glorify him and enjoy him in his glory, enjoy him by glorifying him. What else in the world could satisfy us if we were made in this way?

If you were made with the capacity to glorify God, what in this life, what in this world can you pile up to somehow be a substitute for that? There's nothing, nothing. It's what Augustine found in his famous prayer, you made me for yourself, my heart is restless until I rest in you.

If I'm made to finally find my all, to finally find that everlasting satisfaction and joy and fullness of meaning in your glory and in your glory alone, then I'm restless and hopeless and helpless with anything less than that.

All have sinned, Paul says, Romans 3 .23. This is just how Paul unpacks the biblical story in terms of doxology. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Humanity falls short of what humanity was made to have.

Sinners fall perilously short of what they were made to possess forever. This is the story of the fall. C .S. Lewis, again, I mentioned him. He says, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us. And we're like ignorant children who want to go on making mud pies in a slum puddle because we can't imagine what it's like to take a vacation by the sea.

So that means in part, when I sin, I'm not just doing something that God arbitrarily doesn't want me to do. The librarian that slaps my wrist and says, I really don't like that for some strange reason that's unknowable to you.

No, when I sin, I'm missing the mark and falling short of, I'm leaning into the corruption of what I was always made to possess and enjoy. In other words, me as my own image bearer becomes more and more fragmented and distorted.

I'm settling for less. I'm perverting the good design that God desired for my life. I was made to enjoy His glory. When I give in to sin, I corrupt that glory. Therefore, I can never find joy that lasts.

Practically, and I'd encourage you to think of unbelievers in this way. Because practically, we have sayings like, hate the sin, love the sinner. There's a lot of debate about how to unpack and understand a phrase like that.

It would be a distraction to try to unpack it this morning. But I think, however we feel about that phrase, just understand the concept. There's something about the sin that we must fight against. We must resist.

Something that we hate, that we're filled with contempt and disgust when we see what sin is and we see what sin does. Then there's something very hopeful. It almost becomes a source of lament or mournfulness that we see the effects on that sinner.

And much like the Lord Jesus Himself, we are moved with compassion. We can recognize how God does not desire for sinners to perish in the way. We long for them to actually turn lest they perish. We recognize these things, but think about it in terms of doxology.

When you don't begin with identifying a person, a human being, as one who's an image bearer of God that was made to enjoy His glory, then you start to have a very warped perception of what their sin is and what their sin is doing.

In their life.

What I'm saying is we have to begin by looking at fellow human beings as those who are made in the very image of God.

For the glory of God.

So we don't just see a neighbor, and we don't just see a sinner. We actually, because we're viewing them in this way, we actually somehow simultaneously find more contempt, more disgust about their sin, and simultaneously have more compassion, more burning love for their soul.

When you put it in terms of God's glory, it's not picking one or the other. It's turning the dial up on both. When I see what sin has brought about in this image bearer's life, knowing why he was made, and what sin is corrupting, what he's in bondage with, it gives me more of a mournfulness and a longing for his soul, more of a compassion upon him, and more of a disgust for the sin that he loves that he will not relent.

Again, I mentioned this sermon from Lewis. He says, the load, the weight, the burden of my neighbor's glory. Image bearer is meant to reflect the glory of God. When my neighbor is corrupting that glory, glorifying himself for the things of his vain imagination, that becomes a burden to me.

He's not only robbing the glory of God, he's somehow destroying himself. That becomes, as Lewis says, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it. That's why Jesus was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

The Westboro Baptists picketing soldiers' funerals, they know nothing of this. They think they have this vigilant, courageous stand, whatever the cost, to be all about God. And they couldn't be further from him.