Is the God-Centeredness of God Precious?
00:00:00.000 | Is God's God-centeredness precious to you?
00:00:08.540 | This question is one of those continental divides of all theological systems.
00:00:14.000 | How you answer it determines how your entire theology develops.
00:00:18.840 | Is God's God-centeredness precious to you?
00:00:23.200 | I pick up the conversation in Pastor John's trip this year to Northern Ireland.
00:00:28.560 | What makes it interesting here is the biographical context that gets pulled into the topic, something
00:00:33.660 | I have not heard about before.
00:00:36.600 | Here now is Pastor John talking about God's holiness in His glory.
00:00:40.360 | Here's where we pick up the conversation.
00:00:42.720 | I think in biblical terms generally, I can't make this work in every text, I would just
00:00:51.040 | say generally, the holiness of God, not to talk about the holiness of temple utensils
00:00:58.880 | or people, the holiness of God is generally His intrinsic beauty and greatness and worth.
00:01:10.640 | And when that goes on display, the Bible calls it His glory.
00:01:17.320 | They're not radically different realities.
00:01:21.720 | God is who He is, right?
00:01:23.720 | He's great.
00:01:24.720 | He's beautiful.
00:01:26.680 | He's infinitely valuable in Himself without any creation in existence.
00:01:32.400 | But when the heavens were created, they were telling the glory of the Lord.
00:01:40.400 | When the Son of God came, we saw His glory.
00:01:45.080 | God is the only Son from the Father.
00:01:48.560 | The glory of God is the intrinsic worth, the intrinsic beauty, the intrinsic greatness
00:01:59.760 | gone public for you to admire and worship and enjoy.
00:02:10.000 | Hebrews 1, 3 speaks of a radiance of the glory of God.
00:02:19.040 | Psalm 19 speaks of the heavens telling the glory of God as you see what God has put out
00:02:25.120 | there to communicate what cannot be seen.
00:02:29.400 | You're supposed to see the planets and the stars and the blue sky and the cloud formations
00:02:35.960 | and the entire natural world and know this is a great God.
00:02:42.640 | This is a glorious God.
00:02:44.160 | This is a beautiful God.
00:02:46.080 | This is a true, valuable, infinitely glorious, beautiful being.
00:02:55.040 | Why do I choose these three words?
00:02:56.960 | Greatness and beauty and value.
00:03:03.080 | I'm not just throwing those words out there.
00:03:07.600 | Are those the three words that I should use?
00:03:12.040 | By greatness I am referring to His scope, His extent, His grandeur.
00:03:18.200 | I mean, there's no geography, no dimensions in God, but we use language, the Bible uses
00:03:25.400 | language of greatness.
00:03:29.240 | So that's what that is.
00:03:30.760 | Scope, extent, grandeur.
00:03:32.960 | Beauty, the perfections of all His attributes and the infinite harmony of their interrelationships.
00:03:45.080 | View to list all the attributes of God that are revealed in the Bible.
00:03:49.480 | They would all be beautiful, but the totality of the beauty of the glory would be not only
00:03:56.240 | each one's individual beauty, but the harmony of them all as they get shown in history and
00:04:05.400 | in salvation and judgment.
00:04:08.520 | And third, His worth, because the Bible reveals Him as a treasure, more precious, more valuable,
00:04:17.120 | more to be desired than anything or anyone in the universe.
00:04:20.560 | And that may be the one that you need to hear most.
00:04:23.040 | I certainly need to hear it most, because your heart is going after treasures every
00:04:28.680 | day.
00:04:30.040 | Every day your heart is latching onto something satisfying, something precious, something
00:04:34.080 | you want.
00:04:35.840 | And the Bible's message is He's the most wantable reality in the world.
00:04:40.280 | If you don't feel it, you're wrong.
00:04:42.840 | You're broken.
00:04:45.600 | So those three things, greatness, beauty, and worth, this is the glory of God on display.
00:04:59.120 | Now my experience is, I'm 73 years old, I've been talking about my love for the glory of
00:05:05.160 | God for about 50 years.
00:05:07.840 | My experience is that the greatness and beauty and worth of God, the glory of God, they don't
00:05:15.560 | become dominant in a heart, in a mind.
00:05:20.280 | They don't become a dominant reality.
00:05:22.560 | They didn't in my life, until I saw how dominant the glory of God was to God.
00:05:31.880 | I grew up in a home, my dad probably mentioned the term glory of God in almost every prayer
00:05:38.880 | he prayed in my presence, and that was every night that he was home from his evangelistic
00:05:43.960 | work.
00:05:44.960 | He pronounced it glory, glory.
00:05:47.760 | He divided the syllables after O, glory, not glory.
00:05:53.520 | I love it, because it's just stuck there.
00:05:56.480 | Do everything for the glory of God.
00:06:00.360 | And my mother would sign off on letters to me in college and graduate school, whatever
00:06:06.440 | you do, in word or deed, do everything to the glory of God.
00:06:12.320 | But they never, to my, I'm sure this is not true, but you know, the memories of kids are
00:06:18.080 | distorted.
00:06:20.120 | I don't remember them ever saying, "God lives for the glory of God.
00:06:27.280 | God exists for the glory of God.
00:06:29.720 | God does everything he does for his glory."
00:06:33.800 | And when that began to come home to me, and I had to wrestle with whether I liked a God
00:06:38.640 | like that, my life shifted.
00:06:43.240 | I was newly married.
00:06:44.240 | We were just in seminary, and I remember saying, "Noel, you know, one of the biggest evidences
00:06:49.520 | that your world is being turned upside down by the centrality of God in the mind of God
00:06:57.880 | is your prayers."
00:07:00.160 | I mean, why is the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, "Hallowed be your name."
00:07:06.280 | Like, take yourself seriously.
00:07:09.640 | That's not for him.
00:07:10.640 | That's for us.
00:07:12.360 | We got to get in sync with that because Jesus said, "That's one.
00:07:16.640 | That's number one.
00:07:18.240 | Kingdom next.
00:07:19.240 | Will next."
00:07:20.240 | Or do I get backwards?
00:07:21.240 | "Hallowed be thy name.
00:07:22.240 | Thy kingdom come.
00:07:23.240 | Thy will be done."
00:07:25.240 | First three petitions, "God, God, God, do it for yourself."
00:07:28.920 | Powerful.
00:07:29.920 | God's God-centeredness is so important.
00:07:34.880 | That was a clip from John Piper's trip in July to Belfast, Northern Ireland.
00:07:40.400 | If you want a more developed theology of the God-centeredness of God, be sure to check
00:07:45.060 | out, well, really just about any book by John Piper, to be honest, but especially you'll
00:07:49.520 | find this theme concentrated in his book on missions, "Let the Nations Be Glad."
00:07:55.560 | That book title, "Let the Nations Be Glad."
00:07:57.880 | You'll find the God-centeredness of God to be especially thick in that book.
00:08:01.720 | Thank you for listening along.
00:08:03.880 | Be sure to subscribe to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app or even in YouTube.
00:08:09.000 | For our archive of episodes or to send in a question of your own, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:08:16.880 | Speaking of God's God-centeredness, how should that reality shape what TV shows and movies
00:08:22.760 | we bench?
00:08:23.760 | That's the question on the table Friday.
00:08:26.360 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:08:27.360 | We'll see you then.
00:08:28.280 | [End of Audio]
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