Week 2 - The Story of His Glory
2022-08-26
The Story of His Glory
Steven C. Hawthorne
- The name of God is categorized into His name-tag names, window name, and His fame name. These correspond to the reference, revelation, and reputation of God.
- The heart of missions flows in this amazing economy of glory: God reveals His glory to all nations in order to receive glory from all creation. (50)
- He never needs the worship gifts. But the gift brings the giver.🔥 (51)
- He loves people so vastly that He wills to exalt them to something better than greatness; He wants to bring them into an honored nearness to Him. (52)
- Abraham wasn’t a model missionary. He got kicked out Egypt and judged places he passed by (Genesis 20:11). However, the one thing he did right was establish ongoing public worship of God.
- God displayed His glory through the plagues in Egypt—to the point that Jethro, a Gentile who married into Moses’ family, had heard of Israel’s great exodus.
- Idolatry profanes God’s name. God’s objective for the conquest of Canaan was first to repay their wickedness and second, primarily, to remove everything that hindered pure worship to God alone. Reminds me of A.W. Tozer’s quote from Knowledge of the Holy:
Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character.
- Jesus knew that in God’s ways, volunteering is of little value. Anything of lasting power comes from an authentic “sending” of God. Compassion flows like rivers from one who is truly sent. Mission efforts which draw their motivation from compassionate response to human predicament will only go so far. Guilt-based appeals to care for hurting or lost people continue to soften our hearts a little. In practice, however, they weary and harden believers to a minimal token obedience. Costly and difficult work needs to be done. Such labor cannot be sustained by the fleeting, momentary zeal generated by appeals for desperate, perishing souls. God’s global purpose is an ancient affair, far more than an urgently need. Now more than ever believers need to be nurtured into a far-reaching jealousy for God's glory. (61)
- But our goal must not be reduced to approaching peoples merely to “impact” them as “targets.” We must aim beyond the gospel encounter. We must aim to see obedient worship result for God which may be distinctive to that particular people. (62)
- The doxological approach settles the false dichotomy drawn from the balancing between saving souls and healing communities. God gets glory from gospel declaration and kind deeds. The gospel’s impact on entire communities, transforming the lives within them, definitely glorifies God.
Let the Nation Be Glad!
John Piper
- Missions exists because worship doesn’t. (64)
- God obeys the greatest commandment since He delights in His own glory with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength.
- Missions is the overflow of our delight in God because missions is the overflow of God’s delight in being God. (65)
- God is completely unique from other gods. He delights in serving His people and showing His might by showing mercy. Other gods must be served and show their glory by enslaving others.
- A God who cannot be served is a God who can only be enjoyed. (66)
- I emphasize again that the motive of compassion and the motive of zeal for the glory of God are separate. God-centered compassion (which is the only kind that cares for people eternally) weeps over the misery of people who reject God’s glory and drink the cup of his wrath. But this weeping is not because of the loss of Christian joy. If that were true, unbelievers could blackmail the saints and hold their happiness hostage for eternity. No, the weeping of the saints at the loss of precious souls is, paradoxically, the weeping of joy in God. And the reason joy can weep is because it longs to be extended and expanded into the lives of others who are perishing. Therefore, the weeping of compassion is the weeping of joy impeded in the extension of itself to another. (69)
Beyond Duty ⭐
Tim Dearborn
- Mission ultimately not a human response to human need. The Church’s involvement in mission is its privileged participation in the actions of the triune God. (70)
- ==Lack of interest in mission is not fundamentally caused by an absence of compassion or commitment, nor by a lack of information or exhortation. And lack of interest in mission is not remedied by more shocking statistics, more gruesome stories or more emotionally manipulative commands to obedience. It is best remedied by intensifying people’s passion for Christ, so that the passions of his heart become the passions that propel our hearts.== (70)
- If that quote is all I got from this course, it was well worth it. Let I not be someone who saw unbelievers’ great need for missions; rather, I have a great need for Christ and a great Christ for my need.
- Christ, not mission itself, ought to have the first place in the Church’s life.
- Rather than proclaiming “the Church of God has a mission in the world”, the reality is “the God of mission has a Church in the world.” The Church doesn’t write God’s story; she gets caught up in the story God is already writing in the world.
- Oftentimes, efforts to provoke missions interest focuses primarily on the bad news (world poverty, unreached people groups, martyrdom) when the Christian faith is inherently based on good news.
- The rhetorical usage of statistics explaining the world’s needs evokes an exhausted response form genuine church members. Their compassion and kindess compels them to do more and be more, so they embark on missions out of a sense of duty. This cycle produces exhausted servants.
- something to chew on—Missions it not ultimately our response to great need. (71)
- from P.T. Forsyth: ==The weakness of much current mission work is that [we] betray the sense that what is yet to be done is greater than what [Christ] has already done. The world’s gravest need is less than Christ’s great victory.== (72)
- When we neglect God’s total confidence from His victory on the cross, we begin to see missions as a mandate that is left for us to complete by ourselves. No, mission is a privilege.