Weight of Glory 06/06/2021

Opening

The Gloryscope

Sadly, many of us live this way every day even though God has designed the world in which we live to be a gloryscope. What does this term mean? Just as a telescope points you to the stars and magnifies them for you to see their illuminating glory, so the earth focuses our eyes on God and magnifies his glory, so it can produce wonder in us.

Every beautiful and amazing sight, sound, color, texture, taste, and touch of the created world has gloryscopic intention built into it. Every powerful and mighty thing, animate and inanimate, is gloryscopic by design. No created beauty is an end in itself. No physical wonder exists in isolation. Nothing that is, just is. Everything exists for a grand, vertical purpose. The glories of the physical world don’t reflect God’s glory by happen chance.

No, God specifically and carefully designed the physical world to reflect him, that is, to be the gloryscope that our poorly seeing eyes so desperately need. As the technician grinds the lens of the telescope for the best clarity and magnification possible, so God fashioned his world in such a way that it would bring his glory into view. God created every fish, stone, flower, bird, cloud, tree, monkey, and leaf to be gloryscopic because our loving Creator knows how fundamentally blind we can be.

Taken from Awe: Why it Matters to Everything We Think, Say, and Do by Paul David Tripp, © 2015, pp.65-66. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.

Today, let us think of this passage through the eyes of a gloryscope.

I would like to focus that Gloryscope on believers in Jesus Christ.

The Glory Being Revealed To Us

In Romans 8:18, Paul describes the future of those who persevere in the faith: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” in The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkein provides a stirring image of this glory at the death of the great king Aragorn (that is, after his life-long struggle against the evil forces in Middle Earth, and his own personal demons):

Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.

The idea here is that the same thing will happen to those who place their faith in Jesus Christ. We are, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “no mere mortals.”

Stuart Strachan Jr. , Source material from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The things that we see are temporal. 1. One thing I have realized this past year is that places and things that I thought would be long lasting are not. Last year I began looking at what happened as a result of the Spanish Flu and confirmed that it was a watershed causing change and turmoil 100 years ago. People in 1917 didn’t just experience the deaths of loved ones but also the loss of businesses, there were riots and many changes to society.

The same is true for 2020 and this year. We are grieving the deaths of loved ones, businesses and societal changes.

2 .The world we live in is temporary. Change will happen.

But I also look at what is unseen. How Jesus Christ is being revealed.

The things that we can't see are eternal. 1. The things that we can't see are in the spiritual realm. Two worlds co-existing side by side, passing through each other, one unconscious of the existence of the other. 2. God has gifted some to see through the veil into the unseen world, and they have written about what they saw and experienced. a. The prophet Elisha could see the spiritual realm. b. He asked God to let his servant see. c. The spiritual realm is in a different.

d. The unseen world is not subject to time and space as we know it e. The Prophets were able to see in the unseen world could write of things that would happen 2000 years later as though they had already taken place. 3. We, by faith, see the unseen world, the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen. D. How is it that the servants of God have been able to endure so much persecution and hardship?

The Bible speaks of Moses, that servant of God who refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked at the end results. He forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king for he endured as seeing the invisible. 2. That is the key to endurance, seeing the invisible, look beyond our problems to the eternal God who is our help and strength, and to the eternal rewards of living a godly life.

Conclusion

The Eternal Weight of Glory: The Shadow of Our Future Selves

In this short excerpt, the scholar and Anglican clergyman N.T. Wright discusses the famous “weight of glory” passage in 2 Cornthians 4:17: For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. (NIV):

“The weight of glory” thus seems to refer to a superabundant expression of that humanness: God’s people will be more truly themselves. We sometimes speak of somebody who has been very sick being “just a shadow of their former self.” But what Paul seems to be saying here is that human beings are just a shadow of their future selves. God has prepared a larger selfhood which is the true fulfillment of all that they are at the moment, which will be the final, glorious enriching of it.

Everything that humans, at their deepest and best moments, are reaching out for, struggling after, longing for, and dreaming of, will finally be fulfilled. Not necessarily, of course, in the ways we would currently imagine; rather, in the ways that God knows will be truly fulfilling for us.

So the “eternal weight of glory” of which Paul is speaking is the new life, patterned on the risen humanity of Jesus, expressing not only what we are at the moment truly as God’s children, as his creation. Bat what we will be when God has completed what he has begun in the Spirit. As Paul says in Philippians 1:6, what God has begun in Christians he will bring to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.

Taken from N.T. Wright, Reflecting the Glory: Meditations for Living Christ’s Life in the World, Augsburg Press, 1998, p.39.

What kind of Gloryscope are you?

There are two kinds of magnifying: microscope magnifying and telescope magnifying. The one makes a small thing look bigger than it is. The other makes a big thing begin to look as big as it really is.

When David says, “I will magnify God with thanksgiving,” …

We are not called to be microscopes but Gloryscopes. We magnify Jesus Christ through our daily living.

We need to share how God is working in our lives to magnify his glory. We are clay pots but in our weakness the glory of God is being revealed.