Soli Deo Gloria – To God be the glory!
I Corinthians 1:30-31
Pastor Jefferson M. Williams
Chenoa Baptist Church
03-11-19
Jesus is King
Last week, rapper, producer and designer Kanye West released his new album titled “Jesus is King.” Now remember, Kanye used to call himself “Yesus,” but in the last year he’s gone through what he describes as a Christian conversion. He has been meeting weekly with a pastor and holding religious services in different cities attended by thousands of people.
Jimmy Kimmel asked him if he knew he considered himself a Christian artist. Kanye replied: “I consider myself a Christian in everything.”
He said, “I’ve told you what fame did for me. I’ve told you what alcohol did for me. I have told you many things. But now I want to live to tell what Jesus did for me!”
This week, as an announcement for the new project, the entire front of a building in Time Square featured the headline “Jesus is King! ”
I saw a photo on Twitter of a church comment card in which a mother wrote, “My teenage son was with me at church today because of Kanye’s new album. I am a happy mom.”
Regardless of whether you believe his salvation is authentic, I am sure of one thing. God will get the glory for all this.
And that brings us to our fifth and final Sola for this series, Foundations of our Faith, Soli Deo Gloria – to God alone be the Glory.
a brief review
This week, 502 years ago, Martin nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg and sparked what we now call the Protestant Reformation. For the last five weeks, we have been studying the five Solas of the Protestant Reformation. What do we believe makes us clearly Protestant?
We discovered that all three main branches of Christianity, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant, affirm that grace, faith, and Christ are important to our salvation. But what separates is that little Latin word, “Sola”.
We believe that the equation for salvation is Jesus + Nothing = Everything!
As Protestants, we believe that the inspired, sufficient, inerrant, infallible, immutable, and invincible Bible alone (Sola Scriptura) is our foundation and standard for Christian faith and practice, not councils or popes.
It is in the Bible that we learn that we are justified before God, saved by grace alone (sola gratis) – the unmerited favor of God alone. Why did he save us? Simply because he chose it out of love.
We are saved by faith alone (sola fide), not by any good deed we have done. Even our faith is a gift. We do not have faith in faith but in a Person – Jesus Christ.
We are saved by Christ alone. Christ is our only hope, our only Savior, (not Mary or the saints), our only mediator between God and man. From Ephesians we learned that we were dead in our sins, defiant in our souls, and doomed to hell. His death on the cross, in my place, to pay the penalty for my sins, opens the way back to a relationship with God. His perfect life allowed him to make the great change: our sins for his righteousness.
“God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. ” (2P 5:21)
He was the last prophet, the last high priest, and the King of kings and Lord of lords.
But why? Why did you do this? Why did he save us by grace, through faith, in Christ alone?
So that He alone would receive the glory!
See, if we believe that we can somehow contribute to our salvation, it robs God of his glory.
Jonathan Edwards put it bluntly: “The only thing we contribute to our salvation is the sin that made it necessary.”
Think of these five as structure. Sola Scriptura is the foundation. Sola Gratia, Sola Fide and Solus Christus are the pillars. And Soli Deo Gloria is what covers the entire building.
David Vandrunen has written that Soli Deo Gloria is the glue that holds the other four together.
We are going to spend our time together today in 1 Corinthians 1:30-31.
Prayer
That’s heavy man
Before I continue there, let me try to define the glory of God. The Greek word is “doxa,” and that’s where our term doxology comes from that we sang a few minutes ago.
It carries the idea of being heavy or weighty, having importance, meaning and dignity.
I love the line in Back to the Future when Marty says, “Wow, that’s heavy, doctor,” and Doc Brown replies, “Here’s that heavy word again.” Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull?”
Or perhaps you have felt that someone treated you “lightly”, did not give you due respect or attention.
Someone who tries to relive a moment in their life when it was important is said to be trying to relive their “glory days”.
Giving glory to God means giving him the centrality that he deserves. It is attributing weight to Him in our lives.
In Isaiah 6, when Isaiah stands before God, the angels sing:
“Holy, holy, holy is the “Lord” 160; Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” (Isaiah 6:3)
John Piper defines the glory of God as the “outward radiance of intrinsic worth and beauty and the greatest of its manifold perfections.”
God is like a diamond that never runs out of facets. Every one of his attributes is glorious.
Creation shouts His glory:
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the heavens declare his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1)
By the way, I have heard people wonder why God made all these universes and galaxies bigger but only put man on a small planet. The answer: So we could get a glimpse of how absolutely amazing God is!
John Calvin said that the entire universe is “the theater of the glory of God.”
He created us for his glory:
I will say to the north: ‘Give them to me!’ and to the south, “Don’t stop them.” Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth, all those who bear my name, those I created for my glory, those I formed and created. (Isaiah 43:6)
Human beings have dignity because God gives us dignity – each and every person has dignity before God.
And His glory, ultimately, is beyond all knowledge. The Apostle Paul, one of the greatest minds of his generation, wrote that even this mystery should move our hearts to praise:
“O depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable his judgments, and how inscrutable his ways!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his adviser?” “Who has ever given to God, so that God will repay them? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.” (Romans 11:36)
A church that needs some humility
The Corinthian church was a mess. There were fights, gossip, and sexual immorality that were tolerated and even celebrated.
Pablo wrote them two letters to try to solve their problems. We will be looking at verse 30-31 of chapter one of his first letter to Corinth:
“It is for his sake that you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us the wisdom of God, that is, our righteousness, “holiness” and redemption.” Therefore, as it is written: “He who boasts, let him boast in the Lord.” (I Cor 1:30-31)
God chose you for his glory
“It is through Him that you are in Christ Jesus…”
God is sovereign in his calling of us. It is for God the Father. This could be translated “by his work.” Denotes origin or source. Our salvation is completely initiated by God to display his glory.
Chapter one is full of evidence of this call:
Verse 1: “Paul was called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus.”
Verse 2: “The church at Corinth was called to be holy with all who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Verse 9: “God is faithful, by whom you were called into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Verses 26-28: “For look at your calling brothers, not many were wise by worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many of you were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even what is not, to undo what is, so that no human being may glory in the presence of the Lord.
I love these verses because they give us so much hope. Steven Lawson says that God chose the leftovers to make into the first round of the lottery!
What was the basis for God choosing Israel?
The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasure, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. Not because you are more than any other people, the Lord put his love in you and chose you, because you were the least of all peoples, but because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath he made to your fathers. (Deuteronomy 7:6–8)
Peter wrote these words to New Testament believers:
“You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own” (1 Peter 2:9).
He chose you because you were worthy of being chosen. He didn’t choose you because he saw some potential in you. You were dead, defiant and doomed.
Some people imagine a rowboat. You grab an oar and God grabs an oar. But the dead can’t grab anything. If we are to be saved, it has to be started from outside of us.
God chose us, before the foundation of the world, simply out of love and grace:
“Because he chose us, in him before the creation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, according to his good pleasure and will — to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” (Ephesians 1:4-6)
As we learned in Jonah, “Salvation is of the Lord.” (Jonah 2:9).
B. God is glorified through Jesus on the cross
“…which has been made us by God wisdom, that is, our justice, holiness and redemption”. (v.30)
Paul writes that Jesus “has become wisdom for us from God.”
In Corinthians, the wisdom of God is manifested most beautifully in the cross of Christ.
“For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God to save believers through the folly of preaching. For the Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, and a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness for the Gentiles, but those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (I Cor 1:21-25)
This is the Gospel: God gets the glory through the salvation of sinners through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross.
Paul then uses three words to describe…