The Sweetest Good of the Good News

Scripture is from 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 verse 18 to chapter 4 verse 7. And we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. Therefore having this ministry by the heart but we have renounced disgraceful underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's Word. But by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord with ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake. For God who said let light shine out of darkness has shown in our hearts to give the light of the God of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. Let's pray. Father I pray now that my words would be faithful to this text and that through my opening of it the glory of Christ who is the image of God would shine forth. And I pray that you would speak light into every heart here and that we would see and savor and show the glory of Christ. And I pray that as we behold Christ in the Word of God we would be transformed from one degree of glory to the next. This comes from the Lord who is the Spirit and so we rely now on you Jesus and ask that your Spirit would come. In your name we pray. Amen. Thank you so much for having me and Noel here for the conference and for the privilege of standing in this pulpit. I don't take it for granted. The text answers four questions that are important to me and I believe should be important to you. Questions about who you are and how you might be of use to the people around you. So here are the questions we're going to try to answer from the text. Number one, what is the sweetest and the best and the highest and the final good of the gospel or of the good news which makes the gospel good and without which all the other goods of the gospel would not be good. So the highest, sweetest, best, final good of the gospel. What is it? Number two, what kept you from enjoying it? What hindered you from knowing it, receiving it, seeing it, savoring it and keeps the people around you who don't have it from having it. Three, what did God do to turn that around? What did God do to change that? How did you come to have the best and highest, sweetest good of the good news? And fourth, is there anything you can do that would help anybody have it? The sweetest, best, highest, final good of the gospel. Those are my four questions that I see answered in this text. So let's take them one at a time. Number one, what's the highest, sweetest, best, final good of the good news that makes all the other aspects of it good and without which all the other aspects would not be good. So here's a possible list. Is it justification by faith? You got to feel the weight of these because every one of these is infinitely valuable. And I'm going to say no, none of these is the answer. Is it justification by faith? Is it the forgiveness of sins? Is it the removal of the wrath of God? Is it redemption from guilt? Is it liberation from slavery to sin? Is it salvation from hell? Is it entrance into heaven? Is it eternal life? Is it deliverance from pain and sickness and depression and conflict? Is it the new heavens and the new earth? And my answer is no, it is none of those. None of those infinitely precious gifts is the sweetest, best, highest, final good of the gospel. But if you have the sweetest and best and highest, final good of the gospel, each of those are precious. So what is it? I think the answer is given in verses 4 and 6 and the depth of the answer, the real beauty of the answer is found when you lay verse 4 on top of verse 6 and notice the changes that verse 6 makes in verse 4 to illumine it. So verse 4, in their case, that is the case of the perishing, the lost, the unsaved, in their case, the God of this world, that's Satan, has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing, and here comes my answer, I believe the biblical answer, the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. Verse 6, we'll come back to verse 5 later. Verse 6, for God who said let light shine out of darkness has shown in our hearts to give, and here it comes again, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Now lay on top of each other the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God from verse 4 and the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ, lay those on each other and compare them. So both of them start with the light, so that's the same, and then comes in verse 4 of the gospel and in verse 6 of the knowledge. So gospel is replaced by the word knowledge, and then comes of the glory of Christ in verse 4 and of the glory of God in verse 6, and then verse 4, who is the image of God explaining Christ and in the face of Christ, Jesus Christ, explaining the glory of God. So here's what seems plain to me, the gospel, I'm at verse 4 now, the gospel is the gospel of the glory of Christ. So my answer is going to be the glory of Christ is the sweetest, highest, best, final good of the gospel, because it's called the gospel of the glory of Christ here, and as I contemplate, okay what's better than that? There's no answer. So that's the best. The gospel of the glory of Christ. Now notice there seems to be two glories, or are there? The glory of Christ, verse 4, the glory of God, verse 6. But notice, Paul, as soon as he says glory of Christ, qualifies with who is the image of God. So the glory of Christ, who is the image of God? So whose glory is it? Or verse 6, the gospel, the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ. So as soon as he says glory of Christ, remember Christ is the image of God. As soon as he says glory of God, remember it shines most brightly in the face of Christ. So there's one glory, not two glories. So the best, sweetest, highest, final good of the gospel is the glory of God in the face of Christ, or the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, shining forth in the gospel. When I say gospel there, I mean the facts, the narrative. We all know the gospel is Christ died for our sins, he was buried, he rose again from the dead, triumphant over hell and sin and Satan. If there's no glory of Christ, no glory of God, shining from that event into your heart, being savored, you don't have it. The highest good of the gospel that makes the facts glorious is glory. So my answer to the question, what's the highest, sweetest, best, final good, is the glory of God in the face of Christ. The glory of Christ, who is the image of God. Beauty is best, greatness is best, he is best, shining. So when you come back to that list, justification by faith is good news. Why? It enables us to stand accepted by that, loved by that, seeing that without being incinerated. That's why it's great. There's no other reason it is great. If there's another reason for you that it's great, it may not be yours. Or forgiveness of sins. Why is forgiveness so precious? Because it gets out of the way everything that's an obstacle between me and him, me and the glory, me and the fellowship, me and the beatific vision. It just gets it all out of the way, so I have him. Or why is eternal life great? Because this is eternal life, that they know you and him whom you have sent. That's what eternal life is, Jesus said. What about freedom from pain and sickness and conflict? Isn't that good? It is very good. It's hard for me to think about Jesus when I have a headache. It's hard for me to savor beauty with annoying cancer inside. That's going to be taken away. There won't be any obstacles anymore to seeing and savoring and knowing, cherishing him. So I conclude that of all that list of ten wonderful, glorious, infinitely valuable goods, none of them is good. Except insofar as they are a means of helping me know him and taste him, savor him, treasure him, enjoy him, be enveloped in him, transformed by him. Let me give you an illustration of where this came from. Why years ago I began to ask this question and speak it. Suppose I get up in the morning and trip over something I asked my wife Noelle to put away last night. This has never happened, I'm making this up. And I snap at her, still lying in bed, I say, put that away, it could have broken my neck. And I go to the kitchen, she goes to the kitchen later, and there's ice in the air. She's got her back to me at the sink, manifestly back to me. And I know what I need there, right? I need forgiveness. So, why do I want it? I want it. Why do I want it? Why would you want it? Here's some bad answers to that question. I hate going to work with a guilty conscience. Second bad answer, she might not fix supper if she doesn't forgive me. What's the right answer? Forgiveness is worthless in and of itself. Why do you want forgiveness? You want her back, not that kind of back, the other back. You want her to turn around, her face to soften, words of forgiveness to be spoken, and embrace in a clear, sweet, unhindered relationship. So, my question for you is, why do you want to be forgiven by God? Is it just escape from hell? Then you don't know Him. Is it just a clear conscience? You don't know Him. Forgiveness is precious for one reason, one ultimate, sweet, high, good reason. We get God back. Everything is out of the way. I have Him and no fear. That's sweet. Let me restate it for the kids, okay? Perk up, kids. This is for you, alright? When I was about 13, the same thing happened at another level. I can't remember how old I was. I just remember I was mad at Ronnie Jordan. Ronnie Jordan went on to become a policeman in Charlotte, North Carolina. I wouldn't do this today. I have never in my life hit anybody with my fist. I'm 67 years old. I've never hit anybody. I've seen a thousand people get hit on TV with their fist. They're all fake, because if you hit like they hit, you'd break a jaw. They never break a jaw. I've never done that, because I fear you would break a jaw. I don't want to break anybody's jaw, and besides, they'd hit me back. I was so mad. I can't even remember why. We were resting, and I was getting madder and madder. I finally decided, I'm going to squeeze him. So I squeezed him. Then I picked him up off his feet and dropped him. He's as big as I was. I never thought I could do that. Then I just stormed home. I went home. Now Ronnie Jordan is my friend. I like to play with Ronnie Jordan. Now what am I going to do? I've just wrecked it. I've ruined the relationship. It doesn't really matter what he was doing. I've just messed it up so terribly by this anger of mine. So you know what I need to do. I need to call him up, or walk down to his house and say, Ronnie, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Would you forgive me so we can play again? Let's go play. If he says yes, and we go play, it makes my day, right? So why is forgiveness precious? It's precious for Ronnie. It's precious for Noel. It's precious for God. I want God. That's why I want to be forgiven. I can't have God if I'm not forgiven. My sins have dug a huge chasm between me and him, and I need forgiveness because he's on the other side. I want him on this side. That's why. That's my answer to question number one. What's the highest, sweetest, best, final good of the good news that makes all the other goods good? It's God, shining forth in his glory, in the gospel, in the face of Christ, enjoyed and savored by my heart. Now, question number two. What stood in the way of your experience of that? Maybe still stands in the way. Don't know where you are. What stood in the way? What kept you from having that good? And the answer is in verse four. In their case, those who are lost, those who are perishing, who don't have this good, in their case, the God of this world, Satan, has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. So, here's what it means to be lost. To be lost is that you're presented with the gospel and it's really, really boring. You don't see glory. You don't see beauty. You don't see greatness. Paul talks about seeing foolishness and a stumbling block because the natural man cannot receive the things of the spirit, and this text says they're blind. So, my definition of myself once upon a time was that I was blind to divine glory. To be lost is to be blind to divine glory shining forth from the story of the gospel, shining forth in the face of the Christ portrayed in the gospels. To be blind to it, you can't see it. You see the facts, and the facts are not nearly as interesting as the ball game or the sex or the food or the sunshine or whatever is your superior treasure. He's not it because you're blind to his supreme glory. That's what it is to be lost. That's what kept you from coming to him. That's answer number two, and we should not scoff at people like that because we all were once that, and you would be that tomorrow morning without the sovereign keeping of God. So we should weep. We should weep if you meet somebody like that, and you all know somebody like that, and some of them are in your families, and nothing is more terrifying than to sit across the table at a pizza hut or anywhere else and pour out your heart commending Christ in his glory. He's beautiful. He's beautiful. Don't you see there's perfection here, how patient he is, how kind he is, how good he is, how loving he is, how just he is, how humble he is, how sacrificial he was to go to the cross and die for us. Don't you see that? Nothing. Nothing. That's terrifying. So we don't scoff. We weep. We plead. We pray. Question number three, what happened that enabled you to have the sweetest, best, highest good of the gospel? What happened? And the answer to that is in verse six. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. So you see what he's doing? He's saying the blindness is the problem. There's no light in his heart. There's no light of glory, no light of beauty. They're not seeing beauty. They're not seeing greatness. They're seeing stumbling block and foolishness and emptiness and boredom, and they're not seeing him for who he is as he's spoken to them in the gospel. They're not seeing it. What needs to happen? Creation needs to happen, right? And he's making the analogy between the beginning when there was no light, and God said, let there be light, and the heart where there's no light, and God saying, let there be light. That's the analogy here. You can all see that, right? For God who said, verse six, for God who said, once upon a time, let light shine out of darkness, has done it again and shone in our hearts. So how did you get saved? How did you come to see the good of the glory of God? And the answer is he lifted the veil. He took away the blindness. He spoke light into your life. He said, let there be light. So you might have been sitting at a Billy Graham conference, or you might have been sitting under your mother's tutelage at age four, or wherever, or whenever, and it meant nothing to you. It was boring to you. You just were going through motions with this religious thing, and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, it tasted good. It was precious. It was valuable. You had just stumbled upon a treasure hidden in a field, and you were looking for something to sell to buy that field, because this treasure is better than anything. I would sell anything to have this treasure. That's what it means to be saved, to discover the treasure, the glory of Christ in the gospel. So that's what happened to us. God spoke into our lives. It is a wonderful thing to have a testimony that you can't remember. I don't remember ever being an unbeliever, and my guess is many of you are in that category, and the children growing up in this church are many of them going to be in that category. So do they have a testimony? They have a massive testimony, and the massive testimony is, I was born a dead man, and a blind man, a woman, and this happened to me. Verse six happened to me. God said into my little heart, live, or see, and that's why I loved Jesus. That's what they need to be taught, and adults do too in many churches need to be taught how they got saved, because they don't know how they got saved. They haven't been taught, and therefore they're not giving God the glory that God ought to have. I have a youth minister at Bethlehem. I say I have. I'm not the pastor anymore. I've got to stop talking like that. We had, have, a youth minister at the church, and he spoke to our young people last week and last spring to help them come to terms with how to give testimony of their own experience. Now I think when you share the gospel, you're not sharing your experience, but your experience is a good thing to share now and then, and he said, every one of you has an amazing testimony, because resurrection from the dead is never boring. I just think that's awesome. Man, I'm just glad we have a youth minister like that. I just think it's awesome to say to every young person, you were dead, and you are alive, and you can say that with the authority not of your memory, but the Bible. That's what makes a testimony so powerful. It says so in verse 6, I was blind. Verse 4, I was dead like Lazarus. God said to me, Johnny, live at age 6. At least my mother tells me that's what happened. I have no idea. What I know is, I can see. I can taste. When I read the gospel, I am blown away by Jesus, and I know people just like me who could care less. Why is that? We love to hear stories, and here's one from an email. This is a Jewish person, a man in the Netherlands, who listened to a sermon I preached in a building program. So this is encouragement that great things happen in building programs. I don't know if you're going to get one, but it sounds like you're talking about it. So we're going to build an education building. It's going to cost $4 million. This is 2004. So I'm preaching 10 sermons on education for exaltation. That's the mantra we were into, to make this look like it counted. It did. It does. So I preached the sermon on education for exaltation. Build a building for the building of lives. Cool. We didn't make that one up. We borrowed that one. And here's a guy in the Netherlands who's Jewish, listening to a building program sermon. And here's what he wrote about set desiring God. God bless everyone who reads this. I can't believe it took two whole years to understand what is said in the audio sermon, Education for Exaltation in Christ. I am a Jew, a Christian Jew, as of two minutes ago. I believe that Jesus is God. Jesus is Elohim. He who has the Son has life. God used that audio sermon to crush the mind of this stubborn Jew. I must say that I had troubles with the Father's name being pronounced, as is in Jewish culture, it is not common to pronounce the Father's name since we don't know how it is pronounced. But I decided to go on and listen anyway. My eyes went open. That's the phrase I underlined when I read the sermon. My eyes went open. Jesus, just today, I was angry with God. I said to him, why are you letting me search without finding answers? Well, now I found it. Jesus is Elohim. I will make sure this message will get spread out here in Europe. I'm from the Netherlands. I can't believe it. Well, actually, I do believe it. Jesus is Elohim. Praise Jesus. Praise Elohim. Two years, nothing. And then, two minutes ago, my eyes went open. That's how it happens. Last question. Is there anything you can do to help that happen? For your friends, family, colleagues? I mean, some people might hear, okay, well, if God is that sovereign and it's like at the beginning, there was nobody there to help light come into being, God had to just do it so there doesn't need to be anybody here to let light come into being. So, God's going to do it. We just wait. You know, one of the differences I make between churches and theologians and friends is are they governed by their perceived logic or are they governed by the Bible? And you can smell it pretty quick. You can smell it pretty quick. We deal with a Bible person here or a logic chopper here who thinks he can weasel around and contradict Bible things because of logic. And I don't like that kind of person. I don't like to hang out with them either. So, the answer is given in verse 5. Between 4 and 6, something was done by a man, Paul and his sidekicks. What we proclaim is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord. That's what we're doing between verses 4 and 6. Between blindness and sight, this is what we're doing. We are proclaiming Jesus as Lord with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. So, you've got words about the lordship of Jesus coming out of his mouth and you've got a demeanor of servanthood getting under people to lift them up, not lord it over them. Those two things are very powerful. You leave either of them out, it weakens everything. So, you've got the truth of the Lord Jesus being spoken and you've got a person who's a servant ready to die for the person he's talking to. Now, that's powerful. So, my answer to the question, is there anything you can do that might be pleased to be used by God to bring about light in a dark, dead heart? The answer is yes, indeed there is. You can speak the lordship of Christ into their lives and you can be a servant to them. Now, I'm going to give you two passages of Scripture before we close to undergird that. These are amazing to me. These passages have been determinative. They've been governing of my understanding of how to be a human agent in a sovereign God's service. Doug and I, a lot of this weekend has been, it began especially with talk about mediatorial things. How do blessings get mediated to people from a sovereign God? What are the intervening means that God has? And that's huge for a church to understand and for you to understand. So, here's an answer to that. First text to show you is in Acts chapter 26, verses 17 and 18. The situation you know, Paul has just been knocked off his horse on the Damascus road. He's seeing glory and God has, Jesus has something to commission him to do. And what he says is mind boggling. Because now we know according to 2 Corinthians 4, 6 God must open the eyes of the blind. And here's what he says to Paul to go to do. Verse 18, I am sending you to open their eyes. I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light. That's what these texts have been about. And from the power of Satan who's blinding them to God. See both issues, light and Satan are in this text. Just like in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. Only here, Paul you go do it. You do what only I can do. Isn't that amazing? The Bible is a risky book. It's willing to say things that are really risky. I raise the dead, I open, I save. Now go do that. And of course the implication would be in my power, by my strength, totally dependent on me to do it through you. That's what he means. Right? But you cannot take away, go open their eyes. Go do that Paul. Go pray like that and preach like that and serve like that. And I'll use you, I will use you to do that for dead people and blind people. The only reason I read verse 7, which is in the next paragraph, is because right at this moment we should really feel like helpless clay pots, shouldn't we? Okay, God is sovereign and God gives light to the blind. I'm just a nothing here. No, this glory rides in clay pots or it doesn't ride. God has brought you into this process as a clay pot and he means for the clay pot to do the evangelism and to do the praying and he's going to use the clay pot to make sure he gets the power. But he will not do it without the clay pot. There's no point in you praying for somebody in a darkened tribe in Papua New Guinea who's never heard the gospel to believe on Jesus at that moment. You pray, get them the gospel. Send the gospel and get them ready to hear the gospel because when the gospel is met, life can happen because the Holy Spirit is poured out according to John 16 to glorify Jesus. If there's no Jesus in the head, no Jesus in the eyes, why would God open the eyes? There's no Jesus to believe in. You put him there and the Holy Spirit may open their eyes, which leads me to my second text, last one. This is 2 Timothy chapter 2 verses 24 to 26, one of the most important passages of scripture in all my ministry for how to understand my counseling, my preaching, my exorcisms. What do you do with the devil? How do you deal with the devil? I've had one very unmistakable exorcism in my experience where there was a demon possessed person in another personality, wild and dangerous, and God delivered her. It was very scary. I wouldn't want to be in too many of those. That's true and you should be ready for it with the word of God. You don't have to be an expert in this. You just need to know a lot of Bible because the devil hates the Bible. Ordinarily the devil is knocked out this way. So let's read these verses. 2 Timothy 2 24. The Lord's servant, important word because Paul said, I came as your servant, proclaiming as a precursor to the light going on in a person's life. The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome. He should be kind to everyone. So now you've got moral character traits that are important here for the ministry. Able to teach. Now you've got words coming out of the mouth. Back to moral traits. Patiently enduring evil. Correcting opponents with gentleness. So you can see that teaching is embedded in a kind of person. Not quarrelsome, kind, patient, gentle, teaching, teaching, teaching. So word and servanthood. Word and love. Now, next verse. God, in that context, that counseling session, that sermon, that witnessing at Pizza Hut, in that context, God may perhaps grant them repentance. Leading to a knowledge of the truth. Now that means spiritual truth. That means the kind of light that's going on in the heart in 2 Corinthians 4 6 because unbelievers have knowledge. Not this kind though because this kind has to have repentance to get it. Something needs to change inside for this knowledge to come in. This is the knowledge of honey, thinking Jonathan Edwards here. This is the knowledge of honey that's not, it's brown, it's sticky, must be honey. That's one kind of knowledge. That's honey. That's honey. Don't care what color. Doesn't matter if it's sticky. That's honey. That's another kind of knowledge. And that comes through repentance and through the miracle of the taste buds being cut free from their dead callous condition that enables the world to taste good and Jesus to taste bad. So you get changed according to this. Then comes the demonic part. Verse 26. That they may, and you can see by the logic here that the freedom from the devil is coming from light and truth and sovereign repentance giving. That they may escape from the snare of the devil having been captured by him to do his will. So in both Acts 26 17 and 18 and in 2 Timothy 2 24 to 26 you've got two issues. You've got a demonic issue, blinding, which ties into 2 Corinthians 4 4. And you've got a light issue, they're blind. And the solution in all those texts is twofold. God has to do it and he does it through people who are teaching and not quarrelsome and they're kind and they're patiently enduring evil and they're gentle. So my answer to my fourth and last question is you better believe there is something you can do to bring about this miracle. You don't do the miracle. I planted a polis, watered, God gave the growth. So he who plants and he who watered is nothing but only God who gives the growth. We'll get our reward for faithfully planting, faithfully watering, but no seed comes up without sowing and watering. So Christ's church, you are massively important in this city. Parents in your family, friends in a relationship. God does his miracle through you. He does his miracle in tandem with your word. God may grant repentance when you're teaching the gospel to your friend with a humble, servant like, ready to die for them spirit. So let me sum up what we've seen. Number one, the sweetest, highest, best, final, good of the good news is the glory of God in the face of Christ. Standing forth from the gospel story and the gospel events in the face of Jesus Christ, perceived, supernaturally, tasted, savored, embraced, treasured. This is the end of the line. It's not a means to anything. Worship is not a means to anything. It's the end of everything. Savoring Jesus with fullness of joy at God's right hand and pleasures forevermore is the end of the quest. You're not going anywhere else after this. Second, what kept you from enjoying that was that you were blind and the devil had a big hand in that. Third, the solution to that problem was that just like God created light at the beginning, he creates light in your heart. Sovereignly speaks, let there be light. You couldn't explain it any more than you can explain what's happened when you turn on a light switch. You can use language for it, electrons, what in the world is that? It's like a monster in a wire, Nate would say, I'm sure. And fourth, is there anything you can do that that miracle might attend you? That you might walk through this city and see miracles happen in people's lives of seeing? The answer is yes. You can speak the gospel and you can love people. So Father, I ask that you would make me more like that. I want to be a speaker, a faithful speaker in every situation I can. I want to love better in every situation I can. And I want this church to be like that more and more. So we ask you to come and even as we celebrate the Lord's table and eat and drink, would you minister to us power that we might be in all of our clay pottishness agents of the miracle of seeing the glory of God in the face of Christ. The charge is this, as we consider the privilege of beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, remember that the Hebrew word for glory and the Greek word for glory both have the connotation of weight. It's infinitely, eternally weighty. And one of the reasons we are reluctant to approach is we think that we are going to be crushed. But because Jesus Christ took the penalty for us and because his righteousness is given to us, it becomes possible for finite creatures to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and far from being crushed. Rather, we are lifted up. Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, it says, and he will lift you up. He lifts you up through the gospel. And even though the glory of God is extraordinarily infinitely weighty, it makes you rise. So here the benediction of the Lord, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.