“THE OBEDIENCE THAT MAGNIFIES GOD”

James 4:17; 1 John 5:2-4

INTRODUCTION How many of you would like a life where what you know is what God wants you to know? A kind of life where what you see the way God wants you to see? Where what you will is what God wills? A kind of life where what you feel inside is what Jesus feels? Where what you want and desire is what Jesus desires? A kind of life where you are doing is what Jesus did and the Father is well pleased? A kind of life that is large, significant, impactful, and meaningful? Do you think that is possible? Well, I have good news and bad news for you this morning; First the bad news, if you are a Christian you must have and live this kind of life. Second, the good news, if you are a Christian you can have and live such a life! Jesus said he came that we might have life abundant (John 10:10). Because when life operates this way you are living life the way that God has created you, chosen you, and redeemed you for. The Bible is crystal clear: God has created and redeemed us more than anything else for his glory. Thus says the Lord, "Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory" (Isaiah 43:6-7). It is all for his glory. That is why the Bible gets down into the details of eating and drinking. "Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31). But what does it mean to glorify God? It may get a dangerous twist if we are not careful. "Glorify" is like the word "beautify." But beautify usually means "make something more beautiful than it is." Improve its beauty. That is emphatically not what we mean by glorify in relation to God. God cannot be made more glorious or more beautiful than he is. He cannot be improved. Glorify does not mean add more glory to God. It is more like the word magnify. The aim of God in creating the universe, creating you, choosing you, and redeeming you is to magnify His greatness and maximizing your happiness. I am talking about qualitatively and quantitatively. The word "magnify" is a tricky word because it can be used in two different senses as with a microscope or with a telescope that magnify in the opposite ways. A microscope magnifies by making little things look bigger than they really are so that you can see them. A telescope magnifies by making huge things that look little to the naked eye look more like they really are. So they are very different. A protozoa looks big under a microscope but is in reality very little. A star looks little to the naked eye yet is in reality very big. If you magnify God like a microscope you blaspheme. You cannot make God bigger than He is. He is always greater than we think, feel, or know Him to be. That is why our call is to see Him for who He really is, savor Him for His great worth, and show Him for His true greatness. We are not called to be microscopes, but telescopes. The whole duty of the Christian can be summed up in this: feel, think and act in a way that will make God look as great as He really is. Be a telescope for the world of the infinite starry wealth of the glory of God. Obedience is the primary way that we magnify the worth, wealth, and glory of God.

REVIEW We have been learning about God’s demand for obedience from His people. First, we saw from James 4:17, that biblical obedience is not merely ceasing from doing the wrong things, but also doing the right things. Then, last week we saw 7 reasons why obedience is important to God. One of the key points I made is that obedience involves not only that we are commanded to do right but we are also commanded to feel right! We are commanded for example: To delight or enjoy God (Psalm 37:4) ; to hope (Psalm 42:5); to serve the Lord with gladness" (Psalm 100:2); to "Rejoice in the Lord always" (Philippians. 4:4); to be tenderhearted (Ephesians 4:32); to be zealous and passionate (Romans 12:11); thankful (Colossians 3:15); broken and contrite ( Psalm 51:17); to have affection for my brothers ( Romans 12;10); to crave or desire (1 Peter 2;2); and most of all to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength ( Mark 12:30). We ended by looking at several wrong responses to obedience: No obedience, partial or selective obedience, doable obedience, hypocritical duty based external obedience, and self-effort obedience. None of which are obedience and all are displeasing to God. So God demands obedience but we saw that there are two major problems for us when it comes to obedience. Our disobedience is rooted in the total sinful depravity and corruption of our hearts: We have wrong desires and utter powerlessness. Left to ourselves, we neither desire to do what is right nor do we have the ability to do what is right. My flesh always goes after what it likes, yet apart from Christ it always likes the wrong things, therefore, it always does the wrong things. That is why for obedience to take place there has to be a change in my likes and desires. The only obedience that pleases God is the obedience that comes from the heart and yet the very problem in regards to obedience is the problem of my heart! So God demands our obedience and if we disobey He holds us responsible. So how do we obey when we cannot obey? How do we do what we ought to when we don’t want to? To get to the root, how do our "want to’s” change?

I. WHAT IS THE KIND OF OBEDIENCE THAT GOD DEMANDS AND THAT WE CAN DO? The Apostle John says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” (1 John 5:2-3a). Surprisingly, the apostle John adds something else about obedience that is both puzzling and wonderful. “And His commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). When the Apostle John says that loving God by commandment keeping is not burdensome, has that been your experience? So what does John mean when he makes such a statement? Listen to how Jesus Christ put it in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." Jesus says that there is something about Him that makes his demands upon us “light” and “easy”. When you look at combine what Jesus and John say you discover that in God’s Kingdom there is a kind of obedience that is not burdensome but joyful, easy, and light. Love is not just obeying but a kind of obeying that comes from a certain kind of heart that makes the obedience not burdensome, but easy and light. So in order to obey these commands there has to be something more than my desires, willpower, duty, and decisions. Otherwise God is making a burdensome and impossible demand upon me.

Let’s read John in reverse order and notice his logic. First, being born of God gives a power that conquers the world. This is given as the ground for the basis (for) for the statement that the commandments are not burdensome. Being born of God gives a power that conquers and changes our sinful and corrupt desires to want what we ought to want. As a result His commandments are not burdensome but are the desire and the delight of our heart. This is the love of God, not just obedience, but a kind of obedience out of love that makes it not burdensome but easy and light. This love Paul calls the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5:22. Jonathan Edwards calls it the fountain of all others. It’s my joy to please God. It is my pleasure and delight to please God. We give joyfully (2 Cor. 9:7). We do acts of mercy “with cheerfulness”. We serve gladly (Psalm 100:2). It becomes and is my true desire to want to please God. I prefer the pleasures of God over the fleeting pleasures of sin. I used the analogy last week of a monkey with his hand caught in a nut jar. It would be easy for him to slip his hand out of the jars opening except that he has his fist clinched around that nut. If he loves the nut more than he loves freedom from that jar, then getting his hand out of the jar will be very burdensome, even impossible (as Jesus said about the young man who’s fist was clenched around his wealth in Mark 10:27). But what could be easier than dropping a nut? The monkey will drop the nut if he desires freedom more than the nut. Which desire rules your heart? The desire for the fleeting short term shallow, soul diminishing, God dishonoring sinful pleasures which make command keeping burdensome? It’s hard to be honest if you want to lie. It’s hard to be pure if you want to lust. That is why command keeping is burdensome. It’s hard to forgive if you want to nurse a grudge and bitterness. It’s hard to give if you want to selfishly hoard. It’s hard to endure trials if you want an easy life. It is hard to live for the glory of God if you want to live for yourself. It’s hard to live for God’s great purposes if you are self absorbed, small minded, and desire what is trivial. If that is you then your life will be shrinking God’s glory and minimizing your happiness. Or do you desire God and the maximum happiness and pleasure found in trusting Him? The battle is about desiring what God desires and the freedom of faith more than the nut of sin. God is in the business of changing our desires and enabling us to do what will bring to us maximum pleasure and to Him magnifying glory.

II.GOD’S PROVISION FOR OUR OBEDIENCE Oh how much we need to learn from God that He is not like some sadistic heartless coach or trainer who likes to see recruits sweat and strain under impossible conditioning exercises. In fact, He pronounces a curse upon such heartless taskmasters: “Woe to you lawyers as well! For you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.” (Luke 11:46) God is not like that. With every command, He gives all of His precious promises and His entire commandment enabling omnipotent power and puts them at the service of His children. We read in 2 Chronicles 30:12 a wonderful description of this: “The hand of God was also on Judah to give them one heart to do what the king and the princes commanded by the word of the LORD.” What God commands, God will also give. True obedience begins in the heart where God graces the heart to give it a “want to” so that when the time for obedience comes to do what you “ought to” do you will “want to” do what you ought to do; therefore, you will do what you ought to do! This is amazing! This is non-burdensome true obedience. Throughout the scriptures God has promised that He would work in his people to bring about obedience. Here are some examples of those Old Testament promises: Deuteronomy 30:6, "The LORD your God will circumcise your heart . . . to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul." Ezekiel 11:19-20, "I will . . . put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them." (Psalm 40:8; Jeremiah 31:31-33; Ezekiel 36:26-27; Jeremiah 32:40,)" All of these promises were promises of enablement, the life of God operating within your soul. The New Covenant promise is that beneath every act of obedience is the enabling grace of God. Behind every “ought to” done in obedience, God graces our hearts with a “want to”. Augustine put it this way: "Give me the grace [O Lord] to do as you command, and command me to do what you will! . . . O holy God . . . when your commands are obeyed, it is from you that we receive the power to obey them."

God's plan for you in order to obey Him is nothing short of a new heart. It’s the only way obedience is desirable, possible, and doable. If you were a car, God would want control of your engine. If you were a computer, God would claim the software and the hard drive. If you were an airplane, he'd take his seat in the cockpit. But you are a person, so God wants to change your heart. Made to be like God-made to be truly good and holy so that we do what is truly good and holy. Do you see? He gives us command this morning to obey his word and promises us the grace to give us the desire and the ability to obey so that out of the love that God has put in our hearts the commandments are not burdensome. Or to put it another way, the struggle is as easy as dropping a nut. No wonder why the obedience of the believer who obeys God in faith through the power of His grace, brings God such great magnifying glory. “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify the Father in heaven.”(Matt 5:16) “Whoever speaks, is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God; whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies; so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 4:11) "Now the God of peace . . . equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen." (Hebrews 13:20-21) “To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 1:11-12) Believing that obedience is a gift from God is essential to our calling to live in obedience to the glory of God. It makes us humble. It turns what we do into acts of faith. In everything that we do we pray and trust in the grace of God for a gift.

 The call to deny ourselves, go into the nations, heal the sick, return good for evil, forgive seventy times seven, to endure one another, to obey His 500 commands, and to keep doing this for God’s glory with joy for fifty or sixty years is not possible to the natural human. It is only possible to do this supernaturally. Brothers and sisters true Christianity is supernatural or it is nothing! To be a Christian and to be the Church we must live on God and His God magnifying, joy maximizing grace! We must pray for the desire in our heart to “want to” do what we “ought to” do and God will do give it to you.  We can pray Psalm 119:36 “Incline my heart to your testimonies…” Psalm 90:14, "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days".  Hebrews 4;16 says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help (us to want what we ought to want so that we would do what we ought to do) in time of need.” “Let me see your glory…give me the love that the Father has for Jesus” (John 17:24, 26). So…

III. HOW IS GOD MAGNIFIED IN OUR OBEDIENCE? God is magnified in our obedience because God wills to conform all its inhabitants to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29), God is magnified in our obedience because it manifests God's omnipotence is causing us to walk in his statutes and observe all his ordinances (Ezekiel 36:27).God is magnified in our obedience because He has an awesome passion to remove the reproach of his name that comes from our transgression (Isaiah 48:9-11; Ezekiel 36:22-23). God is magnified in our obedience because he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him" (Ephesians 1:4). God is magnified in our obedience because Christ died for the church "that he might sanctify her ... and present the church to himself in glory without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing" (Ephesians 7:25-27; Titus 2:14; Hebrews 10:10). God is magnified in our obedience because it manifests in the prayers of His people leading to the kingdom of obedience because the sum of all prayer is "Hallowed be our name; your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:9-10).

CLOSING THOUGHTS Oh beloved, God wants you to have a life that maximizes your happiness and magnifies His glory. Is that the life you are pursuing? May God put in your heart a “want to” like He did in Augustine, who wrote, “How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose! . . . You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure." My heart's desire for you worship is that the worth of God really be magnified, that there be no self-deception, no joyless legalism, no contests of religious will power, but rather free, heartfelt, vital, authentic savoring of the living God and his Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. When that life is pursued and God is glorified you will be ever increasing in your joy. “If you know these things, you will be happy if you do them”. (John 13:17).AMEN!