This is the Introduction to the Sermon. You will receive the full manuscript sermon in Word format when you purchase.
Title: “For God’s Glory”
Series: Abundantly More
Introduction:
[1]In Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy, he tells about an experience he had that helped to define the glory of God for him:
While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man … took me out to see the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me ….
I realized that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being ….
We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their beauty and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys …. We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right ….
All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness. [end of illustration]
God is glorified through His creation – and that includes us! Our theme passage for this series says:
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. -- Ephesians 3:20–21 (ESV)
Let’s consider some ways we can glorify God together as a church:
[1] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (HarperOne, 1998), pp. 62-64