Crazy Big Stuff

God is the gospel. It gets said a bunch around our church. It gets explained just as often. However, it is what we cling to – the gospel – and therefore we must press ourselves in every aspect of our lives to have a deep and abiding understanding and passion for this God who is our good news.

For as the illustrations of the life preserver was used yesterday so too is it applicable today (& not just cause it’s cloudy and drippy as I’m writing this). All our life and all our eternity depend on this one thing, this one bit of news. Yet we so often forget our hope, our joy and our God.

It’s a pivotal idea, really, to think that God saved us for Himself, not for our own good, but for Himself. Scripture is replete with passages speaking about God’s redemption of man for his own glory. (A personal favorite is Isaiah 48:9-11.) But more often than not we catch ourselves spiraling downward into thoughts of personal greatness because we’ve been redeemed (maybe that’s just me – but I doubt it.)

But here it remains; Jesus came to glorify the Father in the redemption of sinners (in other words, God came to glorify God in the redemption of sinners). We’re not the center of the universe, we’re not the center of the world, we’re not even the center of God’s plan, God is the center of God’s plan. He must be.

If God is to be God then He must worship that which is most worthy of worship, namely himself; if however He turns to worship man then He is not God and therefore cannot be good and thus must not be worshiped by us.

God is the gospel. He has wooed us and saved us to himself, for himself and by himself. So it is before this God we worship one who is so far above and beyond our thoughts so as to make us feel tiny in comparison, yet who stooped to love us and give us the greatest possible thing in all of creation (and out of creation), He gave us himself.