Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True

Father we pray with the Apostle Paul that we as your children, we as believers would act and work in such a way that we bear witness to your glory and grace. In your son’s name we pray. Amen.

We are going to do a quick pop quiz. You didn’t know that you were gonna be examined. This is gonna be a fill in the blank quiz so follow along on your papers, it’s gonna be pretty easy, here’s a couple well known sayings out and about in the world. Let’s see how many you can get. We’ve only got three so it’s not too difficult.

Number one. Actions speak louder than… Well done. You can’t just talk the talk, you also have to …. Wow, this is an astute congregation. This one’s a little bit more obscure. Let’s see who can get it. Preach the Gospel at all times when necessary… Well done. We’ve got some missionary historians up in the house. These are non-inspired, non-canonical sayings that may or may not be popular to you, and the point of them is relatively straightforward, it’s trying to emphasize the fact that your actions matter. Paul’s prayer tonight from second Thessalonians chapter 1. We’re going to do verses 11 and 12 together. Paul’s prayer is slightly longer, slightly less pithy, but it has the same emphasis in many ways. Here’s the big idea of this prayer, it’s really short, but let me shorten it even more, it’s actually what I just prayed a second ago, Paul is praying that believers works would bear witness to the glory and the grace of God. It’s pretty straightforward. Believers works would bear witness to the glory and grace of God. Let’s see how Paul says it in his letter to the Thessalonians.

Starting in verse 11. If you would follow along. “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.” The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever. You may see the title of my sermon here is Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True. If you are a child and you’ve never had to get married and not heard this saying then you might not know why this is such an amazing title, and I kinda pigeonholed myself when I was thinking of it this week and these are gonna be my four points.

So four things that Paul draws attention to in this prayer. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something true. Four aspects of this prayer that Paul is highlighting. So, number one, this is maybe the shortest point of all of them, actually it’s definitely the shortest point of all of them. He references something that he just calls “His calling”, God’s calling. So something old. He prays that God would make you, these are all plural by the way so as he’s talking to the church in Thessalonica he is praying for them as a body, not just one particular individual, but for the church as it’s expressed in that city. So he says, “I pray always that God would make you all worthy of His calling.” This reference to calling is what theologians would call effectual calling. So effectual calling, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism is a work of God’s spirit whereby convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our eyes, enlightening our hearts, enabling us to see and receive and rest in the work of Christ, he effectually makes the proclamation of the Gospel impressed upon our hearts so that we receive and rest in Him by faith alone. So he says, this thing that God has already done, He has called you out of darkness and into light, I pray that God would make you worthy of that. So he just kinda throws it out there, he doesn’t spell it out specifically, but in other parts of the letter he references it. What he wants you to know even in this tiny little phrase that almost seems like a throwaway phrase, is that because of what Christ has already said is true about you, you now ought to live in a specific way. He prays that you would live worthy of that calling and you might be asking, but how, great question. That leads us to point two.

So he points out something old, number two, he points out something new. He says, he prays that you would be made worthy of His calling, God’s calling by God fulfilling every resolve for good and every work of faith by His power. So he says that in order to live worthy of your effectual calling you ought to exhibit new fruits of that calling. So he says something old is true about you and now something new ought to be true about you and I pray that it is true about you. He prays that we would prove daily that we are indeed children of God. I’m gonna use probably two football illustrations tonight so I’m sorry for those of you who don’t care about football, but the first one here. There is a thing that happens at the beginning of every football season, actually technically before every football season where a group of individuals sit around and they decide before any team has even seen the field, they decide who they think is the best team in the nation that year and they rank all the teams in this pre-season poll and they say, for the sake of the illustration, they say, the Georgia Bulldogs are going to be the best team in the nation this year. They are the pre-season number one, we expect them to win their conference, we expect them to go undefeated, we expect them to get into the playoffs, run the table, and win the National Championship and all God’s people said Amen.

So here’s what’s happening there. There’s a, it’s a broken system, but there’s a group of people that are saying we’re calling this, we are calling the fact that Georgia’s going to be the best team in the nation this year. But, in order for Georgia to follow through or any team to follow through and be considered worthy of that calling, they have to exhibit their worthiness day in, day out, week in, week out. They’ve gotta follow through. They actually have to win the games, they’ve gotta run the table, they can’t just rely on old rankings and old opinions, old things that were said to be true about them, but rather they must exhibit the fruit of that to be made worthy of that calling. Now Paul is praying that there would be fresh evidence of your regeneration, that God would strengthen you day in and day out to do the good works that you are called to do. I also love the way that ESP translated here, says that He would fulfill every resolve for good.

Just a quick plug, I’m actually not a big New Year’s resolution guy, but there is sort of Biblical warrant for resolving to do good things. Now obviously if it isn’t actually a good thing, if you wanna lose 10 pounds so that you look really good in a bathing suit, that’s not a resolve for good, but if you sincerely desire to grow closer in your communion with God and you know that the primary way to do that is to regularly partake in the ordinary means of grace, then that is a resolve for good that you ought to pray that God would fulfill. If you’re seeking to attend church more regularly, read your Bible more regularly, pray with your spouse, pray with your children, be more spirited in worship, that is a resolve for good that is a right thing to pray that the Lord would fulfill in your own life. Now what might that look like, a resolve for good and works of faith in this context. Well the context here, you can see it in verses 1 through 10, it’s a lot about persecution, suffering, and affliction. In fact, in verses 4 through 7, it uses one or more of those terms over six times. He keeps saying you’re afflicted, you’re afflicted, you’re suffering, you’re persecuted, you’re afflicted, you’re afflicted over and over again. Paul is highlighting this reality that believers often times are afflicted, we suffer, and in the midst of that Paul is praying that we would resolve to do good, that we would resolve to works of faith. So what might this context be suggesting or at least implying, are these works of faith, these good things that he would have believers do. Well based on what Paul says in other passages, namely Romans 12, it might look or sound something like this, “That believers would bless those who persecute you, that you would seek to do what is honorable in the site of all, that you would not be haughty but you would associate with the lowly, that so long as it depends on you, you would live peaceably with all people.” This is probably some of what Paul is praying for, the fruit of in the lives of the believers in Thessalonica.

Now there’s an obvious tension here and we don’t always point it out in scripture, but sometimes it’s right, we’re doing a series on the prayers of Paul, and you’ll see time and time again that often times what Paul is praying for God to do is to strengthen us to do something that in his prayer he is saying only God can do, that there is a tension in the reality of prayer that we are asking a sovereign God to do things in us and to strengthen us to do things that in that same prayer we are saying we don’t have the capacity to do it in and of ourselves so Lord would you do this in us. Now why is Paul so insistent on praying these things? He says, “To this end, for this reason we always pray for you.” Why is this such a big deal to Paul? Number one, what we just talked about, he sees that it is, he knows that it is, and he would like you to know that it is the proof of your calling. John Piper in the conference, the seminar that they did last week, he said this line that I thought was really, really helpful, he said “Perseverance is the evidence of our regeneration.” And so Paul here is praying that based on your effectual calling, you would live worthy that you would persevere even in the midst of affliction, doing good works, clinging to Christ as proof of your calling.

And number two, this will be the next portion of the sermon. Number two, he’s really insistent that this is the primary way that glory is distributed and exhibited out in the world. So that leads us to point number three. Something borrowed. We’ll get to the borrowed aspect first, but let’s look at just the concept of glory first here in verse 12. Look at Paul’s statement. So he says, “I’m praying these things always for you so that”, okay why is he praying it, “So that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” Let’s stop right there. “So that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you.” Now as good believers who understand that all things are meant to be done for the glory of God we can very easily and rightly say, yes and Amen to that. We feel comfortable praying this, we feel comfortable with this as a purpose statement. Absolutely everything that we do, everything that we say should be done for the glory of God, that he might be glorified in us.

Now a quick note on the word glory. This is going to become really significant for how we understand these phrases that Paul is using in verse 12. A note on the word glory. It might be one of the most popular well known used words in scripture and in the Christian life. Almost every prayer that we have says something about to God be the glory. We just sang it, we’re gonna sing All Glory Be the God after this. There’s so much about glory that it’s all throughout scripture and all throughout the Christian life and yet it might be one of the most difficult terms to define precisely. So here’s what a couple people say on glory. I’ll quite John Piper again who in one of his sermons says this, “Glorifying God means feeling and thinking and acting in ways that reflect his greatness, that make much of God, that give evidence of the supreme greatness of all his attributes and the all satisfying beauty of his manifold perfections.” It’s a very John Piper sentence, but it’s so good. Thinking, feeling, acting in ways that reflect His greatness that make much of him. Another theologian, John Frame, says this, “To glorify God is to obey Him and therefore to proclaim His greatness by our words and deeds.” Something is said to glorify God when it enhances his reputation and honor in the world. So glorifying God, broadly speaking, can and does include speech, action, thoughts, all of these things. It can include and does include confession and conduct. But too often, if you’re anything like me, you might assume that glorifying God is reserved exclusively to the category of speech or maybe prayer ascribing glory to him and naming his glory from afar. It’s almost like the five love languages, words of affirmation versus acts of service. You might assume that glorifying God robustly as a Christian is exclusively using those words of affirmation and yet scripture would have us know that to glorify God must include our conduct, acts of service for Him, towards Him, and in this context specifically it is primarily about conduct not confession. It is primarily about acting in such a way that our deeds display and enhance God’s reputation, His attributes, His honor. That’s what glorifying God means here according to Paul. So when he says, “Act in such a way, work out works of faith, and good deeds in order that the name of the Lord Jesus may be glorified in you”, we can rightly say yes and Amen to that. We are comforted, we’re excited about that, and yes, when you think about your own depravity, when you think about your own sin, isn’t this an incredibly scandalous thing to hear? When you think about the all perfect, all glorious God of the universe mingling with and interacting with and engaging with, and even being reflected by dirty, wretched, rebellious sinners being represented by a person like me, being represented by a person like any of you in this room it should scandalize us in some ways.

Think about what God had to do and has to do to make it so that anyone here can see anything beyond your own wretchedness. It’s a miracle, He has to transform you from a vessel destined for God’s wrath to a vessel destined for God’s mercy. He has to transform you from one who is inherently ugly and wretched and unrighteous into a vessel of glory filled with His righteousness, filled with His own goodness. It’s a miracle He has done this, He has made it so that we are, as Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, so that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next. These are astounding statements that we see all over in scripture. Calvin himself commenting on this little phrase he says, “This is a twofold miracle that God would have His wonderful goodness be conspicuous and shine forth in us who are covered with shame.” Now Calvin actually says who are covered with ignominy, but I had no idea what that word meant and I assume that none of you did either. It means covered with disgrace, shame, wretchedness. He says that’s one half of the miracle and the other half of the miracle says, and that He afterward eradiates us with His own glory.

So let’s look at the next part of verse 12. We covered “So that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” And here’s this astounding phrase that I have just be wracking, I have been wracking my brain trying to understand the mystery and the complexity and the beauty of this, “And you in Him.” You almost don’t know what to do about it, you don’t know what to make of it. We wanna do maybe one of two things. Number one, it’s actually pretty easy for us to say okay, okay, okay, this is talking about glorification. In systematic theological terms it’s talking about just exclusively a future state of perfection when we are released from this body of sin, when we are released from the strangleholds and the snares of this world flesh of the devil and we finally see the Lord face to face and everything about us that is wretched is undone and is perfected. That’s what he’s talking about, it’s just a future thing and yet that’s not the language, that’s not what he seems to be doing here in this text. He’s using parallel language, he’s saying your works actively today in this life glorify God and in a mysterious way as you glorify God you are glorified in Him. It’s an astounding thing.

So number one we might want to say, we might want to guard this and say, ah glorification is exclusively this future thing and yet we know that because of the inbreaking of the kingdom we do get to experience this right now, so that’s part of it. The second thing that we actually do need to be assured that we do is understand that no matter how scripture, how gloriously scripture talks about our own glory, the believers own glory, there is and always will be an ontological glory gap between God and humans. So only God is worthy of receiving praise, only God is worthy of receiving glory because He himself is glorious by nature. Him and all of His perfection make His glory unique. He stands alone, his glory he will not share with another. And yet, the Bible talks about not just in this one little phrase, but all over the place, talks about Christian’s glory now. John 17, Jesus himself prays that we would be glorified just as He has been glorified from the beginning of the earth.

Second Peter 1 talks about participating in the divine nature and inhabiting the glory of God that he’s poured out on us. Romans 8 that we read in the New Testament reading, talks about our glory, yes future glory, but also our glory now. Second Corinthians 3, Colossians 3, psalm 8 even just talking about the image of God. There is a sense in which Christians are glorified, not in the exact manner as Christ, obviously not in the same quantity or with the same exuberance as the glory of Christ, and obviously not in the same sense that we are worthy of the glory or that we merit the glory or that anything in us intrinsically deserves to be glorified, but in scripture we see that Christians can experience glory even now.

Imagine that you, I have a picture on my iPad that I took on a hike in Peru when I went to go visit my brother when he was doing missions over there, and it was a 14,000 foot glacier, well the lake that we hiked up to was at 14,000 feet and the glacier above us was probably at 18-19,000 feet. I can’t even explain, I really can’t explain how glorious that scenery was. Now I love to show people pictures and videos of that hike, of that scenery and here’s what most people say, they say, “That is stunning. I cannot even imagine how glorious it was to have been there in person, to have seen that in person.” Here’s what no one has said when I show them pictures of this amazing scenery, no one has said, “Shame on you for trying to give me a glimpse of that glory. How dare you use an image to try and show me something that is really glorious. You’re making it dirty, you’re making it nasty, I hate it now.” We know that in a broken sense and in a finite sense even these things that we have images of, they can proclaim and exhibit true glory, yet not fully.

But one more illustration that I think maybe even more accurately gets to the point is, here comes the other football illustration, I’m sorry, I’m sure all of you have seen some video or pictures or something of the moments right after the Super Bowl ends and the winners they start to rush the field and they’re celebrating and there’s confetti falling from the sky, and there’s music playing, and everyone’s freaking out, and they’re tackling each other, but because they’re happy this time not because they’re mad. They’re tackling each other and they are so excited and then the MVPs family runs out onto the field and his little boy or his little girl runs up to him and jumps in his arms and in that moment it is such a beautiful and right thing for that player who just worked so hard and he earned all this glory and he put in the effort and he secured the victory, in that moment the player doesn’t say, “Get out of here little boy, you didn’t do anything to deserve this.” No, he picks him up and he puts him on his shoulder and he takes the hat and the tee shirt and he puts it on his head and he picks up the confetti and he celebrates and he allows his child in that moment to truly experience the glory of that victory. And it doesn’t diminish his joy, it doesn’t diminish his glory to allow the people that he loves to embrace it, and to inhabit it, and to experience it themselves, but in fact it’s enhanced because he gets to share it with the ones that he loves. Now because he is a good father God allows you, brothers and sisters, believers, God allows you to both exhibit and experience the glory of your redemption and your renewal in Christ. This is a marvelous act of grace. Which leads us to point four. Something true.

It’s really important to see the last couple words in verse 11, “By his power.” And then the phrase that ends this passage, “According to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Something true that we must never lose sight of as believers is that all of this is because of God’s grace. The verbs of this prayer are all in reference to God’s activity. He prays that God would make us worthy of His calling. He prays that God would fulfill the desire for good and the works of faith. He prays that God’s name would be glorified in us and us in Him. Your calling, your faithful witness through your good works, your ability to be a vessel for God’s glory, your ability to partake of that same glory, your perseverance, everything from beginning to end that enables you to glorify in word and deed is already enabled by God’s own power and grace which he freely pours out on you thereby displaying and manifesting his glory and grace all the more. Herman Bavinck, theologian, says it well. He says this, “Grace is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the entire work of salvation. It is totally devoid of human merit. It is a work of God, it is of Him and through Him, and therefore also leads to Him and serves to glorify Him.” Let’s pray.

Father we thank you that in your mysterious providence and your overwhelming goodness you see fit to transform vessels of wrath who have nothing inherently beautiful or glorious about us into beings who are being transformed from one degree of glory to another. Would you help us to marvel at this, to cling to this, to celebrate it, yes Lord to speak about it, but even to inhabit it and to exhibit it in our lives by our conduct. We know that we can’t do this in our own power, but it is by your power according to the riches of your grace we cling to that. In your son’s name we pray. Amen.