Proper Shame and Proper Glory in Christ

[00:00:01] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our father and our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:15] In our gospel reading this morning, Peter gets rebuked for rebuking Jesus, which I guess isn't very surprising, is it? You rebuke Jesus, you get rebuked. That's maybe pretty obvious. [00:00:35] It makes me think of transfiguration. Sunday, remember, they're up on the mountain, Peter and James and John. And the cloud covers the mountain. And God says, this is my beloved son. Listen to him. [00:00:49] Okay, well, here they are. Peter's not really listening. [00:00:53] He has his own ideas, and they're clouding his ability to hear because that's just kind of a reality, right? We have to be ready to give up our own ideas in order to receive a new one. And Jesus, his ideas are not what they're expecting. [00:01:12] He began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed. And after three days, rise again. And he said this plainly, little too plainly. Peter was feeling what he's actually saying. He's going to be rejected and killed. Oh, that can't be right. [00:01:40] But turning and seeing his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, get behind me, Satan. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. [00:01:55] So Peter, Peter's thoughts are the reverse of what they should be. [00:02:03] Not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. You have an earthly mindset, Jesus is saying, not a heavenly mindset. [00:02:17] So then Jesus explains what a heavenly mindset looks like. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. [00:02:31] For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it. [00:02:41] So I want to take us back to last week's Old Testament reading for a second here. It's related to this week we have Abraham and Sarah being told, you'll be a father of many nations. You'll become many nations. [00:02:55] There's glory to come for Abraham and Sarah this week, right? Well, last week, Abraham and his son Isaac were ascending the mountain for the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham going up the mountain to give up everything that God has promised. God promises, I'll make you a father of many nations. Then he says, sacrifice your son Isaac, through whom you'll be a father of many nations. [00:03:26] Give up your future, the extension of you. Give up you everything that you have. [00:03:35] Whoever would save his life will lose it. [00:03:39] Isaac is challenged to lose his life, for God's sake. [00:03:45] You see that? So even in taking up our cross and following him, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. That's what it is. It's just losing your life, losing yourself, giving up yourself. But think about what that means. To take up your cross and follow Jesus. [00:04:05] Jesus ascended the mountain, Mount Calvary, Golgotha, the place of the skull. He ascended the mountain with his cross, just like Isaac last week was ascending the mountain, carrying the wood for the sacrifice. [00:04:24] Right? [00:04:26] It's the same image. [00:04:32] So let's picture ourselves through lent, following Jesus, bearing our cross. Right? Let us deny ourself and take up our cross and follow him. [00:04:48] Let's make our ascent up the mountain. Now, remember the mountain? Just two weeks ago on Transfiguration Sunday, we talked a lot about the mountain, but part of it was that the mountain was about glory. If you want to glorify something, if you want to exalt it, then you lift it up, right? If we were all going to look at the same thing, we'd have to put it high up in this room so that we can all see it. That's part of the reason the cross is lifted up. It's so that we can all see it. Because if it were on the floor here, I could see it. A couple of other people could see it. You don't put something low in order to, well, all look to it, right? If you all want to look to it, you got to set it up high. So that's part of what's going on with the mountain. Again, I mentioned Long's peak. I don't know what direction that is. [00:05:38] I mentioned Long's peak. [00:05:43] All kinds of people can see long's peak from a long way away, right? [00:05:49] So something that's high and lifted up is exalted, it's glorified. [00:05:55] Jesus is there on the mountain, on the mount of Transfiguration, because he's the one who's worth looking to. [00:06:03] Okay. And then that's our gradual for the season of Lent. [00:06:11] Oh, come, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, just like we're talking about, right? Looking to one thing. Oh, come, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. You hear that? [00:06:35] There's a movement from suffering, enduring the cross, despising the shame from suffering and shame to glory. And it ends with him up high. He's seated at the right hand of God, right hand of the throne of God. [00:06:50] Jesus made his ascent, and we take up our cross, are denying ourselves, and follow him. [00:06:58] I want to highlight another aspect of the mountain that is that Abraham. Let's go with Abraham. He ascends the mountain, and Isaac ascend the mountain with this self denial. Right. They're going up to lose everything. [00:07:19] If you think about it, that's kind of the shape of a mountain. Okay, so at the bottom of a mountain, you have a lot of mass. You could say a lot of things. But once you get to the top of the mountain, there's just one thing left you could say the one thing that's necessary. [00:07:34] Christ. [00:07:35] So, in a sense, this is the same thing as what we do with our minds by focusing on something. [00:07:44] I'm looking around the room, and I see a lot of you, but I can just narrow in and see one of you. [00:07:51] Carol. [00:07:53] So that's what our attention does. You pay attention to one thing, and you've narrowed your focus. That's the shape of a mountain. So as Abraham and Isaac go up the mountain, you could see it as partly that all the things that they might have idolized, like family time together, or the glorious future that will come through Isaac and his descendants, or Abraham's love for his son, or whatever it is, like all those other things that can become idols, go away. And then they reach the peak and God says, don't harm Isaac. And then says, since I see that you have not withheld even your only son from me, nothing has become an idol for you. Not even your only know there's glory to come. And then, of course, the ram is sacrificed, and it's a picture of Christ in the future and all of that. Okay, but you could see the same thing. Jesus is ascending Mount Calvary to be crucified, to give up everything. [00:09:06] And then when he reaches the highest point, he is giving it all up. Right? He became nothing, took the form of a servant, humbled himself, became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. [00:09:26] So all idols are stripped away at the top of the mountain. [00:09:33] This is our path as well. Oh, come, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of. [00:09:49] Remember transfiguration Sunday? We were praying in the prayer of the day that we would essentially receive the crown with Jesus, that we would reign with him in glory. That's the goal. There's glory to come. [00:10:07] All right, so back to our gospel reading. [00:10:10] Jesus at the end says, there's glory to come. He says, whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him, will the son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels? [00:10:26] So when he comes in the glory of his father, glory is coming. [00:10:31] It's coming. And that's what Paul referred to, too, when he said, through Christ, we've obtained access by faith into his grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. [00:10:51] Glory is coming at the end. [00:10:53] The mountaintop is coming. You could say, and if you think of C. S. Lewis in the last battle at the end, they're always going higher up. [00:11:03] They're going up to glory. The mountaintop is coming. The danger now, before then, is that some other little hilltop would appear to us like glory. [00:11:20] That's the key. Peter, he's got a different idea. That idea is not going to end with the mountain and with glory. When Jesus comes in the glory of his father, Peter's thinking, no, you can't suffer. You deserve glory. Okay, so what? So they set Jesus up on a throne, and he doesn't accomplish the will of his father. And it's like Jesus knows how this is going to work. [00:11:50] Peter doesn't know. [00:11:52] Peter's got his own ideas, and unless he follows Christ, he's not going to get there. [00:12:00] So Christ rebukes him. And let's just take a moment to say, lord, rebuke me, show me when I'm wrong, because Peter has no idea. [00:12:10] He thinks he's doing great. Okay, that's just a little warning for all of us. It's like, just because it seems like I'm doing well or I'm setting my mind on the things of God doesn't necessarily mean I am. So we take God's criticism and correction as a gift, setting us on the right course. [00:12:38] Peter sure appreciated it. [00:12:45] So Peter's setting up his own little hill, his own little ascent to glory for Christ. [00:12:53] It's not going to work. [00:12:58] You could say that's what Adam and Eve did as well. [00:13:02] The serpent tempts them, and Eve sees glory in the fruit that it's good for eating, and it's worthy of my attention. When she saw that it was good for eating and desired to be desired for gaining wisdom and such. Right? When she noticed it. Here's her little mountain of attention. And this fruit has risen to the top, and God's word has sunk to the bottom as just one of those other things that she could pay attention to. [00:13:33] That's the danger that we would get distracted by some other hill. But here's the deal. [00:13:41] In the end, all those little mountains, they're all going to be nothing compared to the mountain, right? You could even think in terms of the flood, where the flood covers all the highest mountains. [00:13:55] It's like all the earthly wickedness that was going on. [00:14:02] It's all done. There's no glory that's not covered by the water. [00:14:08] Of course, when Jesus returns, the world's not going to be destroyed by water. God said that, right? I'll never flood the earth again like this, right? But it is going to be destroyed by fire. [00:14:25] Jesus said, for whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him, will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in glory, in the glory of his father with the holy angels? When we're ashamed of something, we want to cover it up. You're ashamed of what you've done. You want to hide it so that nobody sees it. Essentially, you're trying to erase it. You're trying to make it nothing. [00:14:53] So what we do with our garbage, we don't make a monument of it. Most people don't make a monument of it. [00:15:01] Nowadays, that's the kind of thing that would happen. But we don't display our trash. [00:15:09] We bury it. We make it go away. [00:15:15] You could think of Isaiah, God saying, all men are like grass, right? The grass withers, the flowers fade. But the word of the Lord stands forever. The grass and the flowers, they go in the compost pile. [00:15:38] But the word of the Lord, it stands forever. So this is what's at stake. This is what's at stake. [00:15:48] We want to be in Christ, the enduring word. [00:15:53] We want to be in Christ who will come again in glory. [00:15:58] And Christ says, whoever's ashamed of me, whoever wants to kind of hide away my word or say, christ, rebuke him, like Peter did say, surely not. This isn't the way. Whoever's ashamed of my words wants to hide my words of him, will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in glory, he'll be hidden. He'll be like the grass or the flowers that fade. [00:16:32] Lord, help us. Right. [00:16:35] So this is why then we have this focus through lent. It's that we wouldn't get distracted by some other object of attention that we wouldn't lift up for ourselves, idols that we wouldn't worship on the high places, that we would look to Christ, the object worthy of our attention. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame. [00:17:07] It's tough to look to Christ. [00:17:11] It's tough to have him as the object of our attention, because it's not fun, because Christ's path is a path of suffering. It doesn't look glorious at all. In fact, the cross at the pinnacle there, the cross at the end of his ascent, is a sign of shame. That's the whole point of the cross, is to say, don't be like that person, like you don't want to be that. [00:17:40] So it's not very intuitive that we would look to the cross, that we would look to Christ crucified, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame. [00:17:55] You know, that's part of the point, because our original sin was about seeking glory somewhere else, seeking glory in intuitive ways. Like, hey, I could get wise if I eat this fruit, or I could be happy if I do such and such. That goes against God's will, or if I just had that. Or God can't be so serious when he says, I shouldn't do this, because I can see that at the end of that road I'm going to benefit. [00:18:27] So God gives us a way that's not intuitive. Look to Christ dying on the cross. Look to Christ, who is nothing. Ascend the mountain and give up your life. [00:18:39] Ascend the mountain and give up the hope of the future that God has promised to you, in Abraham's case. [00:18:48] So that's then why the ascent is made by faith, because faith doesn't see the outcome of what's hoped for. Otherwise, it's not hope. Paul says, right. Faith is following Christ in the absence of understanding, not seeing the glory of the outcome, but trusting someone else to glorify us, humbling ourselves under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time we may be exalted, not in any way that we've thought up, not by obtaining anything for ourselves, by our own work or anything like that, but looking to Christ in order to be conformed to him. He sets the pattern, enduring the cross, despising the shame, to be seated at the right hand of the throne of God. [00:19:39] Ken and I, this morning, we're talking about missionaries, we're talking about Michael and Naomi Ursland in Ghana and then some others in Alaska and such. [00:19:51] Their life isn't very glorious. I mean, we can say, wow, cool, you're going to another country. But they give up family and probably wealth. You probably don't get wealthy as a missionary. [00:20:07] All kinds of things. You kind of just become. Become nothing for the sake of the people you serve. You can look to the martyrs giving up everything for the sake of the faith, right? And for the sake of those, that they're a testimony to the martyrs in giving up their lives. It's like their other option is to choose some kind of earthly glory. And then everybody looks to them and know, I guess the faith isn't real. I guess Christ isn't real. But the alternative for them is to embrace suffering, to become nothing, being conformed to Christ in his sufferings, to follow Christ's pattern, trusting that in spite of what it looks like, that there's glory to come in Christ, that just being in Christ is enough, that being in Christ is everything. [00:21:07] This is how we can rejoice in our sufferings. And I saw it a little bit this morning. I just, like 15 minutes before the service, and I had a bunch of conversations with a bunch of you. [00:21:22] Everyone was talking about a certain kind of suffering that's going on, but rejoicing in hope, seeing how it works for their good. [00:21:32] All kinds of suffering we experience. [00:21:35] It doesn't have to be martyrdom. It can be aging. [00:21:42] Why is there suffering? [00:21:45] Why does God allow suffering? Why did he introduce suffering by saying, one day you're going to die? [00:21:54] Who can make straight what God has made crooked? As ecclesiastes says, well, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character. Character produces hope. Hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. May we embrace whatever God gives to us, even suffering, throughout this Lenten season, and see him as purifying our faith, his power being made perfect in weakness, through whatever comes in the pattern of Jesus in his name, amen.