Life.Church with Craig Groeschel - The Last Four, Part 3: Psalm 115:1

Episode Date: July 23, 2016

In this series, Pastor Craig Groeschel unpacks four of his favorite verses—powerful passages from Psalms and Proverbs. Great for small groups or a teaching session, these short videos let you take a closer look at these well-known verses. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's great to have you with us. We're in week three of something I'm calling the last four, and let me explain it to you. If you are new with us, thank you for joining us. You're either watching this on YouTube or watching it at our website, Life.comchurch. Perhaps you're watching it on a Lifechurch app, or maybe you're on iTunes and you can subscribe there. A lot of people wonder, can you get the weekend messages in a different format? And the answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes. We want to provide this to you in every context that we can, and I would love for you to share it with your friends. Normally right now you'd be hearing the message that we taught at the weekend on Life Church. We're not doing that right now because we're doing a weekend message series called At the Movies.

We use this as a tool to reach out to people that normally wouldn't come to church. And what I do during the month of July is I actually teach the Bible and then I use clips from movies to illustrate. the teaching from Scripture. And because we use the movie clips, we're not allowed to archive those for copyright reasons, but you actually can catch it live during the week at Church Online. And so there's somewhere around 80 or so live services, and you can go to Life.Church and just look at the top and see if it's live right now or find out when the next one is streaming live.

And it's really a cool tool to use to invite people that normally wouldn't come to church. Let me tell you what's coming up at church. A couple weeks from now, we're actually baptizing, and this is amazing. Some of you may need to go public with your faith and celebrate what God has done through baptism, the washing away of your sins and new life in Christ. And on that weekend in August, I'm starting a brand new message series. I've actually already outlined the whole message series. I could not be more excited about it.

We're calling it, I choose. Basically, our lives are the result of the decisions. that we make. And what we're going to do is intentionally make four decisions. We're going to choose purpose over popularity. We're going to choose discipline over regret. We're going to choose surrender over control. And we're going to choose the important over the urgent. I'm super excited about what God's word says about these themes. And we're going to start that in August. What I want to do today is I'm going to show you a little bit about how I meditate. on the Bible. And we're calling this the last four. Our church created the U-Version Bible app.

And in the Bible app, I highly encourage you to use it. It's just an amazing tool. And you can, you know, take notes in it, and you can highlight verses. So I go through, and I read through the Bible every year. I've done this for, I don't know, probably 17, 18 years or so. And I'll highlight verses that speak to me. So every year I actually read it in a different translation, a different version so that I'll see it a new way. And then I'll literally there are verses that I may have read through in the NIV, then I read through in the new living translation, and it speaks to me in a different way.

So I'll highlight it. Well, what I'm doing in these small teachings is I'm going through and looking at the last four verses that I highlighted, and I'm just going to talk about them to you. And I'll take a little bit about what my mind does as I pray through these. Psalm 115 verse 1 is one of the last four verses that I highlighted. There's a little bit of debate over who wrote Psalm 115. We're not quite sure, but this is what the psalmist said.

The psalmist said, not to us, Lord, not to us. But to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness. Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness. Immediately when I read that, my mind just kind of went crazy to, I cannot believe how self-absorbed our society has become. I love social media, but my goodness gracious, it's like social media is creating a generation of self-promoters. It's really intriguing to me to think about how narcissistic we're becoming to say, don't you want to see everything about my life? Selfie, selfie, selfie, Snapchat, 43 times a day. Here's what's going on. It's almost like we're all creating our own

reality show that we think the world wants to see. And while there's so many upsides of this, because I can see what's going on in your life, you get a sneak peek into kind of the behind the scenes of my life and we can stay up to date and such. At the same time, I feel like even in my own life, I have to fight harder against the narcissistic tendencies, the self-centeredness, the hey, look at me, the what do you think about me, the me, me, me, me, me, me. And the trajectory of our society is focusing everything towards self, when the reality is God wants us to be Christ-centered and not self-centered. So that's immediately where my mind goes.

As the psalmist does this, he says, not to us, Lord, not to us. The first thing I notice is he said it twice. And a lot of times there's some people that teach about, you know, anytime a writer says something twice in the Bible, there's and obviously the psalmist is trying to bring real emphasis on this not to us not to us the fact that it's in there two times back to back it's like you know it's almost like exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point not to us lord not to us when you pause and think about the word lord it's this is a really big deal that when we think about jesus or god as lord um jesus

is not some, just some savior who's there to give his life for us and then we do whatever we want. He is, he is Savior and he is the Lord of all, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the king of glory, the great high priest. And so when we really see him not just as the one who keeps us out of hell but sends us to heaven, but as the Lord of Host, it really changes our demeanor, our posture. We recognize that we are not the main character of the Bible, that Jesus is the main character of the Bible, that the world doesn't revolve around us, that we're here to bring God glory and all that we do, not to us, Lord, not to us. Then it goes on in the psalma says, but to your name be the glory. And as I'm reading this, I just, I pause,

and I think about to your name. And in my mind, I would go through the different names of God. If you've been a Christian for a long time, you might know some of the names of God, Jehovah Jira, Jehovah Raffi, Jehovah Nisi, and you know who he is. he is. You might even just think about some of the images of who Jesus is. He is the Lamb of God. He is the lion of Judah. He's the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. He is the gate. He is the door. He is the living water. He is the true vine. And when you just go through who he is, it puts us in our place and it reminds us that the Lord is not here to serve us. We're here to serve the Lord. Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name, to the name that is above every name,

hallowed be thy name, the Lord God, the one true God, hallowed be your name. To your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness, be the glory. I looked up the word glory because that's, that word, it's got like power and meaning, but what does it mean? What is glory? And this is just what I found. It means praise, honor, a distinction extended by common consent. That's interesting. Distinction extended by common consent. In other words, when you see God in his purest glory, the whole world is going to bow down. Every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess that he's Lord of all. He's going to be a common agreement. Oh, yeah, right, he's God and we're not. Okay. It means renowned, worshipful praise, honor and Thanksgiving, something that secures praise.

or renown. I like that, something that secures praise or renown. Great beauty and splendor, magnificence, something marked by beauty or resplendence, okay, this glory, not to us, but to your name, be the glory. May you be glorified. Now, if I can rabbit trail for a little bit, Amy and I have had some debates about, you know, when do you give God glory and when does a person actually say thank you for a compliment. For example, if you sang a great song, and I said, hey, you did a great job. You know, if you painted a great painting, I said, then that's amazing. A lot of people say, to God be the glory, and I think that's really, really good. But then I'd say, but you actually did the work. It's kind of like the old preacher's story about some guy that bought a really

run-down field. It was a total mess, completely overgrown. And for five years, he cut away the brush, he planted, he made it beautiful. Another guy came up and said, wow, look at the beautiful piece of land, God gave it to you. And the guy who did all the work said, you should have seen it when God had it to himself. Okay, right? In other words, you know, sometimes we actually contribute something. Are we allowed to say thank you for that? This is just my opinion. But if someone says, hey, you painted a good painting, you got a beautiful field, you did, you know, you did a good job on that song, I would say, say thank you because a person is complimenting you. It's the polite thing to do. It's not rude. It's not taking the credit. But in your mind, you have to say, God gave me the ability. God gave me breath. God gave me the talent. And so you may just be polite, but at the same time, you have to recognize we cannot do anything apart from the presence of God. We don't have any ability without him. He gave us everything. We need air to breathe. God is a source of all. And so in our hearts, we have to remember, he gets the glory, he gets the glory, he gets to glory, he gets to glory. Not to us, Lord.

Not to us, but to your name, be the glory. Because of what? And then the psalmist says two things, because of your love and because of your faithfulness. And this is really cool. Because of your love. Because of who God is, because he is love. Because while we were still sinning, Christ died for us. That's how much he loved us.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, Jesus, that whosoever believes that him should not perish but have eternal life because of his love and because of his faith. He is always faithful. Even when we are faithless, he is faithful. Because of who he is, because of what he's done, may he get the glory in every way. So, when you do something cool, when you post a selfie, when you live in this narcissistic world, let the Holy Spirit remind you, not to us, not to us, Lord. May we never get the glory. When you do something incredible and help someone, when you make a difference, when you teach an amazing life-proof lesson, when you preach a sermon and everybody likes it, when you build something, create something, and you do something and say, I did great, just remember, you didn't do anything without God. He is the Lord of all. May we reflect praise and give it to him. May we reflect any glory and give it to him. May we reflect anything good and give it to him because he is worthy of our praise. So Father, today, I pray that we would be encouraged, empowered, equipped to reflect any light that comes to us to you. May we glorify you in everything that we do. God, may we work in such a way that we show our love for you. May we serve people, show love, and honor the gifts that you've given us.

Whenever someone may be compliments us, God, we'll say thank you. But in our hearts and in our worship in all that we do, we want you to be glorified. God, may we exist to bring you praise and honor in everything that we do. Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.