The Glory of God 4 - Seeing The Glory of God

[00:00:00] Exodus, chapter 33, verse 17. [00:00:14] And the Lord said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken, for thou hast found favour in my sight, and I know thee thy name. [00:00:30] And he said, show me, I pray thee, thy glory. [00:00:38] And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and will proclaim the name of Jehovah before thee. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. [00:00:57] And he said, thou canst not see my face, for man shall not see me and live. [00:01:06] And the Lord said, behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon the rock, and it shall come to pass while my glory passeth bye, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock and will cover thee with my hand until I have passed by, and I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back, but my face shall not be seen. [00:01:42] Well, now, I can't go back over all that we have said about glory. In some of the times that we have spoken about it, we have rambled, I think, through the whole Bible on the matter of glory. But when I went away, there was this portion that I had really wanted to come back to finally and say something about, about, you remember, we started at this point. It was Moses cry, show me thy glory. Which started us off on our ramble, as it were, through the word of God. [00:02:30] You will remember that I said Moses had no mean experience when he asked the Lord to show him his glory. And indeed, on at least two occasions, the glory of the Lord had appeared. [00:02:45] And yet we find that after all that Moses had seen of the Lord, hearing his voice, seeing the fire of his presence, watching the finger of God carving out of the rock the Ten Commandments, the giving of the law, the showing of the tabernacle, which was only a pattern of heavenly things, all that happened before that in Egypt, the Passover, the exodus, the provision of the manna, the provision of water from the rock, the provision of quails, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, all these things that happened to Moses when he saw again and again and again these great acts of God, these great works of God, yet at the end of it all, his one great cry torn out from the heart of the man, is this simple question. [00:03:45] Show me thy glory, I pray. [00:03:52] Now, Moses must obviously have seen so much, so much as I've said to you before, if we had seen this, we should start to write our memoirs. It's not only common now with generals and others, but evidently amongst christians too, to write their sort of memoirs. [00:04:14] And I'm sure that if we had a third of the experience of Moses, we would have been writing all kinds of books when I was crossing the Red Sea, or I was there at the passover or things like that, you know, this kind of thing. I mean, the fact of the matter is, we would be so contented, as I said before, we would probably found a Bible school on half of Moses experience. [00:04:50] We would be doing all kinds of things. Yet here is a man with an insatiable appetite. [00:04:57] All that has come before has only done one thing. It has brought him to the heart of the matter. [00:05:05] And my dear friend, doesn't this really in actual fact, make you and I feel small? [00:05:14] Doesn't it make us feel finite? When sometimes we would give anything to have just a few of the experiences of Moses, and feel that if we. That would be everything and all, only to find that the spiritual man, the spiritual man can never be satisfied with things, not even the works of God. [00:05:46] The spiritual man. The hallmark of spiritual character is an insatiable thirst for God himself. [00:05:58] So that when we see the works of God and we see the acts of God, and we are lost in the greatness of God and what he does, somehow or other, it falls away after a while. [00:06:12] Its just as it were, the outskirts of his ways, the edges of his ways, and we know it. [00:06:20] Some, of course, are content to stay there. [00:06:24] And that is the hallmark of the flesh in the things of God. [00:06:31] But when there is a spiritual character, even small, then there is. The hallmark of that character is a thirst for God himself. And God plays a on that hunger and thirst, he develops it. He will give that man or that woman anything, anything, in order to develop that capacity for himself, to bring a man to the place that Moses came to, where the cry of his heart was, show me thy glory. [00:07:06] Now, you know that Moses had already just said, I suppose the most spiritual thing, or at least had asked the most spiritual thing a person could ask for. He had said to the Lord, now, Lord, grant thy presence. God, isn't that enough? And the Lord had said, and he said, if thy presence go not with us, we won't go. Now, that's a spiritual thing that shows spiritual character, not to run before the Lord, not to be able to be carried along by our own momentum, even spiritually. [00:07:42] Oh, it's so easy once the ball starts rolling, just to be carried forward by it. [00:07:48] But Moses said, no, if thy presence doesn't go with us, we don't go. And the Lord said to him, my presence shall go with thee. The thought is, my presence shall go and shall carry you in you with you. [00:08:09] And I will give you rest. Now, it was after, immediately after this that Moses isn't satisfied even with that. And he says, one more thing, Lord. [00:08:20] Show me thy glory. [00:08:23] Show me thy glory. An insatiable appetite for the Lord himself. [00:08:30] Well, now, we've said quite a lot about that in the past times. [00:08:36] We've been called unto his eternal glory in Christ Jesus. We have seen, I believe, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ has shone into our hearts. Now, the fact of the matter, the thing I'd like to ask is this, is that light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ shone into your heart? And into my heart, is it producing an insatiable hunger on thirst for himself for that glory? [00:09:19] You see, it's all a question of how we look at things. [00:09:23] We can look at the christian life as drudgery. [00:09:27] We can look at the christian life as just so much discipline. Oh, we say, I'm having the corners knocked off. [00:09:34] And it's sort of, well, there's no joy in it. [00:09:40] There's no glory in it. I'm just having the corners knocked off. And we can get the attitude. Well, the christian life is an endless routine, really. It's all tough going. It's all conflict, and it's all this and that and the other. And we forget the word that we have in two corinthians and chapter four where we read this for our verse 16, wherefore we faint not. But though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day. [00:10:20] Now, the fact about outward man decaying, we must make this point that whether we are christians or not, our outward man is decaying. And that's a point that some christians forget. [00:10:34] They seem to think that it's part and parcel of the christian life. The sort of decay of the physical body. It's nothing to do with that. Everyone is subject to that. That's our last great enemy called death, which one day will be abolished. But you see, Paul says, though our outward man is decaying, our inward man is being renewed. And that's the point, is it? [00:10:59] Is it? That's where we have something the world has not got. It has only an outward man. Inward man is non existent. [00:11:10] So all they can know is decay. [00:11:14] But the Christian may know an outward man decaying, but the inward man is being renewed day by day. And there again is one of our little lessons. But we won't stop. We'll go there another day and look at it day by day. Some of us, I think, go from convention to the convention or from conference to conference or from highlight to highlight. [00:11:44] But the word of God says day today. [00:11:49] And that's what you and I have got to learn, that it's finding the inward spring of eternal life in our own being that matters and finding it daily. [00:12:02] There is a supply of the spirit of Jesus. It is a daily supply. And some of us may be only on Sundays. [00:12:12] And gradually we go down till we are back again. [00:12:17] But that's not good enough if we don't drink at the spring daily, if we don't appropriate, what is our daily? Now, you who are young in the Lord, I'll tell you. The secret of spiritual growth is daily appropriation. And if you see in this company, anyone that you see something of Christ in, you will know that it has come by appropriation and it will always be to the end of time. If you find anyone in this company who you feel is a windbag, putting it cruelly, it's all up here and not in here. You will know there is no daily appropriation. Don't get worried about it. [00:12:57] There will be windbags to the end of time. [00:13:00] And the Lord says in his word, there must be factions amongst you so that the approved of God can be made manifest. The church is not a perfect at all. [00:13:12] It's a place where, like a laundry, everything's being washed, all the scums coming to the surface. It's like a cutting out room. Everything's all over the place, all bits and pieces being thrown away by the tailor while he's snipping out what he wants. That's the church. [00:13:31] I remember when I was younger, I heard it described as a pressure cooker. [00:13:36] Once in, you couldn't get out. [00:13:40] Well, I don't know about that. But unless you and I know that, know the secret of daily appropriation now, none of us, surely there's not one of us who wants to be just an unwitting hypocrite. There's not one person I believe in this company who wants to be a hypocrite. Yet unwittingly we become so. Why? Because up here we've got it. But in here we haven't. Why haven't we got it in there? Because we're trying to get it second hand all the time. So we go to this, we go to that, we go to the other. And when we come into the orbit of power or the orbit of a certain ministry, any ministry ministry in this place or anywhere else, we're lifted up. But the moment we go out, we go down. It's not in us. [00:14:32] It's not in us. It's coming from without to us. And whilst we get it up, we go. When? As soon as it stops, down we go. [00:14:42] We've got to know what it is to be renewed day by day, just like the churches in the New Testament, if they had felt. Now, then we've got to have the apostle Paul, or when he's with us, everything goes up. [00:14:57] But what happens when he's in prison? [00:15:00] It all goes down. [00:15:03] He's on a chain there. He can't get to us, so we can't get it. When we get a letter from him, it's not the same, you know, it's not the same because mister so and so doesn't read it out. Like, it's not like the apostle Paul. It's much nicer to have him with us, because when he's with us, we feel power, you see? And what happened when Paul was beheaded? [00:15:29] Do you think half a million christians lost their christian life? [00:15:36] Well, you see, the whole point is, where is the supply? Well, here the word says, is renewed day by day. Now read on. For our light affliction, which is for a moment worketh for us. The affliction is doing something. It's not just an end, it's not just an affliction, but it is working for us more and more exceedingly. An eternal weight of glory. [00:16:06] Of glory. [00:16:08] And that's the point I wanted to get to. I wanted just to say, you see, it's a question of how we look at a christian life. It can be just a drudgery. It can be just like a class that we hate. [00:16:22] We're being educated, we're being instructed all, but we hate it. [00:16:28] We've just gritting our teeth and we're going through, and we don't really know why. We don't see the objective. We don't see what it's for. All we'd like to do is to escape from it if it were possible. [00:16:41] But you see, the glory is essentially LinkedIn to the discipline of the spirit of God and to all these other things. Now, coming back to Exodus chapter 33. [00:16:56] Now, why is it that the Lord doesn't always answer our prayer? Why is it that when we say, show me, I pray thee thy glory, the Lord doesn't hasten to show us his glory. There is a reason you know the Lord. It is God's grace that answers our prayer. It is also when he says yes. It is also God's grace when he answers our prayer and says no. [00:17:28] Because sometimes we don't know what we ask. Do you remember when the apostles said to the Lord, when the Lord said to them, can you drink the cup that I drink? Can you be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with? And they immediately said, yes. [00:17:47] And he said, you dont know what you are. [00:17:51] And then he said, you will drink the cup and you will be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized. But they didnt know what they were asking. [00:18:04] If it had been given to them at that point, they would have been completely finished. As Calvary revealed, they ran for their lives. [00:18:14] They couldn't take it all the way through. They'd said, show us. The father Philip had said again and again they'd said, show us my glory. [00:18:25] But they couldn't take it. [00:18:29] It was only after Pentecost and the deep, deep inward workings of the spirit of God that at long last those men were able to see the glory. Now that's the same with you and me. [00:18:46] We say, lord, I want to see thy glory. [00:18:50] Lord, I want you to commit yourself to me. [00:18:54] Do we know what we ask for? [00:18:58] It is not just a baptism of the spirit. [00:19:02] It is a baptism of the spirit and of fire. [00:19:10] Do we know what we ask for? [00:19:16] Well, now you see, what the Lord said to Moses was very wonderful. He said, no man has seen my face and live. But look, verse 20, verse 21. The Lord said, behold, there is a place by me. Isn't that beautiful? If we put it, the father says to us, behold, there is a place near to me. Now there is an old hymn that says, we are as near to God as we can be. I am putting it in my own language because we are in Christ. [00:19:59] There is a place by. There is a place near me. The only way a man can see the glory of God and live is in Christ. [00:20:14] That is the only way. Now, there are the three things. The first is this, the foundation. [00:20:21] Look at it. Thou shalt stand upon the rock. [00:20:27] Why is it that the Lord cannot show you and me his glory sometimes? Because we have not got the foundation under our feet. There is a lot of sand between our feet and the rock. You remember the two men who built their houses, one on the sand, one on the rock. [00:20:43] It looks, when you read the Matthew account as if they just built two houses, one here and a few miles away, another house. But when you read the account in Luke, you find the two houses were side by side. One man built on the sand, the other man dug deep, it said, down to the rock underneath the sand, and built his house upon the rock. [00:21:06] Now, my dear friend, you and I can build on the subsoil of our own life, the subsoil, if you like, of our own flesh, of our own nature, of our old man. [00:21:20] We can easily do that. There is no foundation. [00:21:24] Those two houses appeared exactly alike. They were probably both clean, both. Both quite sweet looking, both well cared for, both nice curtains and all the rest of it. If looking at it in a kind of western, contemporary way, they were outwardly they were perfect. They were the same. [00:21:45] No one could see which one had the foundations till the storm came and the wind blew and the floods came. [00:21:57] And the house that was built on the rocks stood. [00:22:01] And the house that was built on the top soil of sand collapsed. [00:22:10] Thou shalt stand upon the rock. What does God's word say? Well, in one corinthians, chapter three, we read these words. [00:22:23] One corinthians, chapter three, verse eleven. For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. [00:22:38] Now then, if you and I are going to have our prayer answered, our feet have got to be upon the rock of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you turn to Matthew, chapter 16 and verse 18, you know the well known words of the Lord Jesus. Thou art Peter. Upon this rock I will build my church, the house of my glory. The house of my glory, the place of my glory, that is to be built upon the foundation, which is Jesus Christ. Not upon the topsoil of our own natures and gifts and talents and all the rest of it, but down through it all to the foundation, which is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. That, my dear friend, is a costly business, and it's a laborious business. [00:23:39] Now, we all think we're on the foundation, and so we are if we take it as an area. [00:23:44] The fact of the matter is, are our footings built on the rock? [00:23:54] Ah, let me put it another way. Are our feet on the rock or on the sand above it? Which which you may have the most glorious superstructure, but when the flood comes, it sweeps it away. Rock or no rock, you are on the rock. Aha, true, but there's a yard or two of sand between you and the rock when the storm comes out. [00:24:27] Show me, I pray thee, thy glory. There is a place near to me. Thou shalt stand upon the rock. [00:24:35] You know so easily the Lord could have said to Moses, if there had not been spiritual lesson here. Stand over here. [00:24:44] Stand over there. [00:24:46] Why did he say stand upon the rock? Upon a rock? Because there was a lesson in it for us. [00:24:52] If you and I are to see the glory of God, if we are to be changed from glory to glory, if there is an eternal weight of glory to be worked in us by our light affliction, our feet must be on the rock. We cannot bear the discipline of the spirit of God. Yes, the fullness, all the other things, everything else we'll have. We'll have it all. But it's the discipline we won't have. [00:25:21] And you cannot have the glory without the discipline. [00:25:27] Therefore, the point is this. God cannot answer your prayer or my prayer until our feet are on the rock, until we're prepared for the price of having our feet put upon the rock. The foundation's given to us. Oh, let's be clear. God's grace has given us the foundation. There's no question about that. We can't work. [00:25:50] It's given. [00:25:53] One of these days not so very far off, it's all going to be found out at the coming of the Lord. [00:26:02] Suddenly, when we least expect it, the Lord will come and the houses built on the rock will stand, and the houses on the sand will collapse. [00:26:19] And that's not the end of the story because in the grace of God, the collapse of many christian superstructures will, in his mercy, bring many to put their feet on the rock. [00:26:32] But why wait for such a shock? Why wait when everything's going to be shaken to pieces? Why wait? Why not even now, start to ask the Lord, Lord, get my feet upon that foundation. Remembering what Paul said in his very last letter to Timothy, there is a foundation, he said, which is the foundation of God standeth fast, having this seal. Let him that nameth the name of the Lord depart from iniquity. [00:27:06] Well, now, thats one thing. The second thing very swiftly you will find in Exodus 33 is not only shall you stand upon the rock, it shall come to pass while my glory passeth by. [00:27:19] I will put thee in a cleft of the rock. And you know, you've got another wonderful picture there. If you and I are to know the glory of God, we must know our life hid with Christ in God. That is in colossians chapter three and verse, chapter three, verse three. For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. We've got to know and experience Christ as our life. We've got to know what it is to have a hidden life hid with Christ in God. In other words, it's not just an outward thing. Our christian life is not ourselves. [00:28:01] It is Christ. [00:28:04] It is the life of God in us. [00:28:07] If the Lord wants to change us from glory to glory, as we said last week, there has not only got to be a discipline, there has got to be an experience. [00:28:18] Not only have our feet got to be down upon Christ himself and his finished work and all that he is and all he has won for us, not our own works, but his. [00:28:29] But we have got to know Christ as our life hid with Christ in God. Do you know what it is to be crucified with Christ? Do you know what it is really to have died? [00:28:42] Do you? Do I? [00:28:45] Ye died. [00:28:46] Your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ with our life shall appear, then shall ye all also appear with him in glory. [00:29:02] Do we know him as our life. Christ in us is the hope of glory. [00:29:06] I will hide thee in the cliff of the rock. [00:29:10] If there's any flesh, there will be loss. But when you're hidden in Christ, covered with Christ, robed with Christ, and Christ is not only without, but within around, but within as well. [00:29:26] There shall be glory. [00:29:29] Do we know anything of that? Show me, I pray thee, thy glory. [00:29:35] And the last thing is verse 22. [00:29:42] And I will cover thee with my hand. What an extraordinary. First the Lord says, you shall stand upon the rock. Then he says, I will put thee in a cleft of the rock so that you are hidden. And then I will put my hand over you and cover thee with my hand. The first thing is foundation. [00:30:06] The second thing is life. [00:30:10] The third thing is protection. [00:30:16] Do you and I realize, when we ask to see more of the Lord, when we ask for some deeper experience of him, how we need to be covered, do you realize that you and I are in enemy territory? Do we realize we are in a world that lieth in the evil ones? Do we realize that there is one who is called the prince of the powers of the air, whose spirit worketh in the sons of disobedience? Do we realize it? Do we realize that every time you and I have more of Christ, every time we receive more of him, every time he increases and I decrease? We are marked people. [00:31:00] We stand out a mile spiritually. It's as if, you know, when you sort of look right round a huge congregation. I remember at Billy Graham, I was amazed at the scarlet hats. They stood out a mile. You know, that vast sea of people's faces, some 20,000 people in that arena. And so you could pick out this from that, from that. And that the color. [00:31:28] They were eye catching. [00:31:31] Now, when you and I have something of price, we are eye catching. As far as the devil goes, he spots us instantly. [00:31:43] Not for us, but for Christ. There's something of Christ there now. The moment there is more of Christ, you can be quite sure you'll be tested. I used to say, when I was in Egypt, to a lady who, as we used to call her irreverently, tiger. [00:31:58] She was, a lady who ran to big mission amongst soldiers, and she was the toughest lady I think I've ever seen, but a very dear Christian. And I remember I was only a young Christian. I once said to her, all the devil's busy, blessing must be coming. [00:32:18] And she looked at me and she said, hmm, I suppose it's the way you look at it. I always say, if the devil's busy, there's been blessing. [00:32:31] Well, it is a question of the way you look at it. It is true that you've come in to something more of the Lord. The fowls of the air are there immediately to snatch away what letters of God. So you can be quite sure that every time you ask the Lord for something more and in grace he brings you in, the enemy's there to rob you of it, and then the end of that person worse than ever. [00:32:56] Covering. Well, we must finish. You must go home. And if you get a chance, you look in ephesians six and see what it says in verse eleven. It says, therefore, put on the whole armor of God. Covering. You know, it's something that you and I forget. I. We just forget. What is armour? It's covering. Covering. You see, if you're going to know ephesians in experience, you've got to know the covering at the end. You've got to know what it is to have the helmet of salvation and the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness, and the loins girt with truth and the feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. All these things, you've got to know them in experience, not just as theology, not just as doctrine. We've got to know how to take Christ for protection, for covering, so that every time we move into more of the Lord, we're covered. Don't we know it? When we give testimony, we have to cover one another when we give testimony now, don't draw back into one another. [00:34:03] We apologise to the listener. But the end of side two is missing from the master tape.