Our Need, God’s Glory
God shall supply all your need. I never grow tired of hearing that. I rejoice when I hear that! Those words speak in the emptiest parts of me and fill me: the empty places of my hurts, my regrets; the empty places of my failures. Also places in me that were always empty, needing filling I could never supply, never find, until God found me. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. God shall supply all your need. Those words well up in me—hope, faith. And love? Love for God—a most mysterious love, unlike any other. How to speak of it? Maybe, only, by sharing it.
We get practice in sharing that love of God here, as the Church, so that we can practice sharing it out there. So much emptiness, blindness, and futility in this world; so much hope, out there, still: hope for something braver, something better, a fullness that cannot be lost, a love unknown. We have that love, we know it, though we can barely speak of it. If you would speak of it, share it. And rejoice.
“My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus” (4:19). God has riches to fill us, to meet all our needs. Christ Jesus is the richness of God’s glory, the overflowing abundance, the wellspring, the joyful fountain. What comes to mind when you hear this word, glory? Light—brilliant, dazzling? Sunrise? Over these past few weeks, I’ve spoken of the power of Christ’s resurrection, of how, in Christ’s resurrection, we can attain the perfection of fellowship with God, which is eternal life in the presence of God. Full, perfect fellowship with God. You may know someone who has the ability to fill a room when he or she enters, who becomes the center of gravity. That presence has a fullness to it and a delight, an abundance and an attraction, a glory. Glory as Scripture speaks of it, as Paul tells us about it, is an attribute of God, a characteristic quality. Glory is the fullness of God’s presence, abundance, refulgent, palpable. Glory is God’s victoriousness, His joy, His power. Glory is the essence of the praiseworthiness of God.
In Christ, God calls us to His glory, reveals His glory to us. Have you ever had what felt like an experience of God’s glory: that special moment, wonderful, heart-filling? Sometimes there’s God, so quickly. To what can we compare God’s glory? It is beyond compare, like Christ. Christ is God’s glory. God’s glory evokes our wonder, our praise, our worship. God’s glory is the undeniable testimony to God’s worth, His supreme worth: to know God and to have God with you is treasure beyond price, blessing beyond measure.
Christ, richness of God’s glory, is the wealth by which God supplies all our need. You can love others and not have Christ. You can serve others and not have Christ. People live this life quite competently without the least acknowledgment or praise of God’s glory. Their fullness is emptiness, and emptiness will not save them, they know. To have Christ is to have faith.
Paul asks that, for the sake of their faith, the faithful let their “gentleness be evident to all” (4:5). The word Paul uses has to do with courteousness, tolerance, graciousness—be gracious. The root of gracious is grace: let your grace-full living be evident to all. The spirit of our age accentuates differences, highlights disagreements. Grace-full living does the opposite. Gracious gentleness dwells upon what is shared rather than division and fracture. Gracious gentleness is how rejoicing people live among others outside the church, and how they live together with one another as the church. Not contentious! Gracious gentleness is a sign of rejoicing. People rejoicing in the Lord don’t need to jump up and down, wave their arms in the air, screaming hallelujah—they can if they want to, if the Spirit moves them, but that isn’t the sure sign of rejoicing in the Lord. The sure sign of rejoicing in the Lord is gracious gentleness with one another and with all people: having and sharing the love of Christ the peace of God.
Over these few weeks, I’ve also been speaking of the Day of the Lord. Paul says, “The Lord is near” (4:5), and we may take that to mean the Day of the Lord is near, but that’s not what he says. The Lord is near. Indeed, he is! As near as faith. Near because he is in us. You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart, as near to me as my breath. Faith that this is true is life-altering, life-giving. If Christ, the glorious richness of God’s presence, power, and victory, is as near to us as our breath, living right now in our hearts by faith, then truly we do not need to “be anxious about anything” (4:6). All our needs are supplied by the wealth of glory, the complete fullness of God, that is Jesus Christ. What the faithful most need in a world that is not in love with Jesus Christ is courage, hope, love, perseverance, confidence, and obedience, the resolve of faithfulness. God is in charge of the future. He is at work in all that is happening now.
But we can be anxious. We do worry. We have been afraid; we fear we shall be afraid again. Fear, worry—the feeling that all will not be well, that disaster will overtake us, that we will have no power, no resources, no ability to endure. The conviction that we are weak; the conviction that everyone knows it. And they’re right. We are weak. Are you strong? How strong are you? What is your strength? Your will? Your stubbornness? Is your strength from you, of you, self-born, self-willed?
Christ. Christ is our strength, and in him, we are strong indeed. I do not rely upon my strength, or my patience, or even my capacity for love. I rely upon Christ’s strength. I rely upon Christ’s patience. I rely upon Christ’s capacity for love. O, the love of Jesus! O, the patience Jesus shows me! O, the strength of Christ, the fullness of the glory of God! Shall I be afraid? Yet we know the power of fear. Look around you at these times, the message beneath the barrage of angry words. Fear and those who use fear as a weapon want to master you. Fear, like anger, can be a remarkably effective weapon. I might almost say a Satanic weapon—almost say.
Fear isn’t sinful, just human. Sinful fear is the fear that God won’t be enough, the fear that we need more than Jesus: Jesus plus. Plus what? You’ll need to fill that in.
No, instead, “in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (4:6). Pray. What’s the way through the fear? Prayer. What’s the way through temptation, and the way back after sin? Prayer. What’s the way to God—the way of Christ. Christ prayed. Pray. Paul has urged us to make our lives a continual thank offering to God. Let your gentleness—your discipled walk with Jesus through this life—be evident to all. Gracious gentleness, not fear. Let your life be a thank offering to God, who gives you life, eternal life; let your life be a thank offering knowing the fullness of the presence of God, of being in His glory beyond comparison, beyond description.
Paul gives us a model for prayer. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and Paul offers a model for praying: not petitions only—asking for things—but also thanksgiving. When you pray, are you thanking God for anything? Do you stop to thank God for anything, or do you go right into the asking? Asking is not wrong, though it is only one side of prayer, one dimension of prayer. John Piper has written of prayer as a demonstration and affirmation that “you are helpless and that your friend is strong and kind. You glorify your friend by needing him and asking him for help and counting on him.”[1] God, in Jesus Christ, “our strong and reliable friend [. . .] promises to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.”[2] So, in prayer, as we pray, even if we do not say it outright, we are admitting, confessing “that without Christ we can do nothing [. . . .] prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that He will provide the help we need.”[3] Confidence. Confidence overcomes fear. Faith, not fear.
Prayer is a way toward “The peace of God” (4:7) that comes to us, that is with us and in us, by faith. You remember what Paul says of this peace, the peace that “transcends all understanding” (4:7). It is supernatural. We cannot explain that peace any more than we can explain love or faith, those greatest mysteries, the same mystery. It is the peace of God that fills us with joy, joy the world cannot take away, this world not in love with Jesus, this world that would convince us that the Jesus and faith stuff was all garbage, definitely not something to proclaim: keep it to yourself!
The peace of God “will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (4:7). To be in Christ, as we are, by faith and faith only, is to have the peace of God, the peace of our reconciliation, accomplished for us by God in Christ at the cross. To have and know Christ is our hope and confidence that dispels fear. Fear fights us; fear can make a mess of us, oh, we know! Fear does not win. Our hearts and minds are guarded, defended, already claimed, already held for God in Christ: after the fear, beyond the fear, overcoming the fear, is Christ.
Live your faith, and “the God of peace will be with you” (4:9). Indeed, the Lord is near. How does Paul know all this? What makes him so sure? Beloved, he is living testimony to the truth of all he tells us, all he assures us. Turmoil and contention hounded him. If he had just stopped following Christ, or followed him in some way the world approved of, Paul could have been free from the hostility, the insult, the contempt. He is chained and condemned. And for Paul, to live is Christ and to die is gain (1:21). Terrible words. Wonderful words. May God bless us with the blessing of being able to say those holy words with Paul.
Paul tells us he has “learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (4:11); he has “learned the secret of being content in any situation” (4:12). It is the secret of Jesus Christ, near to us as our breath, the love of God living in us, wanting to live through us for others, live and love its way into the lives and hearts of others. The love that can never be satisfied with self. The love that rejoices in the glory of God, the riches of God’s glory, supplying all our need. Another name for this sacred contentment is joy. Happiness comes and goes, as we know so well, all too well. We need something more durable, more resilient, deeper, something that does not depend upon us or on anyone else here. We need joy, God’s joy. Another name for the experience of that divine joy is the peace of God: we cannot explain it, we can barely comprehend it. We long for it as for water in a thirsty land, as for the means of life in a profoundly impoverished country.
The Lord is near, supplying all our need—our need for joy, which is our need for God. Jesus says, Come to me all who are thirsty. Jesus is the abundance of God; when he fills you, you are full indeed. You might even feel that fullness, sometimes, though not all the time. If we felt it all the time, what would be the point of faith? We walk by faith and not by feeling. God calls us to faith in Him whom we do not see, calls us to faith in the riches of God’s glory in Christ Jesus.
What is the evidence of that faith alive in you, at work in you? It is your grace-full living, that sacred contentment that does not depend upon the things of this world, that peace that finds its life in God. This peace is God’s gift, not your achievement. It is God at work in you. We do not labor to attain this peace. We labor with the strength this peace gives us. God gives gifts. It is God’s nature to give gifts because God is love. Love gives, is always giving itself away. God gives time. Improve the time by your grace-full living.
And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.
[1] John Piper. “We Can Do Nothing.” Devotion for October 11, 2020. BibleGateway.com
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