- [Ray Ortlund] Soli Deo Gloria, glory be to God alone.
It mattered then and it matters now because, as we were then, so we are now,
according to Calvin.
Our hearts are idol factories churning out this endless flow
of false ideals, false self images, false plans, false dreams,
which are calculated to use God in order to exalt self.
And that is the insanity of our hearts to this day.
Here is realism, here is calm, here is joy.
Ephesians 1:6, "To the praise of the glory of His grace."
And so, we say with the psalmist, "Not to us, not to us,
but to Your name o Lord be glory."
And He says, "For my own sake, for my own sake I do it.
My glory I will not give to another."
♪ [music] ♪
- [Trevin Wax] One of the great preachers of the last century,
James Montgomery Boice, spoke about each of these solas,
that we've talked about so far, as being summed up in this last sola,
this motto, Soli Deo Gloria, meaning, "To God alone be the glory."
And I think about this core truth of The Reformation and how it has stood
out over the centuries.
I can't help but think about Johann Sebastian Bach putting these
on his compositions, his famous classical compositions,
always having this line, Soli Deo Gloria, there.
But it's something that actually matters for us, as Christians,
who are part of churches as we, not only think about salvation,
but also think about the motivation for our lives, what we're put on Earth to do.
So, can you explain, how would you sum up this last
of the solas, Soli Deo Gloria, "To God alone be the glory?"
- [Kevin DeYoung] Soli Deo Gloria means the end of all the why questions is God
and His glory.
You know, as a parent, we're all parents and, you know,
have kids or grandkids and they ask you questions, "Why is it taking so long?"
or, "where are we going?"
or why, why, why, "why do I have to do this?
Why do I have to be nice to my sister?"
And you give an answer, "Because it's good for you."
And eventually, the parent gets frustrated and, you know, throws out something like,
"Because I said so," which is an entirely great answer.
We do the same thing with God.
"Why? Why did you do this?
Why is my life going this way?"
The final answer after which there can be no other answers is,
"For the praise of my name. For my glory."
So Soli Deo Gloria reminds us of the end point of all of this.
And it also reminds us of really the starting point of all this,
"Why did God initiate this great plan of salvation?
Why did He give us the Scriptures?
Why did He send His son to die for our sins?"
- [Albert Mohler] "Why did He create the world?"
- [Kevin DeYoung] For his glory.
The end for which God created the world, to use Jonathan Edward's phrase,
is for the fame of His own name.
And of course the alone there tells us, well, then, "It's not for the fame
of my name, it's not ultimately for my good, except insofar is my good is
intimately connected with God's glory," which is the good news for the Christian.
- [Trevin Wax] You know, Jesus taught us to pray this way when He
gave us His Lord's prayer, our Father who is in heaven,
"Hallowed be Your name." Right?
You have this sense of God's name being made holy, declared holy.
And it's interesting that, when Jesus gives us that phrase,
we are obviously...if there can be an application from a prayer, we would say,
"Well, yes, we want to be the ones who hallow God's name," but Jesus tells us
to pray the prayer in such a way that it's clear that God himself will have to be the
one who's ultimately bringing Himself glory, that God Himself will have to be
involved in this.
And so, I think that that helps remind us of these truths of The Reformation
about God's work being this work of bringing glory to Himself,
not something that we ultimately can do, that God must be the one to,
in a final and ultimate sense, be the one to hallow His own name.
- [Albert Mohler] When we declare Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory,
in the background, we kind of hear the Hallelujah chorus by Handel.
You know, this is the great crescendo of all things.
But I think a lot of today's Christians probably want to join right in that
singing of the Hallelujah chorus and they say, "All the glory to God,
to God alone be the glory."
But the question is, "What in the world do they mean?"
So I think we have to define our terms, here.
In the Scripture, glory is revealed in two things.
First of all, it's God's intrinsic reality.
And as He is infinite, He never has less or greater glory in and
of Himself, He simply is.
But the Bible also talks about God's glory as the external representation and
manifestation of God's glory.
And that means more creatures knowing Him, more persons praising His name.
And that's why we pray that the Lord's glory will fill the Earth,
that means the Gospel fills the Earth, and God's creatures, made in His image,
human beings, sinful that we are, redeemed and praise Him.
But it also points to the end and, you know, we'd ask
the question, "How could 'To God alone be the glory' be controversial?"
But it was and it is. - Yeah.
It was in the time of Luther because the Roman Catholic Church actually held
to what Luther called a theology of glory.
Luther compared two different theologies.
He said, on the one hand, you have a theology of glory.
On the other hand, you have a theology of the cross.
And Luther clearly believed in glory but the glory needed to be God's,
it wasn't a theology that brought glory to the sinner or to the church.
It was a theology that brought glory to God alone pointing to His saving work
on the cross. So let's be clear about this.
There's no way to avoid the candor.
Luther was defining this and the reformers continued to define this over against the
claims of the Catholic Church to a glory of its own, to a monarchical kingship that
they declared the papacy to be, to thrones and to all the glory you can
see right now in the Vatican.
I mean, you know, that is a theology of glory, that's what that produces.
And Luther understood, "Well, here's the problem.
In the Bible, God says explicitly, 'My glory I will not share with another,'"
and Luther said, "that means He will not share it with the pope.
It also means He will not share it with me."
This is to the glory of God alone.
- [Kevin DeYoung] And that gets to the very heart of, not only The Reformation,
but our own hearts. You talked about Luther,
you talked about Calvin, he had this dialogued debate with
Cardinal Sadoleto who was trying to bring Geneva back into the Catholic fold
during The Reformation.
And at the crux of the issue was, you know, Sadoleto's basically saying,
"You're taking away too much from man," Calvin says, "You can't.
You can't take away too much.
You're making too much of man as if the end of all of this work of salvation is
to redound to the glory of man.
It's not, it's to reflect and redound to the glory of God."
Now, in God's kindness, it joins together with what is our good,
namely our joy and our satisfaction, in Him, as John Piper and others
have reminded us.
But it is God's glory alone, not ours.
And we can talk all we want about history and theology but, when we get down to it,
all of us are these glory thieves, all of us want to have the universe
somehow revolve around us.
And it's very painful to do it but we think it should.
When the Gospel, it's not bad news, it's the best, most freeing news
in the world, look, "You're not the center of all things, you don't have to be the
center of all things, and you'll never have the joy that you can
have in Christ until you realize that that burden is not meant to be yours."
- [Albert Mohler] You know, for the Apostle Paul,
this was the ground of his assurance of salvation was that the God,
who would glorify Himself, through the atonement He accomplished
in Christ, would continue it all the way to the end.
- [Kevin DeYoung] And finish it.
- [Albert Mohler] And see it all the way through.
And so, when we think about the glory of God, we think, "Wow,
that means it's not my glory.
It's not the glory of the church, it's not the glory of the nations.
It's all just the glory of God."
But that glory is what assures me that I will be saved and eternally that I am safe
and secure in this self-glorifying God's promises and power.
- [Trevin Wax] One of the ways our sin manifests itself is that we want to steal
glory from God. Like you said, glory thieves.
Then the question comes up of, in our day and age, in our own churches,
we can point back to medieval Catholicism and even some of the
expressions of Catholicism today to say, "You can see this theology
of glory on display."
But I would say that it's very easy for, even us as evangelicals and
evangelical churches, to slip back into this theology of glory
in our own understanding of our own churches.
As you said, God doesn't share His glory with another.
And yet, so much of our own culture pushes us in this direction to want the glory
to belong to the church, to belong to the preacher, to belong...
- [Albert Mohler] We could be, even at this moment as the three of us are
in conversation, we could be more concerned for our own glory than God's
glory simply because look how much we know.
Look at how proud we are of our church history, look...
- [Kevin DeYoung] You're wearing a bow tie.
- [Albert Mohler] Yeah, there you go. Look...
- [Trevin Wax] You're well-dressed.
- [Albert Mohler] Look who cares what we think.
You know, it can happen to every preacher.
By the way, Luther understood that, that's why, when Luther got up to preside
the first time at the mass, he couldn't do it because he knew what a
sinner he was. And we all need that.
We all need to remember every time, especially that we get up to teach or
preach or gather together for worship or to do anything, that we can only do this
because God is going to glorify Himself in it.
He will do that either in a way that brings Him maximum glory at our expense
or He will do it by bringing Himself maximum glory by showing His work in us.
- [Trevin Wax] Our world so rewards glory seeking.
And when you think about just...I think about people watching this video who may
be seeking glory as the kind of parents that they are or the kind of people that
they look up to or want to be like in their own congregations or in a career,
glory seeking is so rewarded.
So how do we cultivate that sense of humility and that
understanding of sinfulness?
How would you say we can cultivate that in such a way that humility begins to become
more natural to us, almost second nature to us, instead of what is second nature
being what the world pushes and the environment, the atmosphere that we soak
in all the time?
- [Kevin DeYoung] It may seem obvious but it starts with seeing God as God.
Seeing God in His being.
I mean Calvin started his famous institutes of the Christian religion
by saying, you know, "Wisdom comes by knowing God
and knowing ourselves."
And he didn't mean we're just sort of seek in to understand ourselves,
he meant you start by knowing God and His glory, and then, you understand your own
fallenness and humility and how far from that you are.
So, you know, to give God His glory, the antidote is not to look at ourselves
and try to get really introspective.
It's to see who God is, to see Him in the Scriptures first of all.
You know, David Wells has this very striking line, he says,
"God rests too inconsequentially upon His church."
What the world does is to force to us the weightlessness of God when God is weighty.
I mean we know that Kavod, in Hebrew, for glory can also mean heavy or weighty.
And when we think that we can do church with gimmicks and gadgets and tricks,
and that's how Christ is going to grow His church, or when we think that the
Christian life is just one of style instead of real substance,
we not only rob God of His glory but we have Him rest so ephemeral upon us.
- [Albert Mohler] Absolutely right.
You know, A. W. Tozer said, "What you believe about God
is the most important thing about you." And I think that's just so clear.
And when we think about a glorious God, the infinite God of all perfections found
in Scripture, the omnipotent, omniscient, gracious, providential, merciful, holy,
and just God of the Bible, we have to understand He alone is worthy
of glory. He alone is glorious.
I think we also have to come back, Trevin, to you asking the question,
"How do we correct ourselves on this?"
I think we need an honest admission, we're not going to fully correct ourselves
on this in this life.
- [Kevin DeYoung] Yeah, we'll see through a glass [inaudible].
- [Albert Mohler] Yeah, absolutely.
But this is one of the promises of Scripture.
In Philippians, Chapter 2, we're told that there is a day coming when
every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.
So, the day is coming when we will no longer, as believers,
see through a glass darkly, we won't struggle with this.
In Heaven, there's not going to be any effort necessary to humble ourselves.
We will know exactly where we stand.
And that's why our greatest joy is going to be to glorify God forever.
You know, I think another thing about this we just need to keep in mind is that this
gets very tangible in our lives and in our worship.
Because you can walk, and again, Tozer made this point,
you can walk into a church and understand whether or not it really believes in the
glory of God alone.
Are the songs about us or are they about God?
Are the events that take place, the acts of worship,
are they drawing attention to the worshiper or to the one who is worshipped?
These are really tangible questions.
- [Kevin DeYoung] Yeah.
And, you know, we see once again how all of this ties together because,
if you don't have a view of God as transcendent and glorious, well,
you don't need a sola scripture because you can find your way to God and you can
figure things out yourself.
And then, you don't need faith alone because your hard work can get you there.
And you don't need grace alone because you've managed to do this yourself.
You don't need Christ alone...I mean, if you don't have a God who is other,
who is holy, who is concerned chiefly for His own glory, you're not going
to have the Gospel.
You're not going to be able to share the Gospel with people and tell them that
they're sinners in need of a savior because they don't have a God who
registers in their minds or hearts as being a God even worthy of praise or a God
who cares about sin. We need to know who God is.
- [Trevin Wax] We see that all through the Scriptures as well.
Because you've got someone such as Isaiah, for example, who it's the glorious vision
that he has of God that precedes his commissioning and then his going out and
bringing glory to God with his life.
First, he has to see his sinfulness, he has to walk through that
moment of redemption.
But I love the fact there that God doesn't even have to tell Isaiah to be the
one to go.
That vision of God has Isaiah... all God has to do is ask the question,
"Who shall I send?" and Isaiah says, "Here, my Lord, send me."
Because the vision of God's glory is so compelling, at that point,
that he only wants to bring glory to God through his life from that point on.
- [Albert Mohler] You know, Augustine, one of the most important of the early
theologians of the church to find glory in a way that I think makes sense to us and
will help us here.
He said, "Glory is that to which we are most attracted."
And so, that means that God being glorified means He is the most attractive
focus of all of our attention.
He's the attractive concern of the church in worship.
We are so attracted and drawn to Him that we wouldn't look anywhere else,
we wouldn't want that glory shared with anyone else.
- [Kevin DeYoung] And this book is glory of God from start to finish.
- [Albert Mohler] Right, alpha and omega.
- [Kevin DeYoung] Creation is the overflow of God's glory.
And we come to the scene of the one who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb,
and it's all glory and power and honor and blessing to Him alone.
♪ [music] ♪