Thursday our family attended the funeral of a friend who had been battling cancer for, I think, 2 years.
His name is Frank and Frank was a Christian.
When you attend the funeral of a Christian, the service is different.
And when I say Christian, I mean a person who is committed to serving Jesus Christ. A person who, despite his short comings and sins, is , through God’s grace and strength, walking worthy of God, who hath called him unto his kingdom and glory. (1 Thes. 2:12)
Frank did just that. The praise of the Lord was always on his lips. He accepted the will of God in his sickness.
Also, he was more concerned for other people than himself. He was always encouraging others.
At the funeral service I was impressed with some things that one man said.
I thought it tied in very well to everything I have been hearing lately in different sermons about the glory of God.
He was telling us of another man he knew that spent much time trying to be worthy of the Lord. But one day that man read in Revelation 5 that no man was found worthy to open the book and read it and only the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, is worthy.
He realized he will never be worthy. That it’s only through Jesus Christ and his sacrifice of dying for our sins that we are counted worthy.
This man was trying to appease God in his own works.
It cannot be done.
Romans 3:10 says: There is none righteous.
And in Romans 3:22-26
Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
I think we get caught up in trying so hard to walk worthy, that we miss the real goal.
We miss the goal of glorifying God.
It is God who is to get the glory, not us.
Don’t get me wrong. We are to obey the Word of the Lord. We are to produce fruit. We are to have changed lives. We are called to walk worthy, to walk a different life style, to train our children differently.
That is part of the Kingdom work.
What I mean is, sometimes we focus so much on ourselves and what we can do, that we forget that it is Christ who is working in us and who is using us to his good pleasure. It is Christ who we are to focus on and not ourselves and our works.
Could it be that we are trying to gain favor with man by trying to be so spiritual or trying to gain glory through another man’s praise of us? Because, surely, in our subconscious, we have to know that we can never be good enough or worthy in our own works to please God. We cannot impress God and God will not share His glory with another, not even our self image, which is just another form of idolatry.
Our duty is to obey and we must leave the glorification to the Lord.
Isaiah 66:1,2
Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.
Isaiah 2:17
And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low: and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day.
