Reflecting God's Goodness: Transformation Through His Glory
Devotional
Sermon Summary
Bible Study Guide
Sermon Clips
### Quotes for Outreach
1. "Hope. That's hope. I am right before God because of what Jesus did in a moment in time and I now have a home in heaven and my sins are forgiven. That is hope. And so Paul says, since we have such a hope, we are bold. We should be bold. Here, here, good outweighing the bad, I can't never be bold. I can never be bold. Because I'm not sure if I said the right thing. Did I say the wrong thing to her? Did I say the right thing to her? Did I do the right thing? Did I not do the right thing? I can't be bold here. I'm walking a tightrope between good and bad and if I fall over to the bad, oh no! But he says, because we have such a hope, we are very bold." [40:33]
2. "He who began a good work in you is going to finish it. And you have something to do with that. Work out your salvation in fear and trembling. Emphasis on the trembling. Look into the mirror every day and become more like his son. How do you do it? You do it by staring at his goodness. Gossiping his goodness. Sharing his goodness. Spreading the fame of his goodness. And reflecting that goodness. And you do it by doing the hard work, Paul says. Yes, believe that you're dead to sin's penalty and to its reign. But also repent. Active daily repentance. Crucifying that self that wants its way. And being led by the spirit. Not just letting go and letting God, but taking active steps to keep in step with him and to walk with him." [53:46]
3. "There's the flesh. And it says if you live in the flesh, you will die. But if you live in the spirit, you will live. That always happens in life. If you live in the flesh, you will die. Choose to sin. Choose to suffer. Trust me. Choose to sin. Choose to suffer. Paul isn't saying that if you live in the flesh, you will die physically. He's saying that if you choose to sin, you're choosing to suffer. And he says if you live in the spirit, you will live." [51:34]
4. "God's goodness is transformative. It transforms us as we reflect it more and more. That's where we get to 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians chapter 2. 2 Corinthians chapter 2 is a challenge to get to because it's right before Galatians, right after 1 Corinthians, but it's just like, it's small. It's a couple chapters. It's like 13 chapters, but you'll miss it. You'll go by it in a blink." [37:18]
5. "The Lord is gracious and merciful. He's slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that's what we read in Exodus 34. All those things make God good. And notice he is good to us. All. And his mercy is over all in verse 9. Over all that he has made. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. His goodness is multicolored. It's like a painting with different hues, different tones, different colors. As you look at it from different angles, it looks more lush. It looks more deep." [27:02]
### Quotes for Members
1. "But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Verse 16. The Lord is spirit. And where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the spirit. Paul says that in Christ, we are beholding God's glory, God's goodness. And as we behold, we behold God's glory and His goodness, His Son, we are transformed into God, Jesus' image, more and more. And we are transformed, he puts it as, from glory to glory." [42:44]
2. "What is God's goodness? Is it just the sum of all of his strengths, of all of his virtues? Well, we see it here. We see it here in Exodus 34. So God tells Moses, okay, this is, I'm going to, everything I said that I'm going to do, I'm going to do for you, right? I'm going to bring you to up and put you in the cleft of the rock and you're going to see my glory. You're going to see my goodness. It's going to pass by you. And this is the sum of all of his strengths, of all of his virtues. This is what it is. This is how, this is how God himself defines his goodness, his glory. The Lord, it says in 30, Exodus 34, starting verse five, the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation." [16:24]
3. "learn from Him, consider Him, to know Him over time in the Christian life is to progressively be more conformed to the image of His Son. Romans 8.28, right? Romans 8.28, talks about good, right? Romans 8.28 says that whatever happens in my life, that God will work it out for good, right? What is that good? It's to be conformed to the image of His Son. That's the good. So when something bad happens to those who love God, if you are in Christ, in Christ, bad things happen. I think we would all agree bad things happen. I've been reading the prayer chains lately. I think we can all agree that bad things happen. Amen? Bad things happen. And God promises in Romans 8.28 that when bad things happen, that God will work them out for good. It's not always the good that we want, right? But the good is to be conformed to the image of His Son. That's the purpose. That is the purpose of this book and God's story is to set apart a people, a people for Himself who are increasingly, increasingly more and more staring into the mirror, staring into the image of His Son and becoming more like Him. And that is how the fruit of the Spirit works out. That as we stare at the Son, as we learn from Him, as we are in a relationship with Him, we reflect Him more and more in our daily lives. In Christ, the most wonderful change is not only possible, but it happens naturally to those who are led by the Spirit and walking by the Spirit." [44:49]
4. "The book of Galatians, written by the Apostle Paul. Good morning. How is everyone today? Great. If you don't have a Bible, if you don't have a Bible, it'd probably be a good idea just letting you know to either grab one in the back or fire up one on your phone maybe or something, because we're going to spend spend some time in the Bible. So just a word of warning, I guess, maybe, I don't know, that we're going to be rifling through pages or swiping and moving around. In your Bible app, you'll be searching for mainly three places. So I'm Jason Runyon. I'm a teaching elder here, and I preach from time to time, usually about once a month, which is probably more than you want of me. But today we're going to be talking about the Bible. And I'm going to be talking if you've been with us for a little bit, we are camped out right now in the fruit of the Spirit. So we're in Galatians chapter 5, and we've been there. There are nine of them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine of them, I believe. And we are on the sixth. So we've been for the last six weeks, including this week, we've been camped out on the fruit of the Spirit. And today we're talking about the fruit of the Spirit that is goodness. So we did love, patience, kindness. Love, peace, patience. Joy, I think it was in there. Kindness, and now we're on patience. And if you recall, in Galatians chapter 5, Paul is writing about the conflict that Christians face. We don't necessarily need to turn there. We've been there a lot. But in Galatians chapter 5, he's talking a lot about the conflict that Christians face. And in Galatians chapter 5, he talks about the works of the flesh, right? And he says, He uses words like drunkenness, envy, strife, right? It's not very hard to think about left up to our own devices, our flesh, which the Bible calls our old man, our sinful selves. It's not hard to come up with what the works of the flesh are. And then Paul contrasts that, and this is the conflict, with the fruit of the Spirit. Those things are harder to come by than the works of the flesh. It's easy for me to be jealous. It's easy for me to covet. But I mean, right off the bat, if you just go into the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not cover your neighbor's wife, his stuff, his animals, right? And it's really easy for us, me, all of us, to get jealous of what other people have, right? It's a lot more difficult for me to be kind to other people, right? And to, to be thankful for them and to love them than it is to just right off the bat be jealous of them. It's just how it works. And so there's a conflict, and Paul spends a lot of his time talking about the conflict. And if you remember, Paul has spent a lot of time in this book of Galatians, talking to the church of Galatia and to us, comparing the law with the gospel. And he's, he's, he's talked a lot about how the, the gospel is far superior to the law. Because the Galatians had begun to believe that in order to be in Christ, that they had to adhere to the rules and the regulations of the law. But the law was given, Paul tells us, as a temporary thing. It had an expiration date, like your milk in your refrigerator. It had an expiration date. God's purpose had always been to replace the law that was written on tablets, Ten Commandments, Moses. We're going to be talking a little bit about him this morning. He had always purposed to replace the Ten Commandments. With the law written on our hearts. He'd always intended to do that. And so the gospel is far, far superior. The law was meant to help us define and understand what sin is. And it was meant, the Bible tells us, as a tutor or a guide that could help us understand that we could never measure up to God's perfect standard. We could never do it. We needed help. And that's the crux of this conflict. And what Paul does is he lays out the means by which Christians can successfully avoid the works of the flesh and prune those things from their hearts. And it's not by the law, Paul says, it's by the Spirit. And that's where you get into the fruit of the Spirit. Said another way, it's not through any means we have at our disposal. It is only through what Chris was talking about, the gospel, that we can do it. What Jesus has done for us in a moment in time on the cross, that is the means by which we can successfully prune the works of the flesh from our hearts and replace them with Spirit-grown fruit. And so today, the fruit that we're talking about, not the fruit, but an aspect of the fruit, a virtue of the fruit, right? Because we talk about, and I guess people have talked about it in different ways. I've heard it talked about, there's the fruit of the Spirit. And then all these things are the fruit. I've heard it talked about as if the fruit is the grape or the bunch of grapes, and there's all the little grapes on it. But the idea is that there's fruit, and then there's aspects of the fruit. And today, that aspect or that virtue of the fruit of the Spirit is goodness." [01:51]
5. "The Lord is gracious and merciful. He's slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that's what we read in Exodus 34. All those things make God good. And notice he is good to us. All. And his mercy is over all in verse 9. Over all that he has made. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. His goodness is multicolored. It's like a painting with different hues, different tones, different colors. As you look at it from different angles, it looks more lush. It looks more deep. It reminds me of a, remember the movie Ferris Bueller's days? Days off, days off, day off. So in that movie at the end, Cameron is standing, they're in a museum. And Cameron, he's got the Gordie Howe jersey on, right, the Red Wings jersey. And so he's standing in this museum and he's looking at a Georges Seurat painting, like a pointillism, very post-impressionist, right? It's blotchy, but from a distance, it kind of looks like something. And as you get closer, it's just like little points and little things. And he's staring at this thing. And if you remember from the movie, he's staring at this painting. And then all of a sudden, the camera starts going in to the painting and the focus goes in further and further and further. And so from the outside, you see the picture of the woman sitting in the park or whatever. And then as you get closer and closer and closer, the pointillism, the post-impressionist part of the painting comes out because then you no longer see the person. You just, you start to see the colors and then you see the dots. And if you remember that movie, it's a weird thing. But that is what God's goodness is like. And that's what A.W. Tozer was after, saying that we're never going to get after this because we can't even comprehend it. Because the more we look at it, the tones, the hues, the colors, the blotches, the points, right? There's just more and more of it to understand and to get. And that is how David describes God's goodness. There's all these different aspects, aspects that make up his glory, that make up his goodness. And he says, generations of people will declare how his goodness is displayed in his redemption. Generations of people. There's a redemptiveness to God's goodness displayed here with David writing his psalm, displayed in Moses' day in terms of being redeemed from Egypt and being rescued and being driven, being taken to the promised land. And ultimately, being redeemed by his son." [27:02]
Ask a question about this sermon
1. "Hope. That's hope. I am right before God because of what Jesus did in a moment in time and I now have a home in heaven and my sins are forgiven. That is hope. And so Paul says, since we have such a hope, we are bold. We should be bold. Here, here, good outweighing the bad, I can't never be bold. I can never be bold. Because I'm not sure if I said the right thing. Did I say the wrong thing to her? Did I say the right thing to her? Did I do the right thing? Did I not do the right thing? I can't be bold here. I'm walking a tightrope between good and bad and if I fall over to the bad, oh no! But he says, because we have such a hope, we are very bold." [40:33]
2. "He who began a good work in you is going to finish it. And you have something to do with that. Work out your salvation in fear and trembling. Emphasis on the trembling. Look into the mirror every day and become more like his son. How do you do it? You do it by staring at his goodness. Gossiping his goodness. Sharing his goodness. Spreading the fame of his goodness. And reflecting that goodness. And you do it by doing the hard work, Paul says. Yes, believe that you're dead to sin's penalty and to its reign. But also repent. Active daily repentance. Crucifying that self that wants its way. And being led by the spirit. Not just letting go and letting God, but taking active steps to keep in step with him and to walk with him." [53:46]
3. "There's the flesh. And it says if you live in the flesh, you will die. But if you live in the spirit, you will live. That always happens in life. If you live in the flesh, you will die. Choose to sin. Choose to suffer. Trust me. Choose to sin. Choose to suffer. Paul isn't saying that if you live in the flesh, you will die physically. He's saying that if you choose to sin, you're choosing to suffer. And he says if you live in the spirit, you will live." [51:34]
4. "God's goodness is transformative. It transforms us as we reflect it more and more. That's where we get to 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians chapter 2. 2 Corinthians chapter 2 is a challenge to get to because it's right before Galatians, right after 1 Corinthians, but it's just like, it's small. It's a couple chapters. It's like 13 chapters, but you'll miss it. You'll go by it in a blink." [37:18]
5. "The Lord is gracious and merciful. He's slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that's what we read in Exodus 34. All those things make God good. And notice he is good to us. All. And his mercy is over all in verse 9. Over all that he has made. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. His goodness is multicolored. It's like a painting with different hues, different tones, different colors. As you look at it from different angles, it looks more lush. It looks more deep." [27:02]
### Quotes for Members
1. "But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Verse 16. The Lord is spirit. And where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the spirit. Paul says that in Christ, we are beholding God's glory, God's goodness. And as we behold, we behold God's glory and His goodness, His Son, we are transformed into God, Jesus' image, more and more. And we are transformed, he puts it as, from glory to glory." [42:44]
2. "What is God's goodness? Is it just the sum of all of his strengths, of all of his virtues? Well, we see it here. We see it here in Exodus 34. So God tells Moses, okay, this is, I'm going to, everything I said that I'm going to do, I'm going to do for you, right? I'm going to bring you to up and put you in the cleft of the rock and you're going to see my glory. You're going to see my goodness. It's going to pass by you. And this is the sum of all of his strengths, of all of his virtues. This is what it is. This is how, this is how God himself defines his goodness, his glory. The Lord, it says in 30, Exodus 34, starting verse five, the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation." [16:24]
3. "learn from Him, consider Him, to know Him over time in the Christian life is to progressively be more conformed to the image of His Son. Romans 8.28, right? Romans 8.28, talks about good, right? Romans 8.28 says that whatever happens in my life, that God will work it out for good, right? What is that good? It's to be conformed to the image of His Son. That's the good. So when something bad happens to those who love God, if you are in Christ, in Christ, bad things happen. I think we would all agree bad things happen. I've been reading the prayer chains lately. I think we can all agree that bad things happen. Amen? Bad things happen. And God promises in Romans 8.28 that when bad things happen, that God will work them out for good. It's not always the good that we want, right? But the good is to be conformed to the image of His Son. That's the purpose. That is the purpose of this book and God's story is to set apart a people, a people for Himself who are increasingly, increasingly more and more staring into the mirror, staring into the image of His Son and becoming more like Him. And that is how the fruit of the Spirit works out. That as we stare at the Son, as we learn from Him, as we are in a relationship with Him, we reflect Him more and more in our daily lives. In Christ, the most wonderful change is not only possible, but it happens naturally to those who are led by the Spirit and walking by the Spirit." [44:49]
4. "The book of Galatians, written by the Apostle Paul. Good morning. How is everyone today? Great. If you don't have a Bible, if you don't have a Bible, it'd probably be a good idea just letting you know to either grab one in the back or fire up one on your phone maybe or something, because we're going to spend spend some time in the Bible. So just a word of warning, I guess, maybe, I don't know, that we're going to be rifling through pages or swiping and moving around. In your Bible app, you'll be searching for mainly three places. So I'm Jason Runyon. I'm a teaching elder here, and I preach from time to time, usually about once a month, which is probably more than you want of me. But today we're going to be talking about the Bible. And I'm going to be talking if you've been with us for a little bit, we are camped out right now in the fruit of the Spirit. So we're in Galatians chapter 5, and we've been there. There are nine of them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine of them, I believe. And we are on the sixth. So we've been for the last six weeks, including this week, we've been camped out on the fruit of the Spirit. And today we're talking about the fruit of the Spirit that is goodness. So we did love, patience, kindness. Love, peace, patience. Joy, I think it was in there. Kindness, and now we're on patience. And if you recall, in Galatians chapter 5, Paul is writing about the conflict that Christians face. We don't necessarily need to turn there. We've been there a lot. But in Galatians chapter 5, he's talking a lot about the conflict that Christians face. And in Galatians chapter 5, he talks about the works of the flesh, right? And he says, He uses words like drunkenness, envy, strife, right? It's not very hard to think about left up to our own devices, our flesh, which the Bible calls our old man, our sinful selves. It's not hard to come up with what the works of the flesh are. And then Paul contrasts that, and this is the conflict, with the fruit of the Spirit. Those things are harder to come by than the works of the flesh. It's easy for me to be jealous. It's easy for me to covet. But I mean, right off the bat, if you just go into the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not cover your neighbor's wife, his stuff, his animals, right? And it's really easy for us, me, all of us, to get jealous of what other people have, right? It's a lot more difficult for me to be kind to other people, right? And to, to be thankful for them and to love them than it is to just right off the bat be jealous of them. It's just how it works. And so there's a conflict, and Paul spends a lot of his time talking about the conflict. And if you remember, Paul has spent a lot of time in this book of Galatians, talking to the church of Galatia and to us, comparing the law with the gospel. And he's, he's, he's talked a lot about how the, the gospel is far superior to the law. Because the Galatians had begun to believe that in order to be in Christ, that they had to adhere to the rules and the regulations of the law. But the law was given, Paul tells us, as a temporary thing. It had an expiration date, like your milk in your refrigerator. It had an expiration date. God's purpose had always been to replace the law that was written on tablets, Ten Commandments, Moses. We're going to be talking a little bit about him this morning. He had always purposed to replace the Ten Commandments. With the law written on our hearts. He'd always intended to do that. And so the gospel is far, far superior. The law was meant to help us define and understand what sin is. And it was meant, the Bible tells us, as a tutor or a guide that could help us understand that we could never measure up to God's perfect standard. We could never do it. We needed help. And that's the crux of this conflict. And what Paul does is he lays out the means by which Christians can successfully avoid the works of the flesh and prune those things from their hearts. And it's not by the law, Paul says, it's by the Spirit. And that's where you get into the fruit of the Spirit. Said another way, it's not through any means we have at our disposal. It is only through what Chris was talking about, the gospel, that we can do it. What Jesus has done for us in a moment in time on the cross, that is the means by which we can successfully prune the works of the flesh from our hearts and replace them with Spirit-grown fruit. And so today, the fruit that we're talking about, not the fruit, but an aspect of the fruit, a virtue of the fruit, right? Because we talk about, and I guess people have talked about it in different ways. I've heard it talked about, there's the fruit of the Spirit. And then all these things are the fruit. I've heard it talked about as if the fruit is the grape or the bunch of grapes, and there's all the little grapes on it. But the idea is that there's fruit, and then there's aspects of the fruit. And today, that aspect or that virtue of the fruit of the Spirit is goodness." [01:51]
5. "The Lord is gracious and merciful. He's slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that's what we read in Exodus 34. All those things make God good. And notice he is good to us. All. And his mercy is over all in verse 9. Over all that he has made. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. His goodness is multicolored. It's like a painting with different hues, different tones, different colors. As you look at it from different angles, it looks more lush. It looks more deep. It reminds me of a, remember the movie Ferris Bueller's days? Days off, days off, day off. So in that movie at the end, Cameron is standing, they're in a museum. And Cameron, he's got the Gordie Howe jersey on, right, the Red Wings jersey. And so he's standing in this museum and he's looking at a Georges Seurat painting, like a pointillism, very post-impressionist, right? It's blotchy, but from a distance, it kind of looks like something. And as you get closer, it's just like little points and little things. And he's staring at this thing. And if you remember from the movie, he's staring at this painting. And then all of a sudden, the camera starts going in to the painting and the focus goes in further and further and further. And so from the outside, you see the picture of the woman sitting in the park or whatever. And then as you get closer and closer and closer, the pointillism, the post-impressionist part of the painting comes out because then you no longer see the person. You just, you start to see the colors and then you see the dots. And if you remember that movie, it's a weird thing. But that is what God's goodness is like. And that's what A.W. Tozer was after, saying that we're never going to get after this because we can't even comprehend it. Because the more we look at it, the tones, the hues, the colors, the blotches, the points, right? There's just more and more of it to understand and to get. And that is how David describes God's goodness. There's all these different aspects, aspects that make up his glory, that make up his goodness. And he says, generations of people will declare how his goodness is displayed in his redemption. Generations of people. There's a redemptiveness to God's goodness displayed here with David writing his psalm, displayed in Moses' day in terms of being redeemed from Egypt and being rescued and being driven, being taken to the promised land. And ultimately, being redeemed by his son." [27:02]
Chatbot
-
I'm an AI bot trained specifically on the sermon from Jun 02, 2024. Do you have any questions about it?