Will you please turn to Matthew? Matthew 6. We will read from Matthew 6:9-13.
Our Father who art in the heavens, let Thy name be sanctified.
Let Thy kingdom come.
Let Thy will be done, as in heaven, so upon the earth.
Give us this day our needed bread,
and forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors,
and lead us not into temptation, but save us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Let us have a further word of prayer.
Dear Lord, we want to thank Thee for gathering us together this morning. We do gather in Thy name, and as Thou hast promised us, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”
We praise and thank Thee for Thy presence here with us. We do realize that we stand on holy ground. We will remove our shoes and stand before Thee as Thy bond-servants.
Dear Lord, we want to open our hearts to Thee. Come from above and come into our hearts. May Thy word be living and operative in us.
Grant us the spirit of wisdom and revelation unto the full knowledge of God. Bring us into the reality of Thyself.
May Thy will be done in us as it is in heaven. May Thy glory be manifested in our midst. May Thy glory attract us and lead us to Thyself.
We praise and thank Thee for Thy faithfulness, and we trust ourselves totally to Thee. May Thy name be glorified. We pray in Thy precious name. Amen.
Thank God for gathering us together this morning. Every time we gather together in the name of our Lord Jesus, I always feel it is a special mercy and grace of God.
Our Lord is coming soon. He may come at any time. But He is not here yet. It is not because He does not want to return to receive His own to Himself. It is because He knows that we are not ready for Him.
So we do thank the Lord that He has given us another opportunity, that we may be made ready for Himself.
As you all know, the theme of this conference is, “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”
As our brother mentioned last night, the last sentence, “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen,” is not found in the earliest manuscripts. We read it in the later manuscripts. So, in the version that I am reading to you, Darby’s version, you do not find this last sentence.
And yet, as our brother mentioned last night, the spirit of that last verse can be found throughout the Bible. Especially, you find it in 1 Chronicles 29.
It is the spirit of the man of God, the man after God’s heart, David. The spirit of David is such that he wants to give God all the kingdom, power, and glory.
And it is befitting for each one of us. As we pray the prayer that the Lord has taught us, as the church is praying that prayer, it is but right for us to offer to God our doxology.
So it is the response, the result, of the prayer of the church. We do want to see that kingdom and power and glory be all unto God.
So, in spite of the fact that this verse is lacking in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible, we believe that it is right that we should have the spirit of David unto God. That is the reason why we find this verse becoming the theme of this conference.
Three of us have different assignments. Our brother Christian is assigned to speak on, “Thine is the kingdom,” and Brother Dana is assigned to speak on, “Thine is the power.” I am assigned to speak on, “Thine is the glory.”
If God wills, we will approach this matter from three different areas:
We find in the Bible many mentions of the God of glory, the glory of God.
I think, brothers and sisters, we all remember when God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees into the land of Canaan.
In Genesis 11, you find how Abraham came out of Ur of the Chaldees under his father. But if you want to know the real story, you have to go to Acts 7:2.
There you find Stephen recounting the working of God among His people. He said, “The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham,” and commanded him to leave Ur of the Chaldees and his kindred and go to the place where God wanted him to go.
So, in other words, it all starts with the God of glory.
We know from history that at that time the whole world was given to idolatry, and even Abraham’s father was an idol maker.
According to Jewish tradition, Abraham felt that there must be a living and true God. So, when his father left home for a while, his son Abram began to destroy the idols that his father made, taking off some legs or some hands.
When his father came back and saw what had happened, he asked, “What happened?” Abram said, “When you left home, these gods, these idols, began to fight against each other, and that is what happened.”
The father said, “That is nonsense.” Abram replied, “Now, if it is nonsense, why do you worship them?”
But this is Jewish tradition. The reality is that one day the God of glory appeared to him, and that was the beginning of the journey of Abraham.
Brothers and sisters, when the glory of God appears, it is a new beginning. Even in our spiritual life, how we need the appearing of the glory of God.
Once the glory of God appears to us, we cannot be the same anymore. We have to leave the old behind and press on to the new before us.
In a sense, this happened to every one of us. How do we come to believe in the Lord Jesus? Not because we have heard the gospel. We may hear the gospel for many years. We may be brought up in a Christian home. We may, in our mind, accept the existence of God. We may even know how to pray to Him. But there was no change.
Not until the God of glory revealed His Son in us did our whole life change. We have to leave the old behind and press on to the new way.
So thank God: the God of glory appears. It is the beginning of everything that is of God.
If you take Moses as another example, God delivered Moses out of the water when he was a little boy.
Somehow, his mother had instilled in him a thought. When she nourished him, somehow she conveyed a thought to Moses that God delivered him for a purpose. God delivered him in order that he might deliver His people.
After he was raised in the Egyptian palace and learned all the learning of Egypt, he became mighty in words and deeds. According to tradition, he became a great general.
Yet he wanted to deliver his people. He tried to use his eloquence to bring peace to Hebrews who were fighting each other, but he totally failed.
God allowed him to fail because he tried to do this work on his own. He had to flee for his life. For forty years, he was in the wilderness shepherding sheep.
After forty years there, he lost all his eloquence and all his might. It was at that time that God appeared to him in a burning bush.
In the wilderness there are many bushes. Because of the heat in the wilderness, it is a common sight that a bush will catch fire, and very quickly it will all be burned up.
But one day Moses noticed a bush that was burning but was not burned. That is a miracle. So he went forward to look at it. Why was this bush burning and yet not burned?
You remember the story of how God called him out of the burning bush. Even though you do not have the word glory there, we know that the fire burning there is the glory of God.
Again, you find the God of glory appearing to him and commanding him to return to Egypt to deliver the people, no more by his own eloquence and power, but exclusively and totally dependent upon God Himself.
By the grace of God, by the power of God, he led the people of Israel out of Egypt. He led them to Mount Sinai, and there you find God giving the children of Israel the Ten Commandments to make them His own people.
In Exodus 24, God called Moses to Mount Sinai because He wanted to give him the two tables of the law. When Moses went up to the top of the mountain, verse 16 says that the glory of God appeared on the top of the mountain.
In verse 17, it says that the people under the mountain could see the fire, the glory of God, on the top of the mountain.
As you go on, you find the children of Israel worshipping the golden calf. Moses had to plead for them before God, pleading for God to forgive them and still be willing to go with them to the promised land.
When you come to Exodus 33, you remember Moses made a request. Since he was so privileged by God, he asked for one thing. He said, “God, let me see Thy face.”
You remember what God replied to him. God said, “No man can see My face and live,” because the glory is so tremendous. God said, “You can only see My back, but not My face.”
God hid Moses in a cleft of the rock, and when God passed by, He covered him with His hand. After God passed by, then He let Moses see the back of God, not the face of God. There God declared who He was.
Brothers and sisters, you find all this recorded in the Old Testament. The glory of God appeared, but in Old Testament times no man could see the face of God. In other words, His glory is so tremendous that no one can really see the full glory of God and live.
But even so, because Moses was with God for forty days and forty nights, even though he only saw the back of God and not the face of God, and did not see the full glory of God, that glory was so powerful.
Because Moses was talking with God, unconsciously his face shone. The shining was such that Moses himself did not realize it. When Moses came down from the mountain, Aaron and all the people could not look straight at his face because it was so brilliant. He was so glorious.
But we all know that glory would fade away, as you find in 2 Corinthians 3. That is what you find concerning glory in the Old Testament.
But when you come to the New Testament, you find there is a great change. In John 1:14, the Word became flesh and dwelt among men—tabernacled among people—full of grace and truth.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,
and we beheld His glory,
glory as of an only begotten with a Father,
full of grace and truth.
Brothers and sisters, in the New Testament there is a great change. When our Lord Jesus came into this world, when the Word became flesh and tabernacled among men, you find that He was full of grace and truth.
But if you really contemplate and think about it, if you really enter into the reality of it, you find that it is the glory of an only begotten Son with His Father.
No one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son has declared Him. So, when our Lord Jesus was on earth, the glory of God rested upon Him.
You remember, at the time of our Lord Jesus, the temple was rebuilt. People worshipped in the temple, but there was something missing in the temple. In the holiest of all, it was empty. There was no ark. There was not the glory of God there.
Outwardly, everything was fine, but actually the most important element was missing, because the presence of God was not there. So it became just a religion. There was no reality.
But when our Lord Jesus came into this world, He became the real temple of God, tabernacling among men, full of grace and truth. You find the glory of God filling Him.
So when you see the Lord Jesus, you see God.
In Hebrews 1, our Lord Jesus is described as:
Who, being the effulgence of His glory,
and the expression of His substance.
When our Lord Jesus was on earth, He was the outshining of the glory of God. Just as you cannot look at the sun directly, because if you do your eyes will be blinded, yet we see the sunlight. When we see the sunlight, we know there is the sun.
This is exactly what our Lord Jesus is. He is the outshining of the glory of God, and He is the expression of His substance.
Substance means the reality, the nature, the character of God. The reality of God is being expressed by our Lord Jesus.
So the Lord Jesus said, “If you see Me, you see My Father. If you know Me, you know My Father,” because the Son and the Father are one.
When our Lord Jesus came into this world, the glory of God was fully manifested. Not only that, but you find that He will bring us into glory.
So, brothers and sisters, we who are in New Testament times have the privilege of seeing the very face of God, not just the back of God.
The glory will not only be something external. This glory will even become a reality in our life.
You remember 2 Corinthians 3:18: as we behold Him with unveiled face, we are being changed from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit.
Colossians 1:27 says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
When we believe in the Lord Jesus, we not only see what our Lord has done on Calvary’s cross, but we find that, even as we believe Him, Christ comes into us. When Christ comes into us, it is the hope of glory.
Because this life of Christ in us will grow from glory to glory. So we must thank God for what He has done for us.
We are no longer living in Old Testament times. We are now living in New Testament times, and we have Christ in us, the hope of glory. He, as our Leader, will lead us into glory.
Now we would like to ask the question: What is glory, really?
Number one: glory is the presence of God. Whenever God appears, you find glory.
When this glory appears, it is the manifestation of what He is. It is not just talk. It is the manifestation of His nature, of His character.
No one can fathom the fullness of God: how holy He is, how righteous He is, how gracious He is, how merciful He is, how mighty He is. No one can fathom that.
And yet our Lord Jesus is the embodiment of the fullness of God. That is the reason why, when the glory of God appears, it reveals to us something of His character that is beyond our understanding of what righteousness is. It really shows us what holiness really is. It tells us what love really is.
So whenever you see the glory of God appear, it reveals to us something of the character of God. Thank God, it is not just something objective; it is something subjective.
In other words, when the glory of God appears, we learn something more of who God is and what God is—not just outwardly, but it begins to be constituted within us. This is from glory to glory, and it is by the work of the Holy Spirit.
So, brothers and sisters, how we need to see the glory of God. Because by seeing the glory of God, we will be transformed. This is the reason why the Holy Spirit dwells in each one of us.
Glory is not only the manifestation of the character of God. Glory is also the act, the work, of God.
In Psalm 19, you find:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament showeth His handiwork.
The glory of God appears in His work. When you see the creation, you see the handiwork of God, and you see the glory of God.
Even though this present world is corrupted by sins and transgressions, yet there is such beauty, such glory, in this creation that it really draws from within us worship.
I remember many, many years ago, there was a lady in China. She was highly educated, and yet she was an atheist. She did not believe in God.
She was the matron of a high school. At that time it was a Christian school, but she refused to accept Christianity. On the contrary, she confiscated the Bibles that her students had.
People tried to reach her with the gospel, but she was so stubborn, so hard. One time, the school had to be disbanded because there was a plague in the city, and she had to send the students back home.
While she was on the boat from Nanking to Shanghai, she looked around at the scenery, and somehow God spoke to her: “There must be God. There must be a Creator.”
From there on, she was converted, and she became greatly used by God. If you want to know her name, she was Ruth Li. When I was young, she helped me a lot.
Even by the creation, though it was already corrupted, you can see the glory of God.
If this is true with the old creation, how much more true will it be with the new creation? In Ephesians 1:6, you find the expression, “the glory of His grace.”
The glory of His grace is even more than the glory of His creation, because this is a new creation, and it is from glory to glory by the Lord the Spirit.
So whenever you think of glory, you see the hand of God—what God can do with us.
We who were dead in sins and transgressions, who followed the fashion of this world, who were under the influence of the wickedness of the power of darkness, and who were the enemies of God—yet the grace of God appeared to us.
See what He has done in us. He not only has raised us from the dead, but He has also lifted us up to heaven and seated us with Christ in the heavenlies.
We are saved by grace through faith. It is not of ourselves; it is the grace of God.
So, brothers and sisters, whenever you see the glory of God, you notice the hand and the handiwork of God.
What is glory? Glory is the satisfaction of God. Whenever God is satisfied, then glory will appear.
You know the story of the tabernacle. When the children of Israel were traveling through the wilderness, God wanted to dwell with them, and He could not dwell with them directly because He was the holy God.
So He asked Moses to build a tabernacle according to the pattern of the mount. Moses was faithful to God because, when he made the tabernacle, he made everything according to the direction of God.
Egypt was famous for its architecture. Even today, people go to Egypt to see the pyramids. Moses had learned all the learning of Egypt. For him to build a tent was nothing.
Yet God showed him every item and detail of the tabernacle. God did not allow him to do anything on his own.
If God had said, “Build Me a tabernacle,” Moses could have said, “That is easy. I can build You a very glorious tabernacle.” But God did not allow him to do that.
That is the faithfulness of Moses: in every detail, he followed the direction of God. So when the tabernacle was set up, the glory of God filled the tabernacle. God took possession.
This happened also with the temple. David had a desire to build a temple for God, and God showed David the pattern of the temple. Solomon was wise enough to follow the pattern.
This is what wisdom really is: wisdom is to follow the direction of God. Because of this, when the temple was built, the glory of God filled the temple.
Even the priests could not stand there. Everyone had to bow down and worship.
If you read the book of Ezekiel, you find in Ezekiel 1 the appearance of the glory of God.
Then, when you come to Ezekiel 8 through 11, you find how the glory of God reluctantly left the temple because the children of Israel sinned against God.
But thank God, when you come to Ezekiel 43, you find the new temple that was to be built. It was built according to the pattern of God, and there you find the glory of God coming back to the temple.
Now, brothers and sisters, I believe there is a lesson for us to learn.
We find that when our Lord Jesus came upon this earth, He was full of the glory of God, and to see Him was to see the Father.
After He had completed the work of redemption, He ascended on high, and He was anointed by God as Christ, as Lord.
On the day of Pentecost, the oil that anointed His head came down to the beard and flowed through the whole body.
On that day, the one hundred and twenty believers had been praying and waiting for ten days. When the Holy Spirit came down to them, they were baptized in one Spirit and drank of the one Spirit. That was the beginning of the church.
You find in the book of Acts how the Spirit of God filled the house, and what testimony they had in the world. Within thirty years, the gospel had been preached to the end of the world—the known world, the center and extent of their world.
But, brothers and sisters, unfortunately, because of the unfaithfulness of God’s people, you find that even toward the end of the first century, it was as if the glory of God was leaving.
When you come to the Middle Ages, it was the Dark Ages because all the truth had been lost. It became just a religion.
But thank God, God did not leave His church. You find that God’s glory is returning. That is what we usually say: the recovery of the glory of God began in the sixteenth century.
When reformers such as Martin Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others arose, you find that justification by faith was recovered. You find an open Bible.
From that time onward, you find God’s truth has been recovered more and more.
Even though, when you look at the church in general, it is as if the glory has left, thank God, you find His glory has returned unto those who are overcomers.
You find there is a remnant of people who are faithful to God, who know the preciousness of the blood of our Lord Jesus.
They overcome Satan by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony. They not only have the testimony of Jesus, but they declare it. They love not their lives even unto death.
You find the glory is returning to them, until one day there will be a glorious church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.
So, brothers and sisters, this is our blessed hope. May the Lord have mercy upon us.
Dear Lord, as we review the story of Thy glory, on the one hand we bow low and repent. On the other hand, we lift up our heads, knowing that our redemption draweth nigh.
May it please Thee, Lord, that Thou wilt raise among us people who are totally given up to Thy glory. Let Thy glory change and transform us.
O Lord, we want to see Thy glory. We give ourselves up to Thy glory. May Thy glory come. Amen.