"We should not ask, 'What is wrong with the world?' for that diagnosis has already been given. Rather, we should ask, 'What has happened to the salt and light?'" ~~John R.W. Stott

"Life without God is like an unsharpened pencil--it has no point."

                                                ~~Author Unknown

A friend from my youth, Jack Elliott, emailed this to me some time ago. Wise words, my friend.

The Practice of Godliness

Since godliness is a distinctive quality of the Christian life, why do Christians seem to know so little about it?  Or why do we see so little of it in practice?  I know the Bible says it's a mystery, even a great mystery (1 Timothy 3.16).  But, if you examine that reference in context, you'll discover it's talking about God incarnating Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.  Incarnation certainly is a great mystery, but what does that have to do with godliness?  Especially godliness as it relates to me?

Hmmm, incarnation may just be the very key that unlocks the mystery of godliness for us.  Maybe that's what godliness is, a kind of incarnation.  After all, we were once created in the image of God.  When Adam bit into the forbidden fruit, he brought serious damage to the image of God in us.  Then Jesus came.  And when we received Jesus as our Savior, He recreated us in the image of God.  Or rather in His own image, as the Bible says, "whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son...." (Romans 8.28-29).  Peter tells us that God gave us "His precious and magnificent promises, in order that by them [we] might become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1.4).  Paul further admonishes us to "put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth" (Ephesians 4.24).  In each of these passages, we see God's purpose to restore the image of God in us.  And we begin to understand the mystery of godliness.  As A. W. Tozer put it,  "The supreme purpose of the Christian religion is to make men like God in order that they may act like God."

Godliness consists of two significant traits that will increase our understanding.  The first is God-centeredness, which expresses itself in devotion to God.  This trait indicates the focus of our lives--God.  It reveals the standard by which we measure our conduct--God.  It further reveals the goal toward which our lives are moving--God.  As the poet said,

                                    My goal is God Himself

                                    Not joy, nor peace;

                                    Not even blessing,

                                    But Himself, my God.

Isn't that what Paul meant when he said, "we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3.18)?

Godliness means we focus our attention on the Lord  so we might learn from Him and live for Him.  Caleb, that Old Testament giant, illustrates this trait of godliness beautifully.  Six times the Bible says of him that he followed the Lord his God fully (cp. e.g., Numbers 14.24; 32.12).  Actually, the statement does not have to do with following the Lord so much as with his love and devotion to the Lord; because literally, the Hebrew reads, "He filled up his heart after God."  It is the devotion of the heart that works its way out into the character of the life.  His heart was so full of the Lord, there was no room in it for anyone or anything else.  That is real devotion to God.  That is God-centeredness.  And that is godliness.

The second quality is God-likeness, which expresses itself in Christian character.  This is the actual meaning of god-li-ness; and it describes the results of the first trait, God-centeredness.  Christian character is the result of devotion to God and of fellowship with God.  When we walk with the Lord and talk with the Lord and think His thoughts and meditate on His Word, before long, we begin to look like Him and act like Him.  We don't just talk with Him, we talk like Him.  We are men and women whom God is shaping into people like Himself, people characterized by righteous living.  We desire to be holy, rather than happy.  We want to see the honor of God advanced through our lives.  We see everything from God's viewpoint.  After all, we've spent enough time with Him to learn His viewpoint.  We would rather die right than to live wrong.  We make eternity-judgments rather than time-judgments.  We want to see others advance and grow even if it's at our own expense.  That is God-likeness.  That is godliness.

These, too, are marks of godliness, like those we see in Daniel; and before long, you begin to realize how impossible it is to achieve them.  How can we effectively pursue godliness as Paul admonishes (1 Timothy 6.11)?  Major Ian Thomas suggests an answer.  He says, "The moment you come to realize that only God can make a man godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know God, and to let God be God in you and through you, whoever He may be--and this will leave you no margin for picking and choosing--for there is only one God, and He is absolute, and He has made you expressly for Himself!"  Godliness is the direct and exclusive consequence of God's activity in man, not the consequence of my capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of His capacity to reproduce Himself in me.  No wonder "godliness with contentment is great gain" (1 Timothy 6.6, KJV)!

          The Shadow on the Cradle

The shadow on the cradle first was life.

God's Spirit overshadowed Mary's womb,

And brought His Son into a world of strife,

And changed the pattern on the master loom.

The second shadow fell on Jesus' bed,

While in the manger silently He lay.

The shadow of the cross, all stained and red

Came to His cradle's foot and there it stay.

The shadow of the sceptre came at last.

Though yet a babe, the royal seed was sown.

God's triumph over Satan with one blast

Will end with Jesus on His Father's throne.

And of His kingdom there shall be no end:

The Savior, Sovereign Lord, and Faithful Friend.

Luke 1:31-35; 2:11

Copyright, 1979. Ken Cooper

How Big is God?

Henry Norris Russell taught astronomy at Princeton back in the day when modernism and fundamentalism butted heads. On one occasion, Russell delivered a lecture at Princeton on the Milky Way. After the lecture, a woman approached him and said, "Dr. Russell, you've lectured on the Milky Way. You've made us aware of how big the universe is and how tiny the earth is. Can we believe that there is a God who would be interested in us?"

Dr. Russell replied, "It depends entirely on how big a God you believe in."

Russell lived from 1877 to 1957 and was the leading theoretical astronomer in America. He graduated from Princeton in 1897 at the age of nineteen. In 1900, he earned his PhD summa cum laude, subsequently gaining considerable recognition in the field of astronomy. In all of this activity, Russell stood firm in his belief in the God of the universe.

Several years after Russell's death, Missionary Alliance pastor, A.W. Tozer published a classic in Christian literature, The Knowledge of the Holy. Tozer opened the first chapter with the words, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."

Today, when we are overwhelmed with current affairs, major personal expenses, unemployment, significant medical issues, and the list goes on, we need to draw our attention to the God of Henry Norris Russell and A.W. Tozer. We may need to ask ourselves "How big is the God we believe in? What comes into our minds when we think about God?"

Isaiah describes Him in these words:

            Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,

            And marked off the heavens by the span,

            And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure,

            And weighed the mountains in a balance

            And the hills in a pair of scales?

                                                            Isaiah 40:12, NASB, Rev. 1995

A rhetorical question, but a challenging one. For instance, how much water does He measure in the hollow of His hand? First, I know, God is a spirit and doesn't really have hands as such. But He uses this kind of language to help us gain a little understanding about God, Who He is, and how great He is. Now, this planet contains a lot of water. Let's gather it together and take a closer look. There are five oceans: The Pacific Ocean, The Atlantic Ocean, The Indian Ocean, The Arctic Ocean, and the Southern Ocean, sometimes called the Antarctic Ocean. That's a ;lot of water to begin with. Then there are the seas. To name a few, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, the South China Sea. Then let's add the lakes. There's Lake Victoria at the mouth of the Nile River. In the United States, we have the Great Lakes--Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, and Lake Superior. In my neighborhood in Texas, we have Lake Arlington, Lake Benbrook, Lake Texoma, Eagle Mountain Lake, Lake Bridgeport. Then there's Lake Tahoe and the Great Salt Lake, and many more. How about adding a few rivers? In my home state of Pennsylvania, there are the Delaware River, the Schuylkill, the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. Then, of course, there are the St. Lawrence River and the Mississippi River. Here in Texas, we have the Trinity River, the Brazos River, the Lampasas River, and the Guadalupe River. Then there's the Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon and the Snake River in Wyoming. Did I mention the Amazon River and the Yangtze River. Put these and all the other rivers of the world in the pot and add all the streams, the creeks, the rain drops and melted snow and how much water do we now have altogether? Lots and lots.

Would you believe, the United States Geological Survey Office has actually calculated the total amount of water on the planet. According to their figures, there are 326,000,000 cubic miles of water. Wow! That's definitely lots of water! But there's more! One cubic mile of water, according to the USGS, contains more than one trillion gallons of water! That's 1,000,000,000,000 for ONE cubic mile! That would make the total amount of water come to about 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons! WOW!  And all that in the hollow of ONE hand! What comes into your mind now when you think about God?

In the next phrase, Isaiah says, God marks off the heavens with a span. How big is a span? For most humans, about nine inches. It covers the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger when the hand is spread out as far as it is able. But then how does this help us understand how God marks off the heavens? How big are the heavens? Astronomers measure distances in space in terms of light years, a standard I still have trouble wrapping my mind around. One light year is the distance light travels in one solar year at 186,000 miles per second. This calculates to a total of 5,865. 696, 000,000 miles in one year. Round that up and it comes to 6,000,000,000,000. The nearest star--after our sun--is four light years away or 24 trillion miles.

One night the Boy Scout troop I worked with set out on a canoe trip down the Brazos River in Palo Pinto County, Texas. At sundown, we set up a camp in a clearing on a riverbank about halfway to our destination. After the boys had settled in for the night, another Assistant Scoutmaster and I laid back on the grass to rest and visit awhile. My head had not even hit the ground when I was astounded by the sight above the trees. For a city boy like me, that country sky was a panorama of wonder with the Milky Way filling my view from horizon to horizon. How immense was the galaxy spread pout before me!

According to some scientists, the Milky Way Galaxy is 120,000 light years in diameter. That comes to approximately 720,000,000,000,000,000 miles using the rounded figure of six trillion miles to a light year. And this is just one galaxy! In 1995, Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute which operates the Hubble Telescope conducted an experiment with the telescope. For about a hundred hours, the Hubble was focused on a segment of the universe that was filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. National Geographic put it this way: "When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours." As a result, the "nothing" was actually "stuffed with galaxies. More than 3,000 of them came spilling out.... " (http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/24/when-hubble-stared-at-nothing-

for-100-hours/, accessed 11-10-15; check this site for a picture of the "Nothing" Hubble looked at) As a result, Williams "calculated that the universe is stuffed with 50 billion galaxies, not the 10 billion that astronomers previously thought." (Sharon Begley, "Science: A Heavenly Host," Newsweek [January 29, 1996]: 52). If, for the sake of discussion, we consider the Milky Way to be average in size, then the size of the known universe would be roughly 120,000 times 6 trillion times 50 billion. The resulting figure would be astronomical (pun intended). And God marks it all off with a span! One hand! The hollow of one hand for the waters! One hand as a span for the heavens! What comes into your mind now when you think about God?

The rest of this verse only emphasizes further both the smallness of creation against the greatness of the Creator. The dust of the earth, the mountains, the hills all express by contrast the immense greatness of our God. Stuart Hamblen penned it beautifully in his song "How Big is God?" His answer was "He's big enough to rule His mighty universe. Yet small enough to live within my heart." What comes into your mind now when you think about God?

Recently, I was perusing an old notebook and came across this little clip filled with some wonderful description of the Face of the Lord from Calvary Baptist News. Read it and ponder on it as I did.

THERE IS A FACE INTO WHICH YOU CAN LOOK THAT WILL HELP YOU ACROSS THE STREET OF LIFE.

That face was SET toward Jerusalem.

That face was SCARRED by thorns and rough hands.

That face was STAINED withy His own blood.

That face was SADDENED by the hardness of men.

That face was SAPIENT with the wisdom of God.

That face was SEDATE with the responsibility of souls.

That face was SHAMELESS because He was without sin.

That face was SILENT for He opened not His mouth.

That face was SORROWFUL for He was a man of sorrows.

That face was SMITTEN with the hands of His enemies.

That face was SUBMISSIVE to the plan of God.

That face was SHINING with the Glory of God.

          Look into that face and you will know that you can TRUST HIM.

                             ~~~Calvary Baptist News, Calvary Baptist Church, Grand Prairie,

                                      Texas, 03-25-81

Acceptable Worship

On his way to a Bible Conference at Oxford University, Jack Hayford visited Blenheim Palace, historic home of Queen Anne. There the stately buildings, the rolling countryside, the dignity characterizing the people tugged at his own spirit with a sense of destiny. Driving away from the palace, Hayford mused on that destiny, "There is something of a majesty in all this." He later added, "Majesty, I thought. It's the quality of Christ's royalty and Kingdom glory that not only displays His excellence, but which lifts us by His sheer grace and power, allowing us to identify with and share in His wonder." Before many miles had passed, that sense of wonder compelled him to dictate to his wife the key, the musical notes, the time and meter, and the lyrics to the inspiring song, "Worship His Majesty."

Hayford's experience and his song together occasioned my musing--naturally. Worship is our destiny, now and forever. Crack the Book of Revelation on any page and you will find the choirs of heaven worshipping the majesty of the Lord. Turn to Genesis. No sooner had the human family begun to grow beyond Adam and Eve than they found themselves confronted with the wonder of worship. And between Abel and Cain arose quickly the question of acceptable worship.

Thousands of years later, Jesus answered that question succinctly: God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:24, NAU) True worship must be determined by God Himself. After all, it is a bout God; it is what He desires from us. And since God is spirit, true worship is basically spiritual.

Jesus describes the spiritual life, the life He came to make possible for all who believe, in terms of living water. With this analogy, He places worship right in the center. To Nicodemus, He declared the spiritual life comes in to believers as living water (John 3:5) To the Samaritan woman, He promised that life would spring up within her in worship (John 4:14). Later, to the Jewish leaders, He proclaimed that the spiritual life flows out from the believer in living service to others by the Holy Spirit (John 7:37-39). And service frequently describes worship in its richest form (cp. Romans 12:1-2); so in a real sense, worship consists of the "living water" returning to its Source just as rivers do on earth (cp. Ecclesiastes 1:7). The spiritual life which flows from God to us, returns to Him in worship from us, thus completing a divine cycle.

From this brief analysis, worship emerges as an attitude, a "feeling in the heart" that flows out from the heart to God. Some time ago, in a discussion of worship, my friend Don Miller described it to me as an exchange of hearts. This is neat, too. I meet with God; and when we part, He leaves with my heart, and I leave with His heart. I cannot leave without a deeper appreciation of His majesty and supremacy, an appreciation exploding from concentration on the awesome Person of the Lord. That is real worship. As Miss C. A. Wellesley once wrote,

Occupied with Thee, Lord Jesus,
            In Thy grace;

All Thy ways and tho’ts about me
            Only trace
Deeper stories of the glories
            Of Thy grace, of Thy grace.

Taken up with Thee, Lord Jesus,
            I would be;
Finding joy and satisfaction
            All in Thee;

Thou the nearest and the dearest
            Unto me, unto me.