Wilmington First Pentecostal Holiness

WHOSE BABY ARE YOU?

We are all some one’s baby.  You have your mother’s mouth, your dad’s ears, your uncles eye’s.  We all tend to share characteristics with the family, and even 2 hours after we are born everyone is speculating who we most look like!  G. K. Beale says that God actually mocked Israel in Exodus 32:1-14, when they worship golden calf in the wilderness, saying that they had become stiff-necked like a obstinate animal who refused to obey its master’s promptings.  Israel became wild, like a wild animal, and had to be re-domasticated by Moses!  In other words, they became what they worshiped.  One of the key indictments of Israel’s idolatry in the wilderness was that they had exchanged their glory for shame (Psalm 106:19-20).  By this Beale says the scripture means not God, but the glory of God that they should be reflecting to this world.  God had made them imagers of his glory and they had exchanged that for something dim and unimpressive, the attributes of a beast, an animal, a cow!  When, because of the strain of this incident, Moses asked to see the glory of God, the Lord passed before him and the glory of God was described as… “The Lord, the Lord the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love, and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness and rebellion…”  (Exodus 34:6-7).  In other words the glory of God consists in the manifestation of his attributes, his holiness, his love, his righteousness, not just luminescence!  The reflection of the glory of God Israel had exchanged, was to represent the attributes of a loving, holy and righteous God to a dying and sinful world.

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IDOLATRY: DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU ARE HERE?

It’s a fair question, since most of us want to be remembered when we are gone.  What is life all about anyway?  It can’t be just be about what I can get out of it by way of fun and pleasure, because somehow that never lasts very long.  I thought I had figured out that life is what I make of it, but life has a way of reducing me to the lowest common denominator, so that I become whatever I put my energy into! 

G. K. Beale says we become what we worship, either for redemption or ruin!  So if I make the stuff around me the focus of my life… I become shallow, miserable and dissatisfied, because it is never enough, and because none of it provides me with a sense of purpose, or the sense that I am leaving a meaningful legacy behind.  When I am gone, there maybe nothing of substance left to show that I have been here.  I will have become as empty as the stuff I worshiped!  So why do I have this craving to matter, to be somebody, to leave something behind, to have had a purpose for my life?  I mean it is eating me up! 

In Genesis 1:26-31 the Bible gives us a clue… God created us to be imagers of his glory, to reflect his attributes in this world and serve his purpose through diligent obedience to his will.  Actually he created me with a purpose for my life in mind!

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