A couple of blogs ago I hope you recall the first part of this article which outlined the importance of how we see things, our view, our whole being is determined by what view we allow to fill our minds of God.   Our view of God is where our liberty is found, it is where our expression comes from, it is where our life flows.    These simple thoughts are meant to get us considering our view of God.    Your liberty is held here, a revelatory encounter will change you and bring you through in life, making such a difference to us all.   Let us continue in our journey of liberty and freedom.

GLORIOUS

God’s glory is His multifaceted perfection put on display.  It is, among other things, His incomprehensible love, His infinite hatred of evil expressed in His wrath, His tender mercy, His amazing grace, His love of justice, His boundless wisdom, and His iridescent holiness. God glorifies Himself by loving and exercising each of these traits. He created the universe and redeemed us to display His glory. It is His ultimate passion.

Remember, before God created the universe He had existed eternally in a perfect trinity of love. The love of His glory as it appeared in the other members of the Godhead was His consuming occupation. The Father rejoiced in His glory as He saw it in His Son, the “exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3). The Son exulted in His glory as it appeared in the Father. This love overflowed in a limitless ocean of eternal, unbroken joy. God in three persons loved His glory as He beheld it in each member of the trinity. Referring to this, Jesus prayed, “Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (Jn. 17:5).

When He created the universe, it was for the display of the glory each member of the trinity had already experienced before creation. That is why the Bible continually tells us that God does everything for His glory, and it never apologizes for these statements.

Now lets go back to John 17 again as outlined Jesus talks about the glory that he was given “…before the world began…” the amazing things is in this account of his word, the words he used just prior to his arrest Jesus included this statement in the middle of the Jesus prayer, his real prayer, his cry for oneness in his body 20-26                                                                                     “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one ²³ I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent meand have loved them even as you have loved me.                                                                                                          ²⁴ “Father, I want those you have given meto be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.                                                          ²⁵ “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

The church has been given Jesus’ glory so we can stop chasing after it,  and just be the gift of glory to our world.

Lets now move on to another scripture that is captured in the account of Moses’s conversation with the Father, its the conversation around the presence of God going with Moses.   It has to be said that there is a fundamental difference for you and I to Moses’ experience, our experience today is that the Fathers presence has come to us as believer in Christ, we, as those who now believe never walk outside or away from his presence, it is the essence of the gift of abundant life “…he will never leave or forsake us…”

Now to Exodus 33:18-19.  Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.” ¹⁹ And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to passin front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

See it, Moses asked to see his glory, what passed by, what did he see?   The glory was manifested in two things his “goodness” and his “name” and we are now to extend his glory by showing his goodness to all mankind, and to the people of God he has given his name, the church being the glorious body of Christ and the carrier of his glory in lives being fully lived out.

FATHER

As a very young Christian, I stumbled onto a verse in Psalm 27 that piqued my curiosity as much as it unnerved me. It spoke of something I could not then imagine: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me up” (Ps. 27:10, NASB).

I am my father’s first child—born in 1956 a reason for him to come home from the dark coal pits of South Wales, he would come home from the coal mines,  wash the dirt of the underground away and say I am here, I will always be here for you.    My dad leaving me, forsaking me how could that ever happen to me?

As I moved out into life I slowly realized that every father fails or “forsakes.” He fails as every human fails—and, worst insult of all, he dies.    My Father died over 15 years ago and when my mother passed away a few years ago a strange thing happen I felt like an orphan, until God overwhelmed me, moved on me and showed me I was not an orphan at all but a son of God.   At that point I could have allowed an orphan spirit to take over, or become like Melchizedek with no mother or father,  I choose to be the latter and the orphan spirit left me.    We realize as we journey in life that our fathers cannot fully father us, then we discover what God has been waiting to reveal: He will take us up. It is in those moments when life hands us a tiny shred of “orphan-ness”—of being on our own—that God the Father is especially present, longing for us to take our hands out of any human hands and grasp His.

He is our Father and longs to have a family; God will bring us to Sonship though his fathering.  We see it even in John 3:16 “For God so loved he gave” his love come forward and manifested in a Son his love gave as it has no boundaries, or control and withholds nothing.    So Jesus is the love of the Father manifested, this love removed the orphan nature of humanity that came through the loss of Adam in the garden, by bring us into Sonship by the love of God giving us the gift of his Son as his love manifested.   We are all given the opportunity to mature in Sonship.

Adam lost his sonship and became an orphan that has affected the whole of creation; Jesus came and died to recover the Fathers ultimate intention.   That God is a Father who longs for a family this is what he had in mind prior to creation.