Money, Sex, Power

Living in the Light

• All of creation was meant to communicate the supreme beauty and worth of God.
• God created the world for His glory. He created the world so that He would be magnified by the way His creatures find their greatest satisfaction in Him.
• Money, sex, and power exist ultimately to show that God is more to be desired than money, sex, and power.
• Everything hangs on what we value as supreme. What is our highest treasure? What is our greatest satisfaction? When God takes that place in our hearts (of the greatest treasure and satisfaction); then money, sex and power begin to find their true and beautiful order. 

Definitions and Foundations

• Money: not just paper and coins but the pleasures, advantages or status that money can signify.
• Money, sex and power are gifts from God. If they sink us, it's not because they are bad. It's because something happened inside of us to turn instruments of grace into instruments of sin, into altars and incense in the temple of pride.

Notes from John Piper's book: Living in the Light: Money, Sex and Power.

For Your Glory - Jaye Thomas

For Your Glory - Tasha Cobbs

Glory to the Lamb - Geoffrey Golden

Why were you made?

The Good News of Christianity
We cannot live meaningful lives if we don't know why we were created.

Six Foundational Truths for Understanding the Good News of Christianity

1. God created us for His glory.
2. Therefore, it is our joyful duty to live for His glory.
3. All of us have failed to glorify God as we should.
4. Therefore, we are all dead in our sins and under God's just condemnation.
5. God sent His Son to save sinners and bring them into His eternal joy.
6. All the benefits purchased through Christ's death and resurrection are given to those united to Him through faith.

Glory

• Greatness
• Beauty
• Value

Isaiah 43:5-7
Bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by My Name, whom I created for My glory, whom I formed and made.

Implications

• That My glory may be known as the greatest treasure
• That My glory be enjoyed as the greatest pleasure
• That My glory be shown as the greatest treasure 
• by being enjoyed as the greatest pleasure and by attitudes and actions that flow from that pleasure in God.

Psalm 115:1 (NIV)
Not to us, LORD, not to us but to Your Name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.

Psalm 115:1 (NLT)
Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to Your Name goes all the glory for your unfailing love and faithfulness.

For Your Glory - Hayden Panettiere

Ninang'ara

In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
John 1:4

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1

Serving God

Serving the Lord means,

• To do what He says in a way that makes Him look supremely valuable in Himself;
• Submitting to Him in a way that makes Him look thrilling.

There are ways to submit to God that only make Him look threatening, not thrilling. There are ways to do what He says that only call attention to the fact that He is an authority not a treasure. 

That kind of service is not the service God commands.

God has not told us to serve Him as though He needed anything.

He is not served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

Acts 17:25

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:45

The kind of service that makes God look valuable and thrilling is the kind that serves God by constantly receiving from God. 

Whoever serves, [let it be] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies - in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 4:11-ff

We receive this supply by faith. That is, we trust moment-by-moment that we need, in serving Him, He will supply ("life, breath and everything"). This is the opposite of being anxious. Such serving is happy. And it makes God look no less authoritative, but infinitely more desirable. This is the glory He means to have. The giver gets the glory.

Therefore,

Serve the Lord with gladness

Psalm 100:2

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