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God is Glorious & I Really Suck!

Timothy Ringering
Thursday, October 3rd, 2003

Here I sit, slouching on my Futon couch, clothed in my well-worn, blue and white plaid flannels. I've got my trusty laptop firmly ensconced where laptops should always be…on my lap. It's around midnight on a starry, Northwest night and my wife and kids have long gone to sleep, leaving me to the danger of my thoughts. I don't write nearly as often as I should, but I think I'll make a feeble attempt to transpose my thoughts into written word. It's funny. I'm finding it harder and harder to contain my thoughts as they are increasingly consumed by the mind-amplifying truth of the cross. The Gospel has come to my life accompanied by a joyous explosion and I am wrecked beyond repair. I'm convinced that my heart and mind would rupture without the outflow of speech or prose. So, if you wish, read on.

Now, understand something right away. I am not a writer. I barely know what the word 'prose' means, and Ernest Hemingway is more of an answer to a trivia question for me than a personal hero. So what you're about to take in will contain no literary luster or luminous language (check that out!), just a guy who is sitting in his plaid pajamas in the middle of the night thinking out loud. The only classical training I have in writing is using spell check, so here we go.

There are two stark and growing realities that I am becoming more acutely aware of with each passing day of my life. Each of these realities is soaked with unassailable evidence that make them at once indisputable and inescapable. Ironically, the more I learn about these two contrasting and paradoxical realities the more they produce within me a sweet, spiritual synthesis. Even more ironically, one reality dashes me to pieces, while the other lifts the rafters of my soul. And yet, ultimately, both engender the same result ... an ever increasing distrust of me and an ever increasing faith in Jesus Christ.

'So tell me, what are these two realities?' you ask. Okay, I'm still not entirely comfortable with the second one yet, so the next sentence will not be the easiest sentence to type. But before I type it, I must tell you that if I am to describe these realities in their naked truth, then I must say it in the most simplistic and unadorned way I can think of right now. No frills. No poetry. Here goes…

God is glorious and really I suck.

I told you I'm no Hemingway. Yep. That's it. Those are the two inescapable truths that are dawning like the eastern sun on the landscape of my life. Now those of you who know me would not find the second one to be all that revealing. You're probably saying something like, 'C'mon, Tim! You can't be telling me you didn't already know that!' But for me, the second reality (the one where I really suck) came as a shocking and thunderous implosion the moment I came face to face with the first reality…God is glorious. All of my goodness, all of my pious morals, all of my Sunday best completely collapsed upon themselves under the shock and awe of God's glory.

I've always seen myself as a fairly decent and good person when measured against the yardstick of American social ethics. Trust me; I've done some pretty bad things in my life. Things that would make my mother blush. But if you were to grade me on the curve, I guess my life would be somewhere in the middle of the pack. Mother Teresa would have shuddered if she took a peek through the keyhole of my heart, but on the other hand, I haven't kept any body parts in a barrel of formaldehyde in my living room like Jeffrey Dahmer either. So in the eyes of society, I'm not half bad. At least that's what I used to think…until I came face to face with the glory of God.

Now here's the tough part. How do you describe the glory of God? Wanna know what I think? I think it's utterly impossible! I've read the poetry of David, the wisdom of Solomon, the soaring passages of Isaiah, and Jeremiah. I've read Peter, James, John, and Paul and their mighty epistles caused me to soar. I've read Augustine, Calvin, Edwards and Lewis, and their words are extravagantly rich portrayals. But human language, even that which is inspired by the Holy Spirit fails miserably at describing the infinite beauty of the glory of God. So who am I? What can I add? Instead of recasting their powerful prose, I will use my own limited bucket of words for this moment in time.

To speak of God's glory is to speak of His holiness. God is infinitely perfect. He never fumbles the ball, never sticks His foot in His mouth, and never puts the cart before the horse. God never says, 'Oops!' His character is flawless, His righteousness unmitigated, and all of His ways are blameless. God is right. And He is not right as compared to some outside standard of 'rightness'. He IS right.

Another way to speak of God's glory is to speak of His beauty. There are some beautiful things to behold in the world. I've stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon at the age of 12 or 13 with the bottom of my jaw resting on my chest. I've seen my firstborn come from my lover's womb to take his birth breath (I know guys; the beauty of childbirth is completely debatable). I've seen the moon dance on the Mediterranean Sea in the south of Spain as I stood near the cradle of human history. But all these beautiful things are shadowy, murky reflections of the manifold beauty of the Creator's glory.

You see, the blazing desert beauty that I took in as I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon was bounded by its depth and diameter. The wonder I felt at the brilliance of the Mediterranean Sea, was mitigated by my sad heart at the religious and ethnic strife between the countries that met at its shores. And even the beauty of witnessing the birth of my sons was shadowed by the great pain born in my wife's body.

But the beauty of the Lord is chastened by nothing. The beauty of God's glory knows no bounds of time or space. The brilliance of God's beauty is never darkened by the strife or sin of men. It is unabated, indescribable, and unparalleled. Notice that I am describing it more by saying what it is not, rather than what it is. This is because God is like no other and cannot be rightly compared with anything else in Heaven or earth. Simply put, the glory of God is His transcendent essence, His infinite being. There is nothing that God points to outside Himself to validate Himself.

That leads me to another facet of the glory of God; His immutableness. Do you know how singular and unique that is?! Think about it for a moment. He is the one and only entity in the entire universe that never changes. He has existed for all eternity and yet is still the same. In fact, the sentence I just used inaccurately describes His agelessness. See, He has no history. In Him, there are no epochs of past, present or future like all other living things. Genesis and Revelation are not the bookends of His existence. He stands above the measurement of time as the great 'I AM'. THAT is glory!

I could go on and on and type 'til Jesus comes and still there would be things left unsaid. You could probably say it a hundred ways yourself. But let me just say this. Most people in the world have exchanged the glory of the immutable God for a lie. Most have made a futile attempt to delete God from their reality and replace Him with another, safer 'truth'. All the while, not knowing that is the most dangerous and destructive omission one can ever make. But that's just the people outside the church. There are those inside the church who don't delete Him, they just diminish and devalue Him.

I grew up a Christian. For most of my life, I have known ABOUT the glory of God. Intellectually and even theologically I understood that He is wholly other. But the full and crushing weight God's glory only came to me when the truth of the Gospel jarred my own reality. I had attributed sovereignty and omnipotence to God in every area except the battleground of my own sin. That was something I had to fix. I sat at the feet of my mom and dad to hear Bible stories that told of a sinless Messiah. Stories that told me that He had set the example of human perfection and that my life's goal was to become like Him. What would Jesus do? The trouble was I could never measure up. And for most of my life, I covered my sins with the Band Aid of good old fashioned Christian hypocrisy.

But then my joyless and synthetic game of 'playing Christian' collided with the truth of the Gospel. Like a gargantuan sledge hammer, the Holy Spirit used a good friend and a host of writer's throughout church history to break my man-centered view of salvation. Suddenly, passages of scripture I'd read a thousand times before leapt off the pages to reveal that God is on the center stage of my salvation and not me.

All that time I had spent working for, striving for, and clawing for some kind of footing on the hill of my redemption, the truth was; Jesus had already climbed the hill. Now I could hear Paul saying 'there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.' And I could understand Peter's cryptic phrase 'He has given us an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.' I saw the glory of God revealed in the radiance of His Son and, cheeks wet with tears, I cried out with the prophet Isaiah, 'Woe is me for I am ruined. I am a man of unclean lips and I live among unclean people. For I have seen the glory of the living God!'

Like Isaiah smitten by the sight of God's majestic train of glory filling the temple I was reduced to a terrified, stammering child. If you think about it, Isaiah uttered what we all utter when we come face to face with the Gospel. Isaiah may have said it in a more couth and cultured way, but basically, he lifted his voice a cried out, 'God is glorious and I really suck!'

But there is an even more awesome experience than Isaiah's glorious witness that day in the synagogue. It is the reality-shattering, life-altering, heart transforming, mind-bending, soul-satisfying encounter with Jesus, the King of Glory. And this encounter takes place at the scene of the most glorious act in universal history, the cross.

The first thing that the cross proclaims to us is the terrible price that must be paid for our sin. Like an awful mirror, it shows us our supreme inability to make up for what we've done. Someone once said that an infinite crime against an infinite God demands an infinite sacrifice. Broken at the foot of the cross, you see the infinite gap between your best acts and the payment God's holiness demands. As for me, I can't do it. Can't make up the difference. The gap is wider than a million Grand Canyons. Calvary's hill is far to steep for me to climb! His glory is much too holy, much too beautiful, and much too righteous for me to match. All of my best stuff falls short.

So, as I sit here on my Futon, laptop in lap, surveying the record of my life, I am keenly aware that I am full of failure. Much of what I attempt to do ends up short. That's not an easy thing to admit for me, but it's true. At times I've said to myself, 'I'll never do that again!' and I do. I'll make promises that I don't keep, rules I end up breaking, plans that end up going awry. Even the things that I succeed in are laced with sin. The horrible thing is that I am completely helpless to do anything about it! It's so bad that even the things I do right I muck up with self pride and arrogance. My arm should be in a permanent sling with all of the times that I've broken it patting myself on the back. But the truth is 'I suck'. Seriously. I mean I really suck.

And here is where my two realities synthesize into a sweet song of freedom. It's not up to me to save myself! When it comes to justifying myself before a holy God, I suck. When it comes to meeting His demands of perfection, I suck. When it comes to living up to the glory of God and being a good Sunday Christian, I suck and fall short every time. This is my reality. But then an even greater reality lifts me out of my helpless state. This is the reality of a glorious God who became for me what I could never become for myself. He has become my redemption and freedom.

So now, instead of attempting to climb the Calvary hill Christ already conquered for me, I am free to pursue Him in love with equal passion. Instead of the vain burden to fix myself, by myself, I am free to love my brother. Instead of pursuing a holiness to appease God, I am free to pursue a holiness, in Christ, to please God.

End of pajama prose.

For His Glory!

John 1:14 - 'And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

E-mail: timothy@thewellchurch.com | top of page