A Well-Defined Faith — Ephesians 3:21 — Glorify

So Ephesians 3 is where I'll be reading from this morning.

We've already been involved in Ephesians all through our worship time this morning as we talked about God the Father, God the Spirit, God the Son.

Now, as Paul comes out of that, he gives a doxology.

And you just take that word apart, doxa, logos, it means glory word.

Paul is going to give glory to God based on everything that he's talked about.

And he says this in verse 21.

He says, So in this is that word glory or glorify.

I'm going to go ahead and give the definition now, and then we're going to step back and look at this passage here.

To glorify means to make somebody look good.

That's it.

It's a really big biblical word, but to glorify somebody means just to make somebody look good.

Now, the reason this word is important for our church is 26 years ago, This church accepted a young, arrogant, 29-year-old pastor who came in on his very first day, very first Sunday, and stood on this platform and said, I know you as a church, you have a mission statement.

It's been curated by a committee.

It's this real long statement about your mission.

Hey, guess what? We're throwing that statement out.

And from this day on, our mission statement is this.

Can you believe the nerve of that guy? Can you believe this church put up with that? Because I remember, if you're a little slow, that guy was me.

In case you're just wondering, 29 years old, full head of hair.

It was so nice, right? This is what teenagers and a downtown Southern Baptist church will do to you.

This is what's left.

Okay, so we changed that mission statement to glorify God in all we do, not because it was my mission of the church.

But because that's exactly what Ephesians chapter 3 says.

To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.

Our job is to glorify him in all we do.

But before we get there, I need to back up and take the first part of this doxology.