The big idea
We spend most of our language on how we glorify God. This message turns the sentence around and asks what God has done to honor us — and finds three answers, all of them resting on the fact that God the Son became a real human being and never stopped.
Key takeaways
- Glory is visible splendor — a bride at a wedding, a victorious general coming back through the city gates, respect taking physical form. It is weight you can see.
- The early church had to fight for the claim that Jesus was truly human, not a convincing appearance. People assumed God would never dignify us that far.
- If anything Jesus was is good, then being human is good. Hunger, tiredness, even temptation are not evidence that something is wrong with you.
- Humanity is not a crowd of unconnected individuals but a single connected lump, and Christ joined into the lump — which is why his arrival dignifies everyone, in every century.
- Holy does not mean pure. Holy means set aside, belonging to God, marked by his presence. A flawless sheep on a hill is just a sheep until it is given to the Lord.
- Both the tabernacle and Solomon’s temple were ordinary construction until the glory cloud arrived. The second temple, tellingly, has no such moment recorded.
- Jesus called his own body the temple — and we are built into that body like living stones, which makes the church an active, glorious temple spread across the earth.
- The inheritance is not standing in the splash zone of somebody else’s glory. It is being made heirs of God himself, transformed from one degree of glory to another.
Matt opened with a contest nobody can score: the joy we bring the Father against the joy he brings us. “Who glorifies whom better? I think he’s going to outdo us.” But the fact that God is inclined to appreciate our small offerings, our service, our “little adorable chats,” makes it an immeasurable contest — and it points at something we rarely say out loud. God has honored humanity, in three specific ways.
Why this, in Advent
The aim was to stir up hope, because Christ in us is the hope of glory — and that hope answers a longing already in us. “We long for a dignity, a place, a place of belonging to belong into his family. That’s what he’s created you for.” Matt admitted the difficulty plainly: if it weren’t in the Bible you wouldn’t believe it, and some of us still struggle even though it is.
So, first, what is glory? Visible splendor — a bride, and everyone looking at her because she matters. Or a victorious general and his troops marching back through the gates while everyone who is anyone watches, as if respect had taken physical form. Or the dignity of a judge in his courtroom, or a performer working at the edge of impossibility and pulling it off with grace, so that you simply stand there in awe.
1. It is a dignity that he became human at all
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
John 1:14The emphasis fell on flesh. When the church first taught this, some could not take it in: God is so special and we are so scummy that surely he only appeared to be one of us. “They thought there’s no way he would actually dignify us that strongly by truly becoming a human. But he really did.” And the verb John reaches for is tabernacled — a deliberate echo of God among his people in the wilderness, which the message would come back to.
The one exception is sin — Hebrews 4:15, tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin. Which Matt turned straight toward anyone who has, as he put it, drunk deeply from the cup of self-hatred. You get tired, thirsty, hungry, sick. You may find yourself disgusted with your own humanity. But anything Jesus was is good, and Jesus was human. Being tempted did not make him bad. It is okay to be a person.
2. We are joined into his body
Who is the “us” he joined? Individuals, yes — but also a mass of collective humanity. Matt borrowed C. S. Lewis’s picture from Mere Christianity: spread humanity out across time and you would see not scattered dots but a tree, everything continuously connected. We are still saved by grace through faith, individually; and yet salvation came to the tree.
He proved the connection from an odd corner of scripture. In Hebrews 7:7–10, Levi is said to have paid tithes to Melchizedek — though Levi had not been born, because he was still in Abraham’s loins when Abraham met the king of Salem. “Sorry about that. Merry Christmas.” You carry your descendants with you; humanity nests inside itself. Follow it back far enough and we are all in Adam, which is Paul’s point in Romans 5 — not merely that we imitate Adam’s sin, but that we were in him when he sinned.
“If the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole lump.”
Romans 11:16Paul told the Athenians the same thing from the other direction: God made every nation from one man, so that they should seek him and perhaps find him, “yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26–27). The sad note is John 1:11–13: he came to his own and his own did not receive him — but to those who did, he gave the right to become children of God.
Living stones, and what makes a place holy
“As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
1 Peter 2:4–5That “you” is plural. We are the bride of Christ, and we are also a temple.
“So Moses finished the work. Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it.”
Exodus 40:33–35Matt wondered aloud what it would have been like in the room. Did the glory have a sound, a smell? Would it have made you woozy, or light, or heavy? “One minute it’s a tent made by people. The next, it’s a holy place. And the difference was God himself arrived.”
Which is what holy means. Picture a flawless sheep on a hill, brushed, with a bow. It is still not holy — it is a mundane sheep doing nothing. It becomes holy when it is given to God. Same with tongs: the pair in your kitchen is mundane, the identical pair in the tabernacle is the Lord’s. “Holy means special or set aside or reserved because it belongs to God or it’s been marked by his presence.” Which is why one of the commonest words for Christians in the New Testament is saints — holy ones.
Two temples, and the one with no cloud
David wanted to build God a house better than a tent, and was told his son would do it instead (2 Samuel 7:1–13). At the dedication, with sheep and oxen past counting, the same thing happened: a cloud filled the house so the priests could not stand to minister (1 Kings 8:3–11). Steve, from the congregation, caught the wording — not that they could not stand it, but that they could not stand to do their work. Brick and mortar one minute; sacred the next, because the Lord arrived and sanctified the work of human hands.
Babylon destroyed that temple, and the returning remnant built another. Haggai asks the survivors who remember the first one: “Is it not as nothing in your eyes?” (Haggai 2:1–3). It was smaller — but the louder clue, Matt pointed out, is that no glory cloud is ever recorded falling on it.
“I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts… The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former.”
Haggai 2:6–9Greater than what, though? If the comparison is the second temple, that is a low bar — something podunk becoming less podunk. If it is the tabernacle or Solomon’s temple, the bar is very high indeed, and nothing made of stone clears it. What clears it is the temple of Jesus Christ.
Matt was not inventing the equation. Jesus made it himself: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” His hearers objected that it had taken forty-six years to build — and John, helpfully, explains that he was speaking about the temple of his body (John 2:19–21). That body is the one we are built into.
And the Spirit who filled the tabernacle and the temple is the Spirit who fills us — Romans 8:9–11, every “you” of it plural. “It’d be wrong to say there’s no current temple of the Lord on earth. There is in fact a sacred and glorious one all over the earth, active and vibrant, because the body of Christ.”
3. A future inheritance we cannot describe
Peter tells the suffering church that after they have suffered a little while, “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” (1 Peter 5:8–10). Called to his own eternal glory. “Can you even take that in? What words do we even use to describe it?”
Then the inheritance itself. When someone mentions an inheritance we picture a lump of money, a plot of land in New Mexico, a crocheted pillow. Scripture says heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. Matt named the smaller thing we tend to settle for: the splash zone. “I’m barely a Christian, I’m going to be in the nosebleeds, but one day I’ll shake his hand and then I’ll be basking.” No — God intends to give honor and dignity and splendor to his people, a bride adorned by God himself.
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
2 Corinthians 3:17–18And the most shocking line of all, from 2 Peter 1:3–4: he has called us to his own glory and excellence, and granted his great promises so that we “may become partakers of the divine nature.” Matt interrupted himself to head off the exit anyone might be reaching for — this is not for some special church lady. “It applies to you because of the blood of Christ.” The same blood shed in our place is, he said, a divine blood donor giving us the source of life itself straight to the veins.
He is not going to undo it
The message closed on a permanence most of us never think about. He became man, lived, died, rose — and then did not announce that he was unincarnating. God made man is on the throne of heaven right now. “There’s no reason to believe God also became a bear just to honor the bears.” Out of every species, we are the one that can say he became one of us. Which is why the hope is not only future: it is already a glory to belong to him, and the more you think about it, even a glory to suffer with him.