Don't Miss the Greatness! - Charles R. Swindoll

today's chapel speaker is dr. Chuck Swindoll or simply Chuck it's very familiar name to many Christians around the world not just to us here at Dallas seminary in fact many of you probably based your decision to attend this very seminary because of his association and his affection for Dallas Theological Seminary he served our seminary well as the fourth president and is known by millions around the world for his practical application of the Bible to everyday living he now serves Dallas seminary as Chancellor and is currently the senior pastor of Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco Texas he and his wife Cynthia reside here in the Metroplex and they love to spend much of their time with their four grown children ten grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren so help me in welcoming my pastor dr. Chuck Swindoll [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well thank you Joe nice words and by the way thank you for the prayer where are you there you are thank you what a marvelous statement and in this piano player where you been all our lives beautiful work very very nicely done Thank You Sonic I'm trying to win everybody's favor today doesn't it you'll soon have another opinion who's I get going today I don't want to preach I want to just talk with you and first of all I want to thank you for showing up I never take that for granted I'm always honored that people will listen when I speak I'll often a little surprised quite honestly I was thinking as I was driving in from Frisco this morning that it was exactly 60 years ago last month that I first stepped into the school having enrolled as a first year student that would be in August of 1959 ours was the class of 63 and so four years later I have to run for challenging wonderful stretching surprising in some ways mind boggling years in other ways really testing years we were on our way to the next as of now 56 years of consecutive ministry in various places a ministering to people in both in these United States and abroad something I would have in ways I would have never even imagined like many of you you have no idea where in the next 50 years or so you will be and where you will serve and please keep an open mind because if you guess and set your heart on it you're gonna be wrong so so don't do that a lot of folks they've got the course planned out and they've you know pretty well put it together and they're gonna be moving in that direction you don't have a clue and so I you're you're doing well to get through today and then this week right yeah there you go and in making it through that course that you're now involved in that's giving you struggles and there are more courses ahead that will give you struggles and that will only lead you into people's lives who will give you struggles and cha-cha I'm trying to think of a better word but that that that seems to to do it well because ministry is messy and it is challenging and it is enormous ly rewarding and at times can be very discouraging and all of your training here is designed to help you take it on with some sense of assurance that you're at least intellectually equipped to handle much of it but it will take time for you to become emotionally equipped to handle what you have in front of you today I want to have an interesting idea this semester when I speak with you and I've chosen a theme that I've never done before when I've come to the seminary to speak and it may surprise you to hear me put it in these words but I want to talk about what is easy to miss while you're here you will gain many great things and I'm not going to address those those will be soon if not already they'll soon become very obvious what you gain by coming to Dallas seminary or any seminary and yet there will be a number of things that you will miss as I look back over my years I can name several things that stand out and I will not be addressing the things necessarily that I missed but you may be missing my list will be different from yours and yours different from the one sitting next to you depending on your set of circumstances let me sort of cut to the chase and and say that the day you enter seminary you entered a world that you've never known before and it's a world of ministry which to look at it very honestly is a world that will soon become repetitive here at the school it will include some academic obligations that will not smack of heart changing ministry but it will seem more academic while you're here and you'll be fulfilling assignments that are required of you with a grade to be given at the end of that course and it will be easy for you if you're not careful to lose the the thrill and the amazement that brought you here your heart was softened you were driven to your knees before the Lord you wrestled through a number of things that finally led you to say yes to becoming a student at this school I commend you for that and I would hope that your enthusiasm would continue but that's doubtful and I don't mean that to be cynical or sarcastic I'm just saying the setup is such that actually a seminary can't do everything a lot of it depends on on you as as the one being trained and how you handle your obligations your assignments the fulfilment of your credits that will lead to your degree how you do that is is really your your call and it will be the result of a lot of decisions you will make but I don't want you to miss and this is what I want to address today is the greatness of God the greatness of God he's not just good he is great great in every way and it is easy for you to miss that and to fulfill yours nine months all the while experiencing a reduction in the greatness of God in your life I'm back again with Paul David Tripps book dangerous calling a book you must read you really must read dangerous calling I don't know mr. Tripp I've never met him I'd love to know him I love the way he writes and he puts his finger on stuff that is very convicting especially to us who loves seminary and Seminary studies and us graduating from a school and fulfilling the responsibilities of training I believe in all of that with all my heart but I also see the dangers and I'll see them more clearly now having been involved in ministry these more than 50 years than I saw when I got out of the school trip writes among other things I am convinced that the crisis of ministry culture begins in the seminary classroom it begins with a distant impersonal information base handling of the Word of God please listen carefully to these words he's reading your mail he he's he's looking into your mind and telling you what's going on and what will continue to go on the years you study here it begins with pastors who in their seminary years became quite comfortable with holding God's Word distant from their own hearts it begins with classrooms that are academic without being pastoral it begins with brains becoming more important than hearts it begins with test scores being more important than character training the problem with all these things is that they are subtle and they are deceptive they don't exist in the black or white world of either/or but in the messy world of both and yes every seminary professor would say that he or she cares about the hearts of the students there is an epochal team member at this seminary that doesn't care about your life if they didn't they wouldn't be here so let's just set that record straight I don't mean they walk on water it doesn't mean they're there above you in any way except perhaps intellectually or with the degrees they've earned they are that they are not necessarily better than you or more gifted than you but they are the teachers they are in that enviable unenviable place of being models at this school and they take that when they take that position as faculty members but listen to these words all of us would say that we want to stimulate a love for Christ the question is does this goal shape the content and process of the theological education to which we have given ourselves a little further on let me read if you would go back let's say a hundred years every professor in the classroom would be a churchman he would have come to theological education by means of the pastor it in these men there burned a love for the local church they came to the classroom carrying the humility and wisdom gained only by their years in the trenches they taught with the hearts and lives of real people in view the people with whom they had wept become angry rejoiced and contended they came to the classroom knowing that the biggest battle battles of pastoral ministry were fought on the turf of their own hearts that's a great line they were pastors who were called not to quit pastoring but to bring pastoral love and zeal into the ecosystem of theological education it's a politically charged culture more given to gatekeeping than to pastoring and more focused on vital information acquisition than on character development referring to a seminary set up I'll write these things as a pastor with a heavy heart who lived in this culture for 20 years I know what I've written we'll make some angry and I know that the system has a way of rising to defend itself but it's a price I'm willing to pay the stakes are that high seminary self-examination is that important honest talk is Mike I bring every time I speak at this school along with many others who speak here this Chapel honest talk I am NOT here to impress anybody or to make you like me or to like what I say but I'm going to tell you the truth as I understand it and as I've come to see it it may be skewed in certain areas but it's as I see it and in many ways I I truly agree with Tripps words and I also could read further as he writes about the dangers of familiarity which causes our God to be reduced to the words of old the old a book by JB Phillips your God is too small and as you grow in your head enlarges and your pride increases and your ego becomes a a little out of control at times because you are learning words in another language and you were learning how to read in another language and you are touching the original text of the scriptures and you are finding the thrill of that exegesis that draws its blessings from time in the original text which I love and I'm still engaged in every week of my life I'm in the original text I learn how to do that here and I didn't learn it to lay it aside but it could easily make you proud and rather than increasing your fear of the Almighty it can it can simply pique your curiosity as you learn names of God that are not in English and as you learn the truths of God that are in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and you get the the beautiful shading and the color of the languages before you know it the thrill of that will steal your heart and you'll you exchange just the word of for you will exchange a soft and pliable and humble spirit for a more hardened and even a more critical look on life and on others and rather than loving them more they will get in your way and all the while God God's greatness will diminish I I don't want you to let that happen now let me let my pastoral heart out here and say you you will not do well in the pasture it if that continues people who are ministered to deeply by their pastor are minister to because their hearts are touched and they are softened because they are ministered to by someone whose heart is soft and they are moved to tears at times because there are occasions when you are moved to tears and they are brought to confession of sins as they hear you acknowledge your own failures and trials and their God grows in the dimensions your God grows and a a pastor that has a great God cultivates people who worship at a door a great God now you can make it through this school without becoming cynical you can make it through the school without becoming proud you can graduate a humble broken soul ready to serve willing to serve available to God in all of his holiness and greatness and goodness and do well at school but it won't just happen my plea today is that you remain sensitive to both doing well academically as well as you can and also cultivating your heart and character as deeply as you can every time I open the Psalms God's greatness emerges every time I spend a little longer preparing you for what I want to say from this Psalm I have my Bible open to Psalm 145 for example which is one of those great so Psalms of God's greatness what Kaiser it occurs to me I remember reading it in the archaeological Bible has a footnote at the at Psalm 145 in which he says it is the practice in many Jewish homes for this Psalm to be recited twice every morning and once every evening I never had known that think about it recite suggest memorized you recite a song you recite a poem maybe that explains why David composed this song as an acrostic poem each verse beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet this first verse olive first beef then gimel the dulles and run on down through the Hebrew alphabet the kind of a head start for kids that had learned the alphabet it's the kind of a memory prompter so they would be able to ultimately recite it with Oh long with her mama and daddy and their siblings twice in the morning and once before they pull the covers up to go to sleep at night I like that that thought Cynthia said to me is what I told her about what I just read from Walt Kaiser a man we just loved she said you know what we all want to start doing that I said memorized the song she saying that just what you said that the Jewish homes did and I go yeah they did it you gotta love city just write down and I just hugged her and kissed her and said we're not gonna do that but here it is you could just hear kids repeating these words I will exalt you my God and King and I will praise your name forever and ever I will praise you every day there it is every day I will praise you yes I will praise you forever look at the words great is the Lord right out of the chute David writes it great is the Lord he is most worthy of praise no one can measure his greatness let each generation tell its children of your mighty acts let them proclaim your power he's already getting into the greatness he mentions greatness at the end of verse three mentions mighty axe in verse 4 power in verse 4 glorious splendor in verse 5 wonderful miracles at the end of verse 5 all inspiring deeds in verse 6 look at this greatness at the end of verse 6 what statement after another after another you could you almost wonder if we learned our little childish prayer childlike prayer when we got started in life God is great God is good let us thank him for our food if it didn't have its roots in this psalm you wonder about that just the beginning and and and then through the acrostic through the alphabet you could work your way through the psalm he speaks of his glory in verse 11 his power at the end of verse 11 his mighty deeds in verse 12 his majesty and glory in verse 12 his rule in verse 13 and then down toward the m-19 he speaks of rescuing us and protecting us and and destroying the wicked and then he ends with bless His Holy Name forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever the greatness of our God we need analogies to get our arms around it you know we learned verses like romans 11:33 or the death of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God get this next to him how unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding Alan so there are secret things about the greatness of God will never tap into will never exhaust the truths of him and the secrets of his greatness dr. Wolper used to say we can't unscrew the inscrutable God you can't get it all and we want to we want to because we're learning Hebrew we're learning Greek and and we're learning theology and we're learning church history and and and our minds are expanding when it comes to God no no no no you you can't fathom him you can just worship Him you must worship Him and adore him and at times I'll just say it follow down before him and just acknowledge your need for him and just cry out to him as he becomes increasingly more significant to you as your mind is stretched in your studies make sure that that you embrace a great God don't miss that don't miss it faculty members don't miss it you're great in your specialties and and and you are or you're outstanding in in in your pedagogy we all are impressed with that and we love you for that but you keep it God keep your God great so that we can get that picture from you we can grow in it and you bow before and we Bala before him you help us do that I always think when I look up in the night sky that's clear and cloudless and and star studied I often think now there there is a there is the analogy that really helps heavens Psalm 19 heavens declare the glory of God makes us shook in our breath I'm never doing that when I was crawled in my sleeping bag with my our two sons we were camping up near Eureka California very near the the Oregon border we were a Jedidiah state park and we decided to sleep outside on we had cots and and we had a little tent camper so Cynthia the girl slept in and we were outside under the stars and we were looking at just it's just our galaxy and I'm laying there and I go boo she's bara Elohim a fashion item we had the hearts and Chuck look at me like what's the matter with you so I said well what you need to know is Hashem a.m. is what this is all about the heavens the in the beginning God created this all of it now it's just our galaxy but multiple millions of others I'm sure many of them much larger than ours see what I mean you cannot get your arms around that as David puts it it's high I can attain to it it's beyond me no mind can grasp it about a year and a half ago I was speaking to our insightful living board of directors and I decided I would address the greatness of God as a sort of a thing with me starting back then and I've been hanging on to those thoughts ever since I decided I would read part of what I read to them to you today because it provides an analogy that out analogies plural that will help you appreciate it greatness as it relates to the Hashem a.m. if it were possible to travel through space at the speed of light remember from your physics class in in school 186,000 miles of second and if you didn't have to orbit anything you could do a direct reject ur e you would get to the moon and 1 and 1/3 seconds continuing at the same speed of light you realize how long would take you before you'd reach the first star for years good for you you're silent that's the right response for years for the first star in our galaxy and there are trillions of them Genesis 118 says oh he made the stars also before I forget I mean if we had made stars we'd write books about making stars but with God it's half a verse because when you're great it's not a big thing when you're trying to look great it's huge let me go on new york city's Hayden Planetarium you may have been there has a miniature replica of our solar system showing the speeds and sizes of the planets in our galaxy what is interesting is that three outer planets are not even included there wasn't room for Uranus Neptune and Pluto Uranus would be in the planetariums outer corridor Neptune would require a walk down to eighth Avenue and Pluto another three long avenues away all the way to Fifth Avenue so those planets had to be ignored in that miniature model by the way no stars are included for obvious reasons however since I mentioned the Stars I should go ahead and tell you we're on the same scale the nearest star would be located since it's doubtful you and yes Cleveland Ohio good for you stay silent and let the Wonder in you're going to be exposed to one tiny example or analogy of the greatness of God remember by the way that's only the first star and that's only in our galaxy a scientist once suggested another interesting analogy to grasp the scene imagine a perfectly smooth glass pavement on which the finest speck can be seen then shrink our Sun from eight hundred sixty five thousand miles in diameter to only two feet and place that to football on the pavement to represent the Sun now stay with me now a step off eighty two paces about two feet per pace and to represent proportionately the first planet Mercury put down a tiny mustard seed walk sixty more paces and for Venus put down an ordinary BB Markoff seventy eight more spaces put down a green pea representing earth step off another 108 paces from there and for Mars put down a pinhead sprinkle around some fine dust for the asteroids then take seven hundred eighty-eight more paces and place an orange on the glass pavement for Jupiter following 934 more steps put down a golf ball for Saturn net now it really gets in tricky you'll need to mark off 2086 more steps and for Uranus place a marble on the glass take another two thousand three hundred twenty two steps and you'll arrive at Neptune will in a cherry represent Neptune this will take a total of two and a half miles and we haven't even discussed Pluto we have a smooth glass surface five miles in diameter yet just a tiny fraction of the heavens excluding Pluto now then guess how far we'd have to go on the same scale before we could put down another two football to represent the nearest star that would be another six thousand seven hundred twenty miles not paces miles before we would arrive at that first star and that's just one among trillions beyond it in one galaxy among millions of others perhaps multiple millions and everything moving in perpetual motion perfectly synchronized to the most accurate timepiece known to mankind as we've all sung throughout our lives God really does have a hole world in his hands now men and women you have just been introduced very briefly to the greatness of God in just one area just one and whatever category you choose and whatever area of your life you may have a need he is great there as well he is the one to whom we pray he is the one to whom we get praise for his quote inspiring deeds and wonderful miracles and glorious splendor great is the Lord and greatly to be praised don't miss that don't let that get by you don't graduate from this place without a great God to preach to teach to use as a basis of your counseling ministry to sing to represent I thought before I closed I would mention some of the byproducts of it when you really have a great God it's not hard to put this list together you could put your own list number one is humility you can't be really proud and arrogant and you have a great God you're humbled it puts us in our place I like that in this arrogant day of narcissism second tenderness God's greatness helps me to be more patient with people and to treat others with grace third is passion God's greatness renews my enthusiasm and my energy I just don't run shy of those things but he's great and security I'm now serve an audience of one I don't have to please people I want to live in the fear of what she thinks her he thinks her they're saying that's not my security when God's greatness takes its proper place he becomes my security and I'm in all of him and none other though I treat others with respect and appropriate courtesy and kindness another would be joyfulness because it's all in his hands a positive attitude and finally rest I can rest a marked absence of worry I love this subject I love to talk about it because it's so beyond me and I pick one little analogy and it just makes us silent rick reilly used to write the last article in every Sports Illustrated magazine and I miss Rick never met him but I always read him I used to say to people I read sports illustrated backwards always start in the last page because that was the best part of the whole magazine and he would a just had a classic stuff and one of his best ones was when he addressed the graduating class of the college's of that particular year and addressed the athletes that were going to go into the professional world and become famous and rich and if they didn't watch it really proud so Rick writes a piece that really puts them in their place I love it I'll not read you the article I wish I had the time some of its just hilarious for example one of those I'll just tell you is he where he says to the athlete go light on tattoos okay just go away otherwise your bicep today that's got that figure on it's gonna look like Don Knotts in about 50 years I think it's a great life but here's the final part of the little article and not close with it one last thing remember when you were just a kid now all of you dreamed of was playing center field for the New York Yankees soon you'll be there and when you're there don't forget to tangle it's a great lot when you're in center field you got the glove on and you made it let that chill run up your back and I would say remember who made that happen if I say to you someday when people listen and you speak and you serve in the ministry that becomes known and God uses by His grace don't forget to tingle hold it all really loosely because your one breath from death every day of your life and in his greatness he chooses to use you give him all the glory all the glory bless the Lord all my soul and all that is within me bless His Holy Name our Father today we sit in all of you realizing as we think back over the the way you have led us often in the spite of us rarely because of us and here we are recipients of your magnificent greatness to put us where we are and to use us as you're using us you brought us to this school you've given us minds that can absorb truth you've given us good eyesight good hearing the ability ultimately to articulate what we take in oh god bless your name today we tingle may that never leave us may we never forget what it means to be the recipient of your grace we bless you o Holy One we bless your Holy Name through Christ everybody said amen

Channel: Dallas Theological Seminary

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Length: 48min 42sec (2922 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019