Made for Glory: Understanding Your Life’s Quest (Romans 2:1-16)
September 14, 2025
What is life all about?
What is the meaning of life—especially for us as Christians? What is the purpose of life? What are we supposed to be doing and giving ourselves to in the time we have here on earth?
The purpose of life is not just to get saved so you can go to heaven when you die. Perhaps some Christians think of it that way, but God has so much more in store for us—so much more he wants us to do. In Romans chapter 2, I think Paul helps us understand what that is. Let me set it up for you this way. I’m not going to do a real detailed exposition of the whole part of Romans 2 that we read this morning. I’ve done that in other places, even in other sermons, so you can go look that up. I’m going to have a much narrower focus this morning. But I want to set up the question that arises from this chapter. The Bible in general, and Romans in particular, teaches justification by faith apart from works. We are sinners. We deserve condemnation by nature—fallen nature. We are slaves of sin. But God, in his grace, saves us, and our salvation is a work of God’s grace from beginning to end. God the Father chose us. Jesus the Son died for us. The Holy Spirit comes to indwell us. God accomplishes our salvation from beginning to end. Jesus died on the cross, taking the wrath and curse we deserve as our substitute. Jesus has accomplished for us a full and free salvation for all who trust in him. Salvation is a free gift.
But in the Bible in general and in Romans in particular, we also find that we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ at the last day, and Scripture again and again teaches that at the last day we will be judged by our works, or judged according to our works. For example, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, Paul says we make it our aim to please God. And you can say, “Well, why, Paul, do you live to please God?” He says, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive according to the things done in the body, whether good or bad.” This is also a theme in Romans chapter 2—that we will be judged according to our works. We see it especially in verses 6, 13, and 16. In verse 6, he says, “God will render to each according to his deeds,” and the surrounding verses—the whole context here—make it clear that the final judgment is in view. Paul there is actually quoting from Psalm 62 and Proverbs 24 when he says, “God will render to each according to his deeds.” So really, he’s just picking up on what Scripture has already taught about the final judgment. In verse 13, Paul says, “On that day”—that is, the last day, judgment day—“it is not the mere hearers of the word of the law, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” He says, “will be justified.” It’s future tense. It’s pointing to the last day, a future judgment day, and those who keep the law will be the ones who are justified in God’s law court on that day.
Now, you might ask, “Well, who are those people? Who keeps the law?” This is not about what we might call sinless perfection. The Bible actually refers to many people as law-keepers. Just one example of this: in Luke chapter 1, consider how Luke describes Zechariah and Elizabeth. Luke says they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord. They were blameless. He doesn’t say sinless, but blameless as a pattern of life, as a way of life. They demonstrated obedience, and so even when they sinned, they did what the Bible says to do when you sin: confess it, repent. That’s the kind of obedience, that’s the kind of law-doing Paul has in view here. In verse 16, he goes on to say that on that day God will judge the secrets of men. It’s not just our deeds that will be judged, but the secrets of our hearts will be judged as well. He tells us there that Jesus Christ will be the judge. And Paul says, “All of this is according to my gospel.” In other words, he is proclaiming not only justification by faith alone but also a future judgment according to works. This is part of Paul’s gospel as well. In fact, we find this in Paul’s preaching. When Paul preached the gospel, he preached judgment according to works. When Paul went around preaching the gospel, he did not merely preach salvation by grace and justification by faith; he also preached a final judgment according to works—in other words, he preached the necessity of obedience, the necessity of a transformed life. An example of this is found in Acts chapter 24, where Paul is preaching to Felix, and we’re told there that he reasoned with Felix about righteousness—that probably means about justification, justification by faith—about self-control—that probably has to do with life in the Holy Spirit—and the judgment to come: what will happen at the last day when we are judged according to our works.
Now, you might ask the question, “How do we square this? How do we fit all of this together? How can justification by faith in the present fit with judgment according to works in the future?” Actually, it’s really not that hard to answer this question. The Bible makes it clear, plain. The same faith that justifies us apart from works also produces good works. James tells us faith without works is dead, and a dead faith can’t save. What does faith do? Faith unites us to Christ. We trust in Christ. We believe into Christ. Faith unites us to Christ, and in union with Christ we are declared righteous. We are forgiven. We are adopted. But that same faith that unites us to Christ in that way also transforms us. So we live a new life in Christ Jesus in the power of his Holy Spirit—again, not a perfect life but an obedient life, one of growing conformity to Christ. So when Paul speaks of the doers of the law, you might say he has in view ordinary Christians who are growing in their faith, who are in good standing with the church, and in whom there is evidence of grace. You can actually see fruit being borne in their lives. God is pleased with our efforts to obey him, even if those efforts are in various ways still stained with imperfections. Even if they fall short in some way, God is still pleased with our efforts to obey him. The grace of God not only frees us from sin’s penalty; it frees us from sin’s power. And at the last day, it will free us from sin’s presence forever. Because Christ intercedes for us, he presents our good works—our good but imperfect works—to the Heavenly Father. And so we can be assured that the Father accepts our good works despite whatever flaws they might still have. And of course, because Jesus intercedes for us based on his once-for-all sacrifice on the cross, we can also know that as Christ intercedes for us, he is covering and forgiving our sins. So his intercession covers our good works as he presents them to the Father; it also covers sins we still commit. So we know that they are forgiven. All throughout Scripture you see this, and all throughout Scripture you see that obedience is necessary. The reality of a transformed life is necessary. In fact, obedience is the test of salvation throughout Scripture. In 1 John 2, John says we have come to know that we know him if we keep his commandments. Hebrews 12 says, “Pursue holiness, for without holiness no man will see the Lord.” Holiness is necessary. If you want the beatific vision, you must pursue holiness. Every book in the New Testament teaches salvation by grace, and every book in the New Testament teaches the necessity of obedience to be saved at the last day—again, not a perfect obedience, but a real obedience; not a sinless obedience, but a genuine obedience—an obedience that increasingly characterizes our lives. That’s what God calls us to. Where there is faith, there will be good works.
One more passage: Think about what Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2: “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so no man can boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” And so that’s the message again and again. You are saved apart from works, and yet you’re saved to do good works. And so if you ask that question, “What comes between the time I am saved by grace apart from works and the final judgment when God renders to each one according to his works?” this is the answer. What fills in that gap—what fills in that time between your salvation and final judgment—is the life of faith: a life of growing in obedience, persevering, repenting, maturing, bearing fruit. But sometimes I think we have a very narrow view of what that means, and here’s where Romans chapter 2 can really help us. I’ve done more on Romans 2 elsewhere if you’re interested in getting more of the details of this. But I think the way Paul describes the Christian life in this passage is critical. I love the way he puts it. If we want to understand what it means to be a Christian—what your mission in life is between salvation and final judgment—you need to see what Paul says here, because he summarizes for us the Christian life. If I were to just say to you, “The mission of the Christian life is to do good works,” or “The mission of the Christian life is to obey God,” that’s true enough, but it also sounds pretty boring, really. It sounds kind of stale. But what Paul says here in Romans 2 doesn’t sound boring at all. Look at how Paul describes the Christian life, the Christian mission, in Romans chapter 2. You especially see this in verses 7 and 10. Verse 7: “Eternal life comes to those who by patient continuance in doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality.” Glory, honor, and immortality. That’s probably not how many of us think about the Christian life—a pursuit of glory, honor, and immortality. Pursuing or seeking glory, honor, and immortality sounds more like a knight’s quest than the way many Christians think about the Christian life. It sounds heroic—something like a medieval warrior’s code: “Yes, I hereby pledge to seek glory, honor, and immortality for the rest of my life.” One thing it doesn’t sound is boring: to pursue, to seek after, glory, honor, and immortality. He says it again in verse 10—with a slight change but the same basic point: “Glory, honor, and peace” come “to everyone who seeks what is good.”
This is how you need to view your life as a Christian. You are on a mission. You are on a quest—a quest. You are seeking glory, honor, immortality, and peace. This is what the Christian life is all about. This is the Christian mission: to seek glory, honor, peace, and immortality. The Christian life is a glory quest. It is an honor quest. That is the Christian mission. Note what he doesn’t say here. He doesn’t say earn glory, honor, and peace; he says we seek them. And of course, as he unfolds in the rest of the letter, we seek them by faith in Christ. We seek them because this is what we were made for. This is what life is all about. This is the divine design coming to realization in God’s new humanity that is the church—those who are in union with the new Adam, who are a new humanity. This is what life is all about: the divine design coming to fulfillment in the way they live. In fact, it’s interesting: what we seek contrasts with what the hypocrite or the unbeliever seeks. According to verse 8, the unbeliever is self-seeking. He seeks himself. He is his own god. He makes himself his own authority, his own end. Paul says, too, the unbeliever does not obey the truth—the truth that God has revealed in his Word and in his world, the truth of the gospel. The unbeliever will not obey God’s truth. Paul says instead the unbeliever obeys unrighteousness. Unrighteousness is his master. He is sin’s slave. He is a rebel against God and God’s design. In this passage, just as in so many other places in Scripture—from the book of Proverbs to the Sermon on the Mount—Paul is contrasting two ways of life and two kinds of people.
Now let’s come back to our initial question. If you are on a quest for glory, honor, and peace—if that is the meaning of life for the Christian—what does that mean? What does it mean to seek after glory, honor, and peace? We can’t talk about every aspect of this, obviously, because each one of these terms is huge. But I want to point you in the direction you should go in thinking about this and living this out. If your life is anything less than a quest for glory, a quest for honor, a quest for peace, you are settling. You are not nearly ambitious enough. Your view of the Christian life is too small, and probably your view of God’s kingdom is way too small. The Christian life is the pursuit of glory, honor, and peace. I’m bracketing out immortality here. I’ll just say one thing about that this morning. What does immortality mean? When somebody seeks after immortality, it means something like lasting fame or lasting glory and honor. When Paul says we seek immortality, he means the glory and honor we seek is a glory and honor that will last forever. So immortality here is really just the eternal dimension of these other things we seek. There are eternal consequences to what we do right now. The way we seek glory and honor can reverberate for all eternity. It’s like R. C. Sproul says: right now counts forever. That’s the kind of thing that’s in view with immortality here. So I’m going to bracket that out for the rest of this.
But what does it mean to pursue glory, honor, and peace? If you make that your life mission—if your life is a glory quest and an honor quest and a peace quest—what does that mean? We’ll start with glory. What is glory? Paul uses “glory” elsewhere in the book of Romans. One example would be in Romans chapter 8, where he says glory will be revealed in us in the resurrection, in the new creation. In fact, he says there that the whole lower creation—the creation beneath us—longs to see the sons of God come to their full glory, because in that day creation herself will be glorified. When we are fully redeemed, creation itself will be fully redeemed. When we come to glory in the fullest sense, creation comes to glory. Glory pops up in other places in the letter. In Romans chapter 1, Paul says the unbeliever exchanges the glory of God to worship the creature. When man goes after idols, when man turns to idols, he gives up on the glory quest; he gives up on glorifying God; he gives up on the glory of God. In Romans chapter 3, Paul says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That is, glory is the goal, and to sin is to fall short of that goal. It means falling short of the glory God intended for us to reach. Sin derails the divine design. It derails the glory train God wants us to ride on. Sin is exchanging the pursuit of true glory for the pursuit of a false glory—a fading glory, a fake glory. And of course, Satan tempts us with these fake glories all the time. These are glories you don’t have to patiently wait for. They’re glories that don’t require you to seek the good. Not everything that looks and feels like a glory really is. Idols offer a cheap glory that isn’t that glorious at all. Sin settles for what is not glorious. Sin is falling short in the glory quest. That’s what sin is.
What is this glory that we seek? Obviously, as good Presbyterians, we know we’re to glorify God in all we do, so we seek God’s glory in everything we do. We still would have to explain what that means. We could say we seek to reproduce the character of Christ—the glory of Christ—in how we live. That’s certainly another way that we seek glory. If sin is falling short of the glory, then obedience to God is reaching the glory. Obedience is glorious. But to really understand the depth and breadth of what this glory is, we have to go back to the beginning—to creation. It’s really interesting here: Paul combines glory and honor. Glory and honor are like a pair, and it’s very common for glory and honor to go together in Scripture. One place where we see them together is Psalm 8, where David describes God’s creation of man. There David puts glory and honor together. David says in Psalm 8, addressing God: When I consider your creation—your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars which you have ordained—what is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you visit him? You have made man a little lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor. See that: God crowned man with glory and honor in the beginning. Man might be small in comparison to the vastness of creation, but man is not insignificant. That’s what David is saying, because man has been crowned with glory and honor. Then David goes on to explain what it means to be crowned with glory and honor. In this, he echoes the creation account of Genesis chapter 1—what we call the creation mandate. What does it mean for man to be crowned with glory and honor? David says, “You made man to have dominion over the works of your hands.” He’s already described God’s creation as the work of his hands. He says man has dominion over all God created. He goes on to give some specific aspects of that creation that have been put under man’s feet, and he lists a lot of animals: sheep, oxen, beasts of the field, birds of the air, fish of the sea. But the point of Psalm 8 is this: man has dominion over what God made. God put creation under man’s feet. Man’s glory and honor is found in being the ruler under God of the creation. Man has been given stewardship over the creation. All of creation has been entrusted to man. Man was made to be creation’s king. That is his glory and honor.
Psalm 8 is really echoing the creation mandate of Genesis 1. In Genesis 1, when God made man, what did he do? He gave man his original mission statement—his original quest. God blessed man and told him, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, rule the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the creation.” Paul is saying in Romans chapter 2: those who embrace the fulfillment of that original creation design—that is, those who live out their humanity according to God’s original creation purpose, those who seek to fulfill the creation mandate in union with Christ Jesus, the new Adam—will find glory and honor. We were made to form and fill the earth, to turn the garden of Eden into the city of God, to take the raw material of creation and out of that raw material build a culture and a kingdom, all to the glory of God. When we do this to God’s glory, we find glory. We were made to rule the creation, and as we do so righteously and productively, we are seeking glory and honor. That is the righteous fulfillment of God’s creation design. It is glorious. It is honorable. Life is about dominion and multiplication. Dominion means work. Multiplication means family. Man is to form and fill the earth: work and family. That’s how we do that. God’s design for human life centers on work and family. It has from the very beginning. And what that means is that a great deal of honor and glory is found in the most basic aspects of life. There is a glory embedded in the ordinary—in doing the ordinary, most human things. As you take dominion over the piece of the creation God has assigned to you in your daily work—whether that’s schoolwork, housework, office work, construction work, or artistic work—as you do your work with excellence, you are pursuing glory.
The book of Proverbs can really help us here. Proverbs, of course, is wisdom from a king given to his son, the prince, and so it’s all about training in rule—training for dominion. You could say the book of Proverbs is all about glory and honor: how to seek glory and honor in a fallen world. Proverbs is all about fulfilling the creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply in a fallen world. So it’s a father’s wisdom to his son, and it’s wisdom about work and wife—a man’s work and his wife—because work and wife represent the two sides of the original creation mandate, the two original forms of glory and honor. A man’s work produces wealth, and with his wife he produces a family, and that is right at the core of life. Proverbs shows us the glory in these things. For example, in Proverbs 3 we read, “Long life is in wisdom’s right hand, and in her left hand are riches and honor,” and the rest of the book unfolds that wealth rightly gained—that is, wealth gained through work rather than theft—is an honor. It is a glory. In Proverbs 28 we find, “When the righteous triumph, there is great glory, but when the wicked rise, the people hide themselves.” When the righteous triumph—whether we’re talking about a culture war or a physical conflict—it is glorious. It’s a blessing to all. In Proverbs 14 we read, “In a multitude of people is the glory of a king, but a prince without a people is ruined.” What’s this a picture of? A growing, prosperous nation where most people marry and have children. That’s a glory. That’s a glorious thing. It’s the fruit of having a wise king, a prudent ruler, contrasted with the prince: when huge numbers of people are intentionally rejecting marriage and children, that is a ruin to a ruler.
In Proverbs, a well-ordered life is glorious. Pursuing a well-ordered, responsible life is glorious. In Proverbs, a well-ordered family life is glorious. In Proverbs 12 we read, “An excellent wife is the crown”—the glory—“of her husband.” This is why we make weddings glorious events—because marriage is a glory. To have a rightly ordered marriage is a glorious thing. The wife is the glory of her husband. Proverbs 16 says, “Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” There is a glory that comes in living a long, faithful, fruitful life. There’s wisdom and gravitas that comes with age; having lived many years faithfully, there’s a kind of wisdom and gravitas in that, and that is glorious. Proverbs 17 says, “Grandchildren are the crown”—the glory—“of the aged, and the glory of children is their fathers.” So grandchildren are a glory to their grandparents, and for children their glory is their fathers. It’s like God has woven the generations together, with each generation finding glory in those above and those below. God has designed the generations to bless and serve one another, and when that happens, it is glorious. In Proverbs 20 we find, “The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendor of old men is their gray hair,” which, of course, stands for their wisdom. Why is a young man’s glory his strength and an old man’s wisdom his glory? Because strength and wisdom enable men to take dominion over the creation, to do productive and fruitful work. And you can see how younger men and older men need one another: younger men have the strength; older men have the wisdom. There’s a glory in each, but they need one another’s glory to do really glorious things. Here’s another one about work from Proverbs 22: “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings.” To stand before kings—to stand in the presence of royalty—is a glorious thing. A man who does his work with excellence will find glory. A man who does competent, skillful work—who excels in taking dominion over the piece of the creation assigned to him—is manifesting glory. Such work is honorable, and it brings honor. It fulfills God’s intention—God’s design—for humanity. When you seek to do your work—when you work hard and you work skillfully—you are seeking glory and honor. In Proverbs, glory and honor are tied to the creation mandate—to work and family—just like honor and glory are tied back to creation in Psalm 8.
All of this together means: doing your duty is glorious. It is honorable. Fulfilling your responsibilities is a glorious thing. Taking responsibility for yourself—taking ownership of outcomes—that is a glorious thing. Robert Louis Dabney put it this way: there is a true glory and a true honor which comes from God and not from man. It is the glory of duty done, of obstacles overcome, of fears resisted, and of generous sacrifices made to a worthy cause. It is glorious to be what God calls us to be, to do what God calls us to do. It is glorious. It is honorable to fulfill the divine plan for human life. There is glory in a man’s work and wife, in his children and grandchildren, in his wisdom and in his wealth, in his victories and in his influence and gravitas. There is glory in all of these things.
So you should roll out of bed every morning ready to pursue this kind of glory and honor. Get out of bed every morning ready to continue your glory quest, to fulfill the creation mandate in your little corner of the world. God has given you a kingdom—a kingdom to rule and to cultivate. If you’re young, that might be a very small kingdom. If you’re a child, your kingdom might be your bedroom and your schoolwork and your household chores—but that’s your kingdom. Cultivate it to the glory of God. If you’re older, your little kingdom might be a business. It might be homemaking. It’s going to require wisely managing time and finances. Paul would say, following Proverbs, this is glorious: to do your duty, to fulfill your assigned role. I’ll tell you another place we see the same kind of thing: in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 or the parable of the minas in Luke 19. I’ll take Luke 19; I think it makes this point really clear. A mina was a currency—a form of money. In the story Jesus tells, a nobleman is going away, and before he leaves he gives each of his ten servants one mina each, and he says, “Do business until I return.” That is, get to work until I come back. When he finally does come back, each of the servants will have to give an account for what they have done with what they have been given. This is your judgment according to works. The ones who multiplied their minas were rewarded with even more. The one who turned his one mina into ten was given ten cities to rule. The one who turned his one mina into five was given five cities to rule over. The one who did nothing with the mina he was given is condemned as wicked and evil. Ruling cities—taking on that authority and responsibility entrusted to you in that form of rule—is a kind of glory, and that’s what we’re called to pursue. If you’ve got one city now, you should be seeking to multiply that into ten. If you’ve got one little piece of the creation to rule, you should be working to expand that, to grow that. God wants us to live lives of diligence and productivity. That’s where the glory is found. He’s given you a little kingdom to rule. What are you doing with it? To keep your personal life well-ordered and productive, to take responsibility for your life, to do your duty—these are glorious. And, of course, the more responsibilities you have, the more opportunities you have for glory.
All too often today, Christians disguise their sloth and their laziness and their effeminacy as humility, but they’re not really being humble at all, because they aren’t doing what God calls us to do. Christians should chase honor and glory in righteous ways. Sin is refusing to seek the true glory. Sin is falling short of the glory God calls us to. There’s nothing glorious about consuming more than you produce. There’s nothing honorable about living life as a passive lump—just being a nice person who gets along with everybody. Glory and honor must be pursued. We must have a holy ambition for them. We embody glory and honor when we do the good works God created us and redeemed us to do. We seek glory and honor as we pursue the fulfillment of our design in the creation mandate. We don’t just seek to be good people. We seek to be a glorious people. We seek the glory of building a Christian culture, a Christian civilization. We should settle for nothing less.
Let me say something quickly here about peace, and then I’ll wrap this up. What does it mean to seek peace? Paul includes that in verse 10. Certainly we want to have peace with God, and Paul says we have that—we have peace with God through Christ Jesus in chapter 5. That’s already been accomplished. We don’t have to seek it; we just receive it. Certainly we want to have peace with each other, which Paul commands in chapters 12 and 14 of this letter. Certainly we want to have peace in our hearts, which Paul prays for in chapter 15 of this letter. But just as glory and honor tie back to creation, so peace does as well. Remember the Old Testament word for peace—it’s that word shalom. That’s really what Paul is talking about here. The Old Testament prophets use shalom to describe life lived according to God’s design—when everything in creation is working together as it should. That’s shalom. Shalom is the way things ought to be—the way God designed them to be. Shalom is living in accord with God’s design, in harmony with God’s design. Shalom happens when grace restores nature. Look at the prophets: shalom is abundance and flourishing. It’s generosity and justice. It’s security and happiness. Shalom, of course, must be sought, which means it takes work. You will not have shalom in your life without work and wisdom. Consider the prophetic pictures of shalom in the Old Testament, because this is what Paul’s talking about: pictures of shalom include God’s people feasting in his presence in the book of Isaiah; children playing joyfully in the city streets in Zechariah; every man sitting under his own fig tree in Micah chapter 4. Shalom means enjoying the gifts of God to the glory of God. It means the peace and prosperity that come when—not just as individuals but as a community, or even as a society or a culture or a civilization—we obey God. That’s when you get shalom. That’s when shalom happens. And we’re called here to seek shalom—meaning we are to contribute to the building of that kind of culture, that kind of world. That’s what it means to seek shalom.
So this is what Paul is saying: the life of a saved person—of a Christian—is a life of seeking glory, honor, immortality, and peace in the context of the creation mandate. This is Paul’s vision for the Christian life. You were made to seek glory, to seek honor, to seek peace in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. The kind of righteousness we are called to is a practical righteousness, a productive righteousness, a glorious righteousness. Your work is a form of glory. Your family life and community life are a form of glory. Your enjoyment of God’s gifts is glorious. Your faithful suffering and the sacrifices you make to serve others are glorious. It’s all glory.
And I’ll tell you someone who I think did this very well—who lived this out—is Charlie Kirk.
I know many of you were shaken by his murder—really, his martyrdom—in the last week. I wouldn’t call this an assassination—that’s when a political leader gets killed. That’s an assassination. Martyrdom is when someone gets killed for their faith. And while it’s true that Charlie talked about politics a lot, it’s obvious that his politics were the fruit of his faith. His faith drove his politics. This is really about his faith. His faith drove everything he did. Think about it. What did Charlie do? What was the glory and honor of his life? It was a life lived in accord with God’s design. Charlie fulfilled the creation mandate in his all-too-short life. He embraced his work—his calling. It seems his main work was defending the Christian faith on secular, progressive college campuses, and he honed his skills at that, and he did his work with excellence, and he did get to stand before kings—or at least presidents. To see Charlie—in the videos that float around—proclaim the gospel with humility and clarity to thousands of college students; to see him defend biblical principles of economics and self-defense and the role of government and life in the womb—that is glorious. He ruled his part of the creation well. He didn’t bury his talents; he multiplied his talents through hard work and productivity. He wasn’t passive. He actively embraced his mission. Further, he embraced his wife and family. He was obviously a family man. He was a wise husband who managed his family well. You can see that even in the way his wife is speaking about him now. He delighted in his wife and in his children. And there is definitely a glory in that. There is a glory in a Christian household that is well ordered. Think about the kinds of things Charlie Kirk would say. It all sounds so basic. You listen to Charlie talk to college students—what are the kinds of things he focused on? They seem so basic, so elementary. He would tell these college students to trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins; to get married; to have kids; to work hard; to speak truth whenever and to whomever they could; to go to church. It was not that complicated. But that’s because life’s not that complicated. When you do these things, it is glorious. And of course, the best way to honor a man like Charlie Kirk is to do the kinds of things he did.
Obviously, Charlie had courage, and to do those things requires courage. It is dangerous—let’s just face it. It is dangerous to be a faithful Christian in the public square today. But think about this. There are so many examples we could point to. Think about John the Baptist. When John the Baptist got beheaded for calling out Herod’s sin in public, what did Jesus tell his disciples? Did he say, “Okay, guys, now we’ve seen what can happen, so be real careful out there. Don’t say anything too controversial. Play it safe. You might be next. You don’t want to get hurt, so don’t speak up”? No, that’s not what Jesus did. That’s not what Christians do. Christians don’t live in fear like that. We are seeking glory, and glory is costly. No one seeking glory and honor can play it safe all the time. It’s actually glorious to die for your faith, to suffer for the gospel, to suffer in union with Jesus. Some things are worth dying for. Dying in the line of duty—doing what God calls you to do—is honorable.
If you take Romans 2:7 as your vision of the Christian life, you will want to do great things for God—costly things for God’s kingdom. When David defeated Goliath, he was seeking glory and honor. When Daniel broke the law and refused to stop praying and got sent to the lions’ den, he was seeking glory. When Paul preached the gospel openly to civil magistrates, even in chains, he was seeking glory. When Constantine began to reshape the laws of the Roman Empire with biblical truth, he was seeking glory. When the Frankish ruler Charles Martel turned back the Muslim invasion and saved the West at the Battle of Tours, he was seeking glory. When Columbus sailed the Atlantic to extend the blessings of Christendom to new places, he was seeking glory. When medieval Christians built cathedrals that would take centuries to construct, they were seeking glory. When the Puritans fled religious persecution and came to America to build a city on a hill—a Christian civilization—they were seeking glory. This is our legacy. This is our inheritance. The history of the church is filled with great men who made the world a better place and who advanced the kingdom of God because they sought after glory, honor, and peace in this way.
Christians are not Buddhists or Stoics. We don’t seek to kill desire. We don’t think that the desireless life is the holy life. No—we seek to desire good things as strongly as possible. Some Christians think that if you desire anything strongly, or if you are really assertive—if you seek positions of power in leadership, in business, or in politics—obviously you’re being unfaithful. You must be arrogant or compromised in some way. If you seek to really obey and apply God’s Word to all of life, and if you pursue that vision privately and publicly, well, then you must be a legalist. That’s how a lot of Christians will talk today. But that’s just not true. Paul gives us a vision of the Christian life that is as wide and as deep as the creation itself. Paul gives us a vision of the Christian life that goes far beyond being a nice person who stays out of trouble. No—Paul sends us on a quest. Paul gives us a mission, a vision. The Christian faith is not just a set of doctrines to believe—there is that—but it’s more than that. It is a way of life. It is a culture. It is a civilization-building faith, and nothing less will do. No, Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, but it is certainly in this world, and its intention is to transform this world, and seeking glory, honor, and peace is how we do that. The Christian life is a strenuous life, an active life, a life of building and of productivity and of fruitfulness. Like Doug Wilson says, remember: baskets of fruit are heavy. There’s work involved, but it’s also a blessing. We all have a court date appointed when we will stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and he’s going to ask, “What did you do with what I gave you? I gave you that mina—what did you do with that? Where is the return on my investment?” And on that day, if you want to hear the verdict, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” then you must seek honor, glory, peace, and immortality right now.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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