The God-centeredness of God is a staggering thing, and problematic to many people. God’s constant demands for praise, particularly in the Psalms, is what C.S. Lewis described as one of his chief stumbling blocks. Before he was saved, Lewis compared God to a vain old woman pining away for compliments. Just consider Christ’s high priestly prayer in John 17 where He prays for all of us who will come to faith in Him. He prays in verse 24.

Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me;

Now imagine if the Pastor were to get up in the pulpit this morning and pray, “Lord, I just ask that you would give this congregation eyes to see my glory, that they may behold me in all my splendor!” Such self-absorption would be contemptible. Surely someone so consumed with himself would be incapable of truly loving anyone else. And yet Christ prays as such, that we might see His glory. Do you see the tension?

Why would such a request be despicable for any of us to make and yet perfectly righteous for Christ? The reason is simply this, God is the only one in all the universe who is deserving of glory. If He were to glory in anything else, He ceases to be God and all is lost. The perfection of God demands that He delight in that which is perfect, and that is Himself.

So we’ve established that God’s delight in Himself is absolutely righteous and absolutely necessary. For Him to place His affections anywhere else would be idolatry. Still, we are left with the question, how is a God so completely devoted to Himself still able to love us? The answer is this, the free and unmerited love God has for us does not compete with His glory, it heightens His glory. And we are the ones He has granted to behold it! He has put His glory on display for us, and this is good news because we were created to be satisfied in beholding the glory of God. Every time God acts to magnify His own glory, He acts in love, and we’ve already seen that God does everything to the praise of His glory.

There is a reason people find more fulfillment at the Grand Canyon than they do in front of the mirror. There is something in the human soul which longs to behold majesty and glory. There is something in the human soul which longs to feel small in the shadow of something big. The soul begins to find something in the Grand Canyon that it can never find in the mirror.

With that said, I hope that you can begin to see how, one, a self-delighting God can still love us, and, two, how the fact that God always acts for His glory is indeed an act of love. Still there is another question we must answer and that is “How is God’s love to us expressed?”.

There is no shortage of people in this world, both Christians and non-Christians, who have put God on trial for the sufferings of this world. “If God loves me, why do I hurt, why do I suffer, why do I cry?” The problem we have is that we have come to understand love as being made much of. That’s what it means in the world. If someone loves you, they exalt you, they lift you up, they make you central. But, if you try to pile that definition of love onto God it simply will not work because the expression of God’s love towards us is not in making much of us, but rather in eliminating the obstacles which keep us from making much of Him.

So now let us consider again Ephesians chapter one. The number one obstacle that keeps us from seeing and delighting in God’s glory is the fact that we are born in rebellion. We are at enmity with God, on track to behold His wrath and not His glory. Christ died in our place to overcome this legal obstacle, but there is a second and no less substantial obstacle that remains. We are all “dead” in our trespasses. We can’t see and respond to the glory of Christ’s sacrifice because we are stone cold dead, spiritually. But, for those of us who believe, God has chosen us in eternity past, and has at the appointed time made us alive that we may come to Christ though we were dead. He has given us the eyes to see what we never otherwise could see. Both of these glorious miracles are found in Ephesians one, so let’s look closely, and try to navigate through all these long sentences and clauses. Is God’s love, as it is revealed in Scripture, such that He is working to make much of us, or such that is working to free us to make much of Him?

vv. 3,4
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love,

Ok, who is being made much of in these verses? Blessed be God because of what He has done in Christ. Who chose who? Did God choose us or did we choose God? God chose us. He gets the glory.

vv. 5,6
having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.

The “in love” at the end of verse four should really be attached to the thought in verse five. God predestined us according to His will. It is not those who are adopted who choose their parents, it is the parents who choose who they will adopt. God chooses, He gets the glory. And why does God choose us for salvation, so we will be glorified? No. He chooses us to the praise of the glory of His grace.