The Glory of God, Pt. 1 (The Glory of God As Seen Through Believers)

Part 1 (The Glory of God Through Believers)

I think I now sort of know why God made everything.

I certainly don’t comprehend His ways in their fullness (not even close!), but recently I think God has revealed to me His purpose, His will, and all that other stuff that we have questions about…They have sort of come together to make sense and it all boils down to one thing: His glory. This Note is how it applies to us as Christians.

Isaiah 43:5-7
Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, give up, and to the south, do not withhold; bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the ends of the earth, everyone who is called by My Name, whom I created for My glory, whom I formed and made.

God gathered, is gathering, and will continue to gather a people for Himself from every corner of the earth for the primary purpose of His glory. We as His adopted children have been called to lead the world in the worship of the Almighty God…(that is why missions exists, by the way: because worship doesn’t.) God did not make us to climb the corporate ladder or to become famous or to live the American dream. He made us fro the same reason He made the trees, the sky, the birds, the flowers, the universe: for His glory.

So what is God’s glory? To be honest, I went for a very long time pretending to know what that word meant. I would talk about it often, listen to sermons about it, but I didn’t really comprehend what the Bible means when it talks about God’s glory. A close friend of mine found a great definition from the dictionary (haha):

The glory of God is His magnificence and splendour.

Okay, that’s good. So what does it mean to “glorify” God or to “give” Him glory? Surely we cannot make Him any more awesome than He is…He’s already infinitely awesome; addition and subtraction don’t work with infinity. So…(also from the dictionary)

Giving God glory is acknowledging the fact that He is magnificent and splendid.

1 Corinthians 10:31
So, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

To be honest, every time someone talks about this verse they seem to give the impression that all it means is to point to the sky after a soccer victory or a good singing performance…that apparently is what it means to give glory to God. But the implications of “do[ing] all to the glory of God” are much deeper than that.

In chapel, I hear about sin a lot. A friend of mine sarcastically took “notes” one day that consisted of writing “don’t sin” about fifty times…Jesus is often never even mentioned. We hear how destructive sin is and that it’ll ruin your life (which is true) but we are never given a good motivation to not sin. This style of teaching might guilt us into about five seconds of “repentance”, but brings about no real change. But let me tell you right now why living for God is so much better than living for self: His worth.

In the 1700’s, there were two young men who found out about an atheist slave owner who was keeping about 3,000 slaves on an island and boasted that no preacher or clergyman would stay there. If a missionary was shipwrecked, they’d get him a separate house until he is able to leave but he would never talk to anyone about God…so all these slaves from Africa would be brought to this island in the West Indies and will have lived and died without ever hearing of Christ. The two young men, upon finding this out, sold themselves to the slave owner for as much as he would pay for any slave (and he wouldn’t even provide their transportation.) Remember that this wasn’t a three-month or fifteen-year mission trip. This was for life; it couldn’t be “undid.” As these men in their early twenties were on a ship leaving their home in Hamburg about to spend the rest of their lives in inescapable slavery for the sake of the Gospel, their friends and family gathered at the docks to see them off. They were weeping, wondering why these promising and capable young men were making such a “foolish” decision…then one of the young men cried out from the boat as it was leaving the dock, “May the Lamb who was slain receive the reward of His suffering!” Christ’s worth is so great that it motivated these two men to willingly become slaves to an otherwise unreachable people. This also should be our motivation for everything.

We must show the world that we acknowledge God’s majesty, and as a result He has taken the highest worth in our lives. So in everything we do, whether it’s by eating or drinking or anything, let us do it all to show His greatness, to show His glory…any other motivation is simply a waste.

So examine your life. Look at your pursuits and look at your words. Are you leading all to worship, are you acknowledging to the world the worth of Christ? Let me tell you, there is no way of living that is more satisfying, challenging, and exciting than a life that is wholly devoted to the God who is worthy.

“It’s not about what you’re going to get out God; it’s about what God is going to get out of you.” –Paris Reidhead

“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” –John Piper, The Blazing Center

“Worthy are You, our LORD and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things, and by Your will they existed and were created.” –Revelation 4:11