New City Catechism #6

Question: How can we glorify God?
Answer: By loving him and obeying his commandments and law.

Glory? How often do we think about that? Glory seems like something that is only relevant in “church talk” and doesn’t have much bearing on the real world. For it’s not like you think about glory while you are eating breakfast, clocking in at work, or buying toothpaste at the store.

However, we as a people are glory obsessed.

Glory doesn’t mean gazing up at the sky with arms outstretched thinking good thoughts about God. That can be an aspect of glory, but it is far from the only one. Glory is the idea of “weight.” It is the response of treating something as “weighty” or “valuable.”

Picture it like this. You are at a high school graduation. There is a ton of activity going on. Students are excited to receive their diplomas. Administrators are excited to get to summer break. And families are excited to get home to graduation parties. But at this graduation there is a special buzz. The commencement speaker is none other than the president of the United States. This is no ordinary graduation speaker. There is only one president at a time. He can only be in one place at a time. So, to have him as your speaker is a great honor. There is a “weight” to his presence. Everyone will be looking for him. Everyone will be trying to take a selfie with him in the background. Even with different things happening on stage people will be looking to see what the president is doing. His influence is the central point of that gathering.

We as people are hard-wired to give glory to something. That is what I mean by the fact that we are glory obsessed. For you may not treat the president as the weighty focus of your life, but you certainly have many things that weigh heavy on your heart.

• It’s the vacation you are constantly thinking about. You plan for it for over a year. You long for it, and you desire it to bring you great joy. Then after it is done, you long to go back and life doesn’t quite shine with the same luster now that you aren’t on the vacation.
• It’s the relationship you long for. If you just had that special someone then you know your life would be complete. You think about that potential someone. And this coming Valentine’s Day is a time of frustration and sorrow because people are celebrating the love you don’t have. You can’t even walk by the candy aisle at Target to see the heart-shaped boxes because the “weight” of your desire for love is so heavy.
• It’s the approval of other people. You couldn’t sleep last night because you were such an idiot in that conversation the previous evening (at least in your mind). You replay what you said down to the last detail and imagine what you should have said instead. Then, you wake up in the morning wondering what other people are thinking about. You just know they think you are such a fool. The weight of their perception of you hangs so heavy on your soul.

All of these things and more show us that we are glory-obsessed. We give other things outside of us the great weight and pull of our attention because we are looking for them to somehow satisfy us.

But they never can…

You and I have been made to fix our glory in one place: God alone. He should be the pull and weight on our souls. Vacations, love, and other people can be good things, but they must not be the orientation of our lives. Our lives were made for God and life is lived rightly when he is the center of our attention and affections.

Jesus said these words in John 15:8, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”

Glory is evidenced by what we do. We glorify God through our obedience and prove to be disciples. Obedience is not how we become disciples; it reveals that we are disciples. So, we must fix God in our minds as the valuable, praiseworthy, awe-inducing satisfier of our soul. This cultivates love. And when we love God like this, we will scoot things like vacations, love, and approval further down the list of what we value and live for the one who captivates our attention. That is glorious!

Is your glory in God today?