The word glory and glorify is used over and over in scripture but do we know what it means to glorify?
I don’t think I could have given you a definition until yesterday. In the Reservoir devotional that our staff has been going through we read this definition, “to glorify means to cause the worth of something to become visible and acknowledged.”
As a Christian, it is my job to glorify Jesus Christ and not myself, my virtue, or even my church and its accomplishments. How do we do this?
First, we have to understand the worth of Jesus so that we can recognize why he should be glorified.
Jesus is God’s Son who humbled himself to take on flesh and live among the sinful, selfish, ignorant, and foolish human race. He healed, loved, taught, served, and sacrificed for these humans that didn’t appreciate it half the time and often tried to attack him for it. He lived a perfect life and took that perfect life and gave it up to death as a perfect sacrifice for all of those humans who loved him and even the ones who hated him.
That death was an atonement for all of the sin and the propensity to screw things up that should have brought punishment and death for us humans. After entering death in our place, Jesus defeated that death and rose from the grave to demonstrate the power of Christ to overcome all that this evil world could possibly do to destroy us. Jesus now dwells in those that have committed their life to him and is directing his kingdom to have done what needs to be done in the name of God and for the blessing of the human race.
Now that we know the worth of Christ, we then make that worth known to others. We tell his story, we point people to him, we praise his name, we sing about him, we study him, we pray to him, we listen to him, we confess to him, we place him at the center of our existence, and we humble ourselves in relation to his greatness.
I like the simplicity of the word “acknowledged” in the definition. Acknowledge is a surrender to the truth. When we glorify God, we surrender to the truth of who Jesus is and we direct others to discover that truth as well. I surrender that I am lacking and powerless to change myself and those around me without the might and power of the resurrected Christ. I am humbled and through my words and actions, Christ is seen as the only hope and truth for a dying world. Then Christ’s name gets glorified even more.
As Christians, we try to replace our one job of glorifying Christ with countless other things, some good and noble and some just frivolous and detrimental. If Christ is your savior then glorify him today in all that you do. Make the glorified Christ known and acknowledged. Humanity is starving for the hope that only Christ can bring.
Glorify him.
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