A lot of my thoughts and studies lately have been bringing me back to some key thoughts: God is big and God is glorious. These are very simple concepts yet difficult applications to our lives. We seem to have a built in mechanism that tends to orient the world around us. I would have to say that the most important thing to me is - ME. I'm concerned about my happiness, my health, my time, my money, my glory...
The challenge for us to understand is that God isn't overly concerned about our glory and our happiness. God is preoccupied with His glory. God is full of Himself - - who else is He going to be full of? (wrap your mind around that one). Our purpose is to be a reflection of His glory in the whole world.
The struggle is, I want to be in control of everything. Have you ever found yourself wanting to take the wheel of your life and drive? And every time we do that we are saying, "God, I believe you’re real, I believe you are out there, but I need to be in charge. I need to call the shots." And as long as we are calling the shots everything is great but the thing with life is, things don’t always go the way we planned. And often things enter our lives that we didn’t plan on and everything goes south. And if we have the reigns when everything falls apart we get really frustrated; we even have the gall to get ticked off at God for allowing us to screw up our own lives.
There is a lot less frustration in our lives when we get God in proper perspective and see the glory of God. He has invited you to know Him, this great BIG glorious God.
We will focus on some of these thoughts in our series GLORY coming up Dec. 24 - Jan. 21 at church. If you have any thoughts or nuggets of truth you want to share about God's glory I'd love to hear from you (I'm always looking for more material); be sure to leave a post.
I'm wrapping up my New Testament class, and I just finished reading Revelation. You talk about glory... John's visions frequently went back to angels swarming around God just worshiping Him!
ReplyDeleteWhen I imagine my moment in glory, I see myself standing in the middle of an arena... I've done something great, something extraordinary, and the crowds are cheering uncontrollably. They shout my name, they clap, they dance, they're full of joy. I'm the center of their attention. I'm the reason for their gathering!
Of course, this moment will never come for me, but it has already come for God! Hosts of angels are praising Him right now! Do you get that? Right now, this very minute, there are angels all around him praising him, shouting his name, clapping, dancing, they're full of joy. All for God's glory!
heavy b, I've heard people say that they aren't looking forward to heaven because "all we are going to be doing is just singing and worshipping God forever, that just seems so boring". I'll bet they would really enjoy it if the role was reversed and they were the ones being worshiped. We would love that kind of heaven because once again we think it's all about us. But as you rightly point out, the book of Revelation reveals that God is already receiving the glory that is due Him.
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