Can We Really Give God More or Less Glory?
00:00:00.000 | We talk often on this podcast about how God gets more glory or most glory by various things.
00:00:11.480 | It's in our slogan, of course.
00:00:13.920 | God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
00:00:20.840 | Thus we can conclude that, for example, depression will not exist in heaven because we can give
00:00:25.560 | God more glory without depression.
00:00:28.200 | That's APJ 30.
00:00:30.360 | And God gets more glory in our struggle with sin than if we were made sinless immediately.
00:00:35.280 | That's APJ 30.
00:00:37.360 | And God gets more glory in the harmony of diversity in male and female genders and in
00:00:42.200 | his abundance of ethnicities than he would get if we were all the same.
00:00:47.720 | That's APJs 169 and 927.
00:00:51.600 | And Christ receives more glory in the atonement than he would have if he didn't take up the
00:00:56.040 | cross.
00:00:57.040 | That's APJ 265.
00:00:58.720 | We talked about that.
00:00:59.800 | And Christ gets more glory by defeating Satan at the cross than he would have by taking
00:01:04.440 | out Satan at a distance, like as a sniper.
00:01:08.280 | That's APJ 408.
00:01:10.240 | And God gets more glory from our willing service than if he forced and coerced labor from us
00:01:15.560 | as a tireless slave labor force.
00:01:19.160 | That's APJ 1432.
00:01:20.900 | On and on it goes.
00:01:22.280 | With this background in place, we get a question from Devin in Charlotte, North Carolina.
00:01:26.640 | "Hello, Pastor John.
00:01:27.640 | Thank you for this podcast and for your excellent books, particularly Providence, which I just
00:01:31.600 | read and finished with great delight.
00:01:33.360 | I have a question for you about discerning our intensity of glorifying God.
00:01:37.920 | It seems central to Christian hedonism, this idea that there are levels of glory that can
00:01:41.880 | be given to God.
00:01:42.960 | There's a way to bring him some glory, and then we can bring him more glory, and occasionally
00:01:48.920 | we can bring him most glory.
00:01:51.120 | Hence, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
00:01:55.600 | You seem to root a lot of ethical decisions in this gradation of doing what most glorifies
00:02:02.240 | God.
00:02:03.240 | I went to the podcast archive and found that you have explained that we can honor God in
00:02:07.280 | three various states of emotion.
00:02:10.080 | When our affections are white hot or cooled off, even when our hearts fall into deep depression.
00:02:17.160 | But we glorify God most when our affections are white hot."
00:02:22.520 | That was APJ 30.
00:02:23.960 | You talked about that.
00:02:25.560 | Where in Scripture do you find this gradation of glory from what I see in the Bible?
00:02:31.120 | We either honor God or dishonor him, glorify him or fail to honor him.
00:02:36.940 | It seems more binary.
00:02:38.760 | But I assume you put a lot more thought into this than me.
00:02:41.360 | Thank you for any help.
00:02:43.160 | Well, that's a sharp question.
00:02:47.920 | I like that kind of question because it presses me into the Bible to see if my thoughts are
00:02:58.120 | in sync with God's Word.
00:03:01.520 | So the question is, is there biblical warrant justification for speaking of more or less
00:03:13.480 | glorifying God, acts that more or less glorify God, rather than a simple either/or?
00:03:21.320 | Either we glorify him or we don't.
00:03:23.880 | No gradations.
00:03:26.280 | Does the glorification of God by man happen in degrees, glorifying more sometimes, less
00:03:34.840 | sometimes?
00:03:36.800 | Or is that an unbiblical way of thinking and is the only way we should speak, namely that
00:03:45.040 | we glorified God or we didn't, without speaking of degrees or gradations of glorification?
00:03:51.640 | Now, Devon has a good biblical ground for asking this because if you do the word search
00:04:00.320 | on all kinds of formations of the word "glory" or "more" or "less" or other degree words,
00:04:09.200 | you do find that the Bible does not very often speak of God being given more or less glory
00:04:17.880 | by his people.
00:04:19.680 | Almost entirely it speaks of God's being glorified without any references to degrees of more
00:04:27.720 | or less.
00:04:29.440 | So why do I speak so often about God being more or less glorified?
00:04:38.480 | And here's the answer.
00:04:40.360 | So general answer and then some biblical specifics.
00:04:43.800 | It basically flows from asking, "What does glorify mean?"
00:04:51.280 | I think it means, "Show God to be glorious."
00:04:56.520 | I think that's what glorify means.
00:04:59.040 | Show God to be glorious, that is, show him to be great or beautiful or valuable.
00:05:04.640 | Or you could break it down.
00:05:05.960 | Show him to be wise, strong, kind, good, loving, just, holy, merciful, gracious, satisfying.
00:05:14.440 | So to glorify is to make clear to others what God is like so as to seek their praise and
00:05:25.840 | admiration of him so that they join us in seeking to show how great he is.
00:05:33.880 | That's what glorify means, as I understand it.
00:05:37.200 | So once we trace the meaning of glorify back to things we do or feel or think or say to
00:05:47.360 | make God look glorious, then it seems right to say that since our doing and speaking and
00:05:57.240 | feeling and thinking are more or less in accord with God's worth from day to day, from hour
00:06:06.920 | to hour, therefore our showing God's worth will vary in the way our acting and speaking,
00:06:15.400 | feeling, and thinking vary in the degree that they reflect God's character.
00:06:20.480 | That's basically my argument.
00:06:21.720 | In other words, my speaking of God getting more or less glory from my life of holiness
00:06:31.120 | and love follows from the fact that biblically my holiness and love are greater or lesser
00:06:40.560 | from time to time.
00:06:42.640 | And so I am showing with greater or less clarity or greater or less accuracy or greater or
00:06:51.840 | less fullness the glory of God because my behavior is more or less in accord with God's
00:07:00.480 | character.
00:07:02.080 | That's my basic understanding of how degrees of glorification are rooted in degrees of
00:07:07.360 | clarity that God's character is seen in my degrees of holiness.
00:07:12.360 | Now let's look at some text to see whether or not there really are biblical pointers
00:07:19.200 | to the legitimacy and helpfulness of talking like this.
00:07:23.080 | Let's start with degrees of glory when talking about the progress of redemptive history,
00:07:30.840 | 2 Corinthians 3, 7 to 10.
00:07:33.380 | Now if the ministry of death carved in letters of stone came with such glory that the Israelites
00:07:41.360 | could not gaze at Moses' face because of its glory, which was being brought to an end,
00:07:47.120 | will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?
00:07:53.360 | For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness
00:08:00.320 | must far exceed it in glory.
00:08:04.120 | Indeed, in this case, what once had glory has come to have no glory at all because of
00:08:10.960 | the glory that surpasses it.
00:08:14.000 | So it is not unbiblical to speak of God's acting through his people in one way to show
00:08:24.600 | less of his glory and in another way to show more of his glory.
00:08:30.280 | And by inference, I would say that's true individually as well.
00:08:36.280 | Or consider 2 Corinthians 4, 15, "For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends
00:08:43.120 | to more and more people, it may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God."
00:08:52.320 | Now I think that implies that if thanksgiving increases in your life or in your church,
00:09:01.960 | God gets glory more clearly, more fully than if thanksgiving were not increasing in your
00:09:10.400 | life or in your church.
00:09:11.920 | Otherwise, I don't see why Paul would refer to the increase of thanksgiving and then connect
00:09:17.360 | it with the glory of God the way he does.
00:09:20.580 | Or consider Philippians 1, 9, "It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with
00:09:29.240 | knowledge and all discernment."
00:09:32.160 | And then he links this incremental growth or increase of love with his aim that we be
00:09:41.240 | filled with the fruit of righteousness to the glory and praise of God.
00:09:46.520 | So I draw from this that my growth in love from one degree to the next is like the good
00:09:56.280 | deeds, part of the good deeds or expressed in good deeds that Jesus said cause people
00:10:04.240 | to glorify God.
00:10:05.520 | "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good deeds, your love, and glorify
00:10:11.240 | God."
00:10:13.400 | So if my love abounds more and more, it seems that the correlation of what they are done
00:10:21.000 | for, what my deeds are done for, and my love is shown for would also be greater.
00:10:27.360 | Namely, God is seen more clearly to be glorious because I have more clearly reflected his
00:10:36.400 | character.
00:10:37.400 | Or what about Ephesians 5, 18, "Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but
00:10:43.760 | be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual
00:10:47.600 | songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart."
00:10:53.760 | Now what that implies is that the engagement of our heart matters in whether our songs
00:11:01.120 | of praise are fitting.
00:11:03.340 | Jesus said, "These people honors me with their lips, they sing with their lips, but
00:11:07.920 | their heart is far from me."
00:11:10.760 | So it seems to me that the heart is a very variable source of affections for God.
00:11:21.840 | The heart can be warm or cold or all kinds of gradations in between, and Paul says this
00:11:27.680 | matters for the authenticity of our worship, and I would say for the degree to which our
00:11:36.000 | worship conforms to the worth of God and thus the degree to how clearly he is shown to be
00:11:44.440 | our treasure in singing, that is, how clearly he is glorified.
00:11:49.160 | Same thing could be said about the great commandment, right?
00:11:51.560 | You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all
00:11:55.400 | your mind, as more or less of our hearts are engaged, we show more or less clearly the
00:12:03.600 | worthiness of God to be loved.
00:12:06.280 | So to wrap it up, let me take Paul's words when he speaks about his own preaching the
00:12:14.320 | mystery of Christ, which includes the truth that Christ is in you, the hope of glory.
00:12:21.600 | He says—this is Colossians 4:4—"Pray that I may make it clear, which is how I ought
00:12:31.880 | to speak."
00:12:32.880 | So he's asking, "Oh God, would you put it in the hearts of the Colossians to pray
00:12:37.960 | for me that when I open my mouth, the mystery of Christ, the glory of Christ would be clear?"
00:12:45.880 | Paul knew that when he preached the glories of Christ, the unsearchable riches of Christ,
00:12:53.840 | sometimes they were more clear than other times.
00:12:58.200 | That's why he asked for prayer.
00:13:00.040 | So he asked for the Colossians to pray that it might be more clear, which is another way
00:13:07.440 | of saying so that Christ would appear more glorious.
00:13:13.100 | So that's the way I think about the gradations of glorifying Christ.
00:13:21.000 | Very good thoughts.
00:13:22.000 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:13:23.000 | And thank you for the great follow-up question, Devin.
00:13:25.080 | Perhaps you've been listening for a while and you want clarity on something that you've
00:13:28.320 | heard.
00:13:29.320 | Maybe you have an episode or episodes that you want to better understand.
00:13:31.880 | Give me the episode numbers, send me an email, and do that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:13:42.680 | Well it's never a bad time to soak in the glorious truths of Psalm 16.
00:13:47.520 | A glorious psalm.
00:13:48.920 | I know a lot of you have memorized it by heart.
00:13:51.160 | Pastor John certainly has.
00:13:52.640 | And that is the theme up next time.
00:13:54.600 | I'm your host Tony Reiki.
00:13:56.120 | We'll see you back here on Wednesday for Psalm 16.
00:13:59.400 | Amen.
00:14:00.400 | Amen.
00:14:00.400 | Amen.
00:14:05.400 | [BLANK_AUDIO]