“Do you long to give glory to God with your life?”
(Jordan Standridge – The Cripplegate) You hear it said often, don’t you. You need to glorify God! But what does it mean exactly? How can someone glorify God?
Perhaps one of the best pictures of glorifying God in the Bible is found in Luke 9:9. Herod says, “I beheaded John. Who, then, is this I hear such things about?”
The context around this verse is clear. Jesus sends out the twelve on their first evangelistic trip. They go out to preach about the kingdom, but they do so in a way that brings glory to Christ. I say this because as people watch and listen to the twelve, they can’t help but wonder about who Jesus is. In other words, they think to themselves that these twelve men couldn’t possibly believe these things that they were declaring, that they couldn’t do the things they were doing unless God had enabled them to do so.
Bringing glory to God with our lives means that we are doing supernatural things that can only be attributed to Him. And I’m not talking about miraculous sign gifts, those have ceased; I’m talking about supernatural things that can only happen in the minds and hearts of regenerated Holy Spirit-filled believers.
There are three areas I want to highlight in particular in which we can glorify God: In our beliefs, in our decisions, and in our response to trials.