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Hi I'm Rachel Miller, thanks for joining us on the "Life is Hard, God is Good" podcast - where we are real about the hardships we face in life and find God’s goodness in the midst of it all. This is the second part of beauty & glory. In last week’s episode we focused on beauty and today we are focusing on glory.
Do you feel the weight of it? The weight of your sin? The weight of being an imperfect human? The weight of transitions going on in life? The weight of broken relationships? The weight of the brokenness that happens all around us - the violence, the conflict - you feel all of it? And you want this weight to be off your shoulders, right?
You want to escape through things that take away the feeling for a temporary time. We all have ways of coping with this weight, whether good or bad. Maybe you try to do things to offset the weight of the brokenness. If there’s a tipping scale, and on one end of the scale is the weight of what you’re feeling - the guilt & shame, then on the other end is things that you’ve done - I served my family well, I loved people, I try to be a good human and recycle, and I volunteer in the community. It helps you offset that weight of what you’re feeling… at least for a time.
If you’re a Christian, you’ve probably heard that our purpose is to glorify God. what does that mean?
Glorify, similar to magnify, is to make bigger. Not that God is small and we have to make Him big - He is already infinitely beyond our comprehension. But it’s that our perception of Him gets bigger. And our perspective of everything else - this world and all that’s in it and our own lives become smaller. That’s glorifying Him.
And He transforms us glory to glory. 2 Corinthians 3. There’s this veil; in the times of the Old Testament, God dwelled behind the veil in the holies of holies where only the high priest could go once a year. But when Jesus came and died on the cross, the veil was torn in two, giving us access to God.
However, there’s also a veil over our hearts. Just because there’s access to God, doesn’t mean that we have allowed Him into our hearts. Even though He is your Maker and knows everything about you (Psalm 139), when we remove the veil of our hearts, we allow our hearts to become moldable and for Him to work in our lives. He’s a gentleman. He gives us the choice. He stands at the door and knocks, but He does not force the door open. He’s not going to change your heart and your mind without you asking Him to or inviting Him in.
He gave us access to Him, but He’s waiting for us to give Him the green light before He does His crazy amazing transformative work. When we open the veil of our hearts, then He transforms us glory to glory.
CS Lewis describes glory in a couple of ways. Glory is fame and glory is luminosity.
The fame part seems a bit odd. It seems selfish to want fame. But I’m not talking about fame among our fellow creatures, other humans made in the image of God. I’m talking about fame with God. And again, He already knows everything about us, but it’s allowing Him in and inviting Him to change our hearts and our minds to transform us from the inside out. When we tear that veil and He has that access to us, we become radiant. Those who look on Him are radiant. Moses was on Mt Sinai and would come down with so much radiance that he had to wear a veil to hide his face from the Israelites. But now, it is not so. We don’t have to wear a veil. When Jesus was here on earth, there’s a passage about the transfiguration in the gospels, His face was radiant. In the same way, when we are glorifying the LORD, it changes the way that we look. When we glorify the LORD and make Him bigger (and ourselves and our problems smaller) in our eyes and invite Him into our hearts - He transforms us gl
