“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

You are being transformed into the likeness of Christ, from glory to glory. What is glory? Glory is honor, renown, and splendor in abundant, copious amounts. It’s heavy and thick and all consuming. That’s still hard to grasp, and even harder to apply to our lives, but let’s try and break it down.

Examples are always good when defining difficult words. So what is glory?

- Glory is what filled the temple – there was no more room in it (2 Chronicles 7).
- Glory is what will fill the earth, like water fills a sea (Habakkuk 2:14).
- Glory is the light that shone off of Moses’ face after he spoke with God (Exodus 34:35).

So how do we practically move from one degree of glory to the next? Here are some ways:

1.    There is glory in seeking God (Prov. 25:2)
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, not to frustrate us, but to spur us on to investigate him. When we dive into a matter that God has hidden Himself in, glory waits. Think about the potential for finding God in our everyday lives! Desiring glory is not vanity, nor is it selfishness, it is simply seeking God’s presence. “Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.” (Isaiah 55:6) Find a hidden glory today.

2.    There is glory in humility before God (Prov. 18:12)
Humility comes before glory. As we draw closer to God, the dark corners of our life that house pride and selfishness are exposed. We were created to experience the glory of God, but we need the humility to carry it. Case in point? The Israelites, after they had left Egypt and had been given parting gifts from the Egyptians, used their gold to fashion an idol, which they worshiped instead of the glory of God. We need humility to rightly receive the glory.

3.    There is glory in tribulation (2 Cor. 4:17)
One of the ways God teaches humility is through tribulation. 2 Corinthians 4:17 says, “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” We experience painful trials in this fallen world, but tribulation does something unique: it eliminates plan B. Oh, yes, we can choose to turn away from God, but pain often creates a watershed moment –we turn to God or we turn away. So what can we do in the face of tribulation? Experience the glory of saying “Yes and Amen” to God (for an example of this unconditional praise, see Habakkuk 3).

4.    There is glory in God’s presence
Hopefully this is painfully obvious by now, but God’s presence is glorious. He will one day fill the earth with His glory, and in the meantime, He is doing it through us. Seek to bring God’s kingdom to earth. May we invite the thickness of glory to reside in our homes and work places.

And we, with unveiled faces, are being transformed into the image of God, from glory to glory.

Glory in the search.

Glory in humility.

Glory in trials.

Glory in His presence.

God, I want to see your glory. Reveal yourself to me.  Amen.

Question: Where do you most often find the glory of God?

Last night my favorite hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks, beat the Minnesota Wild 3-0, and one of their best players, Henrik Sedin, earned two more points to pull away from Claude Giroux of Philadelphia to top the total-points race.  When your team is winning, it’s easy to bask in their accomplishments and take them on as your own.  I do that.

And yet if you see who the scoring leaders are, some names are conspicuous by their absence.  Among the top five skaters you won’t find Crosby or Ovechkin.  Among the top goaltenders, no Luongo or Miller.  Of course Crosby struggles with post-concussion issues, but the others are just not at the top of their game. They play well, but their current glory is faded.

When Peter said that all of us are like grass, and our glory but like flowers of the field, he was picking up on the prophet Isaiah’s wording to convey the idea that our lives, achievements, and head-turning performances may be amazing today, but gone tomorrow like sunflowers in August heat.

Peter goes on to finish his idea.  He says …”the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.”  What is ‘the word of the Lord’?  Again context helps.  A bit earlier Peter wrote:

“For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.” 1 Peter 1:19-21.

So the word of God is Jesus, and it’s through his death that God overcame sin and Satan and proved to everyone that he really is looking out for us.  And so the glory belongs to God for what he has provided in Jesus’ redeeming death, rather than our efforts to be ‘good enough’ or to ‘measure up’ in God’s economy.

Sometimes I need to remind myself of that.  Like elite athletes, my achievements are here for a season, but their ‘glory’ isn’t lasting.  They may be a good sign that God is working in me and through me, but they are still just gold and silver which are not enduring.  But thank God that Jesus’ achievement opens the door for us to know his salvation forever, like a flower that never fades.

Questions:  Are you working diligently in this life to try to prove your ‘glory’ to God?  What is keeping you from receiving and relaxing in the gift of God’s salvation through Jesus?

TheLife.com is now PowerToChange.com!

This site is maintained by TruthMedia, a division on Power to Change. Over the next days and weeks this site, along with several others, will be moving into a new format branded as Power to Change.

All of your favorites will still be here along with a bunch of new features we’re excited to share with you. Now all of our audiences will have access to blogs, comments and videos along with more frequent updates, bigger images and a wider range of content.

Legacy of a Christian Father
I grew up as a pastor’s kid. I am also adopted. My birth mom was only a teenager when she had me. She was in an abusive marriage with an alcoholic. In order to give me a better life, my birth mother and biological dad thought it in my best interest to be given to a family who could better care for me than they could. I was adopted by a Pastor and his wife who desperately wanted more children. Read more.

Take action: Are there big problems in your life or looming on the horizon? Get help dealing with the big stuff in our online interactive study Confronting Giants: Dealing with the Big Stuff.

You said it: This week kaddee shared on the Back to School women’s devotional, saying “First the best way to be in constant learning mode is to read the Word of God, then there are so many godly authors now that it is way too hard to keep up, books of fiction and non-fiction help with the learning process, and my second favorite is music, gospel music helps me to praise when nothing is going right and I’m feel defeated.” Read the rest of the comments on Back to School, and join the conversation on Devotional for Men and Devotional for Women, each updated daily!

Video: Adoption Conversations
Three Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professors share their stories about adoption, their adopted children, and how adoption has changed and enriched their lives. Read more

Devotional: Displaying God’s Glory
When Jesus’ disciples saw a man who had been blind since he was born, they assumed it was the result of sin. Jesus quickly corrected their misunderstanding with the statement above from John 9:3. God’s intention to display his glory in this man was planned before the man was born. Read more

Coming up next week: One of the topics of our upcoming online chats is “Count It All Joy” Join us in the chat room September 29th 2009 @ 4:00pm EST for this chat or see also our full chat calendar for other upcoming topics.

The request came when I was twenty. “Can you address our church youth group?” We aren’t talking citywide crusade here. Think more in terms of a dozen kids around a West Texas campfire. I was new to the faith, hence new to the power of the faith. I told my story, and, lo and behold, they listened! One even approached me afterward and said something like, “That moved me, Max.” My chest lifted, and my feet shifted just a step in the direction of the spotlight.

God has been nudging me back ever since.

Some of you don’t relate. The limelight never woos you. You and John the Baptist sing the same tune: “He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less” (John 3:30, NLT). God bless you. You might pray for the rest of us. We applause-aholics have done it all: dropped names, sung loudly, dressed up to look classy, dressed down to look cool, quoted authors we’ve never read, spouted Greek we’ve never studied. For the life of me, I believe Satan trains battalions of demons to whisper one question in our ears: “What are people thinking of you?”

A deadly query. What they think of us matters not. What they think of God matters all. God will not share his glory with another (Isaiah 42:8). Next time you need a nudge away from the spotlight, remember: You are simply one link in a chain, an unimportant link at that.
Remember the other messengers God has used?

A donkey to speak to Balaam (Numbers 22:28).

A staff-turned-snake to stir Pharaoh (Exodus 7:10).

He used stubborn oxen to make a point about reverence and a big fish to make a point about reluctant preachers (I Samuel 6:1-12; Jonah 1:1-17)

God doesn’t need you and me to do his work. We are expedient messengers, ambassadors by his kindness, not by our cleverness.

It’s not about us, and it angers him when we think it is.

We who are entrusted with the gospel dare not seek applause but best deflect applause. For our message is about Someone else.

From It’s Not About Me
Copyright (Thomas Nelson, 2007), Max Lucado
Used by permission

Question: How can we seek to be humble, without paradoxically becoming prideful of our humility?

About this Author: Max Lucado

It is with serious intent that I intrude upon our devotional moments in these missives with things such as coffee, the Da Vinci Code, jogging, iPods, Bonnie Raitt, and Dodger dogs. There is a method to this madness – to splash a little profane around the sacred so that the opposite might happen when we leave this devotional reflection to the end that the sacred might invade our profane existence and open our eyes to God in the world.

It’s all about connections. The more we learn to connect God’s truth to the physical world and the culture that surrounds us, the more we will be able to live a life of worship. Worship does not consist in leaving the world to see God, but in learning to see God at all times in the world.

The separation of the sacred and the profane is hard to shake. It is deeply engrained in us, the result of a long history going back at least to the early Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who taught that the good and the sublime exist only in the non-physical realm. The body was tainted; the spirit was pure. The Gnostics came along and took it even farther. They believed the physical does not even exist. It is an illusion. The only truth is what you know in your mind.

Then along came Jesus. He busted the whole paradigm because he was the essence of the spiritual – God himself, to be exact – in human flesh and bone. He ate and drank and got dirty walking the road of life, and made it all sacred in the process. He told stories about vines and branches and farmers and merchants and kings and widows. He changed water into wine, sickness into health, death into life. He healed people’s bodies and forgave their sins at the same time. He paid his taxes, helped his disciples fish, and cooperated with Roman rule. And even after his resurrection, he made breakfast for his little band of followers and ate with them.

To Jesus, life was a mixed bag of the holy and the common, but mostly the common made holy by his touch. In Jesus, the sacred and the profane meet, resulting in the realization that the profane can be redeemed. Our earthly existence can be given spiritual value. The physical world is not disconnected from the spiritual one, nor is it at odds with it, but the physical world can embody all that is spiritual. The Word became flesh, and since then nothing has ever been the same. Now work, play, recreation, entertainment, and even commerce can contain God’s glory. Indeed, the entire physical world is merely a front for the spiritual realities it illustrates.

So to go into the world, leaving God back in your devotions somewhere would be a big mistake, when in reality, by focusing on him, you are just getting warmed up to discovering him everywhere else.

Question: What are some of the ways that we compartmentalize our lives into “sacred” and “profane”? How can we seek to redeem the so-called “profane” parts for God?

About this Author: John Fischer

Five Ways to Use Money
If you think about it, there are really only five things you can do with money: Earn it, spend it, save it, invest it, and give it. That may sound simple. But when it comes to actually doing it, all sorts of questions arise, such as: How much money do I need to earn? How much should I save? How much should I spend? Where should I invest it? How much should I give? The following Scriptures and advice will help you to begin thinking through these issues: Read the full article.

Take action: Celebrate Christ’s death and resurrection by exploring our series of free online interactive life lessons, like the “Portraits of Christ” series. Why not try one today?

You said it: This week kanj shared on the “Do All to the Glory of God” devotional, saying “thank you for this devotional. God has given me His grace once more. each day I wake is another day to celebrate His love. I serve Him each day in being the best that I can be. I read this in study this morning. it said, ”When praying, it’s better to have a heart without words than words without heart (see Romans 8). i’v been distant lately in prayer and I believe this came to my heart for a reason.” Join the conversation on the daily men’s devotional and women’s devotional!

Article: Life After Divorce
If you have experienced, or are experiencing divorce, my heart goes out to you. I know about divorce. My parents were divorced when I was 12 years old … Read more

Devotional: Sharing Good News
Every Christian is called to share with others what we’ve been given from God. But I’m often asked, what exactly are we supposed to share? Here’s your message in two words: good news. Continue reading this devo on the men’s devotional blog

Coming up next week: One of the topics of our upcoming online chats is “Evidence for the Resurrection” Join us in the chat room April 7th 2009 @ 7:00pm EST for this chat or see also our full chat calendar for other upcoming topics.