Show Us Your Glory

This past weekend, Bryan Wright, pastor of Boomerang Church in Albemarle, NC, ministered at Hope City Church on the glory of God; . This is just a very small portion of his message (link to the full service is at the end of this post).  (We’ll get back to our There is Freedom series next week.)

“1 Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth, You who have displayed Your splendor above the heavens! 2 From the mouths of infants and nursing babies You have established strength because of Your enemies, to do away with the enemy and the revengeful. 3 When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place; 4 what is man that You think of him, and a son of man that You are concerned about him? 5 Yet You have made him a little lower than God, and You crown him with glory and majesty! 6 You have him rule over the works of Your hands; You have put everything under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the seas. 9 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!” – PSALMS 8 (NASB)

Have you ever been out to a place where there’s no light pollution (like in the middle of a desert)?  Have you seen the Milky Way galaxy? I think it’s one of the most beautiful things there is. I just look up at God’s splendor of the heavens. How magnificent is our God? Do we realize how big He is? He measures the heavens with the span of His hand!

Do we know His splendor? Do we know how big He is? When He says to us to “speak to this mountain and it’ll be removed”, that mountain that used to look big isn’t so big to God. That impossible force is NOTHING to Him! How much glory does He carry and how easy is it for Him to solve that bill that’s due Friday or to take that cancer and knock it out? Look at verse 2: God will stop your enemies!

Verse 3: Don’t limit yourself to just what we can see here on earth…know there’s so much more out there!  God made every bit of it. How big is our God? It’s all a matter of perspective.

I think that God, sitting on the throne, wonders why we don’t believe in Him more. He says, “Look at what I’ve done! And you’re not believing Me for those great, majestic things? You’re not believing these blessings like I don’t have enough? Like I can’t make every single person in here a millionaire without running out? I can’t heal the whole room at one time…like I don’t have enough power?”

We get mad at the Israelites because God did great miracles in Egypt for them and they came out with power, but when they got into the desert they murmured and complained, “We can’t even go into the promised land…” We want to complain about the Israelites, but are we doing the same thing by minimalizing God down to what we can only see with our fleshly eyes and by what we can only imagine in our mind?

I think the answer is an obvious “Yes.”

What has God given us? Look at verse 4. “What is man that You think of him, and a son of man that You are concerned about him?” What is this creature, made in Your image? Why did you do this? Who is the being, made with the capacity to hold God in the Holy Spirit? Do we really know? One man’s spirit held the legion of demons that Jesus kicked out…over 2,000 spirits in one spirit! What is the capacity of our being? I can tell you: it can hold God!

The Glory of God

We’re filled and overflowed with God; we’re His temple, the house of God. Do we really know how we are created and what God wants us to be considered normal in our lives?

Now this is not something you have pride about: “Look at me! I’m a believer; I’m made in the image of God!” No, it’s GOD who made all that stuff happen; we need to consider HIS works, not OUR works. That said, look at verse 5. “Yet You have made him a little lower than God…” My understanding of this verse is that the original language says it’s just a sliver lower (simply because we couldn’t make ourselves).  God, in His wisdom and love, decided to make you like that, right there up next to Him. Then it says, “You CROWN him with glory and majesty.” God Himself took His glory and designed us to carry it!

Do we know what we have? Do we really have a revelation? We might mentally say “Okay, maybe I have some”, but do we really have it on the inside? Do you know what you are and what you can become?

Look at the rest of Psalms 8: “6 You have him rule over the works of Your hands; You have put everything under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the seas. 9 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!”

Have we mishandled some things? We have. So, what does that take? “Oh Lord, I repent! I want to esteem everything that You’ve given to me.” We need to look at that both individually and as a church. The bigger question is, if we will get our hearts and bow our hearts in honor and worship before the Lord, where is He taking you, Hope City? What does He want to crown Hope City with? He wants to crown Hope City with His glory…a shining light not to be hid, that arises and shines.

Show Us Your Glory

In Exodus 33:7, we see that Moses would go to the Tent of Meeting and God would descend in the pillar of cloud and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses from that cloud. They’d have conversations! And remember, Moses was a man under the curse (without Jesus)! We have Jesus and the Holy Ghost! Think about the mercy and grace of God to be able to stand in front of sinful man without Jesus and come down. Think about the desire of our Heavenly Father to come and commune with a man…WITHOUT Jesus! What mercy God has poured out!

Moses, a sinful man under the curse and without Jesus makes this demand of God: “Lord, show me Your glory!” (Exodus 33:18)  What a request!  Moses had guts…but he also knew the heart of God.  How did God respond?  “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you.”  All.  Not a little bit of goodness or even what you can handle. “I’ll show you My glory and it’ll be every ounce.”

What have we been held back from?  What is normal to us that we haven’t known?  In the Lord’s Prayer we say, “Give us this day our daily bread” and it goes on to say “Your will be done here on earth as it is in Heaven.”  In other words, the will of God is for Heaven to be on earth and manifested through our hands.  There’s no sick people in Heaven or poverty or lack whatsoever.  There’s nothing but His glory.  There’s no shadow because His glory, His goodness, illuminates it all!  We are designed to be crowned with it.

Adam was crowned (clothed) with glory in the garden before sin (the curse you and I are redeemed from in Christ) and he walked clothed with the glory of God. That’s what made him naked because he used to have different clothes; sin broke that.  But Christ dealt with sin so that we could be clothed with His glory again!  We could become a container and a temple of God!

Moses was not at the position of a Christian today; he didn’t have a redeemer in Christ, so God told him (Exodus 33:22), “and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by.”  He said He would hide Moses in a type and shadow of Christ.  He told him, “You can’t handle this all, but there’s a rock carved out just for you where you can experience My glory.”

Thanks to Christ, God’s carved out of the Rock a place where you and I fit and made us good enough to carry the glory!

Do we know what we have?  Do you know what you’re called to?  Do you really know where you’re going, to the heights of the splendor of God?

To watch the entire August 14, 2022, service on which this post is based, CLICK HERE.