What is Glory?

I do not receive glory from men.

How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God? (John 5:41,44)

I have puzzled for many years over the true meaning of this word glory. Yesterday after church we got into a discussion about this and explored it a bit which in turn helped me to flush out the meaning of this term a little more into the open.

There are several concepts involved in this word which at first sometimes seem to almost seem disconnected. One is the definition that says that glory equals character. That is true in some way, but it does not seem to be very complete or even fit well in some instances. Take for example when Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration. I asked someone if all the disciples saw was a clearer revelation of the character of Jesus. What did that have to do with the overwhelming light that they reported seeing? I am not suggesting that the two have nothing to do with each other, but I sense that there is much more to this word than we have typically thought about.

On the other hand, many think of this word only in the context of something along the lines of a bright light and not much more. Whenever someone speaks of glory they sometimes think only of a physical glow around someone, an aura, or maybe even an old-fashioned halo of some sort. The morbid middle ages paintings of sadly pious-looking people with halos around their heads (that have disgusted me for most of my life) are supposed to portray some sort of religiosity or superior value about certain people that is a complete counterfeit of the kind of true glory spoken of in the Bible.

When I noticed the interesting contrasts between sources of glory that Jesus points out in the quoted verses here, I began to see clues as to what true glory must involve. Apparently from the context here it must have a great deal to do with identity and reputation and self-perception all wrapped up together. What I am starting to see here is that Jesus is distancing Himself from relying on what men think about Him as a reliable source of defining His true identity. (see John 2:24,25) On the other hand, Jesus totally and exclusively relied on what His Father in heaven believed about Him as the only reliable source of defining His true identity and reputation.

Reputation seems to be very much involved in this concept of glory as far as I can tell so far. There is competition between various sources that try to define what we think and feel about ourselves. This is likely another clear example of where Jesus is relating how we should think of ourselves just as much as how we should think about Him. What are we relying on as far as how we think of ourselves, our worth, our value? For what we perceive about our own value has an enormous impact on how we live, how we react to outside pressures and how we respond to attacks and insinuations about our true identity.

Our sense of identity and worth seems to lie at the very core of the whole problem of sin right along with what we feel about God. Many of us have such a low sense of personal value that we find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone could love us, even God. On the other hand, the world has attempted to address this problem by emphasizing techniques of elevating self-worth through arbitrary exercises or mental gymnastics designed to make us feel proud of ourselves independent of what anyone else may think of us. But the problem with that is that it is always disconnected from any reference to what God might think about us. This is understandable given that religions of the world generally paint God in such perverted ways that He is not a reliable source of consistent value for our hearts.

Most Christians tend to portray God as one who is more eager to make sure we feel worthless and wicked so that we will feel motivated by so much fear of His wrath that we will run to Jesus in terror to hide from the punishments threatened against the lost. This picture of a schizo Godhead has done more damage to the human race than nearly any other belief and has produced the widespread levels of unbelief that we see in the world today. It is no wonder that people would prefer to look to each other or inside themselves to find better sources of self-worth instead of to a God who has been characterized as primarily one who is interested in exposing and condemning all of our faults and failings and making us feel shamed and devalued.

Another aspect of these verses in relation to the idea of glory is the act of receiving that Jesus spoke of here. He said that He did not receive glory from men but that the Jews were receiving glory from other men. He also spoke of the need for seeking glory when He spoke of their failure to seek glory from the only reliable Source of true glory. Thus I see that not only is glory something that we tend to receive but is something that we need to actively seek out.

What I am perceiving so far here is that Jesus might be talking about two different kinds of glory as well as two different sources. The glory that comes from men – what people think about my value, how good my reputation is among the people who hear about me – that kind of glory is most likely the unreliable, counterfeit sort of glory that is not going to be very satisfying for very long. If I am depending on what others think or feel about me as my source of value, worth and identity at the heart level, then I am always going to be subject to having serious doubts about myself and am going to be constantly trying to manage my image and manipulate what others think about me in attempts to make myself feel valuable.

The reason that Jesus gave us this example of rejecting others around Him as a source of any glory that He would accept is for that very reason. It is a very dangerous thing at best to rely on the opinions and fickle feelings of anyone in this world to define my real worth or sense of value. But having said that, I also am painfully aware that every one of us have a strong tendency to do that anyway because it is just hard-wired into our psyche by sin to do so. Because of the skewed pictures of God we have grown up with we all have naturally turned to additional sources to make us feel valuable as we seek to perform in various ways to be good enough to earn respect and love for ourselves.

When Jesus talks here about God as the only safe source of glory, He is making a most important point that might be very easy to miss in a quick reading of this passage. I am starting to see that very likely the concept of glory and what we crave for self-worth are nearly identical in many respects. The reason that we seek glory from people is because we want to feel better, to extinguish much of the emptiness that we often feel deep inside and to bask in the affirmations and adoration of others who praise us. This is one way to at least temporarily feel like we are worth loving and that life is worth living. Love and respect are the fundamental deep cravings of every one of our hearts and we will do nearly anything to get as much as possible of this kind of glory for ourselves any way that we can.

God designed our hearts to crave love and respect. (It has been noted that men's deepest craving is for respect and women's deepest need is for love.) He knows that this is the basic fuel that we must have in order to thrive and grow in life. Without this fuel we sputter along on empty most of our life and finally give up in hopeless despair sooner or later depending on how successful our efforts were in life to attract attention to ourselves. Without realizing what this word really means, our hearts are all seeking glory from those around us because glory just may be the label of the fuel that we need the most in order to live life successfully.

God does not condemn us for craving glory, but He is trying to get us to see that the places we look to get this heart fuel can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of the use of those fuels for our lives. If we fail all of our lives to come to the only true Source of this vital fuel for our hearts, we will be in danger of losing out on real life completely for all the rest of eternity.

But how does all of this fit in with the commands in the Bible to give glory to God? Is God dependent on our opinions or feelings about Him to thrive like the needs that we have? Does He need our glory to feel better about Himself? Of course not, and it sounds patently absurd at first to even pose such questions. But not allowing them can cause such questions and related issues to percolate inside of our minds and cause us to be confused about how we are to relate to these seeming contradictions in the Bible.

Most Christians would agree that God is the source from which all love originates. As such, God is not not dependent on anyone to love Him in order to keep Him from starting to feel less valuable in some way. That is a given, but in turn I think that sometimes it is very helpful to state what might seem obvious to flush out other important issues. God in that sense does not need our glory in the way that we need His glory and affirmation. But on the other hand there is another very important aspect about glory that I have not even touched on yet. Just because God does not need affirmations from His created beings to feel good about Himself or to prop up His sense of self-worth does not mean that we do not have a vital need to participate in glorifying God for our benefit.

This is very close to our relationship with prayer. Many find it almost silly to talk to God about things that He already fully knows about before we even think or say them ourselves. When people talk to us we tend to feel impatient when they start telling us things that we already know about. So we might project that emotion onto our views of God at times and wonder why He would have any interest in listening to us pray to Him when He knows every detail of our thoughts and words even before we ever knew them ourselves. Yet given that, we are still instructed to pour out our hearts to God and are told He is keenly interested in accepting our prayers, so it must be for some other reason than just getting Him informed about things He might have been unaware of before we brought them to His attention.

The primary purpose of prayer is never to change God's mind or heart about us but is always and totally to change our minds and hearts about Him. In addition, intercessory prayer also releases God's ability to act and work in others lives by giving Him supernatural permissions that He needs to get past the barricades that Satan has established preventing others from hearing God's voice or experiencing His actions in their lives. That is another topic altogether, but I mention it because I see parallels between that dynamic and our relationship to receiving glory from God as Jesus speaks of here in these verses.

God never changes. He does not need to change His mind about how He feels about us for He has never held grudges against anyone at anytime. God has always been forgiving, compassionate, loving and merciful as well as just and fair and He always will be. However, that does not mean that there are not blocks that prevent Him from effecting His presence into our lives, preventing us from really believing all those things about Him. He needs permissive access to our hearts to transform us into His image by revealing to us the real truth about His heart.

The purpose of both prayer and seeking glory from God is to expose and remove the obstacles in our own hearts and lives that are preventing us from experiencing the life-changing power of God's love in our experience. To both seek and receive glory from the only Source of real glory is to have the truth of our real value in God's eyes infused deeply into our own hearts that will in turn produce fresh fuel for our hearts to come alive and thrive as they were designed do.

Seeking glory from men, which is what we do most often whether consciously or unconsciously, is to use inferior or false fuels for our hearts. It might seem to work for awhile but we soon find ourselves filled with complications, addictions and even more emptiness. Until we turn to the only real fuel that our hearts were designed to run on and allow that fuel to clean out our systems over time, we are only going to foul up our internal functioning and suffer more pain and eventually death as a result.

So I am seeing that glory is really a description of the fuel of self-worth and affirmation of value that our hearts were designed to live on in order to and grow and thrive. But in addition, like a lake that needs constant input from a reliable and clean source of water, it also needs an outlet to stay healthy and vibrant. Just so, our hearts need the outlet of giving glory to God as a means of keeping our hearts joyful and alive and thriving as we continue to more deeply bond both with the heart of the Father and with all those who are likewise giving true honor and glory to the same Father. As we both receive glory from God and give glory to God, we will find that our lives are becoming more and more perfectly synchronized with the character of God which is another aspect of the word glory to start with.