No matter how great God is, if we don’t know Him personally through an intimate relationship and experience His power and glory in our lives, His greatness would not mean that much to us at all. By the way, His greatness can only be as relevant to us to the extent that we allow Him to unleash it in us. Since His greatness has already been revealed plainly to us, the thing that matters the most is how we choose to respond to it.
The ideal way to consider the greatness of God Almighty concerning responding to it in a meaningful and life changing fashion is through the lens of His love. God is love by nature (1 John 4:8). He has loved everybody unconditionally and sacrificially (John 3:16). That love is flowing mightily through the person of Christ Jesus.
But the big issue is that not everyone that He loves is enjoying the most important blessing that comes out of that love due to their sheer unwillingness to respond to that love provided to them through Christ Jesus. Moreover, what about His saving grace that is readily available to everyone who is willing to act out in faith in order to receive the gift of salvation?
In the light of the analogy being used earlier, it’s obvious that if we’re not willing to take our responsibilities to make His greatness become real or the top priority in our lives, we won’t be able to enjoy His greatness from a personal level. When it comes to responding to God’s greatness in order to make it significant to us, there are two vital things we can do that can sum up our responsibilities toward Him. First, we are to glorify Him. Second, we are to place our faith in Him.
1) Glorifying God
God has made man for His own glory; in other words, to further reveal His greatness to another type of conscious being after creating the angelic hosts (Isaiah 43:7). When it comes to our responsibilities toward Him, He made us with one unique purpose, which was to glorify Him. It’s an unimaginable privilege that the great Creator of this universe has granted us. It wasn’t because that He couldn’t live without being glorified by us. It wasn’t because He was obligated to bring mankind into existence. Furthermore, He wasn’t under some kind of pressure to do so.
But it was because He willingly chose to express how great He is to the human race. He made us in His own image and equipped us with the abilities to enjoy, contemplate, and admire His works and wonders, and glorify Him in return by serving Him, living for Him, carrying out His will, praising, and worshiping Him alone. Let’s examine this Scripture verse below that sums up God’s worthiness to receive glory.
You are worthy, our Lord and Our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, because You have created all things, and by Your pleasure they exist and were created (Revelation 4:11).
You see, according to this Scripture, God’s worthiness to us is based solely on the fact that He has made us and the world around us. Since He has made us for Himself, He’s expecting us to give Him glory and honor due to Him alone. The question is how can we glorify God acceptably?
Within the greatness of God, you find His glory. And within His glory, the key element that you find is His holiness, which is the most exalted of His divine attributes (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8). Holiness is the very nature of God Himself, and righteousness is His character. Holiness saturates His being. The glory of God is the manifest beauty of His holiness.
To glorify God means so many things since there are many ways He can be glorified. But the most important aspect about glorifying God relates to His holiness. To glorify Him means revering whom He is as a holy and righteous God. If He’s a holy and righteous God (1 Peter 1:16; Psalm 145:17), the only way we can glorify Him acceptably is by living in a way that is in line with whom He is. He has commanded us to be holy since He is holy. Let’s take a further look at these Scriptures below.
Therefore I urge you, brothers, on account of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship (Romans 12:1).
Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Do not let sin control the way you live; do not give in to sinful desires. Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God (Romans 6:12-13).
Glorifying God starts with the kind of life we’re willing to lead before His sight for His glory through the means of committing ourselves fully to Him. Leading a holy and righteous life is literally what will enable us to do the very things that fall within glorifying Him such as worship, praise, honor, magnify His name, and so forth. We cannot glorify Him while continuing to live sinful lives before Him because living in sin is a matter of trying to satisfy self or living for self, which is in direct contradiction with how God wants us to live for His glory.
Sin goes against the very nature and character of God. You see, God hates sin because it injects in the sinner a spirit of hostility and irreverence toward Him who deserves eternal praise and glory. He hates sin because it builds a constant propensity in the sinner to continue to live in the same sinful condition that God already hated up to the core. God hates sin because it either destroys, hijacks, or defiles the very characteristics He has made us with that reflect whom He is by infusing us with the nature of the devil.
It destroys the spiritual appetite of the sinner by making him want nothing to do with God. And it also causes the sinner to find himself in situations where he’s constantly running away from God for the sake of trying to satisfy himself with things that are outside of God’s will for his life. It literally causes the sinner to become prideful, arrogant, irresponsible, negligent, and a liar. Sin separates people from God by placing them in situations where they can no longer have fellowship with a holy and righteous God.
As a result, if we’re serious about glorifying God, we have to make sure that we conform our lives to His will revealed to us through His Word. We must be willing to obey Him. Our obedience to Him is the essence of glorifying Him. We have to offer ourselves to Him without reservation, so that He can fill us up with His greatness. That’s in fact the starting point of true worship.
Glorifying God is the pillar of spiritual growth. As a believer focuses on the glory of God, he will change from one level of glory to the next by the power of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). The main purpose of that serie regarding the greatness of God is to enable you to live a transformed life filled with the fullness of God Almighty. In short, glorifying God is based on acknowledging His greatness revealed to us through the creation and give Him honor by praising and worshiping Him.
2) Placing Our Faith In God
It’s always one thing to learn about the greatness of God either by reading His Word, through preaching, or through testimonies, but it’s something entirely different to make His greatness becoming the cornerstone of our lives. Placing our faith in God is predicated on making Him become as great and powerful He truly is in a personal level.
The truth is that we do believe that God is great since He is the creator of all things. The big problem is that belief isn’t sufficient at all when it comes to tapping into whom God truly is in a personal level. And this belief can be labeled as a passive type of belief since it doesn’t really involve us exercising faith in Him as He wants us to do so.
Our biggest problem is that we don’t always live in complete dependency on His greatness in every circumstance that we find ourselves in by allowing whom He is to shape our perspective concerning life’s struggles. We’re about to read this following verse, which will show us how to connect our lives to God’s greatness.
Consequently faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the preached Word of Christ (Romans 10:17).
The foundation of our Christian life is laid upon our faith in God through Christ Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the ideal way to tap into His greatness is by spending quality time meditating on His greatness revealed to us all throughout His Word. Doing so will eventually strengthen our faith in Him since our faith is totally dependent on His ability to remain faithful to His promises.
We are to believe that He’s fully capable of bringing to pass the promises found in His Word in our lives. This will empower us to pray with confidence and boldness. When we allow whom God is to become the core foundation of how we live, we invite His power and might to strengthen and transform our lives day-by-day.
Prayer
Note: That is a prayer model that you can pray in order to better acknowledge the greatness of God Almighty in your life. You can customize it if you want to.
Father God, I glorify and honor Your holy name because of who You are. And I praise Your mighty name for what You’ve done and what You have in store for me. I want to make a great God like You look as great You really are in my life by magnifying Your name. You are the source of my life. I thank You that my whole life has been sustained by Your greatness since the day You formed me in the womb of my mother.
You knew me before the foundation of this world way before You formed me. You knew me before time actually came into being, LORD God. Thus, my existence isn’t an accident. I acknowledge that every fiber of my being is held together by Your power. I thank You for the salvation that You’ve granted me through Christ Jesus, which is another massive manifestation of Your power in my life.
You’re infinitely greater than all my struggles. I give You praise, glory, and honor for Your limitless greatness and power. I may not like the current situation that I’m going through right now, but I will not let it keep me from depending or acknowledging Your greatness. You are worthy to receive honor, glory, and praise as the sole creator of all things and the sole sovereign Lord of all things.
LORD God, You are so great to the extent that the many great blessings that You’ve poured out in my life that have changed me are just a tiny fraction of what You’re able to do. I rejoice in the reality that nothing is too hard for You Lord. You’re not only the God of the impossible, but You’re the God operating far above that realm; therefore, the impossible has no hold on You.
Lord of heaven and earth, You are great and do marvelous deeds; You alone are God. I will praise You, O Lord my God, with all my heart; I will glorify Your name forever. I pray that You help me to better understand how great You are Lord. And I pray that You empower me by Your Spirit to live a life characterized by complete reliance on Your greatness. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
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