The Back Story

This series started when God began answering a fervent prayer in connection with Psalm 50:15. The prayer was; “LORD if you will show me how to glorify you, I will do the best I can”.

Sixteen months prior, the speaker’s wife, Joane lay dying in an intensive care ward following two back to back brain surgeries that had failed completely. She had been unresponsive for several days and had drawn into a fetal position and all hopes had faded away. The speaker was driving to make the funeral arrangements when he called and learned that she began to miraculously wake up. Within a week she was back home.

Over a year later he was studying other subjects when God brought the speaker to Psalm 50:15 three times in eight days, with no apparent connection to what he was studying. The first two times it stirred overwhelming gratitude for his wife’s miraculous healing, but the third time he said out loud, “God you’re trying to show me something that I’m missing, what it is? It reads, “And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.” His immediate response was, “Oh my, it’s conditional!” no wonder we have so few of our prayers answered, we’re not really giving him what he is looking for”.

There are other reasons for unanswered prayers like James 4:3, “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” But God’s deliverance is different. It comeswith a special condition, which is to glorify him. But it doesn’t stop there, as believers we are admonished in 1Corinthians 10:31 “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” With a subject of this obvious importance where are the messages, books or teachings about it?

At this time the speaker had been saved for 33 years, had earned a BD degree which included Greek and Hebrew, and had read through the Bible more than75 times, taught the bible for over 30 years, been in full time Christian service and had heard countless sermons, lessons, devotions, and messages but couldn’t remember even one that clearly defined how to glorify God, let alone how to do it in eating and drinking. Oh to be sure, the glory of God was a common phrase but how to actually accomplish it was a mystery. That’s when he vowed in prayer “God if you will show me how to glorify you, I will do the best I can”.

When Jesus healed the ten lepers they were all thankful but only one returned to glorify God in a loud voice. The other nine heard him but failed to understand the connection and went on their way.
So what did he say with a loud voice, and why didn’t the others who had heard him not return with the response Jesus was apparently waiting for?

Just as the nine, the speaker was truly thankful for this great miracle, but what God was showing him here was that being thankful is very different from giving him glory. First the tenth leper glorified God and then gave him thanks. The difference is that thankfulness is about how we benefit from God’s blessings but God’s glory is exclusively for his benefit and he made that clear when he said in Isaiah 42:8, “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.”

So exactly what is God’s glory and how can we achieve what the tenth leper did after Jesus answered their prayer for deliverance?
“And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks…” Luke 17:15-16

The answer to this and many other things that are void in today’s modern pulpits are made clear as you will learn in this series. Such as how to prove that our service qualifies under one of the three wills of God that are clearly defined in Romans 12, or why Jesus scolded Martha who was working so hard but praised Mary who was just sitting in Luke 10, or how the emotionless routine of giving can become an exciting experience of joy each time, as detailed in 2Corinthians 9.

As you listen to these lessons that are presented in the chronological order that God revealed then, our prayer is that you too will experience what Paul wrote about in 2Corinthians 3:18. “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord”.