The Back Story

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

Sixteen months prior, the speaker’s wife, Joane lay dying in the Intensive Care ward following two back to back brain surgeries that had failed. She had been unresponsive for several days and had drawn into a fetal position, and hope had faded away. The speaker was driving to make final arrangements when he called and learned that she began to miraculously wake up and was back home in just 4 or 5 days.

Later on while in studying other subjects God brought the speaker to Psalm 50:15 three times in a week. The first two times it stirred overwhelming gratitude again for Joane’s healing, but the third time he said out loud, “God you’re trying to show me something that I’m missing, what it.? 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 giving him what he’s 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 comes with a condition, which is to glorify him. But it doesn’t stop there, as believers we are admonished in 1 Corinthians 10:31 “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”

At this time in the speakers life he had been gloriously saved for 33 years, had earned a BD degree which included Greek and Hebrew, and had read through the Bible through 77 times, taught bible for over 30 years, been in full time Christian service and had heard countless sermons, lessons, devotions, and messages but, couldn’t remember any that made clear how to glorify God, let alone how to do it in everything including eating or drinking. Oh to be sure, the glory of God was a common phrase but how to actually accomplish it in everything that was a mystery. That’s when he vowed in prayer to do his best if God would show him how.

When Jesus healed the 10 lepers they were all thankful but only one actually glorified God and the nine missed it completely. So how did he do it in a loud voice, and why didn’t the others who had been healed fulfill Psalm 50:15? They had the Old Testament. 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. They are presented in the chronological order just as God gave them as he answered that sincere prayer.  Over time we experienced 2 Corinthians 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”.