To God Be The Glory: A New Year’s Message

God deserves the glory. It is all his. All of creation exists to glorify God. The purpose of our existence is to glorify God. The reason for all that we do ought to be to glorify God. The church exists to glorify God. The holidays are over. Now, some people think that's great and some people are like, oh, I was ready. It's funny that it's only been a couple of weeks since, well, New Year's Day, but even before this, it's only been a couple, three weeks. But in some ways, it feels like months ago. For me, 2026 has started just as busy or busier than 2025 ended. Now, this morning, I intended to go back to our First Corinthians study, but then again, I also had in my head originally three messages for this new year. This supposed to lay out was morning, evening, morning. Well, I don't remember what happened, but it turned out morning, morning, and I overdid the third one, and then God brought me back. The third one said, no, you need to do this tonight for the wine. Interestingly enough, the title of it was to God be the glory. It is to God be the glory. I was looking further ahead, not even thinking about this one anymore. Next, when we get back to First Corinthians, I was going to entitle it to God be the glory. I better come up with something different for that. But this morning, I want to talk about giving God the glory. We come back to this third message of New Year's. And again, the next week, we'll go back to our First Corinthians study. Two weeks ago, we asked, how's your heart? We looked at the fact that our spiritual hearts need to be in a good, healthy place with God. We need to be in the will of God, in the right place with God. And it challenged us to do a good heart examination in the light of God's word. Last week, I shared a little more of what I would normally share on a Sunday night. We looked at some things. At the end, it was kind of goal-related or oriented a little bit that direction. But last week, I shared, I see this year as a year of coming as a year of change. And again, I want to reemphasize, as I did last week, I'm not talking about some big, crazy changes, get all upset or nervous about it. Oh, what is he going to do? Oh my goodness, no, he can't, you know, nothing like that. Mostly, I mean, God could still do that. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not planning on it, but God changes my plans often. But mostly, excuse me, small, subtle changes that many might not even notice. Just some little tweaks here and there. Some cleaning up, some things. For example, we may pick up another Wednesday morning devotional time at the assisted living I'm going to once a month. I go to them up instead. Now, who's going to notice that? Well, I'm going to notice it. That's a little tweak, that's a little change. It could enhance that ministry over there a great deal. In fact, the way it changed up this month, I'm doing the last Wednesday of this month and the first two Wednesdays the next month. So that's becoming more of a major ministry for me. But again, you guys may never notice. You will never really know that it changed. Another example, we're moving toward putting some of our own programming on a radio station. And we talked about this, we talked about this, but it's moving at a faster pace than I imagined. With the different equipment coming over is, you know, again, I laugh because I said, I hope by the end of the year, maybe we're to that point. Well, I said, we're going to go sooner than that. But looking at all the best back there, maybe by the end of six months, we might be that point. By the time we get it all figured out, put together and cleaned up. But it's moving faster than we experienced. Again, unless you are helping with some of that programming, you're not ever going to know that it changed. More cleaning up and regrouping in some areas of the facilities, the building, and the grounds. You know, we have a foosball table back here. And one of those Sunday school rooms you can't get to without this. It can't be cleaned up. Can't be cleaned up in our Sunday school room. And we're working toward that a little bit at a time. And so just some of that regrouping and reorganizing to get rid of stuff and cleaning up some stuff. I see many possible opportunities and adventures that could come this year. There are many directions God could take us. However, there is one thing that I know needs to be true of this year and of every year to come. I'm going to share with you some verses. I've kind of given it away a little bit. And you look for a common theme in these verses, right? And the first one is Psalm 86.9. There's seven verses. Psalm 86.9. And the nations whom you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. Psalm 86.12. I will praise you, O Lord, with all my heart, and I will glorify your name forever. Matthew 5.16. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. If you go to Romans 15.5-7. Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus, that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, receive one another just as Christ also received us to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 6.20. For you are bought of Christ, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. 1 Peter 2.12. Having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation. The last one. 1 Peter 4.16. And if anyone suffers for Christ, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter. Now there are many, many more verses I can read, and I'm sure you've caught the common theme in all the ones I read already. They deal with glorifying God in some way, or giving God the glory. While I, while we, may have some guesses about the year to come, if God would allow, the one thing that I know needs to be true this year, no matter what happens, it needs to be a year, as I said, every year, we need to give God the glory, and we need to be glorifying God in the midst of everything. Today we want to explore this necessity of glorifying God, or giving God the glory. As we consider, first of all, the enigma. Second, I want to look at the events. And the third thing I want to look for, or look at, are the effects. Before we dive into this scripture, let's, Father, give me thanks for this day, and we thank you for the opportunity of being here. For those who aren't here, Father, I thank you for the, again, the opportunity of being here, and I pray for those who can't be here today. I ask that you would, that you would be with us, or be with them. Some are sick, set aside, some are working, some are just staying home because of the weather. Whatever the case may be, Father, I ask that you would be with them, that you would help them in what they're doing, and help them in our presence. We turn our attention to the Word of God this morning, and I ask that you would bless our time together, that you would help us to know, to learn, to grow, to be encouraged, to be challenged, and indeed be My first point this morning is the enigma. We talk about glorifying God. We sing songs about giving God the glory. We looked at a handful of verses as we began to instruct us to glorify God and give God the glory. The first thing I need us to realize is that God deserves the glory. It is all His. All of creation exists to glorify God. The purpose of our existence is to glorify God. The reason for all that we do ought to be to glorify God. The church exists, our church exists, the church in general exists to glorify God. But what exactly does it mean to give God, to glorify God, or to give God the glory? If someone were to ask you, what does that mean? What exactly does it mean? What answer would you give them? And there is where I believe the enigma begins, and this interesting definition begins. As you begin to study, I found that the exact definition is hard to nail down. It's not this easy thing to say, well, to glorify God means this, boom. You can't say that to some degree, but there is so much involved with it. At least in my studies, maybe I was making it way harder than it should have been. There are many meanings of this thing of glorifying or giving God the glory depending on the content and the context where the word is being used. And so you can look up, like you go to the Bible, you should look up. And again, it doesn't sound like an easy concept to give God glory, but what does it mean? How do we do that? What does it look like in our lives? And that's a little bit of what we're going to look at today. Excuse me. I discovered as I was studying some circular reasoning, and to some degree, I feel like I did the same thing. And there's some ambiguous descriptions. For example, I discovered in one place, to glorify means to give glory to something. Well, that didn't help a lot, did it? And then it went on to say, what does it mean to give glory? So I looked it up. To give glory means that you glorify something. We went in circles right there. We didn't get a lot of good definition. So bear with me as I make an attempt to define this idea of glorifying God. For our purposes, for our definition today, like I said, it was a lot of different directions we could go with it. And the word takes on a little bit different look, and depending on that definition, that's a particular situation. So for our purposes, we're going to say that the word glorify means that we recognize and give honor by word and deed to God's magnificence, excellence, preeminence, dignity, and grace. And I threw a lot of words out, and I shortened it enough that we recognize and give honor by word and deed to everything God is, to everything, all his attributes, everything. Again, those words, his magnificence, his excellence, his preeminence, his dignity, his grace, we need to keep listening. We give glory to God as we recognize who he is and live to point others to his kingly majesty, which belongs to him as supreme ruler. This means, I'm sorry, glorifying, glorifying God means we focus, our focus is on his majesty. So when we're giving glory to God, we're glorifying God, we are doing everything as we consider the majesty of God. Glorifying God, that was glory, but for glorifying God means that we give glory to God, we focus on that majesty, we give honor to him by word and deed, hopefully in every part of our life, in our words, in our thoughts, in our deeds, in our speech, in everything. In a real sense, these words, the word glory is the knowledge. Okay, I'm going to glory, I'm going to give glory to God. I'm going to recognize who he is. And the glorifying then is in the action. Okay, so we mentally ascend to the fact that we're going to give glory to God, and then when we actually do the glorifying of God, that is in the action, the things that we do. This means we verbally and or physically in some way still honor, praise, and admiration on God or to God. We elevate, we magnify, we lift up God in all that we do, we celebrate God, and we extol God. Now, I've thrown a lot of words out there, and we can honestly spend the next two weeks looking at those words. Again, this is all that's wrapped up in this thing of glorifying God and giving glory to God. But how does this look in real life? I think this is even harder to define as talking about what's it look like, because again, the actions will depend on the context. It'll depend on what we're doing. It'll depend on where we're at. It'll depend on who we're with. Okay, and all of this goes into this thing of glorifying God. That doesn't mean that the basic concept of glorifying God changes. It just means that it's going to look different, again, depending on what we're doing. Well, it still, again, has the same effect. We're going to glorify God. The specifics will look different in different situations. So, basically giving God the glory means we will recognize God in all His attributes in every situation. We will worship and praise God in every circumstance. We will follow God and His Word, the leading of the Holy Spirit, so that all around, we'll see God's work and His working in us. Something that struck me as interesting as I was looking at all of this, that the words, I threw all these words out to you, okay, the extolling and all of that, all right, and celebrating and magnifying and all that, okay. They're used to describe and help us understand this concept of glorifying God. And these words are words that we often, in many evangelical churches today, have diminished or even taken completely out of use. How many times have we talked about magnifying the Lord? How many times have we talked about extolling His name or lifting Him up, that kind of thing? For reasons I can guess at, I don't know why that is the case, but we have taken those words out of use. We've taken those words out of our vocabulary. While other churches may have overemphasized them, and I suspicion maybe that's part of the problem, we're afraid we're going to, I don't know, go way far the other way or something, I don't know, but these words are biblical. And I went back and double-checked that again, and I looked up extoll, and sure enough, it's there. Okay, magnify, I looked up, it's there. Magnify the Lord. It's not just in one passage, it's not, you know, it's in multiple places, these words. And they have a deeper biblical meaning. They are actions that Scripture tell us need to be a part of our lives. I sometimes wonder if we don't lack many blessings and much power in our spiritual lives, as well as in our daily lives and activities, because we don't really define and therefore truly understand and practice these concepts. You know, we don't lift up the Lord because we don't understand what that means. We don't magnify the Lord because we don't understand what that means, and when we don't do what God has said we need to be doing, then we're not going to be blessed as we could be blessed, and we're going to lose, in our spiritual lives, we're going to lose, I say power. Okay, again, that's a concept. The Holy Spirit works through us, and we see great spiritual things happening, but we don't sometimes because we just lack doing what we ought to be doing in our lives. As you can tell by our definition, there is no way to be very specific in a one-day study like this to actually define and to do a comprehensive look at this thing of glorifying God or giving God the glory. But I want to look at, really quick, just two passages and draw a bit of an overview in a sense of things. So that brings us to our second point, the events. The events. As I was looking at various resources in the study, as I was preparing, I found more than one that said the first event in our lives that brings glory to God is our salvation. That is the place to start. That is the first event that brings glory to God. Some even said that we truly can't glorify God unless we have that personal relationship. Now, if you don't have that relationship with God, if there's never been a time in your life that you've asked Christ to forgive you of your sins and come into your life to turn in repentance to Christ, that truly is the place to begin. If you don't understand what that means, you really just don't have a handle on that, and you need to get a hold of someone who can help you understand. Reach out for someone who knows, who's able to help you. But I want to, because that's the first thing, so what about after that? So I'm going to ask you to turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 10, if you would please. And it's funny because we're going back in order. We're back in 1 Corinthians next week, but right now we're going to jump to 1 Corinthians chapter 10. A little background, and this will maybe lead into next week as well. There was a problem in the church of Corinth. There were various temples of false gods in town, and people would bring animal sacrifices to these temples. And after the rituals, people would sell the meat. And by the way, most likely these were really, because they were supposed to be sacrifices to their gods. So you wouldn't give your god the cheapest little weakling thing there was. You would, like, sacrifice would be something that would be nice. So they'd be really good cuts of meat, they'd do whatever they did with them, and then they would sell them in the marketplace. Or maybe the only used part of it they sell. However it worked. But it was meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Now, this became a point of contention among Christians whether or not it was wrong to purchase and eat the meat offered to idols. It was perfectly good meat. There was nothing wrong with it. It was probably, again, the best cuts of meat. But was it wrong to support, you know, maybe the temple that way because you can buy a cheap cut of meat? And some people said it's fine, no big deal, no problem. Other people, it really offended their conscience. You can't do that because, again, you're supporting the temple, you're supporting the activity. So Paul here was writing in 1 Corinthians 10 specifically about this to give guidance and wisdom in the situation. And I want to really just look at verse 31 and kind of look at the previous verses, but Paul sums it up this way at the end. Verse 31, 1 Corinthians 10. So then whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the honor and glory of God. Do all for the glory of God. Glorify God in everything you do. Now, in my mind, this is a purposeful, determined action that whatever you do, make sure you purpose to do it for the glory and the honor of God, no matter what events or activities you may be participating in. It may be, as in the case of Corinth, it was a determination of something as everyday occurrence as food and drink. They just, every day stopped. And you decide, am I going to do it, am I not going to do it? Is it going to honor God, is it not going to honor? You know, you have to make that decision. In some cases, there are some things we don't have a choice in, but we still have to honor God in it. Going to school, don't have a choice. A lot of kids, if they stayed home, their parents would do them in anyway. They send them to school to save their lives. How about going to work or doing a job you don't particularly care for? Okay, I really, really, today is the day we do X thing at work. I really don't want to do that. Now you have a choice. Well, you don't have a choice whether you're going to do it or not, but you have a choice if I get a glory. It may be the housework. It may be the diapers. Today, the diapers are easy, right? Because they're disposable. We use, well, okay. Kid number one, we use real diapers. Kid number two, we use kind of half and half. Maybe changing the diapers, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, whatever else needs to be done around the housework. Are you going to do it to glorify God or are you going to, again, mumble and grumble about it? It may be, and you fill in the blank, that thing that you have to do that maybe is not your favorite activity. We need perhaps to check our attitude and decide instead of whining about it, trudging our way through it. We need to turn it around and do it for the glory of God. It may be something we really enjoy doing and it might be like a craft or a hobby. Again, fill in the blank, whatever it is you enjoy doing it. Be sure you're not doing it just for the earthly enjoyment, but that you're doing it for the honor and glory of God. Again, 1 Corinthians 10.31 says, so then whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the honor and glory of God. And that brings us to our third point this morning, which is very similar to the second point, the effects. We're in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. Now we're going to jump over to 1 Peter chapter 4. Primarily we're going to be looking at verse 11, but I want to pick up in verse, again, 1 Peter chapter 4, beginning with verse 7 through verse 11. It says, but the end of all things is at hand. Therefore be serious and watchful in your prayers. And above all things, have fervent love for one another, for love will cover a multitude of sins. Be as hospitable to one another without grumbling, as each one has a gift, minister it to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. If anyone speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God. If anyone ministers, let him do it as with the ability which God supplies. That in all things, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever. So again, I want to focus on verse 11, but I'm going to back up to verse 7. Peter's giving some practical instructions on serving and ministering to others. He talks about being hospitable to one another without grumbling, receiving a gift, minister it to another as good stewards of the manifold grace and so on. If anyone speaks and so on. So he's talking about this ministry and ministering to others. And in this passage again, he talks about being serious and watchful in prayer, having fervent love for one another, forgiving others' sins, being generous, being a generous host or hostess without mumbling and grumbling, using your God-given gifts to serve or minister to others. And then we come to verse 11, and it says, again, if anyone speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God. If anyone ministers, let him do it as with the ability which God supplies, that in all things, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Again, similar to 1 Corinthians 10.31, but I find a slight difference. In 1 Corinthians, we are doing things with the conscious intent of bringing glory to God. I am going to do this. I am making an effort to do this. And in my effort to do this, my desire is to bring glory to God. And so we're out there making that conscious intent of bringing glory to God. Peter, on the other hand, I find, or at least in my reading of it, is the natural result of doing those things. In other words, because we are living for God, we're doing what God wants us to do. We're doing as we should be doing. God will be glorified. So that's, again, a slight difference. In 1 Corinthians, we're trying to glorify God. In 1 Peter, because we're trying to glorify God, God's being glorified. Again, it sounds almost like a circular reasoning a little bit. A little bit different, but yet still the same. As we're attempting to glorify God, well, go back to my notes, while we can choose to live and bring God the glory in every activity of life, everything we do in life should glorify God. Okay? I hope that makes sense. Notice that Peter is talking about ministering in a way, necessarily physical action. Praying, loving, forgiving, and so on, are all things that are more inward. Okay? 1 Corinthians, again, we're looking at outward activities. In all things that you do, glorify God. Okay? Here, it's more inward. We're still doing it, but it's not a physical action. Think back to the verses I read as we were introducing our message today. Some mention letting your light shine, being light-minded, have honorable conduct. Another talks about suffering as a Christian. Some of these are outward physical activities. Some of these are more inward kind of things. And as these things are taking part in our lives, and as we allow God to work in us and through us, God will be glorified. As we seek to glorify God, and we do what God wants, as we seek to honor God in all that we do, as we seek to extol God, as we seek to magnify God, as we seek to do all these things, all those words that we talked about, as we're moving toward those, and we're doing what we can to do that, because we are doing it, God will be glorified. Again, these two passages were similar, but not exactly the same. But as we put them together, the bottom line in words, thoughts, and actions, inwardly and outwardly, in every part of us, in every way, we need to live in such a way that we glorify God every second of every day. And as we move forward into this new year, I hope that will be something you will strive to do in your life. I hope that's something our church strives to do in everything that we do, every ministry that we have, that we glorify God, that we lift up the name of Christ, that we extol God, that we get all of those things. I hope that's something you'll strive to do, that you will let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. I hope that's something that you strive to do, so that you can say with the psalmist, I will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart, and I will glorify your name forever. How has God spoken to you today, and how will you respond? Let's stand, please, as we close. Father, can we thank you for this wonderful day, we thank you for the opportunity that is ours to be here. We thank you for being able to take advantage of that opportunity in coming and hearing your Word and reading your Word and studying together. Father, I ask that as we move into this year, I ask that you would make that our goal, make that our effort in everything we do, in everything we say, in every thought we have, in every deed, in every action, that it would be a consciousness to glorify you, so that you can be glorified in everything. As people look at us, they see that we are about glorifying you, that they may see our good works and glorify you because of them. Father, thank you for your grace and your mercy. Help us to understand what it means to magnify you and extol you and lift up your name and all these other things that we have missed, so that it's not, and then as we understand, so that it's not just an academic knowledge, but a living practice in our lives. And help us to be careful to give you the praise and the glory and the honor in all things, which in Jesus' name we ask it. Amen.