Grace and glory

October 11, 2007

By Randy Mantik

Years ago, I had a pastor friend who often said things very exuberantly. One of his favorite expressions was “Glory!” For him, it was a way to give God thanks and praise as well as indicate his desire for God’s mighty presence.

In Scripture, there is another word linked to the word “glory” and it comes from my favorite psalm: “For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11, KJV) Here, grace is added to glory.

Charles Spurgeon commented on this verse.

“The little conjunction ‘and’ in this verse is a diamond rivet binding the present with the future: grace and glory always go together. God has married them, and none can divorce them. The Lord will never deny a soul glory to whom He has freely given to live upon His grace; indeed, glory is nothing more than grace in its Sabbath dress, grace in full bloom, grace like autumn fruit, mellow and perfected. How soon we may have glory none can tell! It may be before this month … has run out we shall see the Holy City; but be the interval longer or shorter, we shall be glorified ere long. Glory, the glory of heaven, the glory of eternity, the glory of Jesus, the glory of the Father, the Lord will surely give to His chosen. Oh, rare promise of a faithful God! Two golden links of one celestial chain: Who owneth grace shall surely glory gain.”

I’ve discovered God’s glory evaporates where His grace is not shown. Gracelessness could even be viewed as a vacuum. Without grace, all the life is sucked out of our Christian experience. In the church, that can be a really scary thing. Why? If grace is taken out, something has to take its place.

I believe the substitute is the fear of man. A college chum of mine who is now a seminary professor said a student once asked him, “What is the main thing that keeps our churches going?” After being in many churches and coming to his own conclusion, he sadly had to admit, “Fear of man.” Ouch! Fear of man can keep things looking good and smelling good for a while. But pretty soon everyone realizes that grace is dead.

Could that be why many churches are in decline? Could it be though we preach a gospel of grace, we don’t live it out in our lives and relationships? It doesn’t seem to take long after salvation that grace gets put on a shelf and we live instead in our own personal Rube Goldberg-like invention of spiritual life that knows nothing of God’s grace.

Our expectations — and we all have them — can be problem. Should the church not fulfill those expectations, we tend to check out, little realizing that for everyone’s expectations to be met we would each need our own personal church! In such a self-serving atmosphere, grace evaporates. We are left with a stone-cold religion — an insult to the grace of God.

Grace. Oh, how we need it. Where grace is applied, life grows. Where grace flows, glory grows. Do you live your life in the precious grace God so freely gives to you? Let God create a new heart in you that is breathing and growing and alive and filled with grace! “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26, NIV).

By living in and giving grace, by freely using and sharing the talents and resources God gives us, His grace and glory can be shown in such a way His love and existence become undeniable! When we extend grace to each other, we demonstrate to whom we belong. Joy can trickle in again, becoming rivers of living water spilling out in a life-giving flow to those around us.

Randy Mantik is senior pastor of Crossroads Church of the Assemblies of God in Pembine, Wis.