365 Days of the Great Names of God, Day 41: Glorious One

Glorious One

"You are a shield around me, O LORD, my Glorious One..." (Psalm 3:3 NIV)

I grew up in church (a huge blessing...thanks, Mom and Dad!), so words and phrases like "glory" and "give God glory" and "glorify" were common pieces of my faith vocabulary that I used but didn't think very much about. It wasn't until I started doing some worship leading at church that I realized I had no idea what "glory" and its friends—including "glorious"—actually meant.

Here again, I must give credit to God and to in-depth women's Bible study for taking me places I'd never been before. Where "glory" is concerned, a single page in my workbook from Beth Moore's Breaking Free study is marked up, starred, underlined, bracketed, and exclamation-pointed to excess, because on that page, I got ahold of the very beginnings of understanding about God's glory.

"Very beginnings" is worth noting, because God's glory is something I am only starting to scratch the surface of, both in my personal understanding and in weaving it into our names of God journey. Today, I pray, will be just the first of several days over the next 11 months when we dig into what God's glory is and what it means to glorify him.

My own vastly condensed and (over) simplified definition of God's glory is that it is Who He is. It is His revealed character. It is His essence and nature and presence and power.

To see God's glory is to truly see who and how He is. To glorify Him means to acknowledge and show who and how He is. To give Him glory means to honor and draw attention to who and how He is.

And when we think of who and how God is—a list of superlatives we could put together for the next 325 days and still find utterly lacking—what conclusion can we draw other than this: He is Glorious.