Are You Ready for Some Football?

So this weekend the college football season kicks-off. I rank football a little lower than the automobile and a little higher than the light bulb among the greatest American inventions of all-time.

In football, glory is a zero-sum game. There's a winner, there's a loser. And players who hog the glory are frowned upon by some fans and delighted in by others and occasionally hated by their own teammates...because if one dude is hogging the spotlight, they're not sharing it with others.

This is how it works in the working world, too. If someone in your office is glory-hungry, they're often stepping on or over others to get the glory.

And so when we read in the Scriptures about the centrality and significance of the glory of God, we get a little squeamish. Does that mean that God gets all the attention while we get steamrolled? Do we get lost or overlooked if God is the one glorified? And does all of that mean that God's arrogant and self-centered?

The last question Jesus asks in the Lazarus story helps us navigate these good questions.

Yesterday Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. Today, we see Jesus standing outside the tomb, ready to do the mighty work he's come here to do: raise Lazarus from the dead.

"Take away the stone," Jesus says. "But Lord," says Martha, dead Lazarus' sister, "by now there's a bad odor. He's been in there four days." Jesus says, "Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?"

Here we touch again upon the gospel writer's obsession with the word and actions associated with "belief." And here, as we see throughout the Scriptures, belief isn't simple mental assent. It requires obedience. We cannot say we believe if we will not do what he says. It's that simple.

And Jesus offers a carrot: you will see the glory of God. And what happens afterward helps us sort through our innate conflicted-ness over being "victims" of the glory of God. They take away the stone. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is what happens when we are fixed on the glory of God: all of our deepest needs are met. Everything that we were made for (love, hope, peace, reconciliation, joy, victory, rest, purpose, power, beauty, wisdom) happens.

God's glory is not a zero-sum game. The glory of God being expressed in your life and mine means that everything about our lives gets caught up in the redemptive story of life. Right-ness replaces wrong-ness. Laughter replaces mourning.

God's glory and our good are intertwined. He has designed it all to be so. Praying for God to be glorified in every area of every situation of our lives, our family, our friends, our nation, our politics, our economy is essentially the most self-serving prayer you could ever possibly pray--in part because of the glorious un-selfing that happens as you pray for God to be glorified.

Seeking our own, raw, self-glorification is suicide. Seeking God's glory for these sisters meant that they got their dead brother back. This is the glory of God: that we are fully-alive human beings--a dead guy named Augustine said this many centuries ago, echoing the words of Jesus in John 10. That's the good news of the glory of God.

And here's some more, slightly less, good news: are you ready for some football?