Man, bereft of his holiness, is also bereft of beauty and excellency. Beauty and excellence are essential qualities of the glory of God. Holiness, therefore, is required of those who rightly give God glory. So if man is to glorify God, his holiness must first be restored. Holiness and glory are causally related to one another: holiness is the interaction, the interplay, the self-consistent expression of those elements of the divine character, balancing and supporting each one (love and justice, mercy and wrath, e.g.); glory is the demonstration of God’s holy character.

God desires to be merciful and redemptive. He is also just and rejecting of every human virtue. Every characteristic of God is bound by his nature to act, with all the power of divinity, in defense of his glory. As we long for the beauty and excellencies of the nature of God—as we desire to abandon our ambitions and hopes so that we may be consumed, lost in those qualities for which we so deeply yearn, from the best parts of our redeemed human souls—we begin to know God.

Our desire as restored man is not merely to observe God’s beauty and wonders; it is to be identified with those excellencies, to know them in a way that knowing is not sufficient to describe. We need more and better words, songs, paintings, deeper friendships, more courageous experiences, higher, grander, clearer insights, if we are to know and love God as we ought. Our tools of speech and human language, our arts and sciences, do not give us the sufficient vocabulary to express what we know of God. The longing we have in our souls about God cannot be contained. Neither does our world seem very substantive to us in comparison to the solidity, the eternity, the profundity of God. Something more real has come to us and now is in us.

So worship is to participate in the holy; it is to know God’s glory face to face; and it is to find our longings and aspirations fulfilled in his presence. Lewis wrote lyrically about this longing, not only to understand but to be joined with God’s glory:

“Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 12–13).

By engaging in a direct quest to know and to extol the virtues and actions of God, we find true and abundant life and a glimpse of the life that is ahead. Then we will see clearly and can say exactly what we mean and we begin to praise God without omission, delusion, or distraction. We are stirred by his gracious invitation to examine his glory without shadow or cloud. All of these realities flow from his loving heart and result in our greatest good forever.