The glory of God is the grandest idea that the human mind can think about. It will be the only subject we will study in Heaven. The depth of glory as a subject is the depth of God himself. It can never be exhausted. It can never be totally grasped. It is more and more satisfying to our souls. It is a magnificent privilege to be invited into the world of God’s glory.

But men are at war with glory. This is a war not of bullets and bombs. This is a war of priorities and values. The glory of God boldly asks us: What do you love the most?

A love for God is different from all other loves. There is no greater love that can captivate our hearts. We may struggle to stay faithful through the trials and temptations of life, but the overwhelming desire of our heart will be to return to God, and to find our comfort, our meaning, our purpose, our holiness, and our hope in him alone.

The powerful work of sin tries to move us to love God and to love our sin at the same time. Churches and pastors who teach the prosperity gospel embarrass those who are faithful to the Gospel of holiness by teaching that you can be full of pride and self-promotion, you can be greedy for more and more money, and you can live any way you want, and God will love and forgive it all, as long as you ask Jesus into your heart. For them, Christ never becomes more precious than gold; Christ is never sought above fame; and Christ is never more important that personal success. False glory leads to a false faith. And you can be sure: false faith always disappoints.

The glorious church will not be self-promoting. It will not promise material wealth to those who become members. It will seek to nurture faith, not use people. It will focus on the value of the gospel and the cost of discipleship, not the esteem of the individual and cheap grace.

Sin takes every aspiration of men and it uses them as competitors for God’s glory. Sin convinces whole generations to change the meaning of key ideas and themes within the Gospel, and they redefine terms like “salvation,” “new birth,” “sanctification,” “justification,” and the rest. But then it gives rights of entry to the church to those who believe very little of the content of the true Gospel. Sin would want to believe in Jesus, but deny his sinlessness. Sin would believe in Christ, but deny that he rose from the dead. Sin would invite us to trust in Jesus, but hold that there are many ways to God, and that Christ is only one valid option.

Or it can be very subtle. Sin can take faithful people and plant in their hearts the desire to become famous. It can take a pastor and make him into a rancher (meaning that he just herds the people, but doesn’t care for them individually). It can take success and inflate the soul so that the people become proud of their accomplishments for God even when they verbally and publicly ascribe all their success to God. But secretly they think they did it all themselves.

Personally, sin can take modest spiritual growth and turn it into a desire to control others, or to become hungry for praise or position. It can turn reading the Bible into a dreaded and exhausting discipline, rather than it being the means of joy and worship for a lifetime.

False glory must be guarded against, fought hard with, and it must be defeated. Every church will struggle with false glory, no matter how wonderful the worship, how uplifting the messages, how incredible the music. It makes every church worse. It robs God of his rightful glory and it exalts man too much. It must be defeated.

Day by day, hour by hour, we must keep central in our minds that God alone is the center of all we do. That nothing we do, nothing we can plan or create, no program or activity, no advertisement or campaign, can create success. The only success is that the Lord will add daily to our number those who would be saved.

The glorious church must pursue the glory of God in everything we do. We must be careful that God is the sole and exclusive focus; he is the cause for every blessing; and he alone is our reward.