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GLORIFYING GOD

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 25, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 25.

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GLORIFYING GOD.

By Wayland Hoyt

WHEN we are exhorted in Scripture to glorify God, it does not mean that we are to attempt to add to, or to imagine that we can add to, the already sumless glory of the infinite God; it means that we are to display his glory, to become the surfaces, so to speak, striking on which it shall go reflected forth.
The wavelet can not add to the glory of the sun, but it can so catch and scatter the sunlight that the benign radiance shall seem more beautiful. The flash of the diamond does not make the sun more luminous, but, opening its clear heart to the entrance of the sunbeam, it does so fling it out that you have a new joy in the sun’s effulgence.
She was not a very pleasant member of the family. She was fretful, complaining, irritating, set on a ministry of uncomfortableness. They sent her away to boarding-school. It was a good riddance. But there the Lord met her, and she became a genuine Christian. Getting home, she was seen to be another person—patient, cheerful, kind, beautiful, with a steady service of usefulness. A skeptical cousin looked at her askance for some time, attributing the change to any reason but the right one, and sure the old unpleasantness would soon display itself. But it did not. So he asked her the cause of the transformation. The reply was, the grace of God had given her another sort of heart. He said to himself, “I don’t believe that God has anything to do with it, tho she thinks he has.” And he set himself to trying to be as good as she. But where she all the time succeeded, he failed; until, at last, certain she had some help he missed, and giving his skepticism to the winds, he sought and found what new heart and power of continuance had come to her.
I am sure you see plainly that, while that Christian maiden did not add to the measureless sum of God’s glory, she did manifest forth and commend his glory, and so did, in the most real way, in the precise way in which the Scripture means, glorify God.—Wayland Hoyt, D.D.