When Humility Gets Twisted, Part 1: God’s Glory
I thought giving God glory meant making sure none of it ever touched me. But maybe humility was never supposed to mean disappearance.
There are certain phrases Christians use so often that eventually you stop asking what they mean.
“Give God the glory.”
“All glory to God.”
“God does everything for His glory.”
I heard those phrases for years, and I agreed with them, even if at times I questioned the motive behind the person speaking them. Sometimes people use the right words in a way that feels wrong, and that can make the words themselves harder to hold.
But I do not think I had stopped long enough to ask why they were true.
I was also afraid of where the question might lead because there was a part of me that stumbled over it.
Not over God’s worthiness, but over the language itself.
If a human being talked constantly about his own glory, his own honor, and his own praise, I would not admire him for it. I would probably start backing away slowly.
And maybe that was part of the problem. I had spent so long associating humility with being small, unnoticed, careful, and almost allergic to the spotlight that I did not know what to do with a God who openly receives glory.
So why does Scripture speak this way about God?
Why does that feel right when applied to Him?
I don’t remember exactly when that question first lodged itself in my head, but I remember the discomfort. It was the kind of question I would have been careful saying out loud, because it sounded like the sort of thing a “humble” person should not even wonder about.
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The Picture in My Head
Looking back, I was carrying assumptions I had never properly examined.
One was that glory was something God somehow needed. As though worship completed something in Him, or His happiness depended on whether creatures acknowledged Him properly.
I would have denied that immediately if someone had asked me. Still, some shadow of that idea was there.
Another assumption was harder to see.
I had absorbed the idea that humility meant disappearing. Keep your head down. Don’t draw attention. Be faithful, be useful, be quiet, and make sure no one thinks you are trying to be seen.
And underneath that was another fear I probably would not have named clearly at the time.
If anything good was seen in me, if any fruit appeared, if any recognition came my way, then something dangerous might happen. Some tiny piece of glory might drift in the wrong direction, and I might become lifted up.
So the safest thing seemed to be making sure none of it ever touched me.
There is truth buried somewhere in that. Pride is real. Self-exaltation is dangerous. The hunger to be noticed can twist a person badly.
But humility is not the same thing as pretending reality is smaller than it is.
And God is not humble because He hides His glory.
The problem was not only the doctrine.
It was the picture in my head.
The Sun Doesn’t Care What I Think
A very simple thought helped me.
If I insist the sun is dim, the sun doesn’t become dim. It doesn’t lose anything because I fail to recognize what it is.
The problem is not in the sun, the problem is that I’m wrong.
Reality remains what it is regardless of whether I acknowledge it.
That is not a perfect illustration. All illustrations break somewhere. But it helped me see something I had somehow missed.
God does not become glorious because I glorify Him.
His glory is already true.
That began to change how I thought about worship. Less like validation, and more like recognition. Less like God demanding attention the way insecure people do, and more like creation being brought back into honest relationship with what is real.
That may be obvious to some people.
It wasn’t obvious to me.
The Verse That Kept Following Me
Over the past couple of years I spent a lot of time working through what I actually believe. Not what I inherited or what I was told I had to believe, but what Scripture actually seems to be saying.
Some questions led to difficult places. Others led somewhere unexpectedly beautiful. Luke 12:32 was one of those.
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
That verse has followed me around for a while, though probably not for the reason I would have expected. What keeps drawing me back is not only the kingdom itself, but what Jesus reveals about the Father.
He could have emphasized authority, power, or judgment there, and all of those would have been true. Instead, He points to the Father’s pleasure in giving.
The Father wants to give.
I had not noticed how much that challenged some of my assumptions.
Because if humility means disappearing, then glory feels suspicious. But if glory means the truth of God being seen, then His giving does not embarrass His glory. It reveals it.
A good father is not dishonored because his children receive good things from him.
Their receiving tells you something about him.
A Different Kind of Glory
When people talk about glory, my mind used to drift toward throne-room imagery, power, majesty, authority, and all the things we naturally associate with kings and rulers.
Scripture certainly includes that.
But the longer I read, the harder it became to ignore how often God’s glory is revealed through His goodness.
Psalm 115:1
“Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to thy name give glory, for the sake of thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness!”
That is not the verse I expected to keep returning to.
Yet here it is.
The glory belongs to God, and the psalm immediately starts talking about His steadfast love and faithfulness.
That matters because it does not present God’s glory as cold attention-seeking. It ties glory to the kind of God He is. His name is worthy of glory because He is actually worthy.
Not because He is insecure.
Not because He needs creatures to make Him feel complete.
Not because He is hoarding attention.
But because He is the source of life, truth, mercy, steadfast love, and faithfulness.
His glory is not detached from His goodness.
That is the part I had missed.
The Part I Had Backwards
For years, I carried a distorted picture of humility.
If someone praised something I did, I felt the need to deflect it quickly. If I was recognized, part of me felt exposed, almost guilty. I learned how to sound humble, but I am not sure that always meant I understood humility.
I was not only afraid of pride.
I was afraid of receiving anything at all.
Praise, encouragement, recognition, fruitfulness, even the simple acknowledgement that something good had happened through me, all of it felt spiritually risky. Not because I wanted glory for myself, at least not consciously, but because I had learned to treat human smallness as the safest way to protect God’s greatness.
Somewhere in that tangled-up picture, God’s glory became hard for me to process.
Because if humility means refusing the spotlight, then God receiving glory sounds like the opposite of humility.
But that only works if God is one being among others, competing for attention.
He is not.
God is the source of all things. His glory is not a spotlight He steals from someone else. It is the truth of who He is.
When I read Scripture, I keep running into a Father who gives. He gives life, mercy, forgiveness, wisdom, and ultimately even the kingdom itself. The pattern shows up often enough that eventually I had to ask whether my discomfort was coming from Scripture, or from a damaged understanding of humility.
A good father is not made less by giving good things to his children. If anything, their joy shows what kind of father he is.
Their receiving tells you something about him.
That is different from the way human pride usually works.
And that is part of why the comparison breaks down.
From Him, Through Him, To Him
Romans 11:36
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen.”
I’ve read that verse many times.
It now reads less like a detached theological statement and more like a correction.
Paul writes a sentence like this and I’m finally reading through a different lens:
From Him.
Through Him.
To Him.
Not pretending God is less central than He is.
All things are from Him. All things are through Him. All things are to Him.
That is not arrogance, that is absolute reality.
And if that is reality, then humility cannot mean pretending otherwise.
It cannot mean making creation seem emptier than it is so God seems greater by comparison.
God does not need the world to be nothing in order for Him to be glorious. He is glorious because all life, truth, goodness, mercy, and salvation come from Him.
His glory is not protected by diminishing what He has made.
His glory is revealed when everything is seen in right relation to Him.
Humility Was Smaller Than I Thought
Years ago God’s glory felt threatening to me, though I doubt I would have admitted that at the time.
If someone had asked, I probably would have said all the right things. Yet there was still something underneath the surface that resisted the idea.
Now it is different, though not because I have solved every question.
Mostly because I no longer think humility means pretending glory is bad.
For creatures, humility means refusing to take glory that does not belong to us. For God, glory belongs to Him because He is the source of life, goodness, mercy, truth, and salvation.
But there is another piece too.
Humility also means refusing to lie about what God has actually made.
If He gives, I do not honor Him by pretending nothing was given.
If He fills creation with goodness, I do not honor Him by calling creation empty.
If His steadfast love and faithfulness are visible in the world, then the faithful response is not panic, deflection, or disappearance. It is to let the glory return to the One from whom all good things come.
The Father who receives glory is the same Father who gives the kingdom, who sent His Son, and whose steadfast love shows up over and over again in Scripture.
I still know there is more here than I can fully hold.
But when Jesus says,
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,”
I return there because part of my confusion came from mistaking humility for disappearance.
God’s glory was never the problem.
The problem was that I had learned to protect God’s glory by making everything else almost nothing.
But Scripture does not need that kind of protection.
God is not glorious because creation is worthless.
God is glorious because creation is from Him, through Him, and to Him.
And humility was never supposed to mean disappearance.
It was supposed to mean seeing everything in right relation to Him.
Oh yeah, great stuff, and resonates a lot with my own journey! One of the things that made me start rethinking humility was this bit from CS Lewis in Mere Christianity:
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
That was very convicting because of course I was that smarmy person, though it was not intentional. Like you, I thought that was the way to give God the glory. I also liked how you connected God’s glory to His character and reality. One observation I keep coming back to is that God’s character is the grain of reality. To live with that grain in Christ is to make God visible and give Glory to His name.
That leads to your other great point about disappearing. I used to be very comfortable being aloof. God gives Himself to be known and to take responsibility for His people in covenant. He is present and desires communion. So to deflect praise in order to stay out of the limelight may be a good desire to avoid pride, but God’s character seems to invite us to a more life giving approach. Being preaent, being known, receiving praise and criticism and being accountable, and inviting true communion with God and others.