Breakfast at Tiffany’s: ‘I’m just living from glory to glory!’

I went to a women’s home Bible study recently where we were asked to share any prayer needs we may have. One admitted that it was difficult for her to talk openly about her struggles; nonetheless, she poured her heart out about battling grief since her husband had passed away from Covid. She admitted that she often questioned God’s goodness in taking her spouse when she and their son had prayed so earnestly for his healing. Another lady asked for prayer about some physical issues that were limiting her mobility, but also shared about how God was using her current struggles to draw her into a closer relationship with Him.

Next, the spotlight was on a well-groomed woman with a perpetual half-cocked smile who hadn’t said much so far. When asked if she had any prayer requests to share, she cheerfully responded, “No, I’m great! Just living from glory to glory!” She proceeded to oversimplify and underestimate the other women’s pain by telling them that if they would stop speaking doubt, apply the correct scriptures, and speak to their situations by claiming the ‘things that are not as though they were’—then they would start to live in victory and total physical healing. Then she added, “I had honestly forgotten that people deal with stuff like this. I don’t even go to church anymore because most people who call themselves Christians these days don’t apply God’s Word to their lives like they should.”

It took all my inner strength to keep myself from standing up and rebuking this woman openly. However, the Holy Spirit reminded me that I was also once deceived by the same toxic belief system. Though preached to me as the ultimate life of faith, it had almost destroyed my faith when the fiery trials of life inevitably came, and I wondered why the prescribed formula hadn’t worked for me. It was only when I stopped cherry-picking words and phrases from the Bible that seemed to applaud and encourage my ‘best life now’ that my faith crisis was averted.

For an example, let’s look at the phrase ‘glory to glory’ that our Bible-study friend used (most likely from 2 Corinthians 2:18). When Paul made the ‘glory to glory’ statement, he had just been talking about how God’s glory revealed to Moses through the law written on stone tablets is now written on our hearts through faith in Christ. Because of Christ’s suffering on the cross, the veil that kept us from fully knowing God has been removed and we, “with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (v. 18). Paul was not even hinting that going from glory to glory meant skipping through life like God’s spoiled brats, unscathed by life in this fallen world. In fact, this letter was written after Paul had escaped angry riots in Ephesus for his profession of faith. In chapter 4 of the same letter, Paul reminds the Corinthians that we who have received Christ carry the glory of God in vessels of human flesh so that “the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us (v. 7). Then he says that though we are hard-pressed on every side and our outward bodies are slowly dying, our momentary afflictions are actually working for us “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” 

No, living ‘glory to glory’ does not mean we will walk around this earth as though we are already living in heaven. It means that we joyfully endure every obstacle in light of the glory that lives within us—Jesus Christ—until He brings us to our eternal home where the glory within us becomes the glory all around us and we will know Him fully as he fully knows us.