It is, perhaps, one of the hardest struggles of the Christian life to learn this sentence-- "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name be glory."
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of attributing glory to God rather than seeking it for ourselves.
In this quote, Charles Spurgeon reflects on a fundamental struggle within the Christian faith, which is to prioritize God's glory above our own desires or recognition. He highlights the challenge of humility and selflessness, urging believers to acknowledge that all honor and praise should ultimately be directed towards God, not themselves, acknowledging a higher purpose in the Christian journey.
In practice
This quote can be used in a sermon to remind churchgoers of the importance of glorifying God.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.
The growth of our knowledge is the result of a process closely resembling what Darwin called 'natural selection'; that is, the natural selection of hypotheses: our knowledge consists, at every moment, of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by surviving so far in their struggle for existence, a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit.
We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.
Unless I understand the Cross, I cannot understand why my commitment to what is right must be precedence over what I prefer.
Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings.... Leave and don't look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you're sometimes crescent, sometimes full.
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
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