The Light Came On in a Face

She has sung about glory more times than she could count and she could not tell you what it looks like.

Twenty years of it. Glory in the chorus, glory on the screen, glory in the prayers people pray at the front. She has meant it every time, and she is not a woman who sings things she does not mean.

But if you stopped her in the corridor and asked her what she pictures when she sings that word, she would tell you the truth, because she always does, and the truth is: light. Vague, enormous, impersonal light. Something like weather. Something like the sun coming through a gap in a cloud over a hill, which is beautiful and which is not looking at anybody.

That is what she has been worshipping toward for twenty years. A magnificent atmosphere.

And in the spring she was reading, not even devotionally, just reading, and she came across a verse she had read before, and this time the last four words of it stopped her.

The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

In the face. Not in a cloud. In a face, which is the one thing that can be turned toward a person, and she sat there for a long time with the book open and the strange feeling of having missed something enormous for two decades.

Glory has a face and Scripture says whose it is

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Paul is deliberately reaching back to the first day of creation, where God says let there be light, and he is saying: that same God has done that same thing inside people. Light out of darkness. A command, and then illumination.

And then he tells you where the light is coming from. Not from a cloud, not from a sky, not from an atmosphere in a room. From a face. The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Which means glory, in the New Testament's own definition, is not weather. It is personal, and it is located, and it has features, and it can be turned toward somebody.

You have been given the knowledge of glory in a face rather than in a sky. That is the plain wording of the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written definition into an actual meeting, because Scripture says He takes what is Christ's and shows it to us (John 16:14).

Why the vague version has held for twenty years

Let me say something kind about how you got here, because you did not choose it and it is nearly universal.

Impersonal glory is safer. A magnificent atmosphere does not look at anybody, which means it does not look at you, which means you can stand under it, sing about it, be moved by it, and never once be seen by it.

And for a woman who has been genuinely giving for twenty years, being seen is the thing that has quietly gone missing. You have served in a room full of light and never once been looked at in it.

You are seen by glory and not merely stood under it. The word puts glory in a face, and a face is the only thing in the universe that can regard a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that felt as being known rather than being impressed.

What a face does that a light cannot

Here is why this changes everything, and it is not a technicality.

Light illuminates. It falls on things. It is impartial and impersonal and it does not choose. Wonderful, and not enough.

A face regards. A face turns. A face changes when it sees somebody in particular, and the blessing this whole site is built on asks for exactly that: the LORD make His face shine upon you. Not: may light be generally present in your vicinity. May His face, the specific face of a specific God, turn toward you and do the thing a face does.

You are the one a face turns toward, and it has been turning for twenty years while you were watching the sky. Scripture says we behold as in a glass the glory of the Lord and are changed into the same image (2 Corinthians 3:18), which is a sentence about looking at somebody rather than standing in something, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named right there as the one doing the changing.

And I will keep it honest, because you would not accept anything else. Seeing this does not deliver a spiritual experience on demand and there is no guarantee about what happens in the service on Sunday. What is settled is that glory has a face in the text, and a woman who knows that sings the same word for the twenty-first year in an entirely different direction.