“These Are The Glory Days” has become a bit of slogan for me this year. I meet with a couple of friends from church regularly to get into the deep stuff and pray and we refer to it regularly. It’s not that there is an absence of troubles (believe me, there have been some tough ones this year) but we’ve not wanted to lose sight of the glorious ordinary - friendship, family, football, fajitas…and so on.

These Are The Glory Days.

As Psalm 118:24 says

“This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

It’s easy to say it and believe it when things are going well. And to be fair as a church, these last few months have really felt something akin to “glory days”. Houses opening, healthy leadership transitions, people coming to Christ for the first time, a building purchase and the small matter of a series of stupendous gift days!

These are the glory days and we ought to drink it in!

But I’d also say that it is entirely appropriate and Biblical that such statements aren’t reserved just for the mountain top moments but are also for the every day. The Bible teaches us that whatever that day may hold, the greatest cause for joy and celebration, the greatest reason to say “These are the glory days” is that we have been made in the image of God, that in spite of our sin, God in Christ has reconciled us to himself through the cross, that we are no longer defined by our sin but our sonship to our Heavenly Father, and we’ve been been given an eternal destiny with God which means that we don’t need to fear anything in this life, not even death. Our lives are hidden in Christ!

These Are The Glory Days.

And these truths can be found and enjoyed in every moment if we choose to live that way. Notice the “Let us…” part of Psalm 118. Joy is a choice and we’re invited to make a deliberate decision to rejoice and be glad in the day God has made. That means when we wake up in a funk, or when your housemate hasn’t put the rubbish out like they were supposed to, when your kids aren’t getting their school shoes on or you’re still battling the health condition you’ve been facing for years…as followers of Jesus, we’re called to choose joy, to rejoice in the day God has made, to declare in whatever situation we’re in, that these are the glory days.

It’s not escapism, or unreality to do such a thing. It’s to say there is a deeper, richer, more glorious power at work in our lives. It’s the joy and hope of knowing and being known by God, and more poignantly, to know that we are loved with the everlasting love of a perfect Father.

The writer to the Hebrews says that Jesus chose this kind of joy. In the face of pain, suffering, separation and death, Jesus endured the cross knowing what was on the other side. And the sublime, unfathomable, neck-hair raising end point of such sacrificial love and joy was us. Let that sink in. Jesus went to the cross out of love for you and I.

Such was the depth of Christ’s joy to unite us with himself and to count our sinful souls free that He went to the extreme of human pain and suffering. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that in the week leading up to such a traumatic experience at Calvary, Jesus may have also whispered under his breath, “These are the glory days.”
And so with that, the joy, sacrifice, suffering and glory of Christ instructs us on how we are to walk through this life - as those who know something better is on the other side. In fact, I’ve started to use the phrase as an act of defiance - to declare over myself, my family and our church, that come what may, these are the glory days!

So celebrate the extraordinary provision of God in our lives and in our church. It has been a special season in many ways. But also don’t miss the wonder in the every day - the “every moment holy” outlook.

And so as we draw close to Christmas and near the end of another year, let us be mindful of the ordinary and the extraordinary and pray that in either, we would know the joy of the Lord.

Welcome to the glory days.