I’m typing to you, friends, from a Jason’s Deli somewhere in an airport. I just dropped off my daughter at college the first time; my heart feels kind of tinfoil-y–crumpled, not easily smoothed. This trip has also meant lots of time with friends and family, occasional challenging conversations, and me hammering away at my next book.
(More on all this later. I think.)
That is to say, my soul is a bit tired. But I asked myself each night this week, Is this the good kind of tired? The kind that comes from being faithful?
I’ve wondered what God thinks.
In John 12, there’s a curious mention of authorities who “loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”[i] Typically, my brain has focused on my own proclivity toward the first part—glory-hunting from people.
But catch that last, intriguing phrase denoting what should captivate me instead: the glory that comes from God.
Huh.
Glory coming from God. To his people.
Does God give glory to people?
Question. Do you believe our God, who commands us to encourage others, encourages you? Do you believe our God, who exhorts us to gratitude, is thankful to humans?
Does the God who encourages us to “outdo one another in showing honor” extend accolades himself?[ii] When it comes to humans, does God have an easy smile, a generous laugh? Do we express his delight in them when we thank and celebrate them—or only our own?
Considering this, I first thought of what C.S. Lewis called the “divine accolade” in Jesus’ Matthew 25 parable of a Master, who speaks to servants following their investment on his behalf:
Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy”—the delight—“of your master.[iii]
I also thought of Jesus’ words in Luke 17.
Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.[iv]
Anyone else glimpsing a paradox? Jesus’ emphasis in Luke 17 seems to be our attitude as God’s servants—I’m doing what the King asks. Why wouldn’t I? But in Matthew 25, we see a Master applauding a job well done.
The servants in Luke 17 don’t demand applause. Their obedience isn’t transactional. Jesus warns about our motive to extract glory, perhaps—angling for praise—yet doesn’t deny the reward exists.
The Master’s commendation arrives in the way grace does: A gift the Master delights to extend, rather than an invoice from the servant.
I think of my face toward my kids as infants, when they worked to roll over or sit up for the first time. I was thrilled about them anyway. Their hard work just gives my delight a place to land.
God’s love, too, precedes performance. The faithfulness becomes an occasion to make visible that delight.
I hold out my hands in the posture of an unworthy servant. God, because of who he is, places in them his divine accolade.
Note: One servant’s personal perception of this Master—“I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid”—causes him to bury his investment potential literally underground.
What we identify about the Master’s response to us directly influences the risks we take, and certainly our own delight.
Clearly God’s not a “yes man,” offering us blind affirmation for whatever we wish he’d endorse. But does he cheer us on in our faithfulness, our discouragement?
“All that I have is yours”
Think of the two sons’ narratives of their God-like father figure in the story of the prodigal son. The father has humbled himself to plead with his older son, out in their field, to come into the father’s own party. (Hint: The father is a party-thrower.) Listen to how he distorts the narrative about the father—I’m sure none of you parents out there can relate?—and how this influences the son’s response:
“Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.”
Note his dad’s simple response to the son’s maligning of his character: “‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. … And it was fitting to celebrate and be glad.’”
This is our house. My presence and my stuff is available to share. C’mon—this is praiseworthy.
The older son opts to remain in the field, shovel in hand, siphoning value from his hard work, for which he’s determined he’s never been appreciated. Yet far from his dad and his bounding, exorbitant happiness and astonishing generosity.
But about that younger son.
Before his return, when the younger had been starving to the point of envying the swine he fed, he scripted the spiel for his dad—considering he’d squandered the family fortune and all.
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”
When he opens his mouth for his dad, who’s again humbled himself as a Middle Eastern landowner, sprinting toward his boy, the son only gets out the first line of his planned speech. His overjoyed, forgiving dad proceeds to shed his son’s shame, head to toe. He swaps the reeking rags of a hired hand for the “best robe,” puts a ring on his hand, a sign of the son’s co-rule with his father. The father requests shoes for his son’s likely bare, scabbed, mud-clodded feet. “And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.”[v]
The entitled heart of the older son misses the party to which he’s invited. The poor-in-spirit younger son receives what he never thought to ask for.
(The father’s celebration mirrors two other celebrations of God’s in Luke 15, parables told to the tax collectors and “sinners”, and also to the Pharisees and teachers of Old Testament law. Can you tell which son Jesus likens to each group?)
The God who sees the good things
But God’s celebration with us, of us, is far from over.
- The Hebrew words he pronounces on his creation—“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (meod towb)—imply a richness that includes goodness, delight, pleasantness, and beauty.[xii]
- In Song of Solomon, the (ahem, very) intimate praise between husband and wife represents the ecstasy and delight of God and the Church toward each other. He says, “Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves.” She responds, “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly delightful.”
- At the risk of scaring you away—one might say the bitter onslaught of Job’s trials kicks off with God’s praise, to Satan, of Job: “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?”[vi]
- In the Psalms, David describes God as “my glory, and the lifter of my head.”[vii]
- Jesus, whose first recorded miracle involves turning water into booze at a party—Jesus as first-class vintner—attends enough parties, presumably places of celebration and/or connection, there’s a rumor he’s a “glutton and a drunkard.”[viii] “Jesus, the Party Animal”–maybe you haven’t heard that accusation all that much.
To be clear, Scripture remains far from silent about the fear of the Lord and righteous judgment: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”[ix] But some of us don’t need convincing of God’s severity. That might just be the default factory setting of my anxious heart and spiritual formation.
Yet perhaps within its whole counsel, Scripture describes a God not merely holy, but delighted.
Is it truly prideful if we don’t just celebrate God’s beauty, but he also praises his beauty in us, which he himself creates? (Scripturally, I believe covenant love reaches for delight even when delight is hard.) What if, amid the true gravity of our sin, he’s tickled pink about our shame-removal? What if “well done, good and faithful servant” serves as only the apex of the ways he celebrates our faithfulness throughout our lives?
On weeks like mine, and always–how well can you hear divine celebration, divine expressions of love?
In pursuit of the divine accolade
In his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis elaborates on this “appreciation” by God.
No one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child―not in a conceited child, but in a good child―as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. … Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures―nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of … a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator … I could detect a moment―a very, very short moment―before [the deadly poison of self-admiration] during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. … [The redeemed soul] will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing.
In Lewis’ view, our “inconsolable secret”—to be acknowledged and meet God’s response to us, lies close to the core of who we are.
The promise of glory … becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.[x]
Importantly, Paul David Tripp clarifies,
I forget that every achievement points to God’s awesome glory. I could not achieve anything without the body that he has given me, the gifts he has bestowed upon me, the control he has over me and my world, and the grace that daily rescues me from me. My successes should depend on my awe of him rather than tempting me to be in awe of me.[xi]
Or as 1 Corinthians 4:7 puts it, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” God’s praise and celebration of us as humans ultimately celebrates his beauty within us.
What could it look like to join God at the table?
[i] John 12:43.
[ii] Romans 12:10.
[iii] Matthew 25:21.
[iv] Luke 17:7-10.
[v] Luke 15:17-31, emphasis added; verse 29 quoted in NIV.
[vi] Job 2:8.
[vii] Psalm 3:8.
[viii] Luke 7:34.
[ix] Hebrews 10:31.
[x] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, HarperCollins, 2001, 36-37, 41.
[xi] Paul David Tripp, Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do, 2025, Crossway.
Andrew Cuneo, “Beauty Will Save the World, but Which Beauty?” May 18, 2009, https://www.cslewis.org/journal/beauty-will-save-the-world-but-which-beauty/view-all/#_ftn4.
Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, “ṭôb,” The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Brill, 1994-2000.
“2896. towb,” Bible Hub, accessed July 6, 2026, https://biblehub.com/hebrew/2896.htm.
“3966. meod”, Bible Hub, accessed July 6, 2026, https://biblehub.com/hebrew/strongs_3966.htm.
