God's glory and our happiness are one goal, not two

On Sunday evening I was preaching on Daniel’s prayer in the first half of Daniel 9. It was a bit of trip down memory lane. I first seriously engaged with this passage as a 19 year old student during the late 1990s in Aberystwyth. I was asked to be the Christian Union’s prayer secretary for the year, which involved co-ordinating the CU’s prayer life and having particular responsibility for its prayer meeting on a Wednesday afternoon. Each Wednesday I was expected to lead a 10-15 minute Bible study before a time of corporate prayer – gulp! I ended up doing a series of short studies on different prayers in the Bible; Daniel 9 was one of them. It made a deep impression on me at the time, and has done each time I’ve returned to it over the fifteen years since those Wednesday prayer meetings.

The prayer is a plea from Daniel, asking that God would fulfil his promise of delivering the Jews from exile in Babylon, after seventy years of Jerusalem being left desolate. And it’s an excellent example of searching God’s word (in Daniel’s case reading Jeremiah), finding what God has said he will do (deliver his people after seventy years of exile), and then praying that God would do it. Daniel doesn’t sit back idly waiting for God to fulfil his word, he gets down to the serious business of passionate prayer.

What really strikes me though, is how Daniel ties together a request for God to bless his people by rescuing them, and a request for God to glorify his own name. The two always belong together.

During the prayer Daniel confesses his own sin, as well as the sin of God’s people as a whole. He acknowledges God’s justice in sending the people in to exile, but also reminds God of his merciful character, of his steadfast love. He then asks that God would bless his people once more by bringing them back to the promised land. This is a prayer for God to be consistent with his own merciful, loving, gracious character by doing good to people, his people. But Daniel’s prayer doesn’t stop at asking God to bless people – be that physically, spiritually, or both. Daniel’s final, clinching argument for God to bless his people, is that his people are known by his name (9:19). In other words, for as long as God’s people continue to be in exile, God’s name is dragged down with them, because his people are called by his name. Daniel asks God to answer his prayer to bless his people, because that will also lead to God’s name being lifted up and glorified. God’s glory is at stake, and Daniel is praying for God’s glory.

I wonder how often we pray like that?

“God, bless your people, so that you might be glorified through it.”

“God, bless your church, so that you might be glorified through it.”

Paul’s prayer of thanksgiving in Ephesians 1:1-14 follows exactly the same logic: God has blessed his people, in Christ, to the praise of his glory.

In fact, the whole of God’s word follows exactly the same logic – God glorifies himself through the salvation, the blessing of, sinners.

God has ordered things in such a way that his glory is inextricably linked to him blessing his people. And that is glorious truth. Truth that should increasingly mould and shape our prayers.

I came across a quote recently that brings these twin themes of God blessing his people and God glorifying himself together nicely:

“God’s glory and our happiness are one goal, not two.” (From “A Puritan Theology”)

That sums things up so well.

To borrow another quote from a slightly different context – “What God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Our prayers should keep together, and not separate, the twin goal of God glorifying himself, and God blessing his people.

Daniel keeps God’s glory and the people’s good together as he ends his prayer like this:

“O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem has become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy, and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.” (Daniel 9:16-19).