I’ve sung about magnifying God in various songs over the years but I only understood that in the sense of glorifying Him. Then I heard someone talking about magnifying God last week and it made me think about a magnifying glass.
I think we’ve all messed around with a magnifying glass and made our eye look massive to anyone watching us. That’s usually what you use a magnifying glass for: to magnify something that’s small to make it appear bigger.
When I heard the word ‘magnify’ again last week though, I got a sense of magnifying God to make him bigger in our life, not because He is small but because we can make Him small. For many of us, God should take up more room in our head than He actually does: in our day-to-day comings and goings, in our actions, our conversations...in everything. Or is it just me? I certainly need to magnify God in my life. Not to make Him bigger than He is, because He’s already bigger than we can imagine, but for Him to take up more space; like a magnified eye takes up more room on our face than it usually does!
David, in Psalm 34 (vs 1,3), says ‘I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth...O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together’ When we magnify God, He takes up a greater area in our lives and overspills into the every day stuff so that His praise is continually on our lips.
As Christians we can also magnify God for other people in the same way that we would think of Sherlock Holmes magnifying clues to solve a mystery. Our lives can be like a magnifying lens that shows others a clear, more easily viewed, image of God and everything that walking with Him means. In Luke, Mary, the mother of Jesus, makes a wonderful declaration telling us her ‘soul magnifies the Lord’ (Luke 1:46). In the original text, the word is megalunw, which means ‘to make great’ and, in context, her soul is indeed declaring the greatness of God, but when we read the 8 verses of her ‘song’ (Luke 1: 46-55), her own declaration of God’s greatness is magnifying the nature of God and His plans to us now, in 2022. That’s pretty cool!
I want to magnify God in my own life (in the sense of Him taking up more space), and I want to magnify Him to others (in the sense of being a lens through which others can get a clear view of Him).
Are these things you need to think about doing too? (Oooh bullet points!)
• To increase the space you give to God so that, as He has more room in your life, anything that is not of Him is pushed out
• To make sure the way you live your life magnifies God to those around you and points them to Him
If this resonates with you, maybe think about some of the practical ways you can achieve these things. Could you set aside a specific time to read the bible? Do you need to make more room for prayer? Have you invited God into your every day life as well as your ‘church’ life? Are you up for talking to friends or colleagues about your faith? Are you making sure you live in a way that glorifies God so that others see Him through you?
These are things I know I need to change in my life, and if you’re the same, then let us walk this thing out together. Let us magnify the Lord, as David calls us too (Psalm 34: 3), giving Him as much room in our own lives as we can, and living our lives in a way that highlights His greatness to others.