This is what Paul says in Philippians 1:20,
According to my earnest expectation and hope that in nothing I will be put to shame, but with all boldness, as always, even now Christ will be magnified in my body, whether through life or through death.
This morning we were also enjoying two verses in Isaiah that speak about Christ being a crown of glory and a diadem of beauty to His people (Isa. 28:5) and then the people of Israel being a crown of beauty in the hand of Jehovah and a royal turban in the hand of their God (Isa. 62:3).
On the one hand, Christ is our beauty and our glory, and on the other hand, as He works Himself into us day by day, we become His beauty and glory! He beautifies us with all that He is, and then we express Him in His glory and beauty!
There’s nothing of ourselves that can express God or glorify Him – only as He works Himself into us by us enjoying Him day by day we can become His expression and His glorification among the people.
And this is our reality today: in spite of the things happening in our environment and with us / around us, we are those who enjoy the Lord, get into His Word, fellowship with Him, and live by the spirit. In this way, Christ as the Beautiful and Glorious One is being worked into our being and we become His beautiful and glorious expression.
This was the case with the apostle Paul who, though he was imprisoned in Rome, had this earnest expectation and hope that in nothing he would be put to shame. Rather, instead of being put to shame (though everything in his environment was working together towards this), he was expecting to spontaneously glorify and magnify Christ!
This means that Christ is many times “small” in the eyes of the people today, so He needs to be magnified, enlarged, lived out, expressed. This is what Paul did – he magnified Christ to such an extent that even some from the house of Caesar heard the gospel and received the Lord!
This should be the same with us today – Christ is becoming everything to us in a practical way little by little so that we may express Him, magnify Him, enlarge Him in front of the people we are with!
This is why we should feel NOT ASHAMED that we are Christians – rather, we should feel glorious about being a believer in the Lord!
When we talk about Christ and when we tell people that we are Christians, we should consider that Christ is our crown and diadem, our glory and our beauty! Christ is so Wonderful! He is our real beauty and our real glory! Lord, keep us enjoying You as such a One and to this extent, until we magnify You and we glorify You!
[enjoyment from the life-study of Isaiah, as quoted in the crystallization-study of Isaiah(1)]
Oh Lord Jesus