Living to Glorify God

Guest post by Jaq Baldwin

What transforms life from being relegated to a series of menial tasks, duties, and daily responsibilities into something exciting, joy-filled, and meaningful? We work, come home, play, go to bed, arise, back to work and so the cycle continues. But weren’t we made for more? There indeed is an itch that every heart wants scratched and yet we all continue to lust for more pleasures, acquire more security/comfort/riches or attempt to spend our days more effectively and wisely so as to feel even better about our existence. I believe that same itch in every human being’s heart will continue to be unscratched as long as we are not living for what we are created for; namely, the Glory of the Holy and Almighty LORD.

As believers, we know that there is so much more to which God has called us. He made us and then redeemed us for his own possession (Titus 2:14) and for His own pleasure and especially for His own Glory. We as believers may realize this theoretically but are we allowing a growing desire, birthed in us by the Holy Spirit, to propel us to a God Glorifying life that fully awakens the joy God has designed us to attain? I confess, and I repent because in fact so often and sadly I have to answer “no”, I do not live all out for God’s Glory in every aspect of my life or sometimes in very few aspects at all.
So the first question would have to be, “What do I love more than the Glory of God?” And then I will have to follow up with “Have I repented for making this thing that is not God’s Glory my first love?” In other words, (and maybe more harshly) have I come to Christ in repentance for hating God’s Glory and loving whatever else it is I have elevated above Him? Ouch! It hurts to even type that!

If so, then I will realize that, by Grace alive in me, I can indeed be propelled to live with every fiber of my being for God’s Glory though it may be a process that takes the rest of my life to complete. And so, the last question I ask myself would be “Will I then allow God’s Grace to work in me and answer the calling to live a life devoted to bringing Him glory?”

Christ came to deliver us from our sins but He also came to free us from the present evil age (Gal. 1:4) and thus He has given us the right to live for the age to come, granting us an exclusive citizenship in Heaven. Meaning, we belong solely to the Kingdom of God. And if I am to live as a subject of this Kingdom then in every aspect of my life, even in the common things, I should live to bring Glory to the Kingdom of which I am a part and no longer to myself.

Yet, somehow many of us Kingdom-dwellers have allowed our citizenship to morph into something that falls far short of the calling for which Christ has freed us. As Steve put it this past Sunday, we live for “moralistic, therapeutic deism”. We’ve allowed our calling to devolve from living in the joy giving, blazing center of God’s glory only to settle on being a people who put a Christian wrapper on our moral “do-gooder” lives by refusing to allow anything to impinge on our routine or bring us any discomfort. I say “our” and “we” not to indict the Church as a whole but to include myself and my family in these realizations and also to identify what we’ve observed in most American churches of today.

But let me close with a point Steve made in the same sermon. God ordained the suffering, mockery, crucifixion and death of Christ. And so, we may then rationalize that the same God who is always good and yet delivered up His own Son to suffer and die while not sparing Him from pain and suffering may not deliver us from every pain or suffering that comes our way if it brings Him all the more glory. Meaning, God’s glory and that glory radiating from His people is far more important than our comfort or our moralistic lives. But overcoming the tendency to elevate our own comfort, feelings, emotions, or dread of pain above God’s Glory is about allowing God’s Glory to be our chief end and primary aim. Only a heart freed through Christ’s redemption and empowered with the Holy Spirit can live in this way. But a heart made alive in Christ would propel us through every hurt, every circumstance, every suffering, denying every comfort, conforming every aspect of ordinary life in order to live purposefully and to see God worshipped and glorified with our very lives.

I have a feeling that living with this aim at the center would directly affect the nature of a believer’s prayers, actions, thoughts, intentions, and lifestyle.

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