At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness.
All things done for my glory full#
To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking him in a room full of mirrors. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. We were made to see and savor God-and savoring him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us.
This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. They do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is.ĭoes Being Loved Mean Being Made Much Of?įor many people, this is not obviously an act of love. We are meant to image forth in the world what he is really like. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. But he created us and called us to make him look like what he really is. In the night sky of this world God appears to most people, if at all, like a pinprick of light in a heaven of darkness. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. With the Hubble Space Telescope, pinprick galaxies in the sky are revealed for the billion-star giants that they are. But when you magnify like a telescope, you make something unimaginably great look like what it really is. Pretending to magnify God like that is wickedness. When you magnify like a microscope, you make something tiny look bigger than it is. You can magnify like a telescope or like a microscope. In relation to God, one is worship and one is wickedness. Glorify does not mean add more glory to God. He cannot be improved, “nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:25). God cannot be made more glorious or more beautiful than he is. That is emphatically not what we mean by glorify in relation to God. But beautify usually means “make something more beautiful than it is,” improve its beauty. What does it mean to glorify God? It may get a dangerous twist if we are not careful. We waste our lives when we do not weave God into our eating and drinking and every other part by enjoying and displaying him.
“Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. That is why the Bible gets down into the details of eating and drinking. Life is wasted when we do not live for the glory of God. Thus says the Lord, “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isa. The Bible is crystal clear: God created us for his glory.
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