Glorifying God in the Everyday
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” Colossians 3:23-24
If you flipped through my planner right now, you would see all kinds of things. Assignments that are due, meetings that are coming up, a graduation party my roommates and I are hosting. In many ways, my planner reflects how I spend my time. The things on my planner aren’t necessarily the things I want to do at all. Until I went to college, I didn’t really think much about the things I had to do. They were just tasks on a checklist that I had to get through.
We don’t always have a choice about what we spend our time doing. I’m going to go ahead and bet that if I told my teacher I wasn’t going to turn in my 10 page paper because I didn’t feel like spending time on it, I wouldn’t have a great result. Just going out on a limb here. Here’s the awesome thing. I don’t get to choose what I do, but I can choose how to do what I have to do. I know that’s hard to follow, but just stay with me.
1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” So what is glorifying God? When we glorify God, we’re using our words and actions to say, “Hey, look! Look at how amazing God is! Look at how magnificent he is!” instead of saying, “Hey, look! I’m awesome!”
When we look at how we can glorify God, the answers are limitless. By choosing to put God above ourselves, we glorify God. That’s awesome news for us! That means that even the most boring, everyday things on our planners can glorify God. That’s exactly what these verses from Colossians 3 are talking about. We aren’t told to go find really cool, Christian things and do them for the glory of God. When we get the opportunity to, that’s awesome, but even if we don’t get to; even if our lives seem so normal - school and homework and sports practice - we can glorify God. And we’re called to in everything we do!
When we choose to work for the Lord, and not for men like Colossians 3 talks about, we’re giving up a life that’s about us, and trading it in for a life that’s about God. We step down from choices that are about us, and what we want and start making choices based off how we think we can glorify God.
This my friends, is what abundant life - life like Jesus talks about in John 10:10 - is. When we change our view of what we’re doing from one that’s about us to one that’s about God, when we abandon the idea that life is a story about us and instead realize it’s God’s story, we can be ready for amazing things to happen.