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  • Writer's pictureBible Brian

Is God glorified by what you're doing?


Your relationships, your jobs, your education, your hobbies, your preferred celebrations, the very food you eat, everything you do in life, from the simplest sip of a hot drink to the crowning achievement for which you will be remembered, ought to be done not for your own glory, but for God's.


An excellent example from my personal life comes from my friend, whom we'll call Peter. One day, he read Romans 14, and verse 15 stood out to him. At the time, I was a vegetarian, yet he is a man who often brags about the kinds of exotic animals he's eaten. Alligator, alpaca, scorpion, these are animals I would consider almost sacred, but he often talks about how he's eaten them all. Romans 14:15 made him feel convicted about talking to me about meat, and so he asked me if I thought he should stop.


But Romans 14 in general describes a larger picture. Just as Colossians 3:23-24, Romans 14 describes how we should personally conduct ourselves in our faith. It specifically speaks of food and celebrations, telling us that those who participate are doing so for God, and those who abstain are doing so for God, and therefore we must not quarrel. In this chapter, therefore, we see that God's glory and our relationships are perfectly linked. We must love each other for God. The flip side of this is "Against You, You only, have I sinned..." (Psalm 51:4). It's not that you can't sin against others, but that sinning against others is sin against God. In the same way, you could state it as "you, only, have I loved". In sinning against each other, we sin against God. In loving each other, we love God.


The question we have to ask, therefore, is whether or not God is glorified by how we behave? If I eat this, does it glorify God? If I celebrate this, does it glorify God? If I do this, does it glorify God? If you answer "no", or even if you can't definitively answer "yes", there's a problem with what you're doing, and you need to rethink your actions.

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