How Not to Glorify Yourself

4 Then I heard another voice from heaven saying,

“Come out of her, my people,

    lest you take part in her sins,

lest you share in her plagues;

5 for her sins are heaped high as heaven,

    and God has remembered her iniquities.

6 Pay her back as she herself has paid back others,

    and repay her double for her deeds;

    mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed.

7 As she glorified herself and lived in luxury,

    so give her a like measure of torment and mourning,

since in her heart she says,

    ‘I sit as a queen,

I am no widow,

    and mourning I shall never see.’

8 For this reason her plagues will come in a single day,

    death and mourning and famine,

and she will be burned up with fire;

for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her.” — Revelation 18:4-8

Part of my message to Christians and everyone else is that you were made in the image of God.  That means something philosophical about how you should see yourself and everyone else.  An image bearer is an amazing thing.  All image bearers are amazing because of the God whose image we bear.  

God made you.

He made you in his image.

You exist. 

God does everything for his own sake.  

This is logical.  Who else is going to do things for God’s own sake?

He does everything in for his own sake because he exists.  He is a fact.  When he acts, he must act to do what he wants to do, and what he feels he must do according to his nature and his purposes. 

This is to his glory that he does that.

You, bearing his image, must act the very same way if you are going to be philosophically honest. If you don’t acknowledge this, you will still act as though you believe up to a point.

Why?  Because you must.  You are not an organism that instinctively cares for its needs.  Amoebas do. Plants do.  When the resources are there, plants reach out their roots and leaves and take what they need.  Animals are higher order and more complex.  They do the same thing by instinct.  They get hungry, so they get hunting.  Their sensory perceptions move them according to their impulses.  

But people are different. Because we are image bearers of God, we think and reason like God. Being a human is a burden. It requires logical thinking. We feel impulses toward pleasure seeking and the avoidance of pain.

But we, unlike animals, cannot trust that those impulses are telling us the truth about what is important.

On top of that, we have sin in our flesh.  As mysterious as it all is, there is something to the idea that our first parents achieved in their rebellion a dark “knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 3).

In order for us to know which impulses to follow, and which to ignore for the sake of something better for us, we must think (See footnote). This is how we are like God. We have to have a way to know how to make decisions. God makes decisions in alignment with his nature, and his purposes. Every single solitary thing he does and says falls into line with who he is. Even his purposes are subordinate to his nature, or his being.

What I mean is, he does nothing illogical. He does nothing imperfect. Everything about him, even though “his ways are higher than our ways” (Isa 55:8-9) makes sense from this perspective. Consider that he loves justice, truth, love, mercy, goodness, and perfection. We are not perfect like him, but because he is perfect, he cannot sit by and allow us to continue in injustice, lying, hatred, cruelty, badness, and impurity. If you went somewhere and saw someone doing something awful to someone else, and you did nothing about it, you would be wrong. You would be showing a weakness of character. Perhaps it would be cowardice, or you know you do the same things, or you just don’t want to care about other people.

Imagine that God sees all of our sin, because he does.  He must respond rightly to it because his character is completely good, and perfect.  He cannot NOT respond.  So there is wrath for sin combined with his perfect love for the sinner.  What did he do in order to forgive sinners, while maintaining the standards of his character?  The answer is that God the Son, Jesus Christ, came and lived perfectly, then died for the sins of the world.  Anyone who believes in him and repents will be forgiven for their sins, no matter how grievous.  

That is totally logical.  Most forgiveness is painful, the cross showed exactly that.  

The cross happened because God makes decisions in alignment with his purposes. His purposes fall underneath the reality of his nature, his character, the facts of his personality. This is also called his glory (Isa 45).

You should live the same way.  In fact, you will.  In sin you fell short of the glory of God (Ro 3).  Jesus died to restore you to glory.  Glorification is your destiny in heaven.  Does this mean you will ever eclipse God’s glory?  Not remotely.  No matter how high we could rise, the Creator always is more glorious than what he has created.  Michelangelo is more glorious than the Sistine Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright is more glorious than Fallingwater, and God is more glorious than the Grand Canyon, the Aurora Borealis, or you.  

So because we exist, and because we must act according to our purposes, which must line up and fall under our nature and character, we must work hard to know what is true and what is right.  Our purposes will become evident as we make decisions about who to be.  This is what it means to act like God.  God is perfect and doesn’t need to work on it.  We are imperfect and must first put some serious thought into the matter, and then we must learn to take control over our impulses.  

This is what it means to be an image bearer of God. The name of this blog is For My Own Sake. Let me be clear: I believe in doing everything for God’s sake ultimately. His glory is my chief end. The pursuit of my own “glory” is merely my attempt to come to terms with the reality, or the facts of reality. I exist. I must live. God has appointed me to live, and so that is my job. My life is my penultimate purpose, God being my ultimate purpose.

This has major implications. In my decision making, I must think of this. What does it mean to make my life one of my highest purposes? It means seek out the truth, and come under it. Believe what is true on every level that there is, starting with God, all the way down to the truth about what is going on in my life. For instance, last week I noticed a soft spot on my roof under the shingles. I would have enjoyed evading that truth. I would have liked to keep pretending there was no problem. But instead I spent a few brutal days racing against the coming rainstorm, pulling up shingles, replacing boards, and reshingling. I am not handy, but I had to do it. It was 90 degrees and very humid. I hated every minute of it, but since I didn’t want to pay someone else to do it, I had to. Because the truth was that my roof was rotting under there. To pretend it wasn’t happening would not change the fact.

You can think of a million examples. You evade the truth about your marriage until it is too late. You evade the truth about your rebellious tween, until it is too late. You evade the truth about your high blood pressure, until it is too late. You evade the truth about the shady business practices of your employer, until it is too late and you are in trouble with him. But God never evades the truth. He is unable. Your job is to learn to become unable to evade the truth.

Image bearing also means becoming unable to:

• Hate
• Be anxious
• Avoid responsibility
• Deny forgiveness
• Hoard wealth
• Steal
• Shun Christian community
• Seek the praise of men, doing things to be seen
• Exasperate your children
• Dishonor your parents
• Kick the dog

This list is unending.  

This is how we should seek our own glory, by being like God in that we know we must choose to do things to promote our own life, because God has assigned us to do that, for his glory. So, this is why I say I do things for my own sake, for his sake. I do things for my own glory for his glory. But the Bible is clear about what that does not look like. Look up at Revelation 18:4-8. This is a personification of Babylon, a great, yet evil city we may be seeing now, but most likely is yet to come.

Verse 7 says, “As she glorified herself and lived in luxury, so give her a like measure of torment and mourning, since in her heart she says,  ‘I sit as a queen…’”

There is clearly a wrong way to glorify yourself.  It has to do with seeking the praise of others, and seeking power over others.  It is seen as an affront to God, and a challenge to his position at the top of creation. Why is this bad?  Aside from the fact that the queen, the city, was full of evil and depraved behavior, it defies logic and truth for someone to set themselves up higher than God.  You cannot be higher than your maker.  It warps the structure of reality to pretend so.  In the Bible, God is offended by that sort of thing, because he cannot be otherwise.  He is the most glorious thing, so he must sit at the top.  To do any less would be dishonest of him, and he cannot be dishonest, because he cannot go against his own nature.  

Most people seek glory by showing off, by controlling others, and by trying to feel important. That way is bankrupt and will lead to judgment and also will come with a fair amount of misery in this life.

But God would have you seek glory by learning what is true, and applying the truth to your purpose of living your abundant life in God. Use your brain every day to make decisions about what is best considering the truth of reality. What are the facts? How should those facts be considered as you prayerfully plan your course? This is good stewardship, and according to the Bible, God loves it, and loves to bless those who practice it. I feel compelled here to end with a prayer:

Father in heaven, I pray for anyone who has read this far that you will teach them to be like you, to be glorified in the right way, by trusting Jesus for salvation, and then taking responsibility for their life as an image bearer of you. Help us all to live according to your ways, and that our nature would become more and more like yours. Teach us to do everything for the sake of our abundant life, and to do nothing to be seen by others, or to take power over others. Amen.

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Manifestations of a Broken Image Pt. 2

In part 1 we discussed how we were made in the image of God to work.  Work was meant by God to be a rewarding experience for us.  God worked in the creation of the world and he is still working (Jn 5:17).  Because of the fall, work became difficult, but because of Christ, work can be restored to its proper place of glorifying God and being an aspect of the meaningfulness of our lives.  This meaning in the pursuit of life for our own sake, for his sake is what will drive us when we become mature.  It is something we will do perfectly in eternity.  

Today and tomorrow I’ll consider some of the things that can drive us instead of the pursuit of righteousness and abundant life. Because the world is in sin, working in the way we are discussing, in a redeemed way, is rare. We have already discussed in part 1 the cycle of working hard to seek comfort and pleasure. Consider now the following drivers of the people of the world.

Status Chasing Treadmill

If you have managed to outgrow pleasure seeking and comfort chasing, then there is a good chance you are driven by status seeking. Remember what happened in the garden (Gen 3:11)?  Shame.  Fear of our own nakedness means that we don’t like who and what we truly are.  

Sadly, the way most sinful humans deal with this is to compare themselves with others, hoping to find some reason to believe that they are higher somewhere on the ladder of status than those with whom they are comparing.

The worst part about this is that the way the vast majority of us choose to do this is to mine the world for the opinions of others. Everything we do asks the question: “What do you think of me in comparison with them?”  You can live your whole life this way and never quite realize it, or know how to stop.  Why? Because only one person at a time can achieve the highest place.  There can only be one best person. And the secret is that even that person won’t know they are the best.  

Consider how this happened: You are a bright kid with lots of potential.  Your parents are proud of you, a little too proud.  Every time they hear about the achievement of someone else’s kids, they feel anxious and begin to push you a little harder than before to succeed at everything that you do. When you win, or succeed, they seem to really love it, and love you. When you don’t, they say something about how it’s OK, and they love you no matter what, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same.  They get so very elated when you succeed, and you can hear the joy oozing from their voices as they brag to their parents and friends about how great of a kid you are.  

You pick up on this and learn that the most important thing you can do is impress them.  You also learn that impressing others impresses them the most.  You are good at piano. They like to hear you play, but they love to hear you play for their friends.   If you’re young enough, your parents were on Facebook and projected this unhealthy pattern to hundreds, if not thousands.  And you? Somehow you have become the same way. You can’t wait to tell them about the A that your kid, the grandchild of their loins, got on his math test.  You may have mild discomfort about all of it, but you ignore it, because everybody is like this. Not everybody, but the vast majority.  

Where did this start? The garden.  I was ashamed because I was naked, so I hid myself. The image of the little creators was broken and hopelessly screwed up.  The history of humanity has shown the sad results, starting with the murder of a brother because he was envious of him and not able to master the sin that was crouching at his door (Gen 4:7), and right on until today.   Here are some ways we can turn out as a result.

Second Handers

Some philosophers have called them second handers, others call them agreeable, and most call them people pleasers. These people have no idea who they actually are. They’ve learned from an early age to become experts at reading others to find out what they should value. These are non thinkers who often get possessed by ideological positions, either on the left OR the right, probably depending on who they most interact with.  They make up herds, crowds all driven by the same idea.  How great that I don’t have to think in a herd!  A thousand people can’t be wrong!  They make up mobs, crowds all driven by the same emotion. Again, I don’t have to think, feelings make me feel alive! And they make up gangs, all driven by the same idea and emotion.  These are all ways of experiencing groupthink, and they can be virtual online crowds, or actual physical crowds.  

One sad example of a second-hander is the overwhelming number of young people today that aspire to become celebrities.  In surveys of young people, the number one aspiration tends to be fame of some kind.  Famous for what?  For being famous! If all the people that want to become famous, become famous, then none of them will become famous. Fame truly is a zero-sum game. 

Emotional Dependents

These people don’t bother thinking very much.  They chase the feelings, or at least they run from the bad feelings.  Consider the idolization of romance.  God made us male and female and created sex and romantic love for the purpose of godly families and joy in marriage. Those who are addicted to romantic relationships, making it their highest purpose, tend to go from relationship to relationship searching for a feeling.  If they do stay with one person, the codependency will be certain to cause distress for both parties. 

Emotional dependents may find one person to depend on emotionally, or they will depend on everyone to varying degrees.  Consider the overbearing mothers who felt distant from their father, so they married a man just like him who they also feel distant toward, and then she has a son.  This baby boy will fulfill all her dreams of connection and closeness, and will grow up to have a codependent relationship with her, ruining his future marriage, as he looks for another mom in his choice of spouse. This person has been taught that he is a bad boy if his mother is not happy with him.  This translates to everyone must be happy with him and all the time.  He will never have an enemy, because he will look to win everyone he ever meets.  Someone upset with him will consume until he can win their approval, or find a reason to write them off and try to forget they ever existed.  

This doesn’t just happen to boys.  In fact, women struggle with this more than men. Remember the overbearing mother.  There are books and books written about how we got this way, but for now, remember that the main source is the knowledge of good and evil that came, not from God, but from man’s disobedience to God, which led to shame.  Shame drives the behaviors and emotionalism that keep us from being who we actually are as image-bearers of the great I AM who made us to be creators.  Emotional dependents create nothing except validation pipelines from themselves to everyone.  

Performers

Once in a great while a musician, or an actor, or some other kind of entertainer will come around who truly seems to be doing what they do for the art itself.  These people, in my experience, are one in a million.  Most of them, like 98%, were driven to perform because of shame. Actors probably are especially prone to this because of the allure of becoming someone else in a performance.  But more than that, spend time with them (I am speaking from experience as a former singer-actor), and you will see that they are always on. Do they know they are always on?  Not usually.  Sometimes those who have been driven by the most pain will eventually come to terms with this.  Those who find God will begin to see the idol of the opinions of others as what drives them.  Cultivating a relationship with God can help someone to stop getting the reward from performing that they were getting, as they learn to worship God alone, but this will likely be a lifetime struggle.  

But one doesn’t have to become a professional entertainer to live their life as a performer.

Consider the rise of social media and the tendency to curate an image.  People can carefully consider everything they post, designing their online personality to be exactly what they want it to be.  Or consider those people who do that in person.  They are salesee. They always have some agenda. You never quite know what is behind their words.  You get the sense that you don’t really know anything about them, even if you have “known” them for years.  

Have you ever seen someone who smiles all the time, but you sense they are wound up so tight that they could explode at any minute?  Have you ever caught someone like that when they don’t know anyone is watching, and their face returns to the look of desperation that was hiding behind the huge smile all along? Then when they see you looking, BAM, smile is back.  This is a performer.  They don’t even know themselves, and they probably think they don’t want to know. Sadly, I think a lot of clergy fall into this category, forgetting we are called to be truth-bearers, not salesmen, and that people are God’s children and sheep of his pasture, not potential customers and clients. 

Hope

It doesn’t have to be this way. Jesus did not die just so that we could go to heaven some day. He died to heal us, to restore our broken image back to the glory under God that we were meant to have as we reflect our creator. I’ll come back tomorrow to talk in part 3 about a few other more dangerous ways that our broken image can manifest.

I Am

God is I Am and so am I. So are you; an image bearer with an assignment to produce. Life is the standard. Existence exists, so accept that and get after it. 

In the beginning, God created (Gen 1:1).   There was only one God in three persons, and then he created everything that exists.  In him, before the creation, were certain principles of Logos: logic, reason, math, objective truth, etc.  This is too mysterious for me to ponder too much, except to say that there is something fundamentally important about this fact.  Existence exists, along with objective truth of which God is the source.  

In Exodus 3:14 God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. When Moses asked him who he was so that he could tell the people who it was who had sent him, God said to call him, “I Am.” God is saying, basically, that he exists. He is the essence of all existence. I hope that you are smarter and deeper than I and can get everything out of that fact that can be gotten, but I can at least tell you where my brain has gone. Stay with me a little longer.

God exists. Existence exists.

Also, I exist.  You exist. God made us, and so we are.  You can say of yourself “I Am.”  Why? Because you are. But isn’t that blasphemous? I mean, that’s how God defines himself.  No.  You and I are made in his image: 

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Gen 1:26-27).

Therefore, you are an image bearer of the I AM. You are at least a little “i am,” just like you are a little Christ if you are a Christian. Christian means little Christ. We are not to make graven images of the Father, first, because he said so, and second, because he already made one. Adam. You. Man is the image of God and that means something.

What does it mean that “i am?”

If that is true, what does it matter? Let’s start with God. He does everything because of his existence, because of the nature of his existence. What he says about it is that everything he does, he does for his glory (Isa 43:7). Why? Because it is glorious to exist. The phrase, “God does everything for his own glory,” starts with “God does.” To be God, is to do. God’s being requires, and has the effect of God’s doing. To be is to do. God does, because God is.

Before we keep going with God’s doing, let’s look at Adam’s doing.  Adam is.  Adam exists.  Adam’s existence means that Adam does things. And what things does Adam (and Eve, and you, and me) do?  It says in Genesis 1:28-29:

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.

So that is what man was created to do.  In effect, he is to create. Who does that sound like?  God!  So part of being in the image of God is being a creator.  If God is the Creator with a capital C, then we are creators with a lowercase c.  Why would God create one of his creations to be creators?  So that we could continue to create on his behalf. He would effectually continue creating through his creators.  Man is “i am” like the great “I AM,” and to be “i am” is to be a creator. If we are not creating, then we are not being like God.  Right there is a clue as to what it means to live for the glory of God, or to do everything for God’s glory.  

Being uniquely human, is being a creator, a producer, a multiplier, a subduer of the earth (to create stuff out of it, like iron, fire, wheels, oil refineries, and solar panels, iPhones, and blog posts). Let me go out on a limb here and say that to be human is a potentially glorious thing, depending on the extent to which one lives out their calling as a bearer of the image of the glorious Creator who made them for that purpose.

Let me go out on a thinner, shakier limb and say that if God does everything for his own glory, and we are his image bearers continuing his work of creation, then we, too, might need to understand a sense in which we do everything we do for our own glory which is ultimately for his own glory.

Doesn’t Paul say in Romans 3:23 that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God? Why would it be sin to fall short of glory? Because we were created for glory. This is confusing because we only think of glory as coming from other men, but that is false glory. The glory God wants for us is the glory we receive at the judgment, at our glorification (Ro 8:30). Having been restored in Christ by his blood and sacrifice, we should start living a glorious life now. This means we start behaving like our maker, making, being, doing, according to his kingdom and his righteousness. The glory is not from men, it just is, and it is from God.

Please understand me. Everything we do is meant to be for the glory of God, but I think it is possible that because we don’t understand the honor that he has bestowed on us as his divine image-bearers, we can let our own self-doubt and self-loathing get in the way of what we could be doing for him.

This all speaks to purpose, and it flows from the basic fact of our existence. God has given us life. That means in part that “life” is the point of all this existing. He has called man to go and “live.” The purpose of man is to live. Jesus said he came to give us “life and life abundant” or “to the full” (Jn 10:10). There is something about that word “life” that goes with “creation” that goes with “glory”. We are destined as Christians to be “glorified” with him in heaven. If we are supposed to be living a restored life in Christ Jesus, then we are, in some way, supposed to be living a “glorified” life now, at least in part.

Here’s an example in Scripture of what it looks like to get a good and humble kind of glory here in this life: Proverbs 19:11 says, “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.”  The writer is saying that if one is slow to anger and can overlook an offense, it shows that he has good sense, and good sense is glorious.  It is to his glory that he does this. In what way is it glorious?  It is glorious In the fact that it is an imitation of God to be slow to anger.  To the extent that we are imitation the One who is and always will be most glorious, we are glorious.  

Most Christians seem to think that glorifying God in this life means going to church as much as possible and worshiping. Also worshiping at home, and in the car. This is true, but not the whole truth. If it were the whole truth then we’d be right to hate ourselves, because we don’t spend twenty-four seven singing songs about God and to God (which I love to do). But I say that our whole life, whatever we do, whether we eat or drink, do it all for the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31). How? By pursuing life as a creator because you are created by the Creator for that very purpose, and by doing this creating in the way that God would have us do, by displaying his character and nature in the process. Take your place as “i am” because he is the ultimate “I AM” and you bear his image.