Do it all for the glory of God

I was in church today for the evening service (I was on worship leading duty) and the sermon was on the last portion of 1 Corinthians 10, particularly on 10:31b, "...whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."

The speaker spent much time on that fact that the chief end of man is to glorify God. He spoke on these three points:
1. To glorify God is a command. It requires obedience.
2. It is a very serious command with awful consequences of disobeyed.
3. The glory of God is more precious than anything in the world.

The thing is I get all that, but I decided to ask a simple question: what does it mean exactly to "do it for the glory of God."

I feel that it is a very deep question. It boils down to the very purpose why God gave us life.

In the general sense, it may be easy to answer it. To glorify God is to obey him on all things that we do. It is to read God's word, to know him, to love him and to serve him. It is to live our lives in him and being involved in his work and the Gospel. But that sounds like a pat answer.

Our lives are complicated. We have dreams, relationships, desires, habits. To put it simply, we are sinners and our motives are more often than not questionable.

So how do we glorify God in all that we do?

I think we do it by surrendering our lives to him, daily -- to acknowledge that he is God and he is King, and that we are nothing on ourselves without him. All that our lives are is because of Jesus who died for us on the cross. And do all that we are and all that we do, we offer ourselves at the foot of the cross.

And the fact is that we live because of him. It's not us, but him. If we recognize that every moment of our lives, we will be living our lives doing what we do with gratitude and worship in our hearts.

It's living our lives for him, and how we live it that will bring him glory.

pearlie