In him we were also chosen, . . .in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, live for the praise of His glory. (Eph. 1:11-12)
The apostle Paul wrote these words to a little band of first century Christians who lived in the city of Ephesus. As he continues he makes it perfectly clear that, like him, his ordinary Christian readers were also to “live for the praise of God’s glory.” That is to say bringing honor to God had now become the very purpose for their lives.
“Live for the praise of His glory” can sound like some kind of religious life in a monastery or living under a thatched roof as a missionary in a 3rd world leper colony. And no doubt that is how the enemy of God would like us to see it. But that is a lie. God has called us into the great
epic story that began with His creation of the world and will culminate with the new heaven and new earth. As we live out our lives between those two bookends, we actually “have a say” about the role that we play. We can be a significant character or just be a nameless face in a great mass of movie extras.Most people want their lives to count for something. What is the appeal of Facebook and Twitter? People want to be noticed. They want their lives to have some kind of meaning. They don’t want to be lost and unseen among the four and a half billion people who are living on the face of the planet.
If we choose to live for ourselves—to live for the praise of our own glory—we reduce our lives to a dot too small for even a footnote in history. But if we give our life to God and live it for his purpose, we at once have a significant role in the grand story of God’s creation and His redemption of the world. But you may be asking: How can my life be all that significant?
We have to understand that each life is absolutely unique. Like fingerprints or snowflakes; no two are alike. Your life is like that. Nobody in the world has precisely the same circle of friends and contacts, background, life-experiences, strengths and weaknesses. You are absolutely unique within your own circle of human contacts. And God has a role for you to play that nobody else in all creation or in the grand sweep of history can play. But we each must choose.
Which would you like your life to be, an unnamed character that occurred once in a single frame of a forty-year daily comic strip, or an important character in an epic, literary masterpiece like the Lord of the Rings, Gone with the Wind, War and Peace, or Hawaii?
We can choose to live for the praise of God’s glory, or to live in our own trivial little soap-opera. Each of us has to make that decision. Benjamin Disraeli said:
Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.
And we would add that a person is never so significant as when he chooses to live for the praise of God’s glory.