--Yesterday, I posed a challenge regarding our duty to glorify God in every way. I said that maybe the way we should glorify God was by being good press agents, embellishing His good deeds and spinning His less appealing ones. Whether in the Bible or in the world, maybe we would do well to give God a better image than people might otherwise form of Him. And if that’s true “out there,” it’s also true “in here,” with regard to my own moral growth. Shouldn’t I hide my flaws and fake as much virtue as possible so as to make God look better by all this wonder He’s going to get credit for doing in my life?
--As immediately horrible as all this sounds, the truth is that Christians of all sorts buy into precisely this mistake, whether it’s in the way they deal with the Bible, the way they talk about God in this world, or the way they present themselves to others through evangelism or personal lifestyle.
--So what are the three big problems with such “fake glorification?
--Well, first, it’s lying. And since we serve a God whose core character is Truth, that’s immediately a problem.
--Second, it’s very dangerous precisely because anyone lured into Christianity on the basis of such exaggerated claims (whether about God or about your own life) will be disillusioned by the reality once he discovers it for himself.
--But the most important problem is the third one. And this problem absolutely runs rampant among Christians. We secretly think God isn’t good enough. And so we feel we have to embellish either our accounts of Him or our lives in following Him. But if God finds His deeds and our imperfect lives suitably glorifying for His purposes, on what grounds would we disagree? Instead of secretly nurturing the idea that God isn’t good enough either “out there” or “in here,” we should start from the premise that He is perfect and then stop trying to do anything other than tell the truth as we know and experience it.
--Only then will we be glorifying the actual God as He actually is.
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