Living for God's Glory

There is a single verse that quietly sums up weeks of what we have been learning: 'Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.' It may not look like much, but it carries a heavy truth — a life that is not lived to bring glory to God, and God alone, cannot reach the fullness He designed for it. Instead, it slowly makes a wreck of a person's life, their relationships, and ultimately their soul. If we make something with no glory of its own — sex, marriage, children, wealth, fame — the number one desire of our lives, and try to squeeze glory out of it, it will destroy us.

Paul uses a Greek word worth remembering: kenodoxos. It means to crave or chase after a glory that is not there. And here is what Scripture is exposing: deep inside, every human being suspects they do not really matter. We carry a gnawing sense that we are, in ourselves, nothing. Conceit and vainglory are simply the desperate attempt to prove to others, and to ourselves, that we are something after all — an effort to convince ourselves of something we secretly fear is not true.

The Burden of Not Mattering

Speaking at Whitney Houston's funeral, the actor Kevin Costner described this ache with unusual honesty. He recalled that even at the height of her fame, before a screen test for the film they made together, one of the most successful singers in the world was gripped by doubt — quietly wondering whether she was good enough, whether she was pretty enough, whether people really liked her. Costner called it an unexplainable burden that comes with fame, and said it was the very burden that made her great and also, in the end, the thing that caused her to stumble. Why would someone with so much success still wonder whether she was good enough? Because, like all of us, she carried a buried sense that she did not truly matter — and when circumstances stirred that fear, it confirmed the thing she dreaded most.

If you are honest, you will admit that much of your life has been spent the same way — trying to matter, trying to earn back a sense of worth, trying to convince yourself that your life counts for something. And the Bible warns that when we go looking for that glory in things that have none, the pursuit becomes deeply destructive. It stirs up two opposite but related complexes, and both are engines of human tragedy.

Two Complexes, One Root

The first is the superiority complex, which leads to provoking others. Whenever we look at someone and feel better than them, we start relating to them in ways designed to make us feel important — condescension, smugness, subtle put-downs, even a false humility. Why? Because we know we do not truly matter, and we are desperately using our cars, our background, our achievements, our comparisons to prove that we do.

The second is the inferiority complex, which leads to envying. Whenever we look at someone who seems to matter more than we do and conclude we could never measure up, resentment sets in — of them or of ourselves. And so we start reaching for anything that will make us feel high enough to catch up. Both complexes grow from the same soil: the buried conviction that we are nothing, and the frantic effort to cure it. Paul says we end up biting and devouring one another, consuming people to feed our own emptiness. This is why so many relationships that start well eventually curdle — we walk into them asking, 'Am I better than this person, or are they better than me?' and use each other to answer a question only God can settle.

God Is the End, Not the Means

So what is the way out? Paul answers plainly: whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God. We were made to declare that God — not me, not you, not your family or your reputation — is glorious. To glorify God is to recognize His supreme excellence, to treat Him as the thing of ultimate worth, and to find your deepest joy in Him. Nothing else in this life deserves that place, because everything else is corrupted and shifting.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Matthew 6:33

Jesus is telling us that God is the end, not the means to an end. You do not serve God in order to be healed; you are healed so that you can serve God. You are not made prosperous or gifted so that you can build your own name — you are given whatever you are given so that you can get God Himself. Only in getting Him is your own true glory ever manifested, because you become who you were truly meant to be only when you find yourself in the One who is ultimate. Chase 'all these other things' for their own sake, and you are handing glory to things that have none — and out of nothing, nothing comes. That which has no glory can never give you glory. It will only wreck the life, the relationships, and the soul that lean on it.

This is exactly what Jesus prayed for us on the night before He died. In John 17 He says that the glory the Father gave Him, He has given to us, so that we may be one as He and the Father are one. As you behold the glory God gave Jesus, Jesus hands you that same glory — and then you are made whole. You are no longer fragmented and broken apart, scrambling to prove your worth. You are brought into perfect harmony with the very life of the Godhead: Christ in you, the hope of glory. You become who you were always meant to be, because only God can give glory, and He gives it freely to those who come to Him.

Nothing and Something at the Same Time

The final answer is not a technique but the cross. The cross tells us the truth we have been running from: in ourselves we are nothing. We are sinners, selfish even in our good deeds, deserving of God's judgment. And yet the same cross tells us the opposite truth at the very same moment: we matter to God more than we ever imagined. He left His glory in heaven, laid aside the worship of angels, came to this earth, and took upon Himself the shame, the beatings, and the death that our sin deserved. It was I who should have carried that cross; it was I who should have been forsaken. But because I mattered so much to Him, He carried it and was forsaken in my place.

This is why Paul boasts in nothing except the cross. As the old hymn 'When I Survey the Wondrous Cross' confesses, love so amazing and so divine demands my soul, my life, my all. In that cross I can finally admit that I am nothing and not be crushed by it, because I simultaneously discover that I am something — not because of anything in me, but because Jesus loves me. The theologians had a phrase for it: simul justus et peccator, a righteous sinner. I am a sinner who has been declared righteous, made possible only by another who was righteous and was declared a sinner in my place.

See what this does. I can walk up to someone who seems better than me and feel no envy, because I know I too am something to Jesus. I can walk up to someone I might be tempted to feel superior to and not lord it over them, because I know that whatever I am, I am only by His love. I am set free from sizing everyone up — free from asking whether I am prettier or smarter or more accomplished — because my worth is settled by the One who declared me something while I was still nothing. That is where the endless hunger to matter finally rests. Do you recognize that in yourself you are empty? Do you long to feel forgiven, accepted, and good enough in the eyes of the One who really matters? Then receive it as the free gift it is — become the sinner whom God delights to call righteous, the nothing who, in Christ, is something forever.