The Weight of God’s Glory

If it hasn’t been fairly obvious, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a blog about anything, much less about Theology/philosophy. This has been partially due to work taking up 40 hours of my week that I wasn’t previously accustomed to not having available, but mainly due to laziness and lack of focus.

As I was trying to determine what had caused such a lack of focus in life, I ran through several possibilities.

1) Working in a call center is very repetitive, so I find myself feeling like I’ve been thrown into a dryer going round and round doing the same thing all day. Work also wasn’t busy enough for me to actually consider it “work”, so I’m fighting against boredom as well as redundancy.
2) Living with my parents began to seem like something I needed to stop doing for a variety of reasons, and none of them being very logical. This caused much conflict internally, as well as confusion about whether to just try to put aside the illogical emotions I was feeling and push forward in what actually made sense on paper. None of this had anything to do with my parents, the way they treated me, or anything like that…I just couldn’t push aside the idea that it was time to move out.
3) The end goal of me doing all of this was somehow lost in the shuffle. The end goal of living for God’s glory somehow changed into trying to make my boss happy so that I’d be able to keep my job. The end goal of living for God’s glory somehow changed into trying to please my parents in my decision making. So instead of taking these heavy things to God in prayer, I tried to think through them on my own, which made them even heavier.

As I began to come to this realization last weekend, I was really looking forward to church on Sunday. We have been going through a series on God’s authority, but when I got there, Pastor Matt said that we were taking a break from that series to talk about the glory of God. He made a valid point when he said that so often we talk of the glory of God, but we don’t have a clue what it means. He then told us that the proper understanding of God’s glory is that of weight.

Weight? Really? So when we talk about living for God’s glory, we’re talking about living for His weight? I think something gets lost in translation here. Probably because the only time we consider the word “weight” is when we look at the scale and realize that we’re 10 pounds overweight (which usually means it’s actually 20 pounds). When we thing of weight as something used in a true scale system though, it makes much more sense.

Example:

On this type of scale, we would put an object with a known weight on one side of the scale, and then put an object of an unknown weight on the other side, until it balances out. Then we know how much the other object weighs. The amazing part here is, it doesn’t matter what we put on the other side of the scale, God’s glory outweighs anything and everything on the other side of the scale. Problems at work, problems at home, fear of death for being a Christian. All of that, while important, pales in comparison to the weight of God’s glory.

I remember when I was younger, I used to fish out at my grandparents’ farm. Every once in a while, I’d put a fishing lure on the line and it would go absolutely nowhere. I knew where I wanted the lure to go, but it would fall 10 feet in front of me every time. I’d give it a couple more tries, casting with all the might a 10 year old boy could muster, and then my dad or one of my uncles would come over and put a weight on the line next to the lure, and the next time I cast the line out, it would go 30-40 feet without any effort. In the same way, we have a direction that God has given us, and when we hold onto and live for the weight that is His glory, it sustains us and gives us the ability to do that which we could never do on our own.

So, with work having kicked into 12 hour day mode, I’m going to try to get at least one post a week done on the Ephesians series I said I’d start a couple months ago, with a few probable tangent posts based on other things going on.