Glorifying God

THAT, to me, is the best condition, the best moment we can have in this life. To be able to glorify God presumes that we have been able to identify ourselves with God in his will and in his ways as revealed fully in Christ, the Son who became man to save us, offering us the way of how to be with God in spite of our limitations, mistakes and sins. It is in this condition that we can attain our supreme joy and our total fulfillment.

It corresponds to what St. Paul once said, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor 10,31) And the ultimate foundation of that assertion is because the purpose of our creation is none other than to give glory to God. In fact, the ultimate purpose of the whole of creation is to give glory to God, its creator. There is no other reason why God chose to create instead of just being by himself.

It is not an expression of selfishness on the part of God that he be given glory. He does not need that. He is the fullness of being already. But by giving glory to God, we make ourselves, and the rest of creation, to participate in God’s glory. That’s when we achieve the best and ultimate dignity we can ever have.

We need to be most conscious of this duty and do all we can to carry it out in every act we make, whether it is physical, mental or spiritual, etc. The big problem we have today is that instead of giving glory to God, we tend to give glory to ourselves, thinking that that is where we will find our joy and fulfillment.

That’s when we fall into vainglory that can come to us in many and very subtle ways. It can only be a false glorification of ourselves and a very deceptive one that can give us some degree of joy and pleasure but is actually setting us for a bigger and graver fall.

We have to be wary of this danger. Instead, we have to see to it that we are conscious in truly giving glory to God in all that we do and in any situation that we may find ourselves in, whether such situation is happy or sad, good or bad in human terms.

In this regard, we have to closely follow the example of Christ, “the way, the truth and the life” for us, who did nothing other than to give glory to the Father by doing the Father’s will all the time.

It is with Christ that we can manage to give glory to God in everything that we do and in any situation we may find ourselves in, especially in those unavoidable difficult situations where we are made to suffer in this life.

Yes, every situation can and should be an occasion to give glory to God. As long as we follow the example of Christ, and more, as long as we identify ourselves with Christ, we can manage to give glory to God even in our worst predicament.

The awareness of this duty and the development of the relevant attitudes and skills should be spread more widely, especially to the young ones who are dangerously exposed to all sorts of new things that tend to desensitize them from their duty toward God. There seems to be some kind of systematic secularization of world culture today that needs to be corrected and reversed.

Let us hope that we can have credible teachers, endorsers and models who can make this duty attractive, appreciated and eventually lived by many if not all of us. To repeat, it is when we manage to glorify God that we can have our best condition in life, our best moment of true joy in this life.