Feast Your Soul > Glorify Jesus everywhere

True worship is consistently valuing God for being God.

If a man was to say to his wife, ‘darling, I have strong feelings for you so you’ll cook me some of that delicious food’, we would think that wrong.  In the same way, if we love God so that we can have a better life, we show that we love ourselves more than God.  If we love God to avoid pain, or get rich, we love the absence of pain or the abundance of wealth more than God.  Our hearts delight in whatever person or thing we consider ultimate.  If we love God as a means to getting something else, we show that the ’something else’ is ultimate for us, rather than God.

To cultivate lives of worship, which is what God calls us to do in Romans 12:1-2, we need first to delight in God and savour his goodness more than anything else.  We need to rejoice in him as our ultimate treasure.

And then the lives that spring out of this inner reality will be lives that show off Jesus as treasure.  What might this look like in our lives over the summer?

• living to show Jesus is more valuable than possessions results in counter-cultural generosity: spending money on things that will advance the cause of God rather than increase our comfort, and selling or giving away things that we don’t need or that are becoming dangerously precious to us
• living to show Jesus is more valuable than sex results in radical others-centredness, where guys treat girls (including girlfriends) as sisters and not sex-objects (1 Tim 5:2), and Christians seek honest relationships with others of the same sex who will stand with them, love them and rebuke them in their battles against lust and porn
• living to show Jesus is more valuable than marriage results in commitment to preferring singleness over going out with someone who isn’t growing as a Christian and seeking to treasure Jesus above all things
• living to show Jesus is more valuable than money results in an attitude that doesn’t seek to hoard wealth, and might mean giving up some shifts at work to help on a camp or a project that will introduce other people to the truth about Jesus, or choosing a break in the UK over a posh holiday in the tropics
• living to show Jesus is more valuable than other people’s opinions results in a readiness to love people by sharing the gospel or to stand up against peer pressure rather than shrinking from doing right for fear you’ll be branded an oddball
• living to show Jesus is more valuable than life results in a mindset free from the Western ’safety-bubble’ mirage and ready to risk everything for the cause of God

Living with Jesus as treasure means saying with Paul, ‘it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain’ (Philippians 1:20-21).

So let’s pray that Jesus would be more and more valuable to us, and that our lives would display the joy of living to display his glory.  The best way to get started is by spending time with him in daily quiet times.

Listen to John Piper say the same things much more clearly… or watch the sermon-jam version below.