![[DEVOTIONAL] God's Glory in our Everyday Life](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/570287e6859fd052a949f564/1730921149045-U0FWKNMTWQU50M20RG6X/3.jpg)
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
Let your glory be over all the earth!
Psalm 108:5
Written by C.F. of The Village Church Denton, Denton, Texas
We are forgetful people. Not only that, we all too often desire our way, our wishes, and our wants. Having desires is not bad; we all have them! We desire to be loved. We desire comfort and care. We desire a career, relationship, family, and many more wonderful things. Desires are natural and normal for everyone. However, desires can get disordered and out of alignment. We can even take good desires and twist them. We become infatuated with the new career move. We become overwhelmed with creating a perfect family. We obsess over people, products, and other things.
Desires are good, but our heart takes them to places they were never intended to go.
So, while desires are natural, they are disordered if not placed in the proper perspective. We need a constant reminder of how to order our desires. Psalm 108:5 gives us that reminder. Our greatest desire, the desire that informs all other desires and dreams, is to see God glorified above all else.
But here is the secret: he already is!
If that is true, then the question is: do we acknowledge it in our hearts or display it in our lives? God is exalted and glorified, but if we choose to ignore this and walk according to our own desires, we miss the life-transforming beauty of our God and how it can change our perspective on everything. Let me explain.
If we hope to see God exalted above the nations, we have a new perspective on how our lives will be used for that end. We do not have to be a vocational minister or missionary to magnify God’s glory in our lives. While some may be called to those vocations specifically, every Christian is a witness to God’s beauty and goodness. The daily decisions we make, how we conduct business, how we interact with others, and even how we steward our time are opportunities to glorify God. We too often forget that God is already glorified, but that glory can be further seen in the lives of his people. We should not be overwhelmed by this thought but step into the moments we have in life with intentionality, seeing them as ways in which God can be glorified on every occasion.
God is already exalted and glorified, but we have the opportunity to make that known to others. We can see our lives expressing God’s glory and exaltation over the heavens and earth. Those who have been called into his kingdom are recipients of his loving-kindness and mercy. We are also called into a new life of expressing God’s glory in every corner of his creation so far as we can. We can pray, “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens” as we step into the office or log in to the video conference. We can ask the Lord to let his glory “be over all the earth” as we send our children to school or meet with our neighbors.
Wherever we may be, we can pray Psalm 108:5 so that our desires would be increasingly aligned with what is already true about God as the exalted and glorified one.
What happens if we fail? What if we end our day and feel we did not deliberately glorify God? This is where we stand upon the work of Christ, our savior. While we may need to confess that we did not love God and our neighbor as we should have, we also lean upon the grace and mercy of God in Christ on our behalf. Where we failed, Christ was faithful in giving the Father glory. When we forget to exalt God in our work or home, Christ exalted the Father in all he did. And we who are united to Christ by faith can continue to experience the love of God in our weakness and failure. The love of God that is poured forth into our hearts (Romans 5:5) continues to empower us, bringing renewal as we remember our calling to glorify God in all we do.
Though we trust Christ who perfectly glorified God in everything, we have his Spirit giving us reorienting our desires to see God exalted in our lives.
We all have desires. Desires for our family, jobs, relationships, and many other things. Those good desires can go awry if we neglect to see them as part of God’s plan for his glory. Our desires wither and deteriorate outside the nourishing light of God’s glory. Apart from the subsistence of God’s exaltation, our good desires decompose into cravings that no earthly object or activity can satisfy. We are forgetful and fickle people.
So let this day be a new day to orient your heart and desires to God’s exaltation and glory.
Simply pray and ask God to help you start fresh, seeing your life and desires as opportunities to glorify him. And where our desires are not oriented correctly, that the Spirit would quicken our hearts to see God exalted and glorified above the heavens and over all the earth, beginning with us. We need the reminder of Psalm 108:5 to reorient.
