Living for God

This post started as a writing exercise that I did at my writing workshop.

The concept of living for God is nothing new. We hear it all the time; you must live for God, you need to live for God. We hear this a lot, but we don't often hear the reason why. Why should we live for God?

The reason that you need to live for God is that He is living for you - He is living for you, He came down to earth for you, He performed miracles for you, He died for you, He rose for you. God, through Jesus, did all these things for you. Not 'you' as in plural, 'you' as in singular. I once listened to a sermon in which the preacher told the congregation that even if there was only one person on earth all those years ago, Jesus still would have come and died for that one person. So Jesus is living for each one of us individually. So of course we need to live for God, because He is always living for us. Jesus still has the holes in His hands and feet from the nails that held Him to the cross, and He still has the hole in His side from the sword that was drawn into it.

But how do we live for God? There isn't a single way you can do it, and no one has ever drawn up a list of things that, if every item on it is completed, you are living for God and you don't need to do anything more. That isn't how it works. Living for God is ongoing, and involves every single thing that you do. Basically, you need to do everything for God's glory.

That might seem like an impossible feat; how can everything be done for God's glory? God gives us opportunities to live for Him every day, but it's reckoned that because of our free will, we miss most of them. When I first heard that, I found it quite sad. How can you make sure that you don't miss opportunities to live for God? Of course, it's highly unlikely that you won't miss any of them, but you can make sure that you don't miss as many.

The simplest way that I can think of to explain it - because I'm a Harry Potter freak - is by a bit in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (I'm not going to use too much jargon here, in case anyone reading this doesn't know Harry Potter that well). There is a potion in that book called felix felicis. It's nickname is liquid luck; a potion that, when drunk, will give a person luck in everything that they do until the effects wear off. There's a bit in the book when one of the characters thinks that he's taken this potion, when in fact he hasn't. But even the thought that he's taken it makes him 'lucky' in his endeavours, until he's told that actually he hadn't taken the potion at all.

The reason I'm telling you this, is because to find the opportunities that God is giving you to live for His glory, you need to look for the opportunities. If you're looking for them (which is what the character was doing when he thought he'd taken the potion), you will find them, and it will seem so much easier to live for God.

When you live like this, the opportunities seem obvious. This is the third blog that I've run. The first two were about random things, and I was always struggling to find something to blog about. Then, it hit me: I can blog about my faith. Once I'd realised that, it seemed to silly that I hadn't thought of it before. And when you start looking, lots of different types of opportunities seem obvious.

Listening to Christian music on the commute. Reading Christian fiction... on the commute. When you get a new notebook or diary, write a Bible verse or a line from a hymn in the front cover.

It really isn't as hard as it may seem at first. But everything can be done for God's glory. You just gotta look.