Glory is a Slaver

It’s a terrible experience, to find oneself at the side of the road, hazard lights blinking. The flat tire the quintessential picture of disappointment. But you know what put you here. No nails stood spike-upward on the pavement. The tires weren’t too old, or damaged. No, it was when you said something of importance, and no one valued it. Your moment of sincere brilliance was thrown into a garbage heap of discarded ideas that were not given a proper chance, due to the ignorance or arrogance of those who heard you.

… and because of it, you feel sidelined. You drove happily before, but although no one harmed you, something transpired that put the rest of you off-balance. Internal questioning begins. “Why has this sidelined me?”… “Is that which I said, which I thought valuable, not so after all?” After some thought you ask the next most pivotal question: “Why do I care so much about what other’s think?”.

We’ve all seen the child who receives a birthday balloon, only to lose hold of it, and watch its violent escape into the cloud-filled sky. Imagine if you were that balloon. Your purpose tied to the arm of a little boy or girl that rejoiced in your plucky coloring, and upward posture.

And the moment you were released, you were hurled into the stratosphere, where no one finds you, or values you. The fact that you are symbol of exuberance, or purposed for expression, or celebrated especially for your ability to seemingly defy gravity, are all without meaning without being tied down. You are now, essentially, worthless. And worst of all? It is your nature to take chaotic flight into a sky full of despair.

When it happens, you float in places in which no one has an opinion of you, and where your own opinion of yourself becomes a quintessential priority. If you attempt to evaluate yourself on criteria you have created for yourself, with no one’s input as context, you run the risk of becoming a creature the world around you can no longer identify with properly. Even worse, you become a thing that can no longer identify with the world around you. You are as a balloon caught in gusts of social oblivion, with no one to aid you in an objective evaluation of yourself. Are you really exuberant? Are you really colorful enough? Do you elicit joy in others?

We are glorious only when we are well-esteemed by others – and without it, we feel lost or without consequence – along with our newfound disturbed sense of identity. Whether we realize it or not, we cannot live well without what someone thinks of us. Glory is a slaver we cannot avoid.

So we do and say things we hope is valuable to another person, often not realizing that we are fishing for our own sense of importance, fearing our flight into chaotic skies of staying unknown, or becoming unrelatable.

We are controlled by others through our need for evaluation, and since we cannot escape it, we must have a grasp on which people’s approval we are enslaved to – from whom we choose to receive glory.

Maybe this is why Jesus spoke these words in John 5:44: How can you believe, when you accept glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?

Glory is so important, in fact, that faith in God itself is determined by whoever’s opinion you value most. Does anyone obey a command of God they do not believe? Or said differently, since we are enslaved through our nature by the esteem of others, how can we believe, when our enslavement is to those whose opinions are often trivial, destructive, or incoherent, and requires no divine oriented faith at all? You would never even think to make the effort to believe – you are already filled to the brim with the glory/approval from those around you.

Glory therefore does not only tie you to a sense of gravity but at a minimum determines enormous swaths of your behavior. And herein, one must wonder, there is a promise that is maybe not apparent: When your gravity is determined by the approval of God alone, one is powerfully driven to believe Him. Your behavior becomes dominantly constrained to His will. Your entire sense of self depends on it.

When seeking His glory becomes habitual, one finds that obedience furthers your understanding of His approval and trust in you. Obedient action has effect upon the world that proves whose you are, and what you are made of. You grow into ever greater spheres of influence, meaning, potency, and size, as the best Evaluator in all of existence has been making clear to you what you are through continued obedience.

And when this glory is received from God rather than man, words spoken to deaf peers cannot leave you stranded at the side of the road. In fact, the entire concept becomes a humorous ordeal. How could the puny arm of my peer compare to the immortal one I am bound to as a balloon – who continually grows me to greater meaning and depth? And even more importantly, never lets me go.

Determining unworthy ears might be the experience one has to make and remember, to learn not to waste the treasures in you on unworthy people. Seeking and finding the glory of God will actually do even more: it’ll teach you to view their flippancy with indignation and treat the arrogant as those who have cursed themselves by not recognizing you, or themselves for what they truly are.