Who Do You Glorify?

DEVOTION 1 JOHN WHO DO YOU GLORIFY? 1 John 4:4-6 4 You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. NIV Have we gotten the point yet? Or does God have to keep driving it home over and over again? Those voices out there all claiming to have the truth may well be voices of the world. We have to discern which have it and which don’t. We know for sure there are many out there proclaiming mankind’s achievements and the power of the human spirit. There are those who declare the power of the collective, that together we can attain greatness. There are voices proclaiming the power of positive thought, and that if through correct speech to ourselves we can become whatever we desire to be. There are voices seeking for us to believe in them and place them in authority over the governing of our lives, and they will take care of us, they will supply all our needs. All those voices are easy to discern as from the world and we know we should not listen to them, for we have a greater truth to guide our lives by. But the greater danger that we must overcome is those wolves in sheep clothing. We need not listen to those voices of partial truth and partial lie. Yet both of those voices are corrupted by self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, self-serving motives. We also can tell exactly who those voices belong to because they refuse to listen to the truth we share with them. They insist we are fools and simple minded, putting our faith in words written by men, yet they desire we put out trust in their words, the words of but mortal men, who do not have the inspiration of the Spirit. When we actually hear the truth spoken we know it is the truth because we have that same truth within us. But when we hear words spoken from the viewpoint of human kind, we see it for what it is for we have overcome the words of the world. We do not need to be entangled in all the human plans and efforts to save the planet. We do not need to be entrapped by all the plans to solve all the aliments of mankind, such as hunger, poverty and the lack of a proper education, or indoctrination of human ideas and ideals. We simply have to live by the truth of God. Does that include some of the same things? It surely may, but not as human plans and efforts, but rather as the people of God, so that in everything he receives all the glory. The world glorifies man, believers glorify God.