Spotlight 12/2017: Adopting the right position
Keeping our feet on the ground and vanity at bay … District Apostle Rainer Storck (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) calls on us to reconsider our personal position before giving glory to God.
If we give glory to someone we try to bring to expression that that person has achieved something special or has given us something that we ourselves could never have achieved on our own. In a way, we express our admiration, gratefulness, and our humility.
Unfortunately, we humans tend to seek our own glory and can become a little overambitious. One of Jesus’ parables in Luke 18, verses 9 to 14, illustrates this.
Jesus describes two men here who both went to the temple to pray. One, a Pharisee, makes a point of mentioning all his good qualities in his prayer. He thanks God that he is not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers. He says that he is faithful in offering, gives alms to the poor, and even fasts twice a week. But the man’s prayer is nothing more than self-adulation. One could say that this man was eager to earn admiration and wanted to elevate himself. But God did not accept him.
The situation was quite different for the tax-collector. This man also had good sides, no doubt, but in his relationship to God he acknowledged that he had nothing to bring and stammered: “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” This abasement led to his being exalted before God.
To give glory to God our Father also means that we must see ourselves as the sinners we are and never forget to be thankful that God always grants us grace and mercy.
This is another aspect of our 2017 motto that I would like to fill with life.
Photo: Oliver Rütten