Give God the whole orange
Are you or have you ever been a glory thief?
In his book, The Soulwinner, Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) says glory thieves are like those who suck all the goodness out of an orange before giving it to God:
Of course, they give God the glory after they have sucked the juice out of it, but they first must have the orange themselves.1
Instead, we need to give the Lord the whole orange, juice and all.
Yet it’s not as easy as it sounds; you notice that glory thieves often still give God the orange—but only after they’ve had their fill. I think this can be the case for many of us. We may still give God a token piece of the glory, but only after we’ve given ourselves a jolly good pat on the back first. From a distance, the orange peel might still look the part, but the heart of the orange is missing (Matthew 15:8).
Who gets the credit?
Being a football referee (especially a VAR one) is a pretty thankless task. If it all goes well and no wrong decisions are made, no-one notices, there’s no round of applause, no plaudits or back-page spreads celebrating the ref’s performance. However, the minute a controversial decision is made, players, managers, fans and pundits are all up in arms railing against the ref.
The way we treat the Almighty Lord of the universe can be a bit like that. We only pray or think of God when things go wrong or when we’re not happy about something.
However, when things go well, we’re more likely to try and take the credit ourselves. It might be in our day-to-day work or in church commitments—the temptation is there all the same. You will have felt it, I’m sure. All sin is essentially pride, thinking we know better than God and wanting a slice of the orange ourselves. It began in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:5-6) and has been a problem ever since. The minute something goes right, pride comes as a soft whisper, sweet and enticing: ‘Didn’t I do well?’
It may start off small, but pretty soon we puff ourselves up like peacocks. People notice and we glory in their attention. Like Simon Magus, we want to be ‘somebody’ (Acts 8:9-24). We want to be talked about or thought of well.
I find the real danger of being a glory thief is when it comes to spiritual matters, which makes sense when you consider sin wants us—our very souls—for itself (Genesis 4:7). What better place for Satan to strike than the church itself? Whether it’s in how much we think we know (1 Corinthians 8:1), how great we reckon we are (Luke 9:46-48; Luke 22:24-27), how many church activities we commit ourselves to, how many chairs we stack on a Sunday, how polished our prayers are, how doctrinally pure we believe ourselves to be—we’re always at risk of sneaking a bit of the credit for ourselves, rather than giving it all to God.
This is where the Bible blows away our vain pretensions:
What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?
1 Corinthians 4:7
All we are, all we have comes from God through Jesus Christ. He is the Creator, Sustainer, Beginning and the End, Alpha and Omega. He is literally the centre-point of everything, across all realms, terrestrial and heavenly. It’s only fitting that the glory should come back like a boomerang to its Source.
The truth is we’re not even necessary for God to fulfil his purposes. The seventeenth-century, Kent-born Puritan George Swinnock (1627-1673), speaking of Christian preachers in particular, says that it’s often not the most gifted who have the most success,
because God would have us know that it is not the [piety] of the preacher, but His grace and Spirit that does the work; they are nothing, He is all in all. He made light the first day of the creation, and not the sun or stars till the fourth, to tell the world that He can enlighten it without the sun.2
God doesn’t need us, He didn’t even need the sun to institute the day-night cycle on earth; but like a dad doing the gardening with a small child, even though we’re often more a hindrance than a help, our Father delights to involve us anyway!
Is there no room for pride then?
You might think, surely it’s not wrong to be proud of your work, of your achievements, of a job well done?
Well, it may be right to take a measure of pride in these things, but not out of arrogance, selfish ambition or for worldly acclaim. Scripture tells us that ‘pride of life is not from the Father but from the world’ (1 John 2:16). For the adopted child of God, we ought to be like little ones saying ‘Father, look what I did for you!’
If it’s pride at all then it’s pride not in us or in what we’ve done but pride in Him:
Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord
1 Corinthians 1:31
[or as it’s sometimes translated: ‘let the one who glories, glory in the Lord’]
This is very freeing; we’re no longer bound by the expectations of the world around us. We don’t have to climb up the greasy pole, join the rat race or make something of ourselves. We are free to just be. We have a heavenly Father who looks down on us in love. Now all we have to do is follow Him, as sheep follow their shepherd, faithfully plodding on wherever He calls us.
Ambition isn’t wrong; it’s right to do our best with what God gives us; but we should desire all our praise to come from God Himself. If we are faithful in the small things, He will give us bigger things. The truth is we will one day share in God’s glory; we have our part in Christ (Romans 8:17).
But we can be like the younger son in the parable, we want our share of the inheritance now. We’re not content to wait for it. Beware Jesus’s sobering words: ‘they have their reward in full’ (Matthew 6:5). Pride leads only to destruction (Proverbs 16:18). Is what He’s given us not enough for us that we want more—we want His very glory itself as well?
How dare we try to steal God’s glory! We must let the Word of God knock us off the perch of our pride and repent of all our glory thievery. It’s not about you or me, it’s about Him. It would be remiss of me to not warn us all here—the Lord God Almighty takes His glory very seriously:
I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another
Isaiah 42:8 (NIV)
All of us to varying degrees have a desire to be appreciated and accepted, otherwise we start to feel insecure. But ultimately our security should come from our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, not through the acclaim of others. The latter is unreliable; the former is all that matters in the end—no matter what the world says!
It’s not that we don’t care what other people think, but we don’t derive our identity from—or let ourselves be defined by—it. This also helps us to be truly humble and open to receiving critique from our brothers and sisters in the right way. The early church father Jerome (347-420 AD) says:
Christ’s soldier goes marching on [eyes front] through praise on the right hand, blame on the left. Applause doesn’t thrill him, criticism doesn’t crush him.3
To God be all the glory
Giving God the whole orange means giving Him our all, our whole heart. It means giving Him our best, taking the pips out of the orange as it were and then giving the best of the fruit all to God. It means ditching the orange-peel mentality, giving up every vain ambition and reserving no nook or cranny of our heart for pride. It means being full of zesty zeal for God’s glory, not self-glory!
We ought to thank Him and praise Him for when things go well and resolve that people come away from us thinking, not ‘Wow, isn’t <insert your name here> amazing?’, but, ‘Wow, isn’t God amazing?!’
When we receive thanks or praise, we ought to immediately thank the Lord and beware the warning of Herod (Acts 12:21-23).
When we give another person praise or thanks, it should be the same. Don’t play to people’s egos, point them to our amazing God:
Oh, magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together!
Psalm 34:3
And we need to do the same when things don’t go so well. We shouldn’t feel down when things don’t seem to go to plan, the Lord is teaching us through it. He will more than make it up to us (Joel 2:25)!
The cure for pride is not to tell yourself (and others) over and over how bad you are—Jesus already died for all our glory thievery—but over and over how good and great the Lord is. Less self-flagellation, more God-exaltation.
Giving glory to the Triune God is a sure-fire way to deepen your relationship with Him. The Father delights in praise given to His Son; the Son loves it when the Spirit is honoured; the Spirit rejoices when the Father’s love is held in high esteem.
Not to us, LORD, not to us
Psalm 115:1 (NIV)
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.
