So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
1 Corinthians 10:31
As some people know, I am a headliner engineer. You know, when I say that to many people, their first reaction is: what's a headliner? I usually have to then explain that, when they sit inside their vehicle and look up, everything they see is what I work on.
Did you know that, most of the time, the headliner is a different color than the rest of the vehicle? Most auditors don't even realize that until someone tells them. The reality is: nobody really notices the headliner too much, unless something is wrong.
As the headliner engineer, it is my goal to simply NOT be noticed. I do not want management to notice me. I do not want the auditors to notice me. I don't want anyone to even know I'm there!! Why? Because if anyone notices something about the headliner, it's almost always because something is wrong. The goal of a headliner is to focus the occupant forward in vehicle.
If we were to ask a person to sit inside a vehicle for 10 minutes, and then ask the same person to sit inside the same exact vehicle with a higher quality headliner, the occupant would react by saying that the 2nd vehicle is nicer. If we were to ask what makes it nicer, the person wouldn't know the answer. He/She would just say the vehicle seems higher quality. In this example, the headliner accomplished it's purpose by giving the person a higher quality feel without the person even realizing it was the headliner.
I think God wants us to live our Christian life similar to a headliner. He wants us to serve Him with a high standard of quality, while making sure we focus all of the attention back to Him. You see, while we are serving God, if people are focusing on us and our accomplishments instead of God, we are actually distracting them from our main goal, which should be to focus people on God.
When we serve or volunteer in the church, do we sometimes get upset because people don't seem to show their gratefulness to us for what we do? When we serve God on a daily basis, do we get upset because people aren't telling us how great we are? If so, we should probably take a step back and realize why we serve God.
If we are serving God with the main goal of focusing people on Him, why are we so focused on ourselves? Why are we constantly looking to be compensated? Why do we take the attitude of "they owe me now because of what I've done"? If our goal is to focus people on God, then the thing that should give us satisfaction is when we see others focusing on God as a result of what we do!! That's the goal, isn't it?
So, today, let's be a headliner! Let's make sure to serve in a way that helps people focus on God, instead of looking for people to focus on us for our accomplishments. Then, when we see people starting to focus on God, let's use that as our motivation to keep moving forward!
