I’ve been thinking about Psalm 106:20 for a little over a week now and just in case this verse is not in your list of memorized verses (it was not in mine) it says, “They exchanged their glory for the image of a grass-eating ox.” The King James says it almost the same way, but some other versions say something along the lines of “they exchanged the glory of God…” either way I think we get the point.

Two other verses that seem to go along with this are Jeremiah 33:16 and Romans 3:22. These verses are good because they highlight the fact that it is God who is our righteousness and glory. It is Him and faith in Him that provides the blessing. I am intentionally not using Romans 1:23 because that is more about nonbelievers. Anyway, that is the housekeeping portion.

What I want to get at is there are times when we as believers in the Almighty trade His glory which is our righteousness for something else. Sometimes it is as harsh and dramatic as the Israelites making a golden calf and other times it is more subtle but the result is the same. The result is we trade our righteousness and God’s glory for something less. We have this gift as Christians of Christ being our righteousness and our glory. He is the “thing” inside us that makes us something different. The indwelling and filling of the Holy Spirit in us sets us apart and makes us more than we could ever choose to be. His gift to us is Himself and sometimes when we are not careful we trade that for something less. Really that is dumb. Kind of like this story…

We recently moved to Knoxville, so I can work on my degree full-time. The move has been awesome and amazing. God has been lining up all sorts of blessings. Some big, some small, and some just to show off. One such blessing is that the school provides internet. This was an unexpected blessing and will save us about $90 a month. I did not know that when we moved up here, so I had originally ordered cable from another company (rhymes with Bomcast). Today I called to cancel said service. It was easy enough but the young woman I was on the phone with kept trying to get me to keep Bomcast as my service provider. I explained to her a few times that I do not need it because I already get service for free (well I mean at least not a monthly payment) so I don’t want to pay for it. She wanted me to trade my blessing for something I would need to pay for. She was trying to get me to purchase something that had been given to me.

That is what we do sometimes. We have gifts from God and we instead fall into pride thinking we created something. We have blessings and think we need to work for more. We have faith and think work is required to earn more, and so on. We trade our glory and our righteousness for something else.

We must be careful to always turn our eyes back to the Master. We must turn our gaze back to Christ and seek His glory and kingdom and in doing so we lessen the possibility of trading Him for less.

Just a thought,

Mike