Have you ever worked so hard at doing something to glorify God that you wound up working overtime on glorifying yourself rather than Him? An often completely unintentional "oops," but one that happens all too frequently among believers who wish to lead others into a heart relationship with God. Sometimes we get so busy being "glorifying" to God that we lose sight of what truly glorifies Him the most - letting Him lead. In trying to stand firm in our faith and devoted to our Lord, we accidentally get caught up in "my way" rather than God's way, and the results are rarely the glorifying outcome we started out trying to produce. I've come to realize something in recent months and it's that you can't bring glory to God for another person. That's the other person's job, yet so often we try to multi-manage lives and wind up living everyone else's life but our own. It's absolutely exhausting, but it doesn't have to be if we'll just stay focused on living our own path, bringing glory to God through our own life, and staying true to our own convictions while accepting that everyone's convictions are not always our own. It sounds easy enough, but it's more difficult than it sounds when you're madly in love with Christ and want the whole world to feel what you feel. Instead, when you find yourself wanting to show God to another person, your zeal might really only wind up showing off you rather than showing God. In our quest to "help" people "get" God the way we do in our own hearts, we wind up preventing them from "getting" anything at all, and in the process we accidentally put ourselves in the role only God can fill. You can't cause another person to "just get it" as you do; they have to get it on their own and on the timetable set between them and God, so just get this - trying to force someone to "get" God the way you do usually results only in repelling them away from the very God you're trying to cause them to get.
