• Another way to think about living for the glory of God is through Jeremiah’s comment that we become like the thing we worship. Worship shapes identity: “what wrong did your fathers find in me… that they went after worthlessness and became worthless?” This idea runs throughout the Old Testament, hence Hosea 9:10 “they consecrated themselves to the thing of shame, and became detestable like the thing they loved,” and 2 Ki 17:5 “they went after false idols and became false.”
• Once your heart opens to some thing, or some-one, you are being shaped and directed by that new love. This is one way to apply Pascal’s “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Despite intentions, our lives are probably not a purely rational quest for truth and goodness. Often, due to some impulse in our hearts, we are far down a new road before the moment of rational self-awareness arrives. At that point, because intuitively we know our hearts are already invested in the new thing, we abuse our capacity for reason and scratch out some explanation for a decision that has, in fact, already been made. The heart had its reasons long before we laid the rational groundwork.
• So the Bible is, one way or another, always asking not what you think, but what you love: “for where your treasure is, there will you find your heart.” The religious behavior of the Rich Young Ruler was impeccable, but it said nothing about what he really worshiped. What he loved was his money, or more likely, the security and standing that money was able to give him.
• Spurgeon used to say the only thing necessary to avoid sin was “a strong pair of legs and the king’s highway.” Well sometimes, but the power of an unworthy love cannot be defeated by mere avoidance. There must be a greater love compared to which lesser loves appear lifeless and tiresome. God’s intention for us is that he would — eternally and entirely — be that love. For the person who does not yet know that love, he or she must come to a moment of crying out, “who will save me from this body of death!” For those of us who are past that point, he promises that we will seek him and we will find him, when we seek him with all our heart. Both are impossible apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, for which we should pray. Even now.
• Your life — today — is being conformed to that thing you worship, the thing you love. If you hope to be “conformed to the image of his son,” it will likely happen in proportion to your worship of him, the depth of your love for him. Start with this: he loves you, and gave himself for you. There is a sense in which you already have possession of his heart. Ask him for the ability to reciprocate. The heart has its reasons.