Highest Honour

This post is excerpted from the new devotional book Highest Honour: 60 Days Toward Honouring God With Your Whole Life, by Kenosi Molato and S. E. Freeman.

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Every day of our lives we are faced with decisions. Sometimes they are big decisions and sometimes they are small decisions. Each decision is important because they open a door that one can take to either honour or dishonour God.

To give God the highest honour, is to give him first place. It means that there is no thing more important in your life than pleasing Him. It is to have no thing or person that is above God. To have anything above God in your life is to have another ‘god’ – an idol, and that is breaking the very first of God’s 10 commandments (Exodus 20). Nothing is more important than giving God the Highest Honour in your life.

Part of making choices which honour God, is first learning what is honourable before God. We can get busy doing ‘good things’ but if it is not what God wants us to do, then we will not be actually loving, obeying, pleasing and honouring Him in the way He wants us to.

What is it that honours God and would please Him? Our culture might tell us certain things are right to do, but we must find out what God says is right to do – what honours Him. To not do what pleases God is sinning against God. When we sin against God we dishonour Him.

When we choose to please people over God, or desire people’s approval over God’s approval, or are more concerned about what people think and how they will treat us over what God thinks, we are sinning against God.

It makes God’s heart sad when His children are not doing what pleases Him and what He knows is for our good.

When we honour God, God says He will reward us with honour. But if we don’t honour God, He says we will get shame and disgrace from Him like a curse.

God has already given us a position of great honour by being counted ‘in Christ’, as part of being born again into His family, in the position of a ‘son’. We have been saved from the greatest curse of eternal shame and separation from God, and been given the great gift of Christ living in and through us. But we all know that when we are born into our earthly family we are expected to live in such a way that is consistent with the honour of our families and our family name. How much more, when we are born again into our spiritual everlasting family – forever as God’s children, must we make every effort to be sure to live according to God’s family honour and the honour of His name.

In fact, we don’t desire to honour God to try to gain a position in His family, but because we already have been given a great position we didn’t deserve, through Christ. We want to allow Christ, who is the perfectly honourable One, who now lives within us, to live out through us. We want to enjoy the blessings and favour of that honour we have been given to the maximum, and not bring shame on God’s name and on His family and thus on ourselves, and bring sadness to God’s Heart.

The first step to always enjoying that honour and making sure we honour God and His name and family, is humility.