Whose Glory Am I Living For?

Friday, October 9, 2026 | Pastor Mark Johnson | Host: Mark Burns

Program Summary

Pastor Mark Johnson continues the Friday room-of-friends discussion of biblical humility. Through Jesus' teaching about worry, Psalm 75, Proverbs 3, and the call to give God glory, he explains that humility means recognizing God as provider, submitting to His direction, and returning honor to Him. A personal account of initially refusing help during his wife's bed rest shows how pride can block receiving God's provision. The discussion also explores jealousy over position, family priorities, biblical calling, and trusting God with outcomes.

Key Takeaways

Scripture References

Quote of the Day

“The humble heart is the heart that lives for God's honor.”

Broadcast Notes

Pastor Mark recalls how church members offered meals, cleaning, and childcare while his wife was confined to bed. His first response was to refuse, until his mother urged him to accept their help. The group connects this experience to worry, God's provision, jealousy, family and ministry priorities, and honoring God in every action. The conclusion asks listeners whose glory they are living for.

❤️ Practical Applications

Today's Challenge

This weekend, read James 4 and 1 Corinthians 10:31. Ask whose glory you are living for, then take one concrete step of humility and thank God for His provision.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for being my provider. Forgive me when pride makes me reject help or worry as though everything depends on me. Teach me to accept Your provision with gratitude, to obey Your Word, and to put my family and responsibilities in their proper place. When I make mistakes, give me humility to admit them. Let my words, work, and relationships honor Jesus rather than myself. In His name, Amen.

About Today's Speaker

Pastor Mark Johnson serves at Calvary Church in Springfield and regularly leads the Friday Mark & Friends Bible study, bringing practical biblical teaching to everyday life.

About Today's Host

Mark Burns is General Manager of the WLUJ Family of Stations and Great News Radio Network and host of Mark & Friends, with decades of Christian radio and ministry experience.

Proofread Broadcast Transcript

Everyone loves you. We hope that it's fair. worry about having something to eat, drink or wear.

Isn't life more than food or clothing? Look at the birds in the sky. They don't plant or harvest. They don't even store grain in barns.

Yet your Father in Heaven takes care of them. Aren't you worth much more than birds? Can worry make you live longer? Why worry about clothes? Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes, but I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them.

God gives such beauty to everything that grows in the fields, even though it is here today and thrown into a fire tomorrow. God will surely do even more for you. Why do you have such little faith? Don't worry and ask yourselves, will we have anything to eat? Will we have anything to drink? Will we have any clothes to wear? Only people who don't know God are always worrying about such things.

Your Father in Heaven knows you need all of these. But more than anything else put God's work first and do what He wants. Then the other things will be yours as well.

What are some of the typical things that we are tempted to worry about? Money. How others see us. Anything else? Job.

How are we going to pay our rent? Health. Relationships. How people see us.

Here is one of the great gifts of humility. When I depend on God I don't worry the way I used to worry. I know what to do when worry comes my way because God is my provider.

Mankind is not my provider. My job is not my provider. My own abilities are not my provider.

God is my provider. So Jesus goes through this list of things that people worry about. You worry about how you dress.

You worry about your food. God provides all of that for the birds of the air and you are more important than them. Can I rest in the fact that God is my provider? That doesn't mean I don't have a role to play in how He provides for me, but I recognize He will give me the opportunity to do those.

He will provide. Am I too prideful to take provision when it comes my way? When my wife, we were expecting our son and we just moved into a new house. We went to the doctor the day after we moved into the new house and he told her, you have a choice.

You can go straight to the hospital and stay there for the next three months or you can go home and go to bed for the next three months. So we just moved into a new house. We have three little kids, a fourth one coming and she's in bed.

And that Sunday, a couple of ladies from the church came to me and said to me, we understand what's going on in your life. We want to help. We want to bring some food over.

We're going to come over and help clean the house. We're going to get some guys to come mow the yard. We're going to get some people to take the kids out and do things with them.

And I looked at them and said, I don't need any of that. I'm fine. I'm fine.

I'm fine. What'd your wife say? She was home in bed. She didn't say anything.

I'm fine. A few minutes later, my mom came to me and said to me, these ladies want to help you get off your high horse. Let them help you.

The next three months, they wonderfully helped us and did things. My pride was in the way. Instead of just receiving what God was offering to me through some ladies who wanted to help.

Sometimes we reject God's direction because we're too prideful to receive it. But in all of our life, we need to be able to look and say, why am I worried? Why am I worried? Why am I sleepless tonight? Isn't God my provider? Does God love me or doesn't He love me? His word says He loves you. Am I getting in the way of His provision some way? Or am I open to His provision in my life? Pastor Mark, I'm thinking how many men can identify with a suggestion or a recommendation that their wives make and they just want to discard it and then find themselves lost or why didn't I listen to my wife? So that's form of pride.

Pride gets in our way. It gets in our way of letting God provide for us sometimes. So the call is for us to recognize the provision when it comes, to give glory to God for it when it comes, and trust God in it in the middle of the darkness.

So here's another place. Psalm 75, 6 says this, no one from the east or the west or from the desert can exalt a man, but it is God who judges. He brings one down.

He exalts another. What does that teach us about pride and humility? According to this verse, He places me according to His will. He lifts me to the places He wants me to be in.

He keeps me from places He doesn't want me to be in. Jealousy of somebody else's place is a lack of humility. When I become jealous because that person gets more attention, that person has a higher position.

I should be in that position. Why am I not given that opportunity? That is a statement of pride that I think I deserve something that God really provides. When I'm in those places of authority, it's prideful to look down on others because God's put me in that position and He can remove me.

My responsibility is to work faithfully at what is before me, prepare for what God has called me, and let God do the rest. Can I rest in the fact that God is my provider? Proverbs 3, 6 says this, I am in all your ways, and how many of my ways? All our ways. Acknowledge Him, and He will make your path straight.

He's saying there, if you do it my way, I'll straighten things out in front of you. I'll help you. Do not be wise in your own eyes.

Fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. How does this impact us with pride? When I am subject to God, I can rest in the outcome.

Am I subject to God? Or am I trying to do it in my own abilities? Can I rest in the outcome when the outcome doesn't seem to be going the way I want it to? Sometimes it doesn't go the way I want it to. Can I rest in that outcome and say, you're God, I'm trusting in you? When wrestling with right and wrong, what's the right thing to do? Do I trust God or do I not? We've just seen something horrendous happen in our culture where this guy who was, I think he was on American Idol, a praise and worship leader, and he kills his wife. So how does a man come to this decision? I'm a praise and worship leader.

I lead people in the presence of God. How do I get to a decision that says, I'm going to try to kill my wife and get by with it? That's pride. That's not trusting God.

That's going selfishly our own direction. It happens. It's why people fall in sexual immorality.

All these things happen because of pride. So he makes the direction of my life clearer. And it may not be something as dramatic as this.

It may be that the man who gets so caught up in a hobby, playing golf, fishing, doing stuff, that he neglects his family. And because he neglects his family and doesn't pay attention to what God would tell him to do for his own pleasure, for his own hobbies, for his own things, that he misses the direction of God. Instead of his path being straight, his path becomes painful.

Are there other places like that where we can miss God? Absolutely. I've seen people that are called to the Lord's service and they're so focused on that, that their family starts to suffer. And if you try to talk to them like, oh, you're tempting me.

You know, God's given me this calling. I'm going, I don't think so, because the Bible says it's supposed to be God first, then your family. There's just another way where pride can get in the way.

When my wife and I had our first child, we sat down and we talked. And we came to this decision that if our children could not live for God while we were pastors, then we would take time off from being pastors and pastor our children. I would say to any pastor listening, if your children aren't living for God today, your first call to pastor is to pastor your children.

If you can't pastor your children, can you really pastor the church? That's a hard word, but that's a word right out of Timothy to us, of what is the priority in our life? What do I have direction with? I am not called to sacrifice my children on the altar of ministry. God has already done that. He's already given his son.

We don't have to. And so the call for us is to be clear to God's path for our life in all of these areas. And that can be a hard word for some people to hear.

But I'm not called to spend all of my time, and the church shouldn't demand all of my time, to the neglect of my family. Mark, when you began, I wrote down biblical humility, but now biblical calling too. And I think the importance, or the truth that you're speaking is, biblically, as followers of Jesus, we are to be led differently.

And there is a difference between just showing humility versus showing biblical humility. And I think the same, there's such a thing as a calling, but there's a greater thing called a biblical calling. I cannot fulfill God's calling by neglecting God's principles.

God's principles have to lead my life in all callings that we have, in all things that we do. God's principles have to outweigh all of those things. The Bible says in Psalm 119, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

That plays true when I'm young and when I'm old. That plays true when I'm single and when I'm married. That plays true when I'm in ministry or when I'm working in a secular workplace.

His word is a lamp unto our feet. God's calling you to do it, but it's against the Bible. It's not God calling you to do it.

The fruit of it has to be true. It has to be true. And if I'm causing damage to my highest ministries, it's not being true.

You mentioned earlier how God can provide and yet also take away, and I wrote down Nebuchadnezzar as somebody that was so full of himself, and then what happened? He was eating grass and nails were growing long and hair and it was a mess. And then when he finally cried out to God again, he was restored. But God's the one that can shift those circumstances.

Mark, we touched on this a bit last week, but I want to come back to it. First Corinthians 10.31 says this. So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

What does that mean? For his honor, to show his honor. How does a rose show the glory of God? It shows the glory of God in its beauty and its smell. It's a wonderful creation of God.

It shows God's wisdom. When we live our life, whatever we're doing, we're showing God's wisdom. We're living for God's glory.

Colossians 3.17 says something very similar. Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. The humble heart is the heart that lives for God's honor.

So how do I drive down the street? How do I react when somebody cuts me off? I know how my flesh wants to react. You can see all the time when you cut somebody off how people's flesh wants to react. How do I react? How do I react in the places of life where things go against me? Do I react with the spirit of self and the flesh, or do I react in a way that shows the honor and the glory of God in how we face? When I make a mistake, do I make excuses for it, or do I admit, boy, I blew it there, I messed up there.

Forgive me, I'm just human. Forgive me, I really blew it. How do I approach those things in life? When we're not called to live for our honor, we're called to live for His.

So biblical humility, which we just talked about, Mark, recognizes our dependence on God, is subject to God, and attributes all honor to God. So to all you singers, all you musicians, and you get up and you sing a song, maybe the congregation applauds you, maybe people come up to you after service, oh, you move me so much today, you bless me so much today. Does that honor belong to you, or does it belong to God? Who should get that honor? Do you keep it? Do you get puffed up? Well, what would they do in this church without me? How would they get by without me? Well, guess what? When Judas got thrown out, they had a guy waiting in the wings.

God always has somebody to take the place. God's not dependent on any of us. I heard a guy say once, the graveyard is filled with indispensable people.

It's filled with people who thought they can't get by without me. The day comes when the world's going to get by without us. God will always supply.

Wasn't it Mordecai that said to Esther, okay, if you don't take on the praying and rise up and go before the king, God will raise up or use somebody else. So we're dispensable. Yes.

Humility is the great gift of peace to us. It takes away worry. It takes away fear.

It takes away concern for what I need because God knows what my need is. I can trust him. I can obey him.

I can follow him. It puts my full trust in his word to tell me what's right and wrong. I can have peace in life.

I can know the right way to go when the world's telling me another way. If I'm humble before God and I recognize my full dependence on him. Yeah.

Worry is a good indicator of your spiritual condition because if you go through life going, I don't think God's got this, I have to deal with this myself versus, you know what? I don't have to sweat this. God's in control. I'm cool with whatever he does.

So we just, we just cycle all the way back around too. He's got the whole world in his hands. Yeah.

We can trust him. A good analysis of ourself. Did I get myself in this mess by disobeying him? If I get myself in a mess because I've disobeyed him, I have gotten myself in a mess.

Now he will rescue me from that mess, but sometimes the residuals of what I did go with me into the rest of my life. You take the person who gets some disease from drug abuse and they can get saved. They may get delivered from the abuse, but they may have to live with the results of that disease the rest of their life.

They may live with the results of a broken marriage the rest of their life because that drug abuse wrecked their marriage. Sometimes the results of our sin go on with us even as God rescues us. Yeah.

I'm thinking there are consequences to our sin, but we have a redemptive God that desires all to come to know him and he does desire to bring healing and hope and ultimately that relationship through Jesus so that we can spend eternity with him. Well listening friend, whose glory are you living for? Is it for yourself or for God? A great question for us to ponder this weekend. Maybe as we read through James chapter four again.

Remember there's only five chapters so Monday through Friday you can read it or read it five times this weekend, but saturate yourself with God's word. It'll have an impact and leave an impression on you and it'll guide you. It'll help you make determinations and judgments that'll be glorifying to him where he is honored and Jesus is raised up.

If you missed a portion of today's broadcast, want to hear it again or pass it on to a friend or utilize all the resources, the transcripts, the scripture that has been used, talking points, tips for living for Jesus, and even a prayer, you can stop by great news radio dot O-R-G and W-L-U-J dot O-R-G and click on the Mark & Friends tab and I think you'll be blessed. So if you haven't done that before, stop by great news radio dot O-R-G or W-L-U-J dot O-R-G and access the Mark & Friends tab and you can listen to this broadcast again and hopefully be ministered by many things that have been shared and said. Now get into church this Sunday, find a local believing church that lifts high the name of Jesus and proclaims God's word and you'll be blessed and you'll be used of God in that church, that body of believers.

So we encourage you to pray for your pastor and get in church this weekend. Well thanks for listening, thanks for being a part of our radio listening family. This is Mark Burns, Pastor Mark Johnson in a room of friends with the ministry of Great News Media.

God bless you and have a great day, night, and weekend.