All to the Glory of God

Grandma taught me how to mop a floor by hand. I never saw my grandma mop a floor any other way. It was the way it was: on hands and knees with a washcloth, a butter knife for the cracks between the floorboards, and a bucket of increasingly dirty water. It was a dreaded task when I was a child, but even twelve- year-old me could recognize (and take pride in) the beauty in the gleaming wood. Grandma would heave a sigh as she clambered to her feet and tossed the filthy water out the door. 

“Cleanliness is next to godliness!” she’d say.

“I don’t think that’s in the Bible, Grandma,” her know-it-all grandkids retorted.

“Well, you can’t complain about a clean floor,” she huffed back. And she was right. 

Fast-forward twenty years, and I didn’t do a good job of handing down her mopping skills. I excused myself due to a leg injury that made kneeling on the hardwood difficult. When my oldest was eight years old she saw me mop on my knees for the first time. She watched with wide eyes, then said: “How nice that mops were invented in my lifetime so we don’t have to do that anymore!” If only she knew!

In Adeline’s eyes it was impractical to mop a floor on hands and knees when a perfectly good stick mop sat in the closet. But truth is, I missed Grandma’s method. You see more clearly on your knees; you catch the dirt you’d miss if you were standing up. The slow back and forth of washcloth on wood takes longer, even takes more effort, but results in a cleaner floor. Does it really matter which method I use? In the grander scheme of things, probably not. Though Grandma’s view of cleanliness wasn’t biblical, her belief that unseen tasks deserve to be done well... is.

Grandma believed in hard work for hard work’s sake. Scripture talks about hard work too, but for a much deeper reason. In his letter to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul spent considerable time teaching the Corinthians how to love God well. In 1 Corinthians 10, he spoke about the importance of loving God by loving others. He commanded the Corinthian Christians not to put a cause of stumbling in the way of a weaker brother, to be willing to lay down their preferences and freedoms to encourage holiness in someone else. He concluded this section with a simple summary: 

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. — 1 Corinthians 10:31

In other words, commentator Matthew Henry writes, “In eating and drinking, and in all we do, we should aim at the glory of God, at pleasing and honouring him. This is the fundamental principle of practical godliness.”1

The natural product of a Christ-transformed heart is godliness, and a godliness pervading everything we do — including our daily routines.

Our daily routines contain some of the most repetitive, mundane, unseen things we do. This is where we are most likely to take shortcuts, to choose the easier route. And sometimes the easier route is the better choice for the season, but like Grandma said: “You can’t complain about a clean floor.” There is something satisfying about tending a home with excellence, not because people see you but because God gave a gift and you wish to glorify Him with it. David Guzik wrote on 1 Corinthians 10:31, “The purpose of our lives isn’t to see how much we can get away with and still be Christians; rather, it is to glorify God.”2 But what does it mean to glorify God? What does it mean to glorify God in the mundane work of mopping floors, when no one is there to see the difference or no one notices but you?

The word glory in Hebrew means “weight,” and to attribute glory to God is to give honor or weight (significance, reverence) to Him. In Exodus 33, Moses asked to see God’s glory and God replied, 

I will make all my goodness pass before you. — Exodus 33:19, emphasis mine

To glorify God is to attribute honor to Him, to point people to Him, and to exalt His goodness in the eyes of the world. So how do we do this through something as simple as the daily routines of home?

One answer is found in another epistle of Paul, this one to the church at Colossae:

Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him... Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. — Colossians 3:17, 23

These two verses are found about a paragraph apart in Paul’s letter. I’ve placed them together for ease of comparison. In the first line,

• Paul told us that everything — word and deed — is done in the name (authority) of Jesus and is worthy of thanksgiving. 

This includes the labor of every daily task! Remember, Paul wrote this encouragement to people who didn’t have dishwashers, powerful vehicles, and handheld computers at their fingertips. What we call mundane, boring, and repetitive would have been life-saving to people walking to work in physically laborious jobs, making every meal from scratch, and mending their own clothes. To Paul (and to God), the unseen necessary tasks of home are not unimportant. They are an act of worship. They bring glory to God.

Which brings me to the second verse. In verse 23, Paul told us to “work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” In context, Paul was talking to servants and slaves. The culture of Paul’s day depended in part on slave labor and indentured servanthood. The jobs these Christians held were necessary for survival, but they were not freely chosen. Yet Paul told them to work heartily, not out of obligation, resentment, or duty but out of love for a heavenly Master; one who loves and sees their work. 

Most of us are not tending to a home as indentured servants, but at times we may still feel a measure of obligation, resentment, and duty. Paul’s command to servants applies to us. Will we work heartily at home out of love for our Father, the giver of all good gifts? Or will we continue to look at the work of the home as an obligation — a dirty, necessary duty to be tolerated and endured? This is not the attitude of a Christian worker. Perhaps we need a better theology of work.

1. “Matthew Henry Commentary on the Whole Bible (Complete): 1 Corinthians 10,” Bible Study Tools, Salem Media Group, accessed November 14, 2023, https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries /matthew-henry-complete/1-corinthians/10.html.
2. David Guzik, “1 Corinthians 10—Idolatry Then and Now,” Enduring Word, 2018, https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/1-corinthians-10/.

Excerpted with permission from Every Home a Foundation by Phylicia Masonheimer, copyright Phylicia Masonheimer.

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Your Turn 

It turns out that the mundane parts of our lives that seem like wastes of time are really valuable. How we do the small, unseen things matters if we do them unto the Lord! God sees our faithfulness and worship and He values it! ~ Devotionals Daily