Are You Building Real Honour or Just Polishing Your Reputation?

Scrolling past another success story at midnight while your own sacrifice feels invisible? That promotion went to someone who lied. That award went to someone who cheated. And you’re lying there wondering if integrity is just expensive naivety. But what if the game everyone’s winning is rigged in a way they don’t realise yet? What if you’re accumulating something they can’t see—something that will matter long after their trophies turn to dust?

Introduction

Daily Biblical Reflection – Verse for Today (12th October 2025)

Forwarded every morning by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, upon whom Johnbritto Kurusumuthu wrote reflections.

“Whose offspring are worthy of honour? Human offspring. Whose offspring are worthy of honour? Those who fear the Lord. Whose offspring are unworthy of honour? Human offspring. Whose offspring are unworthy of honour? Those who break the commandments.”

Ecclesiasticus 10:19

[Watch today’s reflection](https://youtu.be/5Stk1-7mDDs?si=5_roOXZrdPBCn66O)

Grace and peace to you, dear reader.

Every morning, His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan forwards a verse that demands more than casual reading—it requires wrestling, questioning, and honest reckoning with how we’re actually living. Today’s passage from Ecclesiasticus confronts us with a paradox that sounds like a riddle: Are human beings worthy of honour or not? The verse seems to contradict itself, repeating the same question with opposite answers.

But that repetition is precisely the point. It’s designed to stop us mid-scroll, mid-thought, mid-excuse. Because the uncomfortable truth is this: being human isn’t enough. Biology doesn’t determine honour. Birth doesn’t guarantee substance. The raw material is the same for all of us, but what we build with our humanity—whether we become more real or progressively more hollow—depends entirely on the choices we’re making right now.

This isn’t ancient philosophy disconnected from your Tuesday morning commute or Thursday afternoon meeting. This is about the honour you’re building or destroying every time you choose between what’s convenient and what’s true, between what advances your career and what honours God, between the approval you can see and the weight you can’t.

I have reflected deeply on these daily verses under the spiritual guidance of Dr. Ponnumuthan, and what emerges isn’t comfortable theology meant to reassure us we’re doing fine. It’s a mirror held up to our actual lives, asking the one question we’d rather avoid: Which honour are you actually building?

Let’s wrestle with this together.

The Honour That Weighs Something

You’re lying in bed, unable to sleep, staring at your phone. It’s almost midnight when you see the post: your former coworker—the one who lied to clients, who threw others under the bus, who everyone knew cut every possible corner—just got named Executive of the Year. The photos show him on stage, holding a crystal trophy, his smile impossibly wide. Three hundred people liked it in the first hour.

You turn off your phone and stare at the ceiling. Six months ago, you reported a billing error that your manager told you to ignore. You fixed it anyway. It cost the company money. It cost you your bonus. Half your team still won’t eat lunch with you.

Your hands are clean. Your bank account is smaller. And right now, at 11:52 PM, you’re wondering if you made the stupidest decision of your career.

This is the question that Ecclesiasticus 10:19 is actually asking: What kind of honour matters? The verse says, “Whose offspring are worthy of honour? Human offspring. Whose offspring are worthy of honour? Those who fear the Lord. Whose offspring are unworthy of honour? Human offspring. Whose offspring are unworthy of honour? Those who break the commandments.”

Read it again. It sounds like it’s contradicting itself. Human offspring are worthy of honour—except when they’re not? We’re all honourable—except some of us aren’t?

The confusion is the point. The verse is designed to make you stop and think: Being human isn’t enough. You need something more.

Where This Verse Came From

Ecclesiasticus—also called Sirach—was written around 180 BCE in Jerusalem by a teacher named Ben Sira. He was writing during a crisis. Greek culture was flooding into Jewish territory, bringing new ideas about what made someone honourable: athletic achievement, philosophical education, social sophistication, and power connections.

Young Jewish men were abandoning their traditional practices—not because they stopped believing in God, but because Greek honour was visible, immediate, and career-advancing. They could see it working. They could spend it. Their neighbours who embraced Greek culture were getting promotions, making connections, and climbing social ladders.

Ben Sira was watching his students ask a very reasonable question: If honouring God means staying poor and irrelevant while people who ignore God get rich and powerful, what’s the point?

He wrote this book to answer that question. And his answer was harder than his students wanted to hear: The honour you can see and spend isn’t the honour that lasts. There’s a different kind of honour—something heavier, more real, more permanent. But you have to believe it exists before you can build it.

What the Words Actually Mean

The word Ben Sira uses for “fear”—”yirah” in Hebrew—doesn’t mean being scared of God like you’re scared of a violent parent. It means the sharp intake of breath when you suddenly realise you’re standing at the edge of a cliff. It’s the moment everything clicks into focus. You see clearly for the first time. And that clarity changes how you move.

Fear of the Lord means recognising that God’s reality is actual reality. Not one opinion among many. Not a nice idea for spiritual people. The way things actually are. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. You have to adjust everything else accordingly.

The word for “honour”—”kavod”—literally means “weight” or “heaviness.” It’s the opposite of being lightweight, insubstantial, hollow. When ancient merchants put items on a scale, “kavod” was what registered. What had substance. What was actually there versus what just looked impressive.

So when Ben Sira asks whose offspring have “kavod”, he’s asking: Who has real substance? Who actually weighs something in the cosmic economy? Who’s building something that will register on the scales that matter?

His answer cuts both ways: You’re human—congratulations, you’re part of the species. But that biological fact alone gives you no weight. You can be human and accumulate enormous substance, or you can be human and become progressively more hollow. Same raw material. Completely different outcomes.

Everything depends on what you do with the humanity you’ve been given.

The Part We’d Rather Skip

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Honour isn’t distributed equally just because we’re all human. It’s not a participation trophy.

Now, before you misunderstand: every human being is made in God’s image, and that gives everyone inherent dignity and worth. That’s foundational. That’s non-negotiable.

But Ben Sira is making a different point. He’s saying that the honour that will matter in the end—the weight that registers in eternity—is something you build or destroy through your choices. You can deface God’s image in yourself. You can make yourself progressively more hollow, less substantial, less real.

The verse doesn’t say, “Those who break the commandments are still learning” or “Those who break the commandments had difficult circumstances.” It says they’re unworthy of honour. Period.

That sounds harsh. It is harsh.

But isn’t it also true? Haven’t you watched someone hollow themselves out through repeated bad choices? Haven’t you known people who started vibrant and substantial, and then through years of selfishness or dishonesty or cruelty, became somehow less present? Still talking, still moving, still posting on social media—but the weight, the substance, the thereness had drained away?

The commandments aren’t arbitrary rules God invented to test our obedience. They’re the instruction manual for human beings. They describe how we actually work. Breaking them isn’t just rule-violation—it’s self-destruction. It’s taking the raw material of your humanity and systematically destroying what makes it substantial.

St. Augustine understood this from personal experience. Before his conversion, he was brilliant, successful, admired, and advancing rapidly in his career. He was also, by his own later admission, becoming progressively more hollow. In his “Confessions”, he describes those years with devastating honesty: “I was in love with my own ruin, though I convinced myself I was sophisticated.”

He could feel himself losing substance, becoming the kind of person who was present at parties but absent from reality. What changed him wasn’t moral willpower—it was the sudden recognition that the honour he’d been chasing was smoke, and the honour he’d been running from was the only thing that could make him real.

What Dr. Ponnumuthan Has Seen

Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, who forwards these verses (for writing reflections) each morning, has spent decades as a bishop and educator watching students face this exact choice in real time: fear the Lord and risk looking foolish to your peers, or choose what makes immediate practical sense and watch yourself slowly evaporate.

What strikes him most is how undramatic it looks in the moment. Nobody wakes up and decides, “Today I’ll become hollow.” It happens through small decisions that seem completely reasonable at the time:

The small lie that avoids conflict. The corner is cut because everyone else is doing it. The commandment is quietly ignored because it’s inconvenient right now. The compromise that seems minor in the moment.

Each choice shaves off a little more weight. Each choice makes you slightly less substantial. And you don’t notice it happening until one day you look in the mirror and realise you’re not quite there anymore.

He tells the story of a former student—we’ll call him Miguel—who graduated top of his class and landed a prestigious position at an investment firm. Miguel was brilliant, ambitious, and Catholic. He went to Mass most Sundays. He wasn’t hostile to faith—he’d just filed it under “personal beliefs” rather than “operating principles.”

Three years into his job, Miguel’s firm asked him to structure a deal that was technically legal but would financially ruin dozens of small investors. When Miguel hesitated, his supervisor said what people have been saying since Ben Sira’s time: “This is how the world works. If you want honour here, if you want respect, if you want to matter, you do what successful people do.”

Miguel did the deal. He got his promotion. He bought the car he’d been wanting. He posted photos on social media showing his success.

Six months later, he called Dr. Ponnumuthan at 2 AM, barely able to speak coherently. “I can’t feel anything,” he kept saying. “I look at my life and it all looks right on paper, but I can’t feel anything. It’s like I’m watching myself from outside and the person I’m watching isn’t real.”

What Miguel was experiencing—though he didn’t have words for it—was the loss of “kavod”. He’d traded weight for smoke. He’d chosen honour according to one system and lost it according to the only system that produces actual substance.

The story doesn’t have a neat ending. Miguel didn’t quit his job and join a monastery. He’s still working through what repentance looks like when you can’t undo the harm you caused. But he’s working through it. He’s choosing, slowly and painfully, to rebuild weight.

This is the pattern Dr. Ponnumuthan sees repeatedly: People don’t usually reject God’s commandments because they hate God. They just can’t see how obeying them could possibly lead to the honour they desperately want. The honour that looks real is standing right there, tangible and immediate. The honour that is real requires faith in an invisible economy.

The Mirror Test: What Honour Are You Actually Building?

Not theoretically. Not in the version of your life you present at church or post on social media. In your real life—the Tuesday afternoon, nobody’s watching, decision-by-decision life.

When you see news about the coworker who got ahead through methods you refused to use, what honour are you trusting? When you’re choosing between the response that would feel satisfying and the response that would be true, which honour system runs your calculations? When you’re deciding whether to report something you witnessed, whether to have the difficult conversation, whether to keep the commitment that’s no longer convenient—which honour are you building?

Fearing the Lord means living as if God’s evaluation is what creates weight. Not because other people’s opinions don’t matter—we’re social creatures, we need community—but because when those two systems of honour conflict, you know which one measures reality.

This sounds simple until you’re standing there in the actual moment. Until you’re choosing between the promotion that requires ethical compromise and the clean conscience that might mean professional stagnation. Until you’re the parent explaining to your child why their friend’s family has nicer things because their dad makes different choices. Until you’re the student accepting the lower grade because you won’t cheat, watching cheaters graduate with honours.

That’s when Ben Sira’s question becomes visceral: Whose offspring are worthy of honour?

The world shouts its answer everywhere you look. Your bank account suggests its answer. Your social media feed demonstrates its answer. They all agree: honour comes to people who do what works, who play the game skillfully, who understand that commandments are optional guidelines for people who can’t figure out how to succeed on their own.

But you—standing there at midnight, hands clean, heart confused—you’re the one who has to decide which honour you’re building toward.

Where We Get It Wrong

Three misunderstandings I hear constantly:

First mistake: “I’m a good person. I don’t need religious rules to have honour. I treat people decently, I’m successful, and I’m raising good kids. That’s honour enough.”

This confuses being pleasant with being obedient. But the commandments aren’t supplementary to basic decency—they’re what make decency coherent. Without them, you’re inventing ethics as you go, which always means inventing ethics that serve your interests. You might be nice. You won’t have “kavod”.

Second mistake: “God grades on a curve. As long as I’m better than average, I’m fine. That’s honourable enough.”

This treats honour like a ranking system—if you’re ahead of enough people, you win. But the verse doesn’t ask who’s more honourable than whom. It asks about actual worth, actual weight, and actual substance. You can be less terrible than your neighbour and still be hollow.

Third mistake: “I follow all the rules. I go to church, say prayers, and keep commandments. Where’s my honour? Why do I feel overlooked?”

This gets closer but misses the heart. Fearing the Lord isn’t about rule-following for its own sake—it’s about that reorienting recognition that God’s reality is reality, and everything else is just opinion. You can externally keep every commandment while internally calculating honour by the world’s math. If you are, you’re still building smoke.

What This Actually Costs

Here’s what the verse demands: surrendering control over your own reputation.

When you choose to fear the Lord over courting human approval, you lose the ability to manage how you’re perceived. You can’t spin the story. You can’t position yourself strategically. You can’t make sure everyone understands you’re actually very reasonable, not like those rigid fundamentalists.

You might look like a fanatic to people who think God is a hobby. You might look like a failure to people who define success as corner offices and influence. You might look naive to people who pride themselves on being realistic.

And you have to be okay with that. Not seeking persecution, not wearing it like a badge—just genuinely accepting that God’s evaluation might leave you looking foolish to people using the wrong measuring system.

St. John Chrysostom wrote, “If you are ridiculed for righteousness, you have gained a crown. If you are honoured for wickedness, you have suffered the greatest dishonour.” He was writing to Christians watching as less scrupulous neighbours prospered while they struggled. He was trying to tell them: the honour you can see isn’t the honour that weighs anything.

But accepting this requires faith that feels impossible most days. It requires believing that invisible weight is more real than visible success. It requires trusting that the economy you can’t see will outlast the economy that’s currently writing paychecks and handing out promotions.

It requires becoming someone who can sleep at night even when the world’s verdict says you’re losing.

One Story That Shows Everything

I know a woman—call her Sarah—who spent fifteen years building a career in pharmaceutical sales. She was exceptional. Top performer, management track, sent to represent the company at major conferences.

Then she noticed something. The drug her company most aggressively promoted—the one tied to the bonuses making her wealthy—wasn’t actually the best option for most patients. There was a cheaper alternative with fewer side effects that worked just as well for the majority of cases. But it came from a competitor and generated a fraction of the revenue.

Sarah started recommending the alternative when appropriate. Her sales numbers dropped. Her manager expressed concern. She was told, in carefully worded corporate language, that her job was to represent her company’s products, not play doctor.

She had three kids, a mortgage, and ageing parents who needed financial support. She was good at this job. She could convince herself that doctors were the real decision-makers, that she was just providing information, that this was how the industry worked.

She quit instead.

The next year was brutal. She freelanced, cobbling together income from consulting that paid a fraction of her former salary. Her kids asked why they couldn’t do things their friends were doing. Former colleagues stopped returning calls—not from malice, just from the awkwardness of not knowing what to say to someone whose choice implicitly judged theirs.

The worst part, she told me, wasn’t the financial stress. It was the constant whisper: What if you’re wrong? What if you’re being self-righteous? What if the honour you’re trying to build doesn’t exist, and you’re just making your family suffer for a principle?

Five years later, she runs a nonprofit helping patients navigate medication options and insurance. She makes a quarter of what she used to make. She works twice as hard.

And when you’re in her presence, you can feel the weight of her. The substance. The realness. She has “kavod”.

Her former colleagues in pharmaceutical sales—many are lovely people, honestly. But when you’re around them, there’s something slightly translucent about their presence. They’re there, but not fully there. They’ve made themselves lightweight.

This is what the verse describes. Not a morality tale where good people get rich and bad people get punished, but the actual mechanics of how human beings gain or lose substance.

What This Looks Like Tuesday Morning

When your alarm goes off and you have to decide who you’ll be today:

If you’re a student: It’s the moment when everyone’s texting answers before the test, and you leave your phone in your bag. Everyone knows you’re the one not cheating. Some respect it. Some think you’re stupid. You have to show up to class the next day either way.

If you’re in business: It’s the meeting where everyone’s nodding along with the decision you know is wrong, and you’re the one who says, “Can we talk about this more carefully?” You become the bottleneck, the person who slows things down, the one who’s not a team player.

If you’re a parent: It’s telling your kid no when all their friends’ parents are saying yes, knowing you’re making yourself the bad guy, knowing your kid might genuinely resent you. It’s explaining why your family’s standards are different, without being able to explain it in ways that will make sense until they’re thirty.

If you’re single: It’s ending a relationship that feels good in most ways but requires compromising something central. It’s facing the terrifying possibility that there might not be another relationship, that this might have been your chance, that faithfulness to the commandments might mean staying alone.

If you’re married: It’s the forgiveness that costs you your sense of justice. Or the confrontation that costs you your sense of peace. It’s choosing what builds actual intimacy over what maintains comfortable distance, even when intimacy is harder.

This is the daily choice of “kavod” over smoke. The daily decision to build weight rather than polish the shell.

The Question That Will Follow You

In fifty years—or five hundred, or five thousand—when all current markers of honour have evaporated, when positions and promotions and social media counts have become meaningless, when you’re standing before the One who measures actual weight: what honour will you have built?

Not what honour will you claim? Not what honour will you have performed? What honour will you have actually accumulated through daily, unglamorous, often invisible choices to fear the Lord more than you fear irrelevance?

Ben Sira understood what Dr. Ponnumuthan keeps telling his students and what Sarah learned in her year of brutal doubt: the honour that comes from fearing the Lord isn’t something you acquire once and relax into. It’s something you’re building or destroying with each choice.

Every time you choose God’s evaluation over the world’s applause, you add weight. Every time you choose what works over what’s true, you shave off substance.

You’re becoming more real or less real. More there or less there. More weighted with “kavod” or more hollowed into smoke.

The world will measure you by its system right up until that system stops existing. And on that day—when all smoke clears and only weight remains—you’ll discover whether you spent your life building something real or polishing something hollow.

Those who fear the Lord will find they’ve become substantial, solid, present. They’ve been accumulating weight all along, even when it looked like losing.

Those who broke the commandments, who chose smoke over substance, who played by the only rules that seemed to matter? They’ll discover they’ve evaporated. They won’t have honour. They won’t have weight. They’ll have the sickening recognition that they spent their entire existence building a self-made of nothing at all.

The choice is being made right now. Not in some future crisis, but in this moment, the next moment, the Tuesday morning moment when nobody’s watching and nothing seems at stake.

Everything is at stake.

Which honour are you building?

Conclusion

The Weight You Carry Forward

So here you are, at the end of this reflection, and the question remains exactly where it started: Whose offspring are worthy of honour?

Not whose offspring “should be” worthy. Not whose offspring we “hope” are worthy. Whose offspring “actually are” worthy of honour—the kind of honour that weighs something when everything else has burned away.

Ben Sira didn’t write this verse to make you feel inspired for thirty seconds before you return to business as usual. He wrote it because he was watching his students make choices that would determine whether they became more real or less real, more substantial or more hollow. He was watching them stand at the same crossroads you’re standing at right now.

Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan forwards these verses every morning because he’s spent his life watching the same pattern repeat: talented, brilliant, well-intentioned people who somehow make themselves disappear through a thousand small compromises. And rare, stunning individuals who become more solidly present, more weighted with kavod, through a thousand small obediences that looked foolish at the time.

The honour that comes from fearing the Lord isn’t something you feel immediately. It doesn’t show up in your bank account next month or your job title next year. It’s built in the invisible economy that operates beneath and beyond the world’s system of measurement. And that requires a kind of faith that feels impossible most days—faith that what you cannot see is more real than what you can, that weight you’re accumulating in secret will matter more than the reputation you’re managing in public.

But here’s what I’ve learned from watching people like Sarah, from listening to stories like Miguel’s, from observing the students Dr. Ponnumuthan has walked with through these exact decisions: the people who choose kavod over smoke don’t regret it. Not in the long run. They might regret it at 11:52 PM on a difficult Tuesday. They might regret it when the promotion goes to someone else. They might regret it when their kids ask why they can’t have what their friends have.

But ten years later? Twenty years later? When they look in the mirror and see someone who’s actually there, someone who hasn’t evaporated, someone who’s become more real instead of less real—they don’t regret it.

And the people who chose smoke? The ones who played the game brilliantly, who succeeded by every visible metric, who accumulated worldly honour while breaking God’s commandments? Some of them, like Miguel, wake up at 2 AM and realise they can’t feel anything anymore. They’ve erased themselves in the process of building themselves up.

This is your invitation—not to a spiritual experience that makes you feel good for a moment, but to a daily choosing that will either make you more real or make you disappear. Every moral decision you face today is an opportunity to add weight or shave off substance. Every moment when God’s commandments conflict with your convenience is a crossroads.

The world will measure you by its system right up until that system stops existing. And on that day—the day when smoke clears and only weight remains—you’ll discover what you actually built.

Those who feared the Lord will find they were building something all along, even when it looked like losing. Those who broke the commandments will discover they spent their entire existence constructing a self-made of nothing at all.

Ecclesiasticus 10:19 isn’t asking you to add this insight to your collection of spiritual thoughts. It’s asking you to make a choice that will echo in eternity: Which offspring will you be? The one who builds honour through fearing the Lord, or the one who loses honour through breaking His commandments?

The question isn’t theoretical. You’re answering it right now, with the choice you’ll make in the next hour, the next conversation, the next decision point when no one’s watching and nothing seems to be at stake.

Everything is at stake.

Build weight. Fear the Lord. Become real.

The honour that matters is waiting to be accumulated, one faithful choice at a time.

Prayer for Building True Honour

A Prayer for Those Choosing Weight Over Smoke

Heavenly Father,

You who measure not by the world’s scales but by the weight of our souls—we come before You tonight carrying the burden of choices we must make tomorrow.

We confess, Lord, that we are tired of looking foolish. We are weary of watching people who break Your commandments prosper while our obedience seems to cost us everything. We are afraid that the honour we’re building in secret doesn’t actually exist, that we’re sacrificing real opportunities for invisible rewards.

Forgive us for the moments we’ve traded substance for smoke. Forgive us for the compromises we justified, the corners we cut, the times we chose what worked over what was true. Forgive us for building our reputation while hollowing out our souls.

“Give us the fear of the Lord”—not terror, but that sharp recognition that Your reality is the only reality that lasts. Help us see clearly when we’re standing at the edge of the cliff, when one more step in the wrong direction will cost us more than we can afford to lose.

“Give us courage” for the Tuesday morning moments when no one’s watching and the right choice looks expensive. Give us strength to be the one who speaks up in the meeting, who reports the error, who ends the relationship, who walks away from the promotion that requires us to become someone we’re not.

“Protect our children” from inheriting our compromises. Let them see in us something solid, something real, something weighted with kavod. Don’t let our fear of their temporary disappointment rob them of parents who are actually present, actually substantial, actually there.

“Comfort those” who made the right choice and are now suffering the consequences. The ones who can’t pay their bills because they kept their integrity. The ones who lost relationships because they wouldn’t bend. The ones who are lying awake right now wondering if they’re fools. Whisper to them in the darkness that they’re building something the world cannot see but heaven is recording.

“Convict those” who are on the path Sarah almost stayed on, the path Miguel walked for too long. Wake them up before they erase themselves completely. Let them feel the hollowness before it’s too late to turn around. Send them a 2 AM moment of clarity that saves their souls.

“For those of us in the middle”—neither fully faithful nor completely lost—give us the honesty to see which direction we’re actually moving. Are we becoming more real or less real? More substantial or more hollow? Don’t let us lie to ourselves about which honour we’re actually building.

Lord Jesus, You chose the cross over the crown. You chose substance over smoke when every visible metric said You were losing. You became obedient unto death, and the Father exalted You with the name above every name—not because You played the game well, but because You refused to play it at all.

“Make us like You.” Not impressive. Not successful by worldly standards. Not honoured by the systems that are already crumbling. But real. Solid. Weighted with the kind of honour that registers on eternal scales.

Holy Spirit, “sustain us” in the long middle years when faithfulness feels like failure. When the wicked prosper and the righteous struggle. When we can’t see the weight we’re building and we’re tempted to go back to building smoke because at least smoke is visible.

Remind us that You see every choice made in secret. Every moment we chose truth over convenience, obedience over advancement, Your approval over human applause—You saw it. You recorded it. You’re building us into something that will outlast empires.

For His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, who faithfully forwards these verses each morning, and for all spiritual fathers and mothers who call us to substance when the world offers smoke—thank You. Give them endurance. Let them see the fruit of their labour. Don’t let them grow weary of speaking truth to a generation that prefers comfortable lies.

And for us, Lord—for all of us reading this prayer, standing at our own crossroads, making choices that will echo in eternity—give us what we need for tomorrow:

The clarity to see what we’re actually building.  

The courage to choose what actually matters.  

The faith to believe that invisible weight is more real than visible success.  

The endurance to keep choosing kavod over smoke, even when we’re the only ones who can see the difference.

Transform us, Father. Make us offspring worthy of honour—not because we’re impressive, but because we fear You. Not because we succeeded by the world’s metrics, but because we obeyed when obedience cost us everything.

Build in us the weight that will remain when everything else burns away.

Make us real.

Make us Yours.

We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, who is Himself the weight of glory, the substance of things hoped for, the honour that will never fade.

Amen.

“For momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”  

— 2 Corinthians 4:17-18​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Reflection Question to Carry With You:

In the next decision you face where obedience to God conflicts with worldly success, which honour will you choose to build—and are you prepared for what that choice will cost and what it will create?

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you as you build the honour that weighs in eternity.

In Christ,  

Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

Under the spiritual guidance of His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan

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