Glory to God alone

At the foot of his manuscripts, the composer would write three small letters: S.D.G. They stood for a Latin phrase meaning to God alone be the glory, and he signed them not only beneath his sacred works but beneath the secular ones too, the wedding pieces and the keyboard exercises and the music written for a prince's dinner. A short jotting in the margin of ordinary work, and it carries the last and widest of the Reformation's recoveries: soli Deo gloria, glory to God alone. The earlier solas had cleared the ground of salvation. This one reaches past the sanctuary into everything. Not just church and conversion, but eating, drinking, working, sleeping, the whole sprawling ordinariness of a life, all of it reoriented toward one aim. Everything comes from God, holds together through God, and bends back toward God, Paul wrote, so there is no leftover territory that belongs to something else. Reorientation, fully grown, is not a religious compartment bolted onto a life otherwise run for other purposes. It is a single direction, God's glory, set over the whole of it, the secular concerto signed to God no less than the cantata.

You may have assumed reorientation is finished once your church life is sorted, your beliefs settled, your Sundays in order. Soli Deo gloria refuses to let it stop there. It walks straight out of the sanctuary and into your Tuesday, into the meal you are about to eat, the work you would rather not do, the rest you feel guilty taking, the small pleasures you keep in a separate, lower drawer. All of it can be aimed upward. The composer signing even his dinner music to God was not being pious about trivial things; he was refusing the lie that most of life is too ordinary to matter to God. There is no sacred slice and secular remainder. The dishes, the spreadsheet, the commute, the ordinary afternoon, every one of them can be lifted as something offered. This is the widest bearing of all, and the most freeing: you are not living a small religious life inside a larger secular one. You are living one life, and its single aim is His glory.