Our Purpose

Review:

Introduction of the new series: Our DNA: Understanding God’s design for His church.

DNA: references what is most fundamental to all living things. We are pursuing clarity on God’s design for His church. What is the church, why does it exist and how are we to live… to function.

We began with 3 presuppositions:

Christ is the Head of the Church

Christ Will Build His Church

Christ Gave a Mandate to His Church

Our purpose statement (it’s on our website):

Purpose: to pursue God’s glory in all things among all people

Definition of terms

Glory of God

Difficult to nail down into one definition

The Lexham Bible Dictionary Secular Usage

Secular Usage

In a secular sense, the Hebrew word for “glory” (כָּבוֹד, kavod) primarily means “weight,” referring to something substantial

The Lexham Bible Dictionary Secular Usage

In this sense, the term connotes honor and fame as coming from a social status that includes greatness, wealth, or power, and the acknowledgment of others.

Undeniable Presence

General Presence

Isaiah 6:3 ESV

And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

Tabernacling Presence

Exodus 25:8–9 ESV

And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.

So God’s glory, as it relates to His presence, it both comprehensive (it fills the whole earth) and personal (dwelling in our midst).

Humbling Majesty

Luke 2:9 ESV

And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.

The glory of God humbles people. It’s overwhelming. It’s breath-taking.

Revealing Holiness

Isaiah 6:5 ESV

And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

God’s glory is revealing. We fall short of it, and it therefore shines light on our sin.

But there’s something else

Perfect Goodness

Exodus 33:18–23 ESV

Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

The request: please show me your glory

The answer: I will make my goodness pass before you and will proclaim my name.

The glory of God is His expression of His own goodness, that is, of the fact that He is good. And how are we to understand His goodness?

Notice what God says to Moses: I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.

The glory of God is His expression of His goodness which displays the fact that He shows grace and mercy to people.

Then God instructed Moses to go cut 2 tablets of stone (Moses destroyed the first 2 out of anger over the golden calf), and come back up to the mountain the next morning. Moses did what God told him to do.

Exodus 34:5–7 ESV

The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, not clearing the guilty

this is God’s glory. God perfectly balances grace, mercy, love, forgiveness and justice

The glory of God is His expression of His goodness which displays the fact that He perfectly balances showing grace, mercy, love, forgiveness and justice to people.

But there’s something else

Christocentric

John 1:14 ESV

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

the Word is Jesus

Jesus perfectly displays the glory of God

As a perfect display of God’s glory, He is full of grace and truth

Jesus is the glory of God

In other words, Jesus is good, gracious, merciful, loving, forgiving, just and He showed all those qualities to His people. He continues to show all these things to His people. He is all these things to His people. He is the glory of God to His people. He is the glory of God to the whole earth.

So the glory of God is His

Undeniable presence

Humbling majesty

Revealing holiness

Perfect goodness

Christocentric Revelation

The glory of God is His humbling and majestic presence that proclaims His holiness through His perfect goodness in Jesus Christ.

Glorify

Glory is the noun that belongs to God.

Glorify is a verb. An action that is taken.

To glorify God is to honor or esteem Him

But that doesn’t help much

How is God glorified?

God glorifies Himself

John 12:28 ESV

Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

Jesus is in the garden in Gethsemane praying and this is how the Father answered. People who were nearby heard God’s answer in the form of thunder. God honors himself, He esteems Himself. He glorifies Himself.

God glorifies Himself by glorifying Jesus

John 13:32 ESV

If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.

Jesus had just declared that Son of Man (referring to Himself) and if He (Jesus) is glorified then God is glorified.

God is glorified through loving obedience

John 17:4 ESV

I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.

Jesus describes His act of glorifying God as obedience to Him. This is how God’s people glorify Him today. Loving obedience.

God is glorified through worship

Romans 15:9 ESV

and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.”

Singing praises to God, in response to who He is and what He has accomplished is how we glorify God.

So in summary

Glorifying God is giving Him the honor He is due through loving obedience and joyful worship.

So what we need to understand so that we will pursue God’s glory in all things among all people, is where God’s glory and our glorifying God fit into our lives because

FCF: Many in the church do not understand their purpose because they do not understand what the glory of God is and what it means to glorify God.

So to get clear on this we will go to

1 Corinthians 10:31 ESV

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

All of life centers on glory and glorifying

What do we need to understand so that our lives will reflect God’s glory?

So again, our purpose statement is to pursue God’s glory in all things among all people. In light of this, we need to understand

God’s Purpose

pursuing God’s glory is the purpose for which we have been created.

This is clear enough from this verse. Do all for the glory of God. If everything we do is to be for the glory of God, and if we have a Creator who orders all things including our lives, then it makes sense that our Creator’s purpose in creating us is that we would bring Him glory.

Isaiah 43:7 ESV

everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

When, in our text today, Paul says do all for the glory of God, the “do” there is a command.

This is important, that we recognize that we have been created for a specific purpose because this line of thinking makes Gd central.

Perhaps the most pursued understanding in our culture today is identity. Trying to understand who we are. It’s a reasonable question to consider. But where the culture goes wrong, is that many presume God can be removed from the pursuit of the answer.

Attempting to answer this question with the very limited resources we have in our own understanding, our own insight ultimately leads to disaster. But if we embrace that we have a Creator, who created us with a purpose, and that His purpose is good and fulfilling, we have peace.

God is the central reality in the universe, He therefore is the only one who can assign purpose to His creation and understanding that purpose can only be found in seeking Him.

Meditate on this verse:

Romans 11:36 ESV

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

Pursuing God’s glory is the purpose for which we have been created.

Something else we need to understand is

Our Task

Pursuing God’s glory is everyday

whether we eat or drink or whatever you do

This is referring to everything, everyday

One commentator put it like this: our duty comes from God’s design

God made us to glorify Him, it therefore follows our task is to glorify Him. Duty from Design

But here’s where we need to ask a question. Why do we need to give glory to a God who lacks nothing?

God is perfect, complete, all-sufficient, infinitely great and glorious, and to be sure, He did not create us to meet His needs. He doesn’t have any needs. So how do we glorify a God like that?

I’ve seen the Grand Canyon once in person, and like most people who see it for the first time, I was speechless. I was with a group, and most of us in the group were seeing the Grand Canyon for the first tie in person together. There is a collective whoa when we first saw it. Now, did our whoa make the Grand Canyon any more impressive.... any more breath-taking? No. But it is the right response.

When it comes to a perfect, all-sufficient, infinitely great and glorious God, who is not in need of anything, our glorifying Him is not filling a need of His, it is filling a need of ours.

Back to what it means to glorify God, loving obedience and joyful worship. This is our task, not because God needs that from us, but because it’s the only response that makes sense and appropriate in light of who God is.

But that leads us to the final point of understanding when it comes to all of life centering on glory and glorifying.

Is glorifying God a burden? I mean, we just suggested that it is our task. Duty, command. These are usually words used in association with something that is burdensome. Is glorifying God burdensome.

We are suggesting that glorifying God is

Our Joy

It is not a burden

We didn’t really set this verse in its context yet. Paul is addressing issues of conscience and prioritizing building others up above our own liberties.

1 Corinthians 10:23–30 ESV

“All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience— I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else’s conscience? If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks?

Paul instructs that if someone has a problem with eating meat that was scarified to idols, don’t eat it for the sake of that troubled person. He not saying it is sinful to eat the meat because it was sacrificed for idol worship, but because our eating it may cause someone else a betrayal of conscience.

Is that burdensome. It sounds like it is. For us, it could be the consumption of alcohol, or watching certain movies or TV shows. Is it burdensome to abstain from these kinds of things for the sake of someone else’s conscience?

I think Paul suggests the answer is no. How does he do this? By saying

1 Corinthians 10:31 ESV

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

If abstaining so that someone else is served glorifies God, then we are loosing nothing. In fact, glorifying God yields joy.

Obeying God, worshipping God is what is most satisfying to our souls.

1 John 5:3 ESV

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.

What is Gd’s love? That we keep (obey) His commandments. And obeying His commandments is not burdensome.

And so that all of life centers on glory and glorifying is not burdensome. It is a purpose that tasks us to pursue something that yields joy beyond comprehension.