"Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger"

I wanted to share a writing that impacted me. This is by Samuel Marinus Zwemer (April 12, 1867-April 2, 1952), nicknamed "The Apostle to Islam." He was an American missionary, traveler, scholar, and a missionary to Busrah, Bahrein, and other locations in Arabia from 1891 to 1905. Famously turned down by the American Missionary Society, which resulted in him going overseas alone, he founded and edited the publication The Moslem World.  His greatest contribution to missions was that of stirring Christians to the need for evangelism among Muslims.

I believe that need should be stirred again today! The Muslim people are the most unreached people of the world. They comprise a vast majority of the 10/40 Window and in some places have as many as 3 missionaries per million Muslims. Their's is the second fastest growing religion in the world, after Christianity. 

The Glory of the Impossible

by Samuel M. Zwemer

The challenge of the unoccupied fields of the world is one to great faith and, therefore to great sacrifice. Our willingness to sacrifice for an enterprise is always in proportion to our faith in that enterprise. Faith has the genius of transforming the barely possible into actuality. Once men are dominated by the conviction that a thing must be done, they will stop at nothing until it is accomplished. 

Frequent set-backs and apparent failure never dishearten the real pioneer. Occasional martyrdoms are only a fresh incentive. Opposition is a stimulus to greater activity. Great victory has never been possible without great sacrifice. If the winning of Port Arthur required human bullets, we cannot expect to carry the Port Arthurs and Gibraltars of the non-Christian world without loss of life. Does it really matter how many die or how much money we spend in opening closed doors, and in occupying the different fields, if we really believe that missions are warfare and that the King’s Glory is at stake? War always means blood and treasure. Our only concern should be to keep the fight aggressive and to win victory regardless of cost or sacrifice. The unoccupied fields of the world must have their Calvary before they can have their Pentecost.  

The unoccupied fields of the world await those who are willing to be lonely for the sake of Christ. To the pioneer missionary, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ to the apostles when He showed them His hands and His feet, come with special force: “As my Father hath sent Me, even so send I you”. He came and His welcome was derision, His life suffering, and His throne the Cross. As He came, He expects us to go. We must follow in His footprints. The pioneer missionary, in overcoming obstacles and difficulties, has the privilege not only of knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection, but also something of the fellowship of His suffering. 

(And what is that suffering but the) glory of the impossible! Who would naturally prefer to leave the warmth and comfort of hearth and home and the love of the family circle to go after a lost sheep, whose cry we have faintly heard in the howling of the tempest? Yet such is the glory of the task that neither home-ties nor home needs can hold back those who have caught the vision and the spirit of the Great Shepherd. Because the lost ones are His sheep, and He has made us His shepherds and not His hirelings, we must bring them back.  

(We go out) not with hatchet and brand, but with the Sword of the Spirit and with the Belt of Truth. They went and blazed the way for those that followed after. Their scars were the seal of their apostleship, and they gloried also in tribulation. Like the pioneer Apostle Paul, “always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, and approving themselves as ministers of God in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in watching, in fasting.”

If the uttermost confines of the Roman Empire were part of (Paul's missionary)  program who had already preached Christ from Jerusalem to Illyricum in the first century, we surely, at the beginning of the twentieth century, should have no less ambition to enter every unoccupied field that “they may see to whom no tidings came and that those who have not heard may understand.”

In the first days of Christianity, there is an absence of the calculating spirit. Most of the Apostles died outside of Palestine, though human logic would have forbidden them to leave the country until it had been Christianized. The calculating instinct is death to faith, and had the Apostles allowed it to control their motives and actions, they would have said: ‘The need in Jerusalem is so profound, our responsibilities to people of our own blood so obvious, that we must live up to the principle that charity begins at home. After we have won the people of Jerusalem, of Judea and of the Holy Land in general, then it will be time enough to go abroad; but our problems, political, moral and religious, are so unsolved here in this one spot that it is manifestly absurd to bend our shoulders to a new load.’”

It was the bigness of the task and its difficulty that thrilled the early Church. Its apparent impossibility was its glory, its world-wide character its grandeur. The same is true today.

He that ploweth the virgin soil should plow in hope. God never disappoints His husbandmen. The harvest always follows the seed time. “When we first came to our field,” writes missionary Hogberg from Central Asia, “it was impossible to gather even a few people to hear the glad tidings of the Gospel. We could not gather any children for school. We could not spread gospels or tracts. When building the new station, we also had a little chapel built. Then we wondered, will this room ever be filled up with Moslems listening to the Gospel? Our little chapel has been filled with hearers and still a larger room! Day after day we may preach as much as we have strength to, and the Moslems no longer object to listen to the Gospel truth. ‘Before your coming hither no one spoke or thought of Jesus Christ, now everywhere one hears His name,’ a Mohammedan said to me. At the beginning of our work they threw away the Gospels or burnt them, or brought them back again - now they buy them, kiss the books, and touching it to the forehead and pressing it to the heart, they show the highest honor that a Moslem can show a book.”

But the pioneer husbandman must have long patience. When Adoniram Judson was lying loaded with chains in a Burmese dungeon, a fellow prisoner asked with a sneer about the prospect for the conversion of the heathen. Judson calmly answered, “The prospects are as bright as are the promises of God.” There is scarcely a country today which is not as accessible, or where the difficulties are greater, than was the case in Burma when Judson faced them and overcame.

The prospects for the evangelization of all the unoccupied fields are “as bright as the promises of God.” Why should we longer wait to evangelize them?

Is there a more heroic test for the powers of manhood than pioneer work in the mission field? Here is opportunity for those who at home may never find elbow-room for their latent capacities, who may never find adequate scope elsewhere for all the powers of their minds and their souls. There are hundreds of Christian college men who expect to spend life in practicing law or in some trade for a livelihood, yet who have strength and talent enough to enter these unoccupied fields. There are young doctors who might gather around them in some new mission station thousands of those who “suffer the horrors of heathenism and Islam,” and lift their burden of pain, but who now confine their efforts to some “pent-up Utica” where the healing art is subject to the law of competition and is measured too often merely in terms of a cash-book and ledger. They are making a living; they might be making a life.

Bishop Phillips Brooks once threw down the challenge of a big task in these words: “Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle.” He could not have chosen words more applicable if he had spoken of the evangelization of the unoccupied fields of the world with all their baffling difficulties and their glorious impossibilities. God can give us power for the task. He was sufficient for those who went out in the past, and is sufficient for those who go out today.

When David Livingstone visited Cambridge University, on December 4, 1857, he made an earnest appeal for (Africa), which was then almost wholly an unoccupied field. His words, which were in a sense his last will and testament for college men, as regards Africa, may well close this book:“For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink, but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”

The Politics of Christianity

The year is 2010, the place - America or any other nation whose majority is Christian. The problem - our nation is faltering, backsliding, failing. The solution, in many minds -- a Christian government. If we could just get a Christian back in the White House than everything would change. If there were just more politicians who were Christians than our country would return to the way it was. 

The year is 30 AD, the place - Jerusalem and Judea. The problem - the nation was faltering, backsliding, failing. The solution, in many minds - Jesus, a conquering Messiah. If we could just get Jesus in charge of Israel, overthrow Rome, than everything would change. If He would take over political power than Israel would return to the way it was under King David...large and in charge. 

But, the question that needs to be asked today, as it was at the time of Jesus Christ, is: was Christianity meant to be used as a political force? Did Jesus come to take over politically and force faith in Him on every subject of the empire or did He come as a servant, speaking the truth, loving others and placing the power struggles in God's hands?

Does Christianity flourish when it is the law of the land or does it flourish when it is spread, one humble servant to the next, in love, humility and sacrifice? 

One example from history is the Roman Empire. Christianity, once a persecuted religion under men like Nero, became the official religion of Rome. Yet, during that transition, the Christian faith was altered. “The political triumph of what eventually came to be known as Christianity was in fact a mixed blessing...(because) when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire it became ill-equipped by its very form to complete the Great Commission among any populace that was anti-Roman,” (Ralph D. Winter). The people of other nations saw Christianity as strictly a Roman religion and thus, whatever wrong things the Roman government did, in the minds of the other nations, it was Christianity that was doing the wrong. This same unfortunate truth can be seen throughout history with the Muslim view of Christianity due to the Crusades, the Indian view due to England's colonization of India, the Eastern European countries and the way they view Christianity due to Russia's Orthodox church, etc. 

When Christianity takes on political power and might, it often times becomes corrupt and power hungry (as seen in the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages and some Western churches today). Our human nature wants to make our religion supreme and in charge. We want power and authority, but of a worldly kind. This is what the Jews were looking for when Jesus arrived. When He did not provide this, many of them rejected Him. 

The sad truth is that when Christianity becomes the main religion of the masses, officially recognized by the government, and the persecution stops, often times so does the fervor of outreach. When it becomes easy to be a Christian, it also becomes easy to be content in this world. When we are content in this world, we are not seeking after the Lord and anticipating His arrival as we should. When this happens, the fervor for the Great Commission seems to dwindle. Difficulty draws us closer to the Lord and thus His heart for the nations. Ease in life makes us complacent and content with the status quo. 

It may be for this reason that Jesus never sought political power and authority for Himself on earth. He did not want faith in Him to be linked to the Jewish or Roman authorities. God is not linked to any one government or people group. He is King. He is Lord. He does not need the help of any government to spread His love and truth throughout the world.  

America has been greatly blessed by God, in freedom and prosperity, for a number of years. We, as a nation, have done much that is good, in bringing the Gospel and freedom to many other nations. But we have also failed God in many ways, especially lately. The moral decline in our culture and the  large scale embracing of a rich and decadent lifestyle, does not speak well of America or the Western World.  But this is not a time for worry or despair on the part of the Church in America. While the “entire Western world in its present political form may be radically altered (and) we may not even be sure about the survival of our own country...we have every reason to suppose from past experience that the Christian, biblical faith will clearly survive” (Ralph D. Winter). While America has reached out to the non-Western world with the Gospel, we could have and should be doing so much more! “If we in the West insist on keeping our blessing instead of sharing it, then we will, like other nations before us (Israel, Rome, etc.) perhaps have to ‘lose’ our blessing in order for the remaining nations to receive it,” (Ralph D. Winter).  We don’t “deserve” any of the blessings we’ve been given. Each American Christian could, just as likely, have been born a girl in China or a Dalit in India. But God chose to place each of us in a prosperous country in order that we might share His blessings of prosperity and freedom with those who have never heard His name. If we are not doing this, He has every right to take those blessings away and give them to a people (like the Chinese and Indians) who are boldly reaching out to the unreached, even at the risk of their own lives.  But this should not be a source of injured pride or sadness on the part of the American church. We need to look at the big picture. We are first and foremost, part of the body of Christ in the world. In Heaven, for eternity, our nationality will no longer make a difference. Thus, on earth, we should be overjoyed at the growth of the Church in non-Western lands. We should join in prayer, financial support and even in person, with those who are spreading the Gospel in the non-Western world and celebrate with them as God, once again, seems to be shifting His blessings to yet another part of His vast world.

140 Days of Prayer

As a Christian, my greatest concern is that the Gospel would be preached in all the world, to all the nations, in obedience to Christ and for His glory. 

But as an American, I have a second concern...the future of our country and the path it is on right now. We are moving farther and farther away from being a Christian nation. And this turning of the tide in our nation, affects my greatest concern...missions. 

According to Dr. Charles Stanley, well-known Christian pastor and theologian, "85% of all mission giving comes from the United States." That doesn't mean 85% of all missionaries are American...in fact, as I've mentioned before, more and more missionaries are coming from Asia, Africa and South America...praise God! But, 85% of the money that makes their outreach possible comes from the U.S.

As our nation falters and enters more and more perilous economic times, the money for missions dries up. "In our present financial crisis, the first thing that suffered in the areas of giving in the Church was in giving to missions because in many peoples' minds...that's something that's over there," said Dr. Stanley." 

There are so many more reasons to pray for our nation and do what we can to turn the tide besides concern over support for missions decreasing. America is the only nation founded on Christian principles. America, in the eyes of many in the world, stands for hope, opportunity and freedom. 

I could go on but I'd rather let Dr. Stanley explain it in an excellent sermon he gave last week entitled "Turning the Tide." You can listen to it at Turning the Tide

At the conclusion of his sermon, he encouraged the Church in America, and I would also say the Church in the world, to pray for America for the next 140 days; to beseech God, on America's behalf, to turn the dangerous tide we are seeing which is moving away from God and toward the agenda of Satan. 

Scripture teaches us, "The good influence of godly citizens causes a city to prosper, but the moral decay of the wicked drives it downhill" (Prov. 11:11, LB). We can make a difference by taking up the mantle of prayer.

It is our responsibility as the Body of Christ to stand for truth and cry out to the Lord-asking Him to turn the spiritual tide and save the people of our nation and as a result, the people of the world through America's support of missions, as well as other areas. 

You can sign up to be a part of 140 Days of Prayer at 140 Days of Prayer  

Bibleless People's Prayer Project

What if you could connect with a people group still waiting for God’s Word—and follow the progress of translation for their language? Thousands of people are already doing this through the Bibleless Peoples Prayer Project (BPPP).

When you join the BPPP, you receive information about your language group and its speakers, a how-to-pray bookmark, and an annual project update. From time to time, you’ll also receive news about your people group.

BPPP partners have the unique privilege of seeing God answer their faithful prayers. A five-year-old boy prayed each Sunday for the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island. One day, he heard that Wycliffe had assigned missionaries to work among the Rapa Nui. His parents later discovered that the missionaries had become interested in Easter Island around the time their son started praying.

Simple enough for a child and rewarding for those of any age, the Bibleless Peoples Prayer Project draws you into God’s love for the people of the world. Will you join us in prayer for those who are still waiting to hear of this great love?

Join the BPPP

I recently did this and am now praying for the Bahing people group in Nepal. You may never be able to visit a foreign nation to tell them about Jesus, but each of us can be involved in the Great Commission through our prayers! 

Why does God want our praise?

This is a continuation of John Piper's sermon from yesterday: 

Psalm 117

Praise the LORD, all nations!

Extol him, all peoples!

For great is his steadfast love toward us,

and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.

Praise the LORD!

God's purpose for the peoples of the earth is clear in Psalm 117, and that is the second word we turn to. The first word was "peoples" or "nations." Now the second word is "praise" or "extol." Verse 1: "Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!" This is God's purpose: that He be praised by all the peoples - that He be made much of; that He be seen and savored and shown to be great.

Missions is a cross-cultural movement aimed at helping people stop making much of themselves and start making much of their Creator. Missions is a cross-cultural effort to transform people's hearts so that God is felt to be more praiseworthy than sport stars or military might or artistic achievements or anything else that God has made. Missions is a cross-cultural endeavor to help people experience God as their Treasure above all earthly treasures forever. It is a life and death struggle to give people eternal life, which consists in knowing and enjoying God forever.

Missions is telling the nations to praise God and then giving them evidences that this is good to do and showing them how God has made a way for sinners to do it because of the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ. Missionaries don't just say Psalm 117:1, "Praise the LORD, all nations!" They also say Psalm 147:1, "Praise the LORD! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting." We don't just say, "Praise the true God, through his Son Jesus!" We give reasons. We explain who He is and what He is like and how He has worked in history and spoken to us in the Bible and in His Son. We give reasons for why praising God is the only safe and satisfying response to God. We make clear: Not to praise is to perish.

Let's face a problem here. Not everyone hears Psalm 117:1 as good news. God's command to praise God sounds really vain to lots of people. For example, Michael Prowse, writing in the London Financial Times March 31, last year said:

Worship is an aspect of religion that I always found difficult to understand. Suppose we postulate an omnipotent being who, for reasons inscrutable to us, decided to create something other than himself. Why should he . . . expect us to worship him? We didn't ask to be created. Our lives are often troubled. We know that human tyrants, puffed up with pride, crave adulation and homage. But a morally perfect God would surely have no character defects. So why are all those people on their knees every Sunday? (Financial Times, March 30/March 31, 2002, p. 2.)

In other words, the only incentive that Prowse can think of for God to demand praise from us is that He has need - a defect. But what if we have the need, and the need is to see infinite beauty and enjoy it so much that is spills over in authentic praise. What if admiration really is the highest pleasure and God is the most admirable being in the universe? If that were the case, wouldn't God's demand that we praise Him be a demand for our maximum joy. And do we not call that love? C. S. Lewis struggled with the same thing, and made the great discovery:

"But the most obvious fact about praise-whether of God or any thing-strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise-lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game-praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least.…

I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958, pp. 93-95)

The reason God seeks our praise is not because He won't be complete until He gets it. He is seeking our praise because we won't be happy until we give it. "Praise the LORD! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for it is pleasant" (Psalm 147:1). Therefore when we say that missions is the cross-cultural effort to help the peoples praise God, we mean that missions is love not arrogance.

Missions is calling the world to do what they were created to do, namely, to enjoy making much of God forever. If missions does not reach a people with the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Christ, God will be dishonored and the people will be miserable - for ever. Therefore we are driven by two motives (which turn out to be one): the glory of God, and the good of man. They are one because praise to God is the consummation of pleasure in God.

This was taken from a sermon, by John Piper, entitled Everlasting Truth for the Joy of All Peoples. You can access it at this website Everlasting Truth

Everlasting Truth for the Joy of All Peoples

Psalm 117

Praise the LORD, all nations!

Extol him, all peoples!

For great is his steadfast love toward us,

and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.

Praise the LORD!

Who Are the "Peoples," the Nations?

"Nations" and "peoples" in the Bible don't refer to political states like America, Spain, Brazil, China, but to ethnic or language or cultural groupings in these political states. For example, if you go to the website China Source you will see, for starters, a list of sixty Chinese "peoples" (Hui, Dulong, Li, Lisu, Shui, Salar, Yao, etc.). And in the Bible you read about, "the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites" (Genesis 10:16-18).

So when Psalm 17:1 says, "Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!" it means, "Praise the Lord, Hui of China! Praise the Lord Bahing of Nepal! Praise the Lord, Baluch of Pakistan! Praise the Lord, Maninka of Guinea! Praise the Lord, Bugis of Indonesia! Praise the Lord, Somali and Dakota of Minneapolis!" These are the kinds of groups Jesus was referring to when he said after his resurrection, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (panta ta ethne, same phrase in Psalm 117:1). These are the groups that Jesus meant when he said, "This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14).

So a huge question for followers of Jesus today is - or should be - how many peoples are there and how many of them are still unreached with the gospel of the kingdom? How many still have no church who obey Psalm 117 and praise the Lord?

Let's just take one reliable research effort, the huge Southern Baptist International Missions Board. For their missionary purposes they calculate 11,227 people groups in the world. Of these, 6,614 have less than 2% evangelical Christians. Of these, 68 peoples have populations over 10 million; 433 populations between 1 and 10 million; 1,452 between 100 thousand and 1 million.

If you hear someone say that the day of Western missions is over, you know something is amiss in their head or in their heart. They may not believe that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is to be praised by all peoples. Or they may not believe that anyone is really perishing without the gospel. Or they may believe that local people can do a better job than Western people (which misunderstands the very issue at stake: there aren't any [or strong enough] local people capable of doing the work: that is the meaning of "unreached"; and nearby reached peoples may be less culturally acceptable than Westerners.). The day of Western Missions is not over. And the day we think it is, will be the day you can write "forsaken" over the doors of our churches. God means for us to engage with him to bring about Psalm 117: "Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples!"

If you have children who don't know about the "nations," I suggest that you subscribe to the Global Prayer Digest or visit the website Unreached of the Day . Read a story to them and pray for a different people group each day. Oh, may we be a Church and families where children consider short-term missions as normal as vacations and who consider the dangers and burdens and joys of vocational missions a gift everyone should consider receiving.

Oh, that children and teenagers and adults in Christ's Church would break free from our tiny little worlds of family and friends and church and Western culture! Jesus Christ is building his church around the world. We are meant to think and feel and work with Him in this cause. Who knows how many of our personal problems are owing to narrowness of thinking and smallness of affections in relation to God's global purposes. May God give us a mind and heart to know and love and reach the peoples of the world for the glory of our Savior!

Let's not be among the number who do not see that the world and the church have changed dramatically in the last 100 years - the greatest missionary century in history. Listen to Andrew Walls from his book, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History:

[The twentieth century] has seen this great recession from the Christian faith in the West, there has been an equally massive accession to that faith in the non-Western world. [At the beginning of the century] well over 80 percent of those who professed Christianity lived in Europe or North America. Now, approaching 60 percent live in the southern continents of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, and that proportion grows annually. Christianity began the twentieth century as a Western religion, and indeed, the Western religion; it ended the century as a non-Western religion, on track to become progressively more so. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002, pp. 63-64)

We are not at the center. God may or may not be done with us in our self-absorbed prosperity in America. But he certainly is putting others on the Christian map to humble us and call us to confess and rejoice that others may be far more effective in finishing the Great Commission than we are. The dynamics of church and missions will never be the same.

One small example is the way the debate in the Anglican Communion about homosexual clergy is playing out on a global scale. There are more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England and America put together. Their bishops are biblically conservative, and they vote. Who would have dreamed just thirty years ago that powerful, liberal Western bishops would be called to account biblically by the churches they planted in Africa?

This is the new world we live in. It is the world that God is guiding and shaping for his glory. So let's join him in his great global purpose and not be limited in our thinking and feeling and acting to our local concerns. Let's give ourselves to missions, either as a goer or a sender.

This was taken from a sermon, by John Piper, entitled Everlasting Truth for the Joy of All Peoples. You can access it at this website Everlasting Truth

What is our purpose?

All of us want to live a life of purpose and meaning. We were created with that desire. But how do we know what the true purpose of our life should be? Do we look inwardly to find the answer? Do we look at the world around us to find the answer? Or, do we look to God, our creator, and His Word to find the answer? I believe it is this last place that we should look. 

God’s purpose for creating people was to glorify and worship Him. He desires that His name be worshipped, glorified, revered, sanctified and honored by all nations. He wants people to know Him and to love and worship Him. Throughout the Bible, the call to praise and worship God is foremost (Ps 97:1, Ps 67:3-4, Ps 96:3, Rev 15:3-4). 

Yet, our selfish, sinful nature, time and again, tries to convince us that this world is all about us. We want to believe that God created this world solely for our enjoyment. Two examples, from the Bible, that indicate this this focus on self is how we view the Exodus and the birth of Jesus. Many of us may believe, I know I did until recently, that God saved Israel out of Egypt and numerous other tribulations because, for some reason, they pleased Him and He wanted to help them, that Jesus Christ came solely to save us from Hell and that Heaven is our reward for doing the best we can do at living our lives in obedience to God and His Word. 

While there is truth in each of the above statements, these beliefs miss the underlying reason or purpose for creation, the Exodus, Jesus’ time on Earth and Heaven. They are not about us. They are all about God and His glory. All that has been created was made to glorify/point to God. “For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities-His eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom 1:20).

The Exodus occurred so that the nations, especially Israel and Egypt, would see that God was much more powerful than any of the gods that Egypt (the greatest world power at that time) worshipped. The plagues showcased God’s power over Satan and his demons. 

While Jesus certainly came to Earth to seek and save sinners, His main purpose was to glorify God, “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.’ And what was the work? ‘I manifested Your name to the men You gave me out of the world” (John 17:4, 6). Jesus made known to the world who God was. He caused his followers to know and adore Him, God incarnate. 

Lastly, Heaven will be a place of happiness, joy, peace, all the good that we can ever imagine. But our primary purpose in Heaven will be to worship God, as seen in the numerous visions of Heaven that God gives to people in the Bible. John tells us in Revelation 15:3-4, what is said about God around His throne, "Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed." The incredible thing about this worship, and worship of God on Earth, is that through worship of God, we find our greatest happiness. God will be worshipped and we will be filled with endless, incredible joy! 

In light of all this truth from the Word, our purpose in life is not to find the most happiness, prosperity, success and peace we can find. It is to glorify the Lord. Our life’s purpose of glorification can be best summed up by what John Piper said, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” May we live a life that points others to God!