DRIVEN BY PURPOSE
(Your number one  purpose in life is ..)

God created everything as an expression of himself. All of creation is designed to move in perfect rhythm with God’s creative plan for it…

Then…God created man as his ultimate masterpiece, the most perfect replica of his likeness, the most accurate reflection of his glory.

Unlike all the rest of creation…. we followed satan’s lead and rejected the God who had fashioned us to be a clear reflection of his character.

Our rebellion toward God shattered, and distorted, the reflected image of our Creator in us….Severed the perfect fellowship between God and his masterpiece… Though we rejected God.. God did not reject us… he pursued a renewal of relationship with him.

When we could do nothing to make right the sinfulness and rebellion in our heart; God himself, came to this earth, became a man, took our sinfulness on Himself, died to pay the penalty for my sin, and yours. He defeated the evil one, who had led us astray, by rising from the dead and offering newness of life to all who would believe.

Then he sets out to remake his image and likeness in us, to replace our sinfulness with a new righteousness, to remove our distorted character and replace it with his character.

He takes the mirror designed to reflect him in our lives; the mirror that our sin shattered causes His likeness to become distorted, and he begins to heal the cracks in the mirror.

The less distorted the mirror becomes the more your life, once again, becomes a reflection of your Creator. That’s what it means to Glorify God!

2 Corinthians 3:18 And all of us have had that veil removed so that we can be mirrors that brightly reflect the glory of the Lord. And as the Spirit of the Lord works within us, we become more and more like him and reflect his glory even more. (NLT)

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the first priority, in life, the number one reason for this 80 or so years on this earth… is something we find so hard to focus on? Probably not… since this life is a spiritual battle.

Your number two reason for being on this earth is also one that many people just can’t seem to get. They fight against it… they try to make God fit into their agenda, on this one, rather than allowing God to mold them into His agenda….

Let me explain:

For billions of years before you, and I, came along God existed without us. It’s interesting that even when God was alone, he wasn’t alone. Did you ever wonder why God exists in three persons. Without getting into the whole multifunction issue, it enough for this sermon to realize that God is relational. A billion years before he created us he was already relational inside of himself.

If God is relational and he created you, in his image and likeness, what should that tell us about ourselves?

That’s not as easy as it may seem on the surface… because if the image of God is distorted in us it makes sense that this part of the image is too. If God is trying to re-establish his likeness in us in other areas; it makes sense that he trying to get us to become like him in this area as well.

The entire Bible is built around the fact that the people of God are a family.

Don’t try to imagine this as a simple concept, because it isn’t. The Bible does not talk about all mankind being one… we’re all part of the great brotherhood of earthlings. Let’s all just love everybody in the world and all get along and the internet, and technology and UPS will eventually bring us all into a single world family.

Scripture has nothing to say about a “world family“. The media gets so upset when some Evangelical says something that suggest that Christianity is exclusive and God accepts some and rejects others. That’s exactly what the Bible says! Christianity is exclusive!

Galatians 3:26 So you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

Those who are children of God, get into God’s family one way: through faith in Christ Jesus!

Once you have embraced Jesus and his sacrifice for your sins, his death in your place, once you have repented of your rebellion against God and received new life from him… then and only then: do you become part of God’s family.

James 1:18 In his goodness he chose to make us his own children by giving us his true word. And we, out of all creation, became his choice possession. (NLT)

That’s a nice little thought, that God symbolically calls you his father, symbolically calls Jesus our brother, symbolically calls other believers our family, symbolically talks about us taking on our family’s name, our family characteristics, our Father’s likeness our family inheritance….

Here’s the thing… none of that is symbolic…. It’s more real than the life we live here on earth.

Our membership in the family of God is more real than our membership in our earthly families!

I don’t have to tell most of us, how our closest earthly relationships can fracture, and splinter, and bring us intense pain… they also can bring us intense joy.

The best, the longest lasting, the most fulfilling of our earthly relationships are temporal. The come with a “do not use after July 6^th 2036” label (or some such date). Your earthly relationships were created by God as object lessons on how our heavenly relationships are supposed to function.

This Saturday, I will marry off my only daughter. I will stress to her and Jeremiah how important the covenant they are about to make before God and all of us.. is. I will drive home the absolute necessity of their covenant being a

lifelong commitment, with no thought of divorce until death separates them…

But, the reality is, one day they will be separated by death and their marriage will not resume in eternity.

The only eternal relationships we form on this earth that have eternal significance are those spiritual relationships we form with other believers. Those relationships are the ones we will still have a million years from now in some form.

Yet on this earth, learning to get along with other believers is one of the real challenges we face. I hear so many people who have been hurt badly by a fellow Christian and in some cases it has driven that person away from the church and away from their relationship with God.

We hear such phrases as: “The Church is the only place we shoot our wounded.” Somebody is struggling to live the life God purposed them to live, they’re having a tough pull of it. Some other “Christian” comes along and instead of reaching out their hand and helping them up…. They slash them a few more times and leave them bleeding on the side of the road of life…..

Please think clearly with me here: If the whole point God is trying to achieve in your life is to re-establish His image in you. If, all of us, have that image blighted because of our sin … and God’s work of salvation in our lives includes him bringing back the likeness of God in our lives and character.

If one of God characteristics is this relational part of him… and if he created us with that likeness… but if sin distorted that likeness as well; does it not make sense that reshaping our relational abilities is a part of what God is trying to achieve in our lives?

Yes, yes, yes….

If somebody says to you that some Christian hurt them by not treating them exactly like Jesus would…. Your response could be…

Of course, that’s exactly what we should expect!

All of us are distorted, all of us are being reshaped, All of us are going to respond in ways that don’t at times look like the image of our Creator….but as we grow in grace.. As our refection becomes clearer… we will…we better become more and more Christ-like in our treatment of others.

The laboratory God designed to allow us to practice our changing character is the institution called the church. The church is not just some accidental formation of history.

It was designed by God as the place he would bring together all the Believers in the world, to allow them to live out this change that would be happening in each one of them.

They would, of course, sometimes rub each other the wrong way… that was part of the plan. In this setting.. believers would learn to respond to each other with the character of Jesus. Believers would learn compassion for each other as they dealt with their own inadequacies. Believers who had made relational progress would then be able to teach other, less mature, people by their example what Christ character should look like.

All of this has to take place in the context of a local church. If a person becomes a believer and does not immerse themselves in a local church… the entire plan of God to change them, relationally, goes untapped.

Warren says in the book… and he’s right:

We are called, not just to believe, but to belong.

While your relationship with Christ is personal, God never intended it to be private. In God’s family you are connected to every other believer and we will belong to each other for eternity.

I’ve spent my whole adult lifetime (almost 30 years) in ministry, and I’ve spent that same adult lifetime listening to people tell me why they can’t attend church or Bible studies, and I’ve spent that same adult lifetime watching the people who do spend time with other believers and God’s word grow and those who don’t I’ve watched shrivel struggle and wonder what is wrong with them and why does God treat his other children so much better….

I’ve watched hundreds of people who have grown to pillar hood in God’s kingdom and I’ve watched hundreds more who have not… and the pattern is always exactly the same! Those who develop an intense relationship with other believers grow and grow and grow, and those who do not…. Do not grow… there’s just no other way to say it!

I’ve tried not to make these sermons simply about what is in the book, you can read the book. But in this case I want to give you some quotes right out of the book… what he says is what I have discovered as an invariable rule….

The first symptom of spiritual decline is usually inconsistent attendance at worship gatherings and other gatherings of believers. Whenever we become careless about fellowship, everything else begins to slide too. Membership in the family of God is neither inconsequential nor something to be casually ignored. The Church is God’s agenda for the world…. It will outlive this universe… and so will your role in it! The person who says, “I don’t need the church” is either arrogant or ignorant

In the early church, people truly thought of the Church as one, In cities like Jerusalem or Ephesus, while the church met in many different houses, it was all one church under the leadership of Elders. If you didn’t fit into one local body, you couldn’t just head across town to another church with a different name that would welcome you with open arms. They were all one church…. They would send you back and say… God has you there to teach you valuable lessons for eternity… get back there and learn what God’s purpose for your life is. Warren points out, that the only Believers who were not in a local church were those who had done some horrible sin and undergone severe church discipline.

It’s such a different world now, where few people ever say, settle down here and grow up!

There is no use heading across town… when you get there you will still find you and that is the real issue here….

Now..there are times when people need to move from one local church to another, after much prayer and much counsel, but many of the people who are wandering from church to church in this town or simply not going to church, anywhere, at all

are completely thwarting one of the most significant purposes for which they were placed on this earth. Growing up with the Body of Christ. Whatever heaven is going to be…whatever we are going to be involved in… in eternity, this process of learning to love and serve our fellow believers in this life is preparation for the next life.

Don’t imagine that you are called to go out and convince the world to repent of their sins and accept Christ unless, and until, you get this second purpose in line, in your life. Learning how to fulfill this purpose qualifies you for telling the rest of the world.