Week Four: Glory
How and why did God create us?
How and why did God create us?
God created us male and female in his own image to know him, love him, live with him, and glorify him. And it is right that we who were created by God should live to his glory.
Thanks for returning with me after a week away for personal and health reasons.
I am back with the fourth question of the New City Catechism this week, “How and why did God create us?”
A rather hefty question, if I may add.
This big question invites us to gaze towards our created purpose as humans. Purpose is something I know that many, many people struggle with. It is a question I grappled with for many years in my young adult life.
Are we here to express or experience something specific to each one of us?
Are we here to have our desires fulfilled or to feel good?
Are we here to serve others, to love and be loved?
As a young person, I lived in a way that was very self-focused. (As is the nature of the world, the flesh, and the fallen nature of humankind)
My life was about my needs, my goals, my perspective, my fulfillment, my will be done.
Even when my desire was to live devoted to the service of others, I recognize now that this goal arose from a certain self-righteous hubris. Glorifying God was not my M.O. Glory was found in the realization of my agenda.
“Not to us, Lord, not to us,
but to your name give glory
because of your faithful love, because of your truth.”
- Psalm 115:1
Contentment isn’t the result of claiming my crown or proving myself as the source of great competence, but in the confidence I place in God’s perfection and He as the Source of everything good in this life.
“My Father is glorified by this: that you produce much fruit and prove to be my disciples.”
- John 15:8
Hope cannot be made complete in the expectation of leaving a holy mark on this world through my sincere efforts or by indomitably accomplishing my own agenda, but in lovingly offering up myself in submission as an empty vessel to serve as an instrument of God’s will.
“In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
- Matthew 5:16
Fulfillment doesn’t arise by way of either overtly or subtly pedestaling my own good works, but by way of continually and intentionally devoting everything I do to the glory of God.
“We all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
- 2 Corinthians 3:18 CSB