Enjoying God Series

1. Review:

1. Week One:

i. We cannot understand or attain our purpose in life apart from God.

ii. We learned that having a purpose gives meaning to our lives.

iii. Having and pursuing your purpose prepares you for eternity.

2. Week Two:

i. This life is preparation for the next life.

ii. Your PERSPECTIVE determines your purpose – therefore we need an eternal perspective, which looks beyond the here and now.

2. Purpose #1: We were created, planned to bring pleasure to God.

1. This is what answers the burning question in each of us…why do I exist?

i. Why did God make me?

ii. If we understand this principle, we will see that the first purpose of our lives is to bring enjoyment to God, to live for His pleasure.

2. God made you and I because He desired to have us be a part of His creation

i. This principle proves your worth.

1. If you are that important to God, and He considers you valuable enough to keep Him with Him for eternity, what greater value can you have.

2. The maker of Heaven and earth, saw you as so valuable that He designed you to be His friend and companion for eternity.

3. And when you rejected Him, He didn’t just destroy you. No, He sent His Son to die the death that rejecting God deserved. He gave up the closest, most valuable thing to Himself to win you back.

4. That is value!

3. Ephesians 1:5 - “Because of His love, God had already decided that through Jesus Christ he would make us his children, this was His pleasure and purpose.”

3. How do we bring pleasure to God?

1. The bible says that “God seeks worshipers” (Jn 4:23)

i. We bring pleasure to God by worshipping Him.

1. Whenever we fulfill His purposes for our lives, we bring pleasure to God.

a. He is pleased..

b. He wants us to find our fulfillment in Him, to enjoy Him.

c. It was for this reason that He made us.

ii. Therefore, worship is our first responsibility to God.

iii. We worship God by “enjoying” Him.

iv. CS Lewis, “In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”

2. God wants our worship to be motivated by love, thanksgiving and delight, not duty.

i. God is passionately in love with you. He passionately longs to have a relationship with you.

ii. My 19th anniversary is coming up this week. What if I brought home a gift to my wife and said, "Honey, I’ve brought you this for three reasons. First, I am your husband. Second, it is our anniversary. Third, husbands are supposed to give their wives something on their anniversary. So here." Wouldn’t she be thrilled? I don’t think so. Why? She wants me to love her passionately. She doesn’t want duty. She wants desire.

iii. God doesn’t want your duty. "Well, I guess we better get ready and go to church. It’s Sunday, you know."

1. That’s not what God wants.

2. He doesn’t want rituals and religion and rules. He wants a relationship. He says, "I want you to love me as much as I love you." That’s what worship is—expressing my affection to God.

3. Hosea 6:6 (LB) “I don’t want your sacrifices – I want your love! I don’t want your offerings, I want you to know me!”

4. Worship (Look at our need to worship)

1. Anthropologists have observed that worship is a universal urge of people in all areas of earth.

i. Explorers have found isolated cultures that never had any contact with the outside world. Yet, each of these tribes or people had some form of worshiping a god or a host of gods or goddesses.

ii. Despite the differences in nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, or forms of worship, one thing is common among us all - we have an innate desire to a god. Why is this so? The Bible tells us that God "has put eternity into man’s mind" (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

2. Our need to worship something is hard-wired into our being.

3. If we don’t worship God, we will worship something or someone else.

4. We will have a god of our own making. Because we have a need to worship.

5. For modern man, that god of his own making is himself. Many people live as if they are god.

i. Many of those who do not believe in God would suddenly call upon the name of God when a great disaster strikes them. It is at that moment that an individual comes to the realization that his powers are finite. He naturally cries for the help of the Controller of all things

5. What worship is and isn’t:

1. It is more than praising and singing and praying to God on Sunday morning at church.