Living a Purpose Driven Life part 2
(Made for God¡¦s Enjoyment)
Brian A. Moon
(Based on the book Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren)
A rich man was determined to give his mother a birthday present that would outshine all others. He read of a bird that had a vocabulary of 4000 words, could speak in numerous languages and was able to sing 3 opera numbers. He immediately bought the bird for $50,000 and had it delivered to his mother. The next day he phoned to see if she had received the bird. "What did you think of the bird?" he asked.
She replied, "It was delicious."
Obviously she did not know the purpose of the bird!
Tonight though I want us to discover the very first purpose of your life because missing the purpose of your life is a big deal. You were made for a reason and that is what we are trying to understand in our 40 Days of Purpose campaign that is looking into the purpose of life. Before we mentioned that you can look for the purpose of life in many places from self-help books to the new age movement and come up empty every time. All of these fail to fully unlock the mystery behind why we are alive because of one simply truth that we found last week¡K
You were made by God and for God!
The Bible says, ¡§You (God) created everything and it is for your pleasure that they exist and were created.¡¨ Revelation 4:12 NLT
You were not made simply to find yourself and please yourself and serve yourself! You were made to be loved and enjoyed by God and he has five purposes for your life, five reasons that he made you and placed you on this earth. Five things that you should spend your life doing. The first purpose of your life is the natural response when we are loved, and that is to show love back.
I hate to admit this but the other night I was watching The Bachelorette on TV and the scene was the final rose ceremony where the Bachelorette has to take 3 roses and pick between 4 guys that she has some obvious feelings for. She dries a tear from her eye and then calls out one of the guy¡¦s names and as the camera zooms in to catch his reaction you can see his face go from uneasy, torture to a big ole smile.
As he walks over and gets his rose he tells her thank you gives her a big kiss on the cheek. It may be really lame reality TV, but it makes a great illustration of what God has done for us.
We were sitting there confused and lonely and then all of a sudden he picks us and then you discover the first purpose of your life and that is to show God you love him in return for his love for you! God made you for his enjoyment and he has given you the purpose of giving him as much enjoyment as you can with all that you can. You were made to love God! So what were you made to love God with? Good question¡K Onetime this guy asked Jesus the same kind of question he asked him what is the greatest commandment, or what is the one thing that pleases God the most. Jesus thought for a second and told him this,
¡§Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. This is the first and most important commandment.¡¨ Matthew 22:37-38 CEV
Underline the words ¡§First and most important¡¨
Jesus told this guy that the first thing, and the most important thing to do, is to make sure you are loving God. That is the first purpose of your life, to love God and enjoy him forever! And what does Jesus say to love him with¡K well he says to love him with all you got, heart, soul, and mind. Love God with all your possessions, all your affection, all your intellect, all your passions, and all your abilities. Love God with all you are, and with all you will ever be! That is the most important thing you can do with your life, to love him. The word that is used for this love for God is worship.
I can remember hearing my dad say onetime that he worshiped the ground my mom walked on and that is the best advice I can give any man on relationships, and it is a picture of what worship is all about.
Worship is a word that brings up all kinds of pictures from singing songs to God, to a Sunday service at a church, to maybe even praying¡K but worship is simply expressing love for God just like a man expresses love for his wife. Worship is more than the ¡§churchy¡¨ stuff that we think of worship is life!
The Bible says, ¡§So then, my friends, because of God’s great mercy to us I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship that you should offer.¡¨ Romans 12:1 TEV
Circle the words ¡§true worship¡¨
You can worship God in thousands of ways and that is what true worship is, it is loving God with everything you do! True worship is offering God all that you own, all that you do, and all that you will ever be to him to use. God may use your job as a teacher in a school to show his love to others. He may use your car to take people to church. Or he might use your voice to sing songs about him that tell everyone of how awesome God is! All of these things you offer to him are acts of worship! But specifically we are going to spend the rest of our time looking at 3 ways we can live out the first purpose of your life, the purpose of worshiping God.
The first way we worship God is by:
Focusing my attention on God
Many of the new age philosophies and other eastern religions teach that worshiping god is about reaching a level of no thought and releasing all your thoughts until your in a state of nirvana¡K But the Bible teaches that to worship the True God you must focus on him with all your mind! It is easy to worship something mindlessly but the results are not very good.
One time I was out on a date in high school and I was caught up in the moment and I called the girl someone else¡¦s name¡K That is mindless worship! It takes effort though to thoughtfully worship God, it takes energy, and sacrifice, and it takes focusing your mind on what your doing. Have you ever prayed before a meal or sung a worship song and your mind was somewhere else? Sure we all have, we are doing a good thing, but our minds are not in it. That is not true worship. So why should I spend my time focusing on God? Because he focused on you first! The Bible says,
¡§You have looked deep into my heart, LORD, and you know all about me. You know when I am resting or when I am working, and from heaven you discover my thoughts. You notice everything I do and everywhere I go.¡¨ Psalm 139:1-3 CEV
God cares about you so much that knows you better than you know yourself. He knows your needs, your fears, your hurts, and he sent his Son Jesus to come and give you a new life, and to give you a place to take all those fears, hurts, and sins in your life.
God made you to show you that he loved you this much!
He loves you enough to give you his undivided attention. Look at that verse he is like Santa Claus he is always watching. Giving your attention to someone is one of the most powerful ways you show them that you love them. Think about that, if your parents love you then they like to spend time with you, if you love your special someone then you spend time with your special someone. Giving your attention shows love! And we should show God we love him by giving him our attention.
The Bible says, ¡§Focusing on yourself is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God and ends up thinking more about self than God.¡¨ Romans 8:7
You can¡¦t spend all your time thinking about me, myself, and I if you want to truly worship God! We must make a conscience effort to think about God and give him our attention, and choose to not think about some other stuff. So what are some practical ways I can do that? Here are three:
„« The first is to set aside a time every day that you stop everything and focus on God!
Pick a time and place that you can stop what you¡¦re doing everyday and give God your undivided attention.
Spend this time talking to God about what is going on in your life. Take out your Bible and read a verse or two. And then write down what God impresses upon you.
You don¡¦t have to do anything big and fancy, just be real and honest and open and God will be pleased.
The key is mark that time and place on your calendar, write it in a notebook, tie a string around your finger, do something that will remind you that at such and such a time in this certain place you are going to stop everything and worship God by paying attention to him! The next practical way you can pay attention to God is:
„« Keep in touch throughout your day.
What I mean by that is don¡¦t walk away from spending time with God and then just forget about him. ¡§Take God with you¡¨ as you go about your day! When you are walking or sitting down somewhere or eating lunch just talk to God in your mind. Tell him what you¡¦re thinking, and feeling and what challenges you are facing right now. Tell him that you love him and how much you need him! Share your life with God like you would a friend, the benefits are amazing!
The Bible says, ¡§You (God) will keep in perfect peace all who trust you, whose thoughts are fixed on you.¡¨ Isaiah 26:3 NLT
The final practical way you can stay focused on God is through:
„« Picking your music wisely.
Music is a huge part of most of our lives. We listen to music at home in the car and even at work and school sometimes. There is some amazing music being put out these days in contemporary praise and worship. A very simply way to stay focused on God is to pick up a praise and worship CD or two and listen to them instead of something else. So that is how we can worship God by paying attention to him but, worship is even bigger than this it is also:
Expressing my affection to God
When Cheryl and I were still in that kind of dating, kind of friends stage, I can remember one phone conversation we had that scared me to death! I loved her and was trying to figure out the right words and the right timing and trying to get up enough courage to face if she said that she did not love me¡K So finally I came up with this different levels of love stuff that I explained and then went into how each one was different and so on until finally she asked me if I was trying to say that I loved her. It is hard sometimes to express love to someone; it is hard to tell them in person that you love them with all your heart. What was so cool about my story with Cheryl is that she helped break the ice first by asking me if I loved her. This was my sign, my assurance, that it would be ok if I told her that I loved her. And the really cool thing is that God has given us a sign that if we tell him that we love him it will be ok. God tells us in the Bible that he loved us first, and to prove it he sent his Son Jesus to come show us in person that he loved us enough to die for our sins and to give us a new life with God!
The Bible says, ¡§We love him because he first loved us.¡¨ 1 John 4:19 NKJV
That is why we love and worship God, because he loves us! Have you ever told God that you love him??? I promise that it will be ok if you do. God wants our love! His heart is touched when we look up and say to him, ¡§God I love you!¡¨
The Bible says, ¡§I don¡¦t want your sacrifices. I want your love. I don¡¦t want your offerings. I want you to know me.¡¨ Hosea 6:6 TLB
Circle the words ¡§love¡¨ and ¡§know¡¨
That is the first purpose of your life wrapped up in a nice little package, to love and to know God! We know that God loves us and we should try to express our love for God in return. When you love someone you do all kinds of crazy things to show that person that you love them, and the same should be true with God!
If you love God then you should express it! And the greatest expressing of our love for God is to surrender our lives to him. What I mean by that is give up the abilities you have now and the plans you have for the future to God.
Give all the things that you are and will be to God!
The Bible says, ¡§Give yourself completely to God since you¡¦ve been given a new life.¡¨ Romans 6:13 NLT
God is not going to make you into a loser, he is not going to make you fat and marry an ugly person. He made you and has an amazing master plan for your life that is bigger than you can even imagine! Realize just how much God loves you! He made you, he saved you, and he planned a future for you! When we realize God¡¦s amazing, passionate love for us our natural response should be to throw our hands in the air and say, ¡§God I love you, here I am take my life and use it for your purposes!¡¨ That is worship! That is showing God you love him! The final way to worship God that we are going to look at is:
Using my abilities for God
God wants us to love him with all our heart, all our mind and with all our strength, or all our abilities.
The Bible says, ¡§Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as though you were working for the Lord and not for people.¡¨ Colossians 3:23 TEV
Underline ¡§working for the Lord¡¨
Did you catch what that verse is saying about your life? Whatever you do, whatever strengths or abilities you have use them for God¡¦s purposes and you will be working for God. You will be a part of God¡¦s work here on earth; you will get in on the master plan of God! And not only that but this how worship can be your life! It doesn¡¦t matter what you are doing, if you do it for God it is showing him you love him, and it is worship. You don¡¦t have to spend 5 hours each day reading the Bible to worship God, you don¡¦t have to sing for the entire day to worship God, you don¡¦t even have to be in a church building to worship God! Use what God has given you and make it for him. Make your school work, your job, your play, your rest, your everything and use it to love God!
The Bible says, ¡§Take your ordinary life ¡V your sleeping, your eating, your going to work, your walking around life and place it before God as an offering.¡¨ Romans 12:1 MSG
Use your life and your circumstances to do great things for God, in ALL the things you do, and with ALL the abilities you have and you will have lived a life of worship! You will fulfill your first purpose for being created; you will be a pleasure to God in this life and in the next!
Prayer Time ----------
God we thank you for tonight! We thank you that we can come and meet together to worship you with all our lives. Make us even more pleasurable to yourself as we live out this message this week and for the rest of our lives!
If you are here tonight and maybe you have never said God I love you for the first time and accepted his love for you. Maybe you don¡¦t know if you have a true relationship with God. But tonight you know that you need him, you know that you need a way to be free from your past and free in your future and you are ready to accept God¡¦s gift of salvation then right now between you and God in your heart cry out this prayer:
God I need you! I need you to come and save me. I know I am sinful and I need a savior. I believe that you sent your Son Jesus to make this possible and I accept what you already have done for me. Amen.
If that was you then the Bible says God will give you the power to be saved and that one day you will spend forever with him in heaven.
God I pray for the rest of our 40 days of purpose and I ask that you bring us all into a greater understanding of our purposes for this life. Amen.
