River Road Church Baptist

October 30, 2005

Dr. Michael J. Clingenpeel

“Our Chief End”

A catechism is a manual of religious instruction used to train new converts in the Christian faith. Most consist of a series of questions and answers. New converts read the questions and memorize the answers. In this manner, the Church transmits the ABCs of the Christian faith from generation to generation.

Among the most famous catechisms is the Westminster Shorter Confession of 1674. It has 107 questions, and it is the shorter version.

The first question asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”

The River Road Church, Baptist Covenant picks up the aroma of this statement in its final sentence: “…we will seek to live to the glory of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.” In short, we will seek to live to the glory of God.

Our covenant, and the Shorter Confession, takes its cues from scripture. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth: “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Peter writes to Christians under persecution: “As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace…in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.”

The purpose of the Christian life is to glorify God, not to satisfy our whims and preferences. We are placed on this earth “to put God on display to the world,” said John McArthur.

This is not automatic. Too often we place supreme value on things other than God. Phyllis Tickle, in her volume on greed based on lectures she gave at the New York Public Library in 2003, wrote: “We must confess, each of us, that the human animal seems to come into the experience of time constructed and equipped not only with body parts and consciousness, but also with the inescapable companions of the interior that historically we have often referred to as our demons.”

One of these “inescapable companions of the interior that demonizes us is that we tend to seek our own glory rather than God’s. Paul said it even more simply and more memorably than did Phyllis Tickle. “All of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

But when we live to our own glory rather than God's glory, we tend to settle for far too little in life. It was in June of 1941, that C.S. Lewis preached a sermon that was carried on the radio in Great Britain. The sermon was entitled, 'The Weight of Glory.' In it he writes, "We are half-hearted creatures; fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. We are like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased."

So we become pleased to seek our own advantage, our happiness and our interests and we miss out on all of the great rewards of living to the glory of God.

So then, simply put, how do you and I live to God's glory?

Well we begin by understanding that God is worthy of worship.

The Hebrew word translated “glory” literally means 'heavy,' as in weight. To glorify something is to give it honor, to give it weight. When we place all of the weight upon ourselves then we give ourselves over to our purposes, but when we give God's purpose our weight, then we glorify God. To live to the glory of God is to recognize the weight, the importance, the heaviness that God carries. It is to make God the Lord of our lives, to place God first in our lives.

Once we understand that principle, then we live to the glory of God by making Christ the Lord over the most mundane and ordinary aspects of life; over our work, our eating, our drinking, our praying, our reading, our resting; over the routine parts of life.

You recall that the city of Corinth in the day in which Paul lived was a cosmopolitan city. It was extraordinarily diverse, and the diversity of Corinth flowed over into the Christian church. In Corinth, there were Christians who were Gentiles and there were Christians who were Jews. They often came into conflict over dietary customs even though they were all a part of the church. Those who had come out of the Judaism followed the strict dietary customs of the Jewish faith. When they went to the market to buy meat, they asked the butcher whether or not the meat that they would be purchasing had first come from an animal that had been sacrificed to a pagan god in a pagan temple. If it was, they would not then purchase that meat.

Paul, you recall, was an observant Jewish Christian. But Paul had come in his own understanding to realize that the purpose of the Christian life was broader than simply eating or drinking. It was more than just asserting one's own personal liberties or satisfying one's personal appetite. The purpose of life, Paul wrote, was to glorify God. Whatever you do, he said, whether you eat or whether you drink, do everything to the glory of God. In the tiniest matters to the most significant and important, follow the rule to do it to the glory of God.

Ultimately that means to live to the glory of God is to live life as an act of worship; to turn the routine of life into the sacred. When you and I come here on Sunday mornings, we try to turn this hour, 11 o'clock to 12 o'clock, into an hour for glorifying God. We try to make it special. We set it apart from all of the other hours. We attempt to make it a holy hour. Some of you here are extraordinarily faithful in your presence to this hour. Even so, the maximum number of hours you would spend in the course of a year is 52. The number of our hours in the course of a year is 8,760. So if we make only these hours sacred hours, there is so much to the rest of life that is not holy and set apart. The goal of the Christian life is to take all of our moments, 24/7, 365, and to live those hours giving glory to God.

History does not record the names of the monks who lived in a Carmelite monastery near Paris in the latter part of the 17 th century. Interestingly, it records only the name and the writings of the cook of the monastery; a lay brother who went simply by the name Brother Lawrence. He started out as assistant to the treasurer of the monastery, but frankly he was clumsy in those duties and they relieved him of them. They sent him off to the kitchen to do KP. There among the pots and the pans and the potatoes, Brother Lawrence lived his life practicing the presence of God.

Whatever we do, he wrote, we should stop for a few minutes to praise God from the depths of our hearts, to enjoy God. Since you believe that God is always with you no matter what you may be doing, why shouldn't you stop a while to adore Him, to praise Him, to petition Him, to offer Him your heart and to thank Him? Lawrence lived his life by this simple rule, practice the presence of God in the most routine and the ordinary moments of life.

The day before he died at the age of 80, he was asked by one of the monks how he had spent his life and he replied that he had spent his time doing what he planned to do in eternity – blessing God, adoring Him, and loving Him with all my heart. “That is our whole purpose brothers,” he wrote, “to adore God and to love Him without worrying about the rest.”

To live life to the glory of God – that's not a bad way to live. It's not a bad way to be remembered – that whatever you do, do every thing to God's glory.

May we pray together? There is so much to life that is mundane and routine, O God. We ask that we would find in the midst of these simple tasks your presence and may we love you, honor you, adore you and then even in the simple moments, may we bring you glory by what we say and do. Through Christ we pray, Amen.



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