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Whenever there is a move of the Holy Spirit, it is always a call for God’s people to be worshipers of the Most High God above everything else. Whatever else revival does, it must restore the purpose and meaning of being a worshiper.
If he does not know why he is here and does not know his purpose, all you are doing is simply perpetuating the life without direction or purpose. If a person is living just because it is the best alternative to dying, what good is it?
God made man in His own image and blew in him the breath of life to live in His presence and worship Him. God then sent man out into the world to increase, multiply and fill the earth with men and women who would worship God in the beauty of holiness. That is our supreme purpose.
The Scripture teaches us a number of things about the purpose of our life. It teaches us that God created all things out of His own pleasure. “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Rev. 4:11).
This is taught throughout the entire Bible, that God created man to worship Him. Man is the darling of the universe, the centerpiece of God’s affection; however, many unbelievers denied this.
When a little baby is born into the world, the father searches intensely to see if the baby looks like him. He may be too tough to say it, but every father looks earnestly into the little wrinkled face to see whether it looks like him or not. We want things to look like us, and if they are not born to us, we go out and make them. We paint pictures; we write music; we do something, because we want to create. Everything we create is a reflection of our personality. In the world of art, a Monet is easily distinguished from a Rembrandt. Each painting reflects the personality of the artist. God
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God made man to reflect His glory; but unfortunately, man does not. The flowers are still as beautiful as God meant them to be. The sun still shines yonder with spacious firmament on high. Evening shadows fall and the moon takes up the wonders and tells us whether the hand that made us is divine. Bees still gather their honey from flower to flower, and the birds sing a thousand songs and the seraphim still chant “holy, holy, holy” before the throne of God. Yet man alone sulks in his cave. Man, made more like God than any creature, has become less like God than any creature.
Worship is man’s full reason for existence. Worship is why we are born and why we are born again. Worship is the reason for our genesis in the first place and our regenesis that we call regeneration. Worship is why there is church, the assembly of the Redeemed, in the first place. Every Christian church in every country across the world in every generation exists to worship God first, not second; not tacking worship at the end of our service as an afterthought, but rather to worship God primarily, with everything else coming in second, at best. Worshiping God is our first call.
John Keats wrote of a tongueless nightingale (“The Eve of St. Agnes”). “As though a tongueless nightingale should swell Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.” I have often thought that this great figure of speech was a beautiful thing. The tongueless nightingale died of suffocation because it had so much song in it that it could not get it out. We are the other way around. We have such a tremendous tongue and such little use for it. We have a harp such as no other creature in God’s universe, but we play it so infrequently and so poorly.
That is what you are here for, to glorify God and enjoy Him thoroughly and forever, telling the universe how great God is.
When a man falls on his knees and stretches his hands heavenward, he is doing the most natural thing in the world. Something deep within compels him to seek someone or something outside of himself to worship and adore.
Then there are those who inform us that there is truth in every religion. This is like saying there is water in most poisons, and so it is all right to drink. It is not the water that kills; it is the poison. The more ambiguous the poison, the more dangerous it is. The closer it is to the real thing, the more damage it does. And the enemy of man’s soul knows this all too well.
Every false religion in the world has a base of truth about it. It starts with some truth and then moves away from it subtly and maliciously, though maybe not intentionally.
This kind of thing, it seems to me, needs to be exposed. We need to tell the world that God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. It must be the Holy Spirit and truth. You cannot worship Him in Spirit alone, for the Spirit without truth is helpless. It cannot be in truth alone, for that would be theology without fire. It must be the truth of God and the Spirit of God.
Thomas Boston said the difference between man and beast is that a beast looks down and a man is made to look up. A man can engage the God above while the beast goes about and only sees the ground underneath its short legs. But man can see into the heavens above. A beast bows under his burden, but a man lifts his heart in praise to his Burden bearer, Jesus Christ.
God is infinitely more concerned that He has worshipers than that He has workers.
God wants worshipers before He wants workers. He calls us back to that for which we were created—to worship the Lord God and to enjoy Him forever. And then out of our deep worship flows our work for Him. Our work is only acceptable to God if our worship is acceptable.
