The Purpose of Man: Designed to Worship

by A.W. Tozer

God’s purpose in creating Adam and Eve is summed up in what they could do for God that nothing else in the whole creation could do. They had an exclusive on God shared by no other of God’s creation. Unlike everything else in this

mystic and marvelous world of God’s creation, Adam and Eve could worship God, and God anticipated that worship.

Religion always focuses on the externals,

This blaming someone else for all our iniquities is one of the great evidences of sin and is the forerunner of religion.

The real tragedy in the Garden of Eden was that Adam and Eve lost their purpose.

Religion only addresses man’s external condition, not his internal confusion.

That biblically defined purpose is that we might worship God and enjoy Him forever.

Apart from that, man has no other purpose; and short of that, man wanders in a spiritual disorientation taking him further from finding his created purpose.

Throughout church history, every revival resulted in a sudden intensification of the presence of God, resulting in the spontaneous worship of God. Anything less is superficial, artificial and even detrimental to true spiritual health.

Everything in God’s creation has its purpose.

Regardless of that man’s opinion, I base my whole life on the belief of God creating man with a special, unique, divine purpose.

Everything we create is a reflection of our personality.

God made man to be like Him so that man could give more pleasure to God than all the other creatures. Only in man, as created by God, can God admire Himself. Man is the mirror image in which God looks to see Himself. Man is the reflection of the glory of God, which was the purpose and intention of God originally. Man’s supreme function through all eternity is to reflect God’s

highest glory, and that God might look into the mirror called man and see His own glory shining there. Through man, God could reflect His glory to all creation.

Man, made more like God than any creature, has become less like God than any creature.

Man, made to be a mirror—to reflect the deity—now reflects only his own sinfulness.

world was the soul of man, more like God than anything, and more fitted to God’s sweet music than all other creatures, with the light gone from his mind and the love gone from his heart, stumbling through a dark world to find himself a grave.

God wants man to worship Him, and only redeemed man can worship Him acceptably.

It is entirely possible to have a religious experience without God, and even reject the God of the Bible. It is possible to have an experience of worship, but not according to the will of God and, consequently, unacceptable with God,

because God hates idolatry. Idolatry is simply worship directed in any direction but God’s, which is the epitome of blasphemy.

A worshiper must submit to God’s truth or he cannot worship God.

The primary purpose of God in redemption is to restore us again to the divine imperative of worship

When the Christian church in any generation ceases to be a company of worshipers, their religion succumbs to mere outer effects, empty works and meaningless rituals.

Worship acceptable to God is based upon knowing the nature of God.

Cain viewed sin as being less severe than God viewed it. Sin is dismissed as inconsequential to our worship of God. Sin, however, is serious, and God never smiles upon it and never looks at any heart with sin upon it. He hates sin because it has filled the world with pain and sorrow but, more importantly, because it has robbed man of his purpose in life of worshiping God.

I do not think I will have to spell it out and mark it in red ink for you to see how much heresy there is these days. Believing what we want to believe. Emphasizing what we want to emphasize. Following along in one path while rejecting another. Doing one thing but refusing another. We become heretics by picking and choosing among the Word of God what suits us at the time. That is the path of heretical confusion.

Therefore, worship originates with God, comes back to us and is reflected from us.

This is the impulse behind exploring other worlds and riding out into the vast spaces in the heavens. No other of God’s creatures do it, and no other creature thinks of doing it.

Man, who has lost the mystery of God within his heart, looks for that mystery elsewhere.

Jesus gave us the marvelous liberating news that God is Spirit; therefore, God is everywhere, and we do not worship in places anymore.

Man wants to worship God, but he wants to worship God after his own comprehension of 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.

Only the redeemed man can worship God acceptably. Only the renewed man can worship God acceptably and embrace the truth as God has revealed it in His Word.

God is infinitely more concerned that He has worshipers than that He has workers.

True worship that

is pleasing to God creates within the human heart a spirit of expectation and insatiable longing.

Christianity is not a result of coming to God

We come to Christ so that we might be individually redeemed and made in the image of Christ—vibrant, personal Christians who love God with all our heart and

worship Him in the beauty of holiness.

Religious noise and worship do not necessarily mean the same thing.

Worship is a moral imperative, and yet I believe that it is the missing jewel in evangelical circles.

When we substitute worship with work, we are failing God in ways that we can hardly imagine.

Without absolute confidence in God, I cannot worship Him.

True Christian worship does not rise or fall on the will of man, for

there is only one object of worship worthy of man, and that is God.

When we kneel before the man, Christ Jesus, we are in fact kneeling before God.

Worship pleasing to God saturates our whole being. There is no worship pleasing to God until there is nothing in me displeasing to God. I cannot departmentalize my life, worship God on Sunday and not worship Him on Monday. I cannot worship Him in my songs and displease Him in my business engagements. I cannot worship God in silence in the church on Sunday, to the sound of hymns, then go out on the next day and be displeasing to Him in my activities.

No worship is wholly pleasing to God until there is nothing in us that is displeasing to God.

If you