Your Responsibility to God

Why We Are Here: Identity, Purpose, and Responsibility to God

Welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host Andrew Rappaport, the Executive Director of Striving Fraternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member. Today, what we're going to do is start a series.

This will be a series from a conference that we spoke at, Striving Fraternity was at, and it was the Rise Up Conference with the theme of our responsibility in this world. The message you're going to hear is the first message on our responsibility to God, the reason you're here.

This is presented by one of our newest speakers at Striving Fraternity, Aaron Brewster. If you haven't heard him before, then you will thoroughly enjoy this. He's one of the podcasters at the Christian Podcast Community.

He does the Truth Love Parent podcast, and he's one of our speakers. So, I hope that you'll find this something you really enjoy very helpful. We're going to be doing a series. It'll be as we go through all six sessions.

So, I hope that you enjoy this first message from Aaron Brewster on our responsibility in this world, our responsibility to God. Enjoy.

The Chief End of Man: Glorifying and Enjoying God

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content, or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

I want you to know that I am very proud of you, that you are here. I travel, I speak, and you know, not enough churches are doing this, and one of the reasons that churches don't do this that often is that their people don't come when they do.

But George and I were talking, and there is so much, an infinite amount of information to learn from God's Word. You're not going to learn all of it even with regular attendance in Sunday school, and Sunday morning, and if you're one of those churches that happens to have a Sunday evening, and Wednesday, you just, you need to be diving into the Word, and so I'm proud of you.

I'm thankful that you're here. I'm trying to see, by raise of hand, how many people here have the right to fall asleep if I don't fall asleep, these people get to. How many of you were up before 4 a .m. this morning?

Okay, you, you're allowed to fall asleep if I don't. The rest of you, if I stay awake, you need to stay awake, because that's what time my alarm went off this morning, and that's the time my wife hit me and told me to turn it off, and I've been awake ever since.

So, Pastor George only gave me two hours to preach tonight. I'm glad there was some laughing. Some of you look concerned. So, I want to get into it, but a quick, quick introduction to who I am. My name is Aaron Brewster, and I am a number of things.

I am a father. I'm a husband. I'm a son. I am the president of a nonprofit called Evermind Ministries. I am a speaker for Striving for Eternity, and I'm a biblical counselor, and I just, lots of little things that I'm doing all in full-time Christian service, and I love my job.

I love what I do, and I'd love to get to know you a little bit more and tell you a little bit more about what I do and what it looks like on a daily basis, but right now is not the time, because I am also an over-preparer.

I always have way more information to present than I have time to present it, and what we're talking about tonight is very important, because it deals with our responsibility to God, and so I want to just jump right in.

Why are you here? Lots of answers to that question, and a lot of them would be accurate, but we want to understand from the Scriptures exactly the biggest reasons we are here. We're going to talk about two of them, and then we're going to talk about tomorrow the more the details of how we accomplish those two main reasons that we are here.

The questions of identity come up a lot in this world. Who am I? But it's also followed up by a question of purpose. Why am I here? Everyone asks those questions in one way or another. Everyone is searching for an answer to those two questions.

The problem is that the world doesn't get it right. They say, well, I am whoever I want to be. I'm here to do whatever I want to do, and when you approach it that way, it's very freeing, because you basically have an excuse to do whatever you want for whatever reason you want to.

The church has answers to this question as well. We know, biblically speaking, I am what God created me to be, commands me to be, and capacitates me to be. That's who I am. And I'm sorry if that's difficult to read, because it's too small.

It says, I'm also, I'm here to do what God created me to do, commands me to do, and capacitates me to do. Now, that is the accurate answer, but the question really is how many people are actually living that way?

You see, the problem with these answers is that the world gets the answers wrong all the time, and they live accordingly. However, the church, though they often get the answers right, all too often don't live accordingly, and that's a huge problem, because, ladies and gentlemen, we have a responsibility.

If the answers I just gave, that we are created by God, we are commanded by God, we are capacitated by God to do a thing, if we're not doing it, that is an infinite problem, and it's so easy to be people who say the right things and don't do the right things.

Now, I don't really know any of you. Pastor George has not told me anything about any of you, but I do know a lot about you, because you're a human, and I'm a human, and the Bible has an awful lot to say about some of our big struggles.

So, if you start to feel like maybe I'm stepping on your toes a little bit as we go along here, please just understand, that's because this is what the Bible says about us humans. Not because Pastor George said that I needed to really focus on that guy right there.

Though, maybe he does want me to do that. I don't know. So, what's the solution? How do we fix this? Actually, before I get to that, I do want to say, this conference is going to be, you're going to provide you with what you need to know, because again, it's not good enough just to understand this, we need to act on it.

We're going to provide you the what's, we're going to provide you the how's, and most importantly, the why's. We're going to discuss your personal responsibility to God, to the scriptures, to others, generally speaking, to unbelievers specifically, to the church specifically, and to the culture at large.

We're going to talk about all those things over the next couple days. But the most important part of this conference is what you are going to do with the truth that you hear, because learning isn't good enough if you're not going to use it.

Andrew and I are going to do our best to try to equip you to succeed in your responsibilities. Pastor Gray is going to be here with you after we leave, to continue equipping you in the work of the ministry that God has given you to do.

But ultimately, none of us can change you. As a biblical counselor, or someone who works a lot with parents, I tell them all the time, you can't change your kids. You can't change your spouse. Pastor George, you can't change any of these people.

We can't do that for you. But you can, and you must change. And if you're not changing, that's a huge problem. Because the only things that don't really grow are dead. All living things grow. All living things change.

And we need to be changing in our relationship with the Lord and in our maturity. So the solution then is you have the right answers, or at least you're going to have the right answers by the time we're done.

You know that you are going to be responsible to God for these things, and you will have a really good idea of what those responsibilities entail. Therefore, you need to do everything you can to fulfill those responsibilities.

Worshiping God as the Ultimate Response to His Worth

So let's get right into it. We're going to talk about the secondary reason you are here. And I guarantee you the moment I reveal what the secondary reason you are here is, there's going to be some confusion.

It's going to take me a little while to get around to explaining away the confusion. But stick with me. If there's that piece of grit in your brain going, hold on, I don't understand. Why is that the second, you know, most important reason we're here?

It'll make sense in a moment. There is a very familiar catechism that asks the question, what is the chief end of man? Does anyone know the answer? That's correct. Very good. That man gets a gold star.

He does know what he's talking about. We are to, the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. 1 Corinthians 6 20 says, 1 Corinthians 10 31, Colossians 3 17, Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.

And 1 Peter 4 11, Whoever speaks is to do as one who is speaking the utterances of God. Whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies, so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ to whom belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever.

Amen. Now, I never want to assume too much when I go someplace new. It's very possible that everything that comes next you already know. So, is that therefore your past to check out and to fall asleep?

The answer is no, because God in his sovereignty ordained that you need to hear it again. So, pay close attention. We all need to be reminded of this. If you've never heard this before, fantastic. I don't want to belabor it, but it's very important that we understand it.

What does it mean to glorify God? What does that entail? To put it simply, to glorify is to think highly about something or to influence someone else to think highly about something. Now, I don't know how you are going to feel about this next image.

Some of you may look at it and have no idea what it is. Your reaction to this next image will tell me everything I need to know. But down where I'm from, currently, which is a Brevard, North Carolina, there are a lot of people who really glorify this place.

All right, some of you know what I'm talking about. This apparently is the coolest gas station in the entire world. Anyone ever been there? I've been there before. Okay, some of you know that Buc-ee's is really a gas station all by itself.

And down there, you can buy t-shirts. People get their pictures outside of this gas station. It is something that people like to glorify. I mean, if the mascot is out, if that beaver right there is out, man, people want to line up to get pictures with him because they—and they like to tell people about how cool Buc-ee's is.

You know, we all do this. Buc-ee's is a silly example, but there's sports teams that we like. There's our jobs. There's our grandkids. There's, you know, all these things. We like to tell people, what are we doing?

We're actually glorifying those things to those people. To better understand, though, as we think about this concept of glorifying God, the idea really comes around to how valuable is this thing? Most of you have a phone in your pocket.

Some of you have an Apple phone. Some of you have an Android phone. And you have your reasons why the other one should have the phone that you have, okay? You value that phone. You value that operating system.

You value the features on that phone. And so, therefore, you tell people, if there's ever an argument, you argue for one side or the other. To better understand a no-God, the main truth of which we have to walk away is that God himself is worthy of something.

What that something is, is important. We'll get to that. In 2 Samuel 2, 22 -4, it says, Literally, it reads,. The idea is that he deserves to be praised. Revelation 4 -11, the 24 elders are going to call out,.

Here, the Greek word translated worthy refers to a weightiness. Something that has just desserts. Something that is fitting. God is worthy. He's deserving. He's valuable. In order to glorify God, then, really comes down to, are we rightly, are we correctly valuing him?

Are we calculating his worth the right way? And the honest answer is, no, we're not. Let's just get that out of the way. You don't even have to wonder how you should answer that question. As fallen human beings, as sinners, no, we do not calculate God's worth the way we should.

We would live very differently, talk very differently, if we truly glorified God by truly living in the awesome weightiness that is his worth. The secondary reason that you are here on this earth is to worship God.

Now, some of you already know, worship comes from an old term, worth-ship. It's a question of value. To worship something is simply to attribute to it a value and to respond to it in the appropriate way.

I have a water bottle up here. Actually, I would have no problem tossing this to the guy in the front row. I have a phone here. It's a nice case. I have no problem even tossing this guy in the front row because I kind of trust that he's going to be a good catch.

But if I had an infant, I don't, I'm not going to toss the infant. I mean, maybe he's a good catch. I don't, I don't care. I value this so much. I'm not going to risk it. I want you to keep that picture in your mind because that is a picture of worship.

My friends, worship is not what a lot of us like to think it is. Worship is not simply the music you sing in church. Worship is not simply going to church. Worship is not simply praying. Worship is not simply giving to the church.

Worship is everything you do. Right now, you're worshiping. Right this moment and the next and the next. When you get up and you walk out of here, everything you say, everything you do, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the entertainment you enjoy, it is all worship.

Now, hopefully you've heard this before, but for some of you who maybe have not heard this before, I want to make it clear. Everything we do says what we value. Everything. Because we only do what we value.

We, I just talked to a number of you. Some of you have lived here your whole lives. Some of you have been transplanted here. Why do you still live here? Because if there were someplace else that were genuinely better for you to live, you would move.

But you value being here. It is worth something to you. It is more valuable than living where I live in Brevard, North Carolina or living in Los Angeles. And so that is why you are here. I know something about you because you are here.

I know something about you because the way you're dressed. I know something about you because of the church you go to. Because I know what you value. Because what you value is what you do. It's how you live.

Life is worship. We are walking around with giant neon signs telling people all the time what we value. What we believe is worthy of our money and our time and our attention and our love and our devotion.

Everything is worship. Because everything is tied to what we value. Now you think about worship and I don't know about you, but growing up a lot of illustrations were often used in sermons about idolatry.

Right? Idolatry. Worshiping things that we shouldn't worship. And so here's an example of the types of things that we would hear, you know, especially growing up in youth group. We put a lot of things on that we worship a lot of things.

We might worship a vehicle. Nobody around here drives this vehicle. I understand that. This does not appeal to any of you. We might worship money. We might worship our families, our relationships. We might worship our food.

Right? And the whole idea, the whole picture of this when I was growing up was that, you know, it was weird to me because, you know, you think about an idol. What do people do with idols? They put it up and then they burn incense to it or they pour out a drink or they burn food to it.

You go to a Chinese restaurant and lots of times you'll see little statues everywhere and there's an orange sitting next to it. That's an offering. That's what they're doing. You know, they're worshiping in that way.

But it's kind of weird because growing up I didn't actually do this. I didn't offer a whole burnt sacrifice to a car or to money or a relationship or food or something like that. It was a weird picture.

It was difficult for me to grasp because the concept of worship as it was shown by this image right here didn't really mesh with our common American way of living life. Well, there's a reason for that.

This actually isn't a very good picture of the problem. The problem is not that you worship food. The problem is that you worship yourself with that food. The problem is not that you use this. You worship this pleasure, whatever it is, by doing things on this that you shouldn't be doing.

The problem is that you worship yourself by what you do on this. A friend of mine named Ken Collier has a saying, just two choices on the shelf. Pleasing God or pleasing self. And we could put in the word worship, just two choices on the shelf.

Worshipping God or worshipping self. Who am I going to value? What am I going to value? God or what I want? Am I going to use this to please him? Or am I going to use this to please myself? And so a better picture of our problem with worship is this.

When we are all born into this world, we all have an altar in our life. And we are all only ever capable of taking everything in our lives and offering it on the altar to self. Everything I do, everything I want is for me.

Why else would I do it? This goes back to the original idea of the world says about my identity. Why am I here? I'm here to be whatever I want to be and do whatever I want to do. It's self-worship. If you have never come to a place where you have put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, where you have a relationship with God through the cross work, the efficacious salvation that Jesus Christ offers, if you've never done that, if you've never truly been born again, this is all you're ever capable of.

You can't not worship yourself. Anything else that you're like, oh no, no, no, I worship my job. No you don't. You use your job in your worship of self. It all comes back to here. Now when we're born again, by God's grace, something amazing happens.

A second altar appears in our life. For the first time, by the grace of God, we now have an opportunity. We have a choice. Whereas before, all we could ever do was sin for ourselves, we now can live righteously by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit for Him.

But now, we have a choice. Do I worship my relationship? Do I worship myself via my relationships? Or do I offer them on the altar to God? Many of you here are husbands and wives. I'm married. My wife and I have been married now for almost 18 years.

And I can tell you many times, a sickening amount of times, my relationship with my wife has been set firmly on the altar to self. Every single time I've sinned against her. It is easy for us to do that.

We are wired because of our sin natures to do just that. We need God's grace to do anything different. And it takes effort. It takes work to treat my wife the way I treat her. Not for me, but for God.

Because this is what God deserves for me to treat my wife this way. It's not about what I'm going to get out of it. It's not about how I'm going to feel. It's not about whether or not she's going to do what I want her to do.

Same thing with my kids or any other relationship in my life. It has to do with the fact that I must treat them this way. Because this is the worship that my God deserves. I work a lot with families. Parents.

Parenting is not about you. If it is, you're not glorifying God with your parenting. You're using it to worship yourself. It's also not about your kids. If you're doing what you're doing to try to get your kids to do something, you're still worshiping you.

It's about you trying to get your kids to do something. We must parent the way God commands for one reason and one reason only. He told us to. And He is worthy of our obedience. It doesn't matter if our kids listen to us.

It doesn't matter if they like it. It doesn't matter if they respond the way we want them to respond. I have to do this because God commanded me to. And so, therefore, I do it. And we can take any instance in life, any instance, and ask that question.

What does God deserve in regards to my work, my relationships, my diet, my entertainment choices? What does God deserve? Not, how's it going to benefit me? What's it going to produce in my life? What's it going to gain me?

What does God deserve? Just two choices on the shelf. Now, praise God. Amen and amen that one day when we are glorified in heaven that first altar is going to be absolutely obliterated. The sin nature will be eradicated and it will be impossible for us to ever worship ourselves ever again.

Amen and amen. And I look forward to that day. I just have to say this before we continue. Some people think, what about those who die in their sin having never worshipped God? Not being born again. Go into a Christless eternity in hell, separated from God forever.

What about them? Do they just maintain their self-worshipping altar? No, the answer is actually quite interesting. Hell is a very real place. The Bible is very clear about the atrocities and awfulness of hell.

We recognize the fact that the worst part about hell is being separated from God for all eternity. I actually believe the second worst part about hell is the fact that it will be so terrible that it will be impossible for me to worship anything.

There is nothing in hell that I can use to worship myself and I will be left for all eternity incapable of valuing and worshipping and glorifying anything, which is exactly what God created me to do. I will be purposeless for all eternity because hell is exactly what God says hell is.

Our Primary Calling as Christ's Ambassadors

Now, that grain of sand that's been itching in your minds. Yes, Aaron, I believe that we are here to worship God. However, I'm having a really hard time saying that it's a secondary reason that I'm here to worship God.

That kind of seems like it's the most important. Like, there's nothing above that and you are right. But the question is, why are you here? You see, when you were born again, it would, in a certain sense, make all the sense in the world for God just to take you home.

Instant rapture. You're saved. Praise God. Glorify him in perfection for all eternity. So why are you here? Some of you have been here for a while. Some of you, not as long. Some of you longer than you want to have.

But why are you still here? This, I'm going to argue, is the primary reason you are here and not there. In 2 Corinthians 5, 1 -5, we read,. For we know that if the earthly tent, which is our house, our bodies, is torn down, we have a building from God, a new body, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

For indeed, in this house we groan. How many of us are groaning? I'm at that stage of life where I get hurt sleeping. We're longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, and as much as we, having put it on, will not be found naked.

For indeed, while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed, but to be clothed so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life. Now He has prepared us for this very purpose is God, who gave to us the Spirit as a pledge.

So God has prepared us to spend all eternity worshiping Him exactly as we should. Amen. So why are we here? The passage continues. This is, we're here on this earth, and this is the reality that Paul instructs us, that we are supposed to live in light of this tension that we just see here.

So we're going to continue reading the same passage in verse 6. Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body, right here, right now, we are absent from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight, we are of good courage, I say, and prefer, rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord, yes, that it would be our preference.

Therefore, we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him. There's that idea of worshiping Him, valuing Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

So Paul is describing what we believe, what we think, what we feel, what we do, and what we say. He's describing all of that there. And he talks about how we will be held responsible for how we do these things here on this earth.

So how does Paul tie all of this together? We're here on this earth. We want to be with God. He's created us for that. We are going to be held responsible for how we live here. Therefore, how does he tie all of it together?

It's actually kind of counterintuitive. Verse 11. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men. That's the therefore. I'm in this human body. It's hard. There's sin. There's pain. I wish to be with God, worshiping Him forever in glory, perfectly.

But, you know, life is hard, and I'm going to be held responsible for the choices I make here. Okay. Therefore, we persuade men. But we are made manifest to God, and I hope that we are made manifest also in our conscience.

What's going to happen here from verse 14? Paul illustrates how he and his companions have done this for the Corinthians. And Paul concludes, I'm going to skip over a little bit, go to verse 15, talking about Christ and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.

If that is true, then that's something really powerful, really persuasive. If I really believe God is who He is, and I value Him, and I value others the way He says I should value others, then this is information that needs to be told to people.

They need to be persuaded of this. Verses 16 through 21 then beautifully describe what practical worship will look like in the life of a believer. If you truly value God, you have a responsibility to Him.

And this is what it's going to look like. Verses 16 to 17 reveal the reality of the change. Therefore, from now on, we recognize no one according to the flesh, even though we have known Christ according to the flesh.

Yet now we know Him in this way no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come. He's no longer worshiping himself. He's worshiping the Lord.

We recognize the reality of the change. You are a new creature, so stop living otherwise. But then he goes on to reveal the means of the change in verses 18 and 19. Now all these things are from God who reconciled us to Himself, praise God, through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

He's going to use this word a lot. God has reconciled us to Him. Amen. Giving us the ability to worship Him. He's done this through Christ. And then what did He do? He gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

Namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. What is He saying here? He said, this is our job.

We need to be part of this reconciliation process. We are here to persuade men to value God the way He should be valued. But verses 18, 19, and 20 then reveal the responsibility of the change. And again, in verse 18, we saw that God gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

Verse 19, that He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. And then verse 20, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. As though God were making an appeal through us. God appealing to others. God persuading other people in my life through me that He is worthy of their worship and their praise and their adoration.

He is worthy for them to take all of that stuff off of the altar to self and to put it as an offer to Him. God, I want to please you with my whole life to persuade men to do this. God has made us His ambassadors.

Why are you here? You are not here to make a paycheck. You are not here to raise children. You are not here to take care of cattle. You are not here to make a name for yourself. You are here to worship God, namely by helping others worship Him.

And yes, bringing in the cows is part of that. And the paycheck is part of that. And parenting is part of that. All of this is part of that. It's not the main thing. It's the things that we use to give God the worship and the glory that He deserves.

This is why you are here. And this is a hard one to get over. Because when we're born into this world, we think just like the world. I'm here to have fun. I'm here to do what I want to do. You know? If it feels good, do it.

And we're very physical beings. Our five senses, man oh man, they just consume our lives. Everything that we see and touch and feel and taste and smell, that's just reality to us. But the spiritual realities, they're easy to get lost behind our five senses.

It's natural for us and our flesh to want to worship ourselves. So we pursue those things that make us feel good. But that's not why we're here. That's not why He left us here. That would really be ridiculous.

Someone comes to the place where they recognize God for who He is and they truly submit to Him and they say, God, you're worth it. I love you. And this is the Catholic view of life. You get your little stamp, you get your fire insurance, you get your get out of jail free card and then you live your life however you want.

No. It's never worked that way. It never will work that way. Because we have a purpose. We are still here for a reason. And that reason is, the primary reason that we still exist here on this earth is to be God's ambassador here on this earth.

So God created us to worship Him for eternity. But He commands us to worship Him right now. Even though we may long to be rid of this earthly existence and commune with God, we have a greater responsibility as long as He graciously gives us this earthly breath.

We are here to be His ambassadors and to persuade men. We are here to persuade them that they are too responsible to glorify God and how they think about Him. We are here to persuade them that they are responsible to worship God and how they live.

So in the exact same way that Jesus came to reconcile men to God, that long dramatic pause when the speaker loses his place in the notes. In the exact same way that Jesus came to reconcile men to God, we too are responsible to God to be His ambassadors in this life.

Otherwise, there is no point for you to be here. We are to appeal on His behalf, 2 Corinthians said. We are here to beg them on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. That is the biblical terminology.

We urge them. We beg them. We plead with them. We persuade them. Well, some thoughts may be going through some of your heads. Yes, Aaron, I know this and I'm doing it. Praise God. I pray that this is an encouragement.

Stoke that flame. Throw some gasoline on it because it's easy to get tired. I know it's easy to get tired. You work at a boy's home for at-risk teens for five years and you pour yourself into these guys and sometimes they leave worse than they came.

It's easy to get tired. So hopefully this is an encouragement to you to rededicate yourself for the fact that I am here for a really important reason, to worship God by being His ambassador. Some of you, though, might be thinking, you know, I've never really looked at it that way before.

It makes sense. Biblically, yes. Yeah, it's clear. But how does that work? I mean, practically. Pastor George was telling me about some of those guys who make his life really easy. Go to Watertown with their sandwich boards.

You're all going to hell! You're all going to hell! And that's pretty much, you know, repent! That's the closest they get to giving anyone an answer. Is that what being an ambassador looks like? Is that what it is to persuade and to urge men to worship God?

Quick answer is no. That's not it. Don't take their advice. But what does it look like? And then really more specifically, what does that look like for you? Because I've found that a lot of times in preaching, we're super inspirational, which is nice.

It's nice to be inspired. I have a friend who says he does not want to be known as an inspirational speaker. Because inspirational speakers, people leave, they're like feeling good, like yeah, yeah, yeah.

But rarely does anything ever change. He says, I want to be an irritational speaker. Because when you're irritated, you got something in your shoe, you got that itch that just won't go away, you do something about it.