Why are we here?
“…Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” John 13: 1
The penultimate question that philosophers and many others struggle to explain.
If you don’t believe in God then you must believe you are here by chance. I’m sorry.
Well if you do believe in God, why did He create us? I started to talk about this before with the love motivation. Let’s look at another that is equally as important, relationship/worship. To me these are the same. I cannot have a relationship with God without worshiping Him. I put worship and relationship in the same category because whatever we worship we have a relationship with.
We are wired to be in a relationship. The perfection of Eden wasn’t the immortality, the perfect air or perfect animals, no it was the perfect relationship Adam and Eve had with 1. God 2. themselves 3. each other 4. nature. Enter sin and all of these were perverted immediately with doubt, self preservation, shame, guilt, blame, jealousy, strife, dishonesty and much more. If we look at our world now, every form of relationship is perverted in one way or another with pride, selfishness and self centeredness. This is the enemy’s plan.
Enter Jesus, whose life was the opposite of pride, selfishness and self centeredness.
You respect whatever you worship. Everyone worships, but it’s not always God. Everything we do as human beings is linked to worship. Not everybody worships God but everybody has a god they worship.
David Foster Wallace, the author or Infinite Jest, an atheist himself puts it most accurately in a speech he gave at a graduation.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.
We are wired to worship. The number one idol or the thing we worship is ourselves. What is at the top of Maslow’s pyramidal hierarchy of needs? Self-actualization. With the rise of social media and self proclaimed influencers, more and more the world is catering us to worship ourselves. We are encouraged to have a relationship with ourself called self-love. All of this has created an environment where God is replaced most often by our pursuits, our jobs, our education, our achievements, our desirability ultimately ourselves.
Enter Jesus Christ whose life from choosing to put on humanity was act of worshipping His Father, Our Father.
“Worship is the only thing we can give to God that He does not already have. Worship is the one thing we do exclusively to God to express our love to God.” Bob Rognelien
The 4th century theologian Augustine sums it up beautifully,
“You have made us for yourself oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
We were made to be stewards, not usurpers of the resources of this precious planet God made for us.
Having Christ in the center there is hope for a beautiful union of husband, wife and children.