Leonard's Enroute

The Purpose of Life: His Glory


Last Friday I (Leo) gave a session at Amplify Fridays on the Glory of God. Frankly, if I could only give one sharing for the rest of my life, that would be it. I showed from scripture, how God's chief purpose of creating and governing the world is to display His glory. And we, as creations of God, the purpose of our lives is to glorify God.

Now, what then does it mean to say that God created us for his glory? Glory is a very hard thing to define. It is like the word "Beauty." We all can use it and communicate with it but to try to reduce it to words is very frustrating. It is easier to point to examples. A sunset seen from the top of the Blue Mountains- that's glory. A perfect performance on the balance beam by Nadia Comaneci—that's glory.

The glory of God is the beauty and excellence of his manifold perfections. It is an attempt to put into words what God is like in his magnificence and purity. It refers to his infinite and overflowing fullness of all that is good. The term might focus on his different attributes from time to time—like his power and wisdom and mercy and justice—because each one is indeed awesome and beautiful in its magnitude and quality. But in general God's glory is the perfect harmony of all his attributes into one infinitely beautiful and personal being.

So God's chief purpose for everything is to display who He is.


Now for some of us, this is a very disturbing thought. That God lives and does everything for his own glory. Say if I tell you that I live for the glory of myself, you would tell me that I have a major issue. So if its wrong for me to seek glory for myself, how could it be right for God to do so?

And the reason why we think this is because for many of us, our concept of God is that He is just a little more bigger than us. Or that like Cheryl Crow puts it, 'like a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home.' So if its wrong for us to seek our own glory, it should also be wrong for God too.

But it is not so. Because God is God and we are not. Consider this quote:


"Now, if it right for men to have the Glory of God as his goal, can it be wrong for God to have the same goal? If man can have no higher purpose than God's Glory, how can God?

If it is wrong for man to seek a lesser end than this. It will be wrong for God too. The reason it cannot be right for man to live for himself as if he were God its because he is not God. However it cannot be wrong for God to seek His own Glory simply because He is God."

- A.W. Tozer



And because God seeks to display His own Glory, He created everything in the heavens and the earth. He created Man, in his image and likeness to reflect His glory in a way no other creature can. But Man turned away from his created purpose, betrayed God and chose to glorify themselves instead

But God, bent on His glory, sent His only Son into the history to suffer and die for the very people who betrayed Him- us. In so doing, leveraged our sins for His Glory, namely His unbelievable love and goodness. See, when a King die for his subjects, its says more about the King than it does the subjects.


This shows very clearly that our very existence is for the Glory of God. That in the end, God will get what He created us for. Either we will glorify Him as Loving Father and Savior by our total trust and reliance on Him in this life and next. Or we will glorify Him as Righteous Judge when we refuse, and are sentenced to pay the penalty of our rebellion against a Holy God in the fires of hell.

Either way, God will have His glory. The question is by which way would my life glorify God? This is what we will all need to ask and answer all our days, in every choice, every circumstances, every season, every relationship of our lives. How will I glorify God in this?

For this is the our purpose. And our choice.




"Today I put before you Life and Death... choose Life that you may live!"
Deut 30:19



Leo