Those of us who weren't able to make it to the annual meeting this past week could get this into the subject that I wanted to talk about. We had the choice of either lengthening our service to an hour and 45 minutes or doing it in two weeks, and I took the latter option. I'm sure you'll appreciate that. First Corinthians chapter 6. I want to talk today about life's ultimate purpose.
As one matures, there is one question which begins to weigh heavily upon the heart and the mind, and that is, what is my purpose in living? As one grows older, he begins to realize that he's not going to be able to accomplish all of those dreams that he once had. And he begins to realize that relatively soon he will be off the scene of this world and will be forgotten by the next generation just like we've forgotten the previous generation for the most part.
That sounds rather pessimistic, doesn't it? But it's rather realistic. Life's day is brief, and as we begin to understand more and more the seriousness of that, we ask the question, what is my purpose in life? I think that's the reason that some people have a very difficult time once they begin to hit the late 30s, the 40s, early 50s. And some go off the deep end because they begin to wrestle with that question, what is the ultimate purpose of living anyway?
Well, the question really is one more, not one of vocation rather, that is, what am I going to do to make a living? Nor is it one really of reputation, what are people going to think about me now and after I'm dead? The question really is one of purpose. What am I here in this life to achieve and to accomplish? The answer for the Christian is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That's the purpose in living. We see that in 1 Corinthians 6, verses 19 and 20.
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have of God and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body. Those are verses that I hope that you've memorized this past month, the key verses for this month of stewardship studies. Turn with me now please to 1 Peter chapter 2. This is the way that the Apostle Peter says it.
But you are a chosen race, verse 9, 1 Peter 2. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession. That you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. In other words, Peter is telling us we have been saved in order that we might glorify God. Do you see how that ties together with stewardship? The stewardship of life involves advancing the cause, the worth, the glory of our Master.
A steward is one who has given something from his Master and who is expected in return to get gain on that something. I believe that Jesus Christ is the greatest example of stewardship that we could find. Would you turn to the Gospel of John with me for a minute and look at what Jesus says in chapter 12. He's getting right down to the very reason for His coming into the world. In John 12 we enter into the Passion Week.
Just a few days before our Lord went to the cross, this is what He said, verse 27. Now my soul has become troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this purpose I came to this hour. He was troubled in His humanity with that which was to take place in a few days. He knew His hour had come. And He said, what is my response to be? Shall I pray, Father, save me from this hour? He says, no. It's for this hour that I came into the world.
He says, this is the purpose that I have come. And so His response is, Father, glorify Thy name. Our Lord Jesus said, Father, bring glory to Yourself in this hour, the purpose of my life. I believe that the purpose of your life, if you're a child of God, the purpose of my life as a child of God, is to glorify our Heavenly Father. We are to bring glory to Him in every dimension of life. I want to talk about three of them this morning. First let's talk about the dimension of our salvation.
Dear people, there is more to salvation than keeping our unworthy souls out of hell and take them into heaven. The purpose of your salvation and mine is to glorify God. That is the ultimate purpose of it. You see, man was created to bring glory to God. Back in Genesis it says that God created man in his own image and in his likeness. There's a lot in that. It involves moral likeness in a sense because man was created without sin. He was innocent. That reflected God's sinlessness, His holiness.
In His constitution, man reflects something of God because man is a tripartite being, body, soul, and spirit, and God is a triunity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, as He's revealed Himself. But I think there's something more specifically intended in that passage because right after it says that, God tells man that He is to rule and to subdue the earth.
In other words, God created man in his likeness so that man could be his representative in this creation to rule and to subdue it and to bring glory to God. That's why man was created in the beginning, in the likeness, in the image of God, that He might bring glory to His Creator. Of course, the sad facts are, as revealed to us in the Bible, that man fell from that exalted position. He chose to disobey God and sinned and then became incapable of bringing glory to God because of his sinfulness.
But in God's sovereign purpose, He had even before that planned man's redemption. Before God ever said, let there be light, God had already, within the councils of the Godhead, planned a way for man who was even yet to be created to someday be redeemed from the sin which He had not even committed at that point as we would look at time. And then in the right time, in due time, God sent forth His Son. And His Son went to Calvary in our place and took our curse upon Himself. He became sin for us.
He died there bearing your iniquity in mind. And then He rose from the dead and ascended back to heaven. In other words, Jesus Christ accomplished the saving work that God had before creation planned. Now why did Jesus Christ do all of that? That He might glorify God and that He might redeem you and me from our sin that we too might bring glory to God. Whenever a sinner repents of his sin and places his faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, he honors and glorifies God.
He is confessing his sin, recognizing that it comes short of God's glory. He is receiving God's only provision for his sin. He is acknowledging God's just condemnation upon him as a sinner. And therefore he comes as a helpless one to God to receive the free gift of eternal life. At the very first part of our salvation experience, we are glorifying God by what we do and repenting and believing on Christ. We are obeying what God tells us we must do to be saved. But that isn't the only thing.
Even someday when our salvation is consummated, that too will be for the glory of God. God is someday going to change our lowly bodies to be like the body of Christ. Why is He going to do that? Well, you say so we can go to heaven and live forever. Well, that's one of the results in it, but that's not the primary purpose of it.
God's primary purpose of someday changing your body and catching you up in the rapture to be with Christ is that even then, through the ages to come, He might show His kindness toward you and thus glorify Himself. No matter which way you look at salvation, it's for the glory of God. Now we see that clearly in Ephesians chapter 1, a chapter some of you have studied in recent days in small church and others of you have read often.
I just want to point out three verses in Ephesians 1 to underscore what I'm saying. The purpose of our salvation is to glorify God. Ephesians 1 verse 5, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace which He freely bestowed on us. Notice, why did God predestine us to adoption as sons? The reason is that we might be to the praise of the glory of His grace.
Verse 12, talking more about salvation, He says, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ should be to the praise of His glory. And then in verse 14 talking about the Holy Spirit who has given us or given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, you and me, to the praise of His glory.
Now how much more clear can the Bible be than this in saying that your salvation, my friend, is not just to get you to heaven and to save you from the fires of hell, but your salvation is intended to bring glory and honor and praise to God. The ultimate purpose of life in every dimension is to bring glory to God. Let's think about a second dimension. I like to think about the physical dimension, and I'm thinking primarily of the body in which you live.
Let's go back now to 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 20. Excuse me, I'd like for us to look again at this critical verse. He says, for you have been bought with a price, therefore, what? Glorify God in your body. And some manuscripts go on to say, and in your spirit, which are God's. The oldest manuscripts that we have stop after body. But the main point is there either way. You've been bought with a price, therefore glorify God. And he says, do it in your body.
There are two specific sins that are warned about in the context of this verse. You're going to have to basically trust me for that. We're going to have time to read the whole thing. But one sin is the sin of gluttony. In verse 12, the apostle quotes, or verse 13 rather, the apostle quotes a statement that was made frequently in that day. Food is for the stomach, and the stomach is for food. They said, God gave us a stomach to eat with, and He's given us food to fill our stomachs with.
Therefore, the two go together, let's eat. And they did. It was not uncommon in the feast in those days for a person to gorge himself, to stuff himself as full as he could, to walk out of the banquet, go behind the building, stick his finger down his throat, regurgitate, go back in and do it all over again. Because there was just glory in eating. That was the purpose of life, gluttony. And the apostle says here subtly, that is not purpose of life. Now, the Corinthians went another step.
They concluded that if in fact the belly is for food, and the food is for the belly, which is what he says here literally, then the body is for sexual indulgence. I mean, we have these desires, these appetites, just like hunger. And therefore, just as food is for the body, so body is for sexual indulgence, and the two of them go together. And they lived that way. And they were guilty of gross immorality.
And so the apostle goes on to say in the last part of the verse, yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord. And the Lord is for the body. Skip down to verse 16. Do you not know that the one who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her? For he says the two will become one flesh. But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.
And then he says in verse 20, glorify God in your body. We live in a day in which immorality is excused, but God does not excuse it. And let's be very, very clear about something. God tells us that any sexual relationship outside of marriage is sin. That's what fornication means here. It makes no difference if it's two consenting adults in private. It makes no difference if there's a deep commitment to one another. Or if you happen to be away from your partner for an extended period of time.
Those are not reasons, as far as God is concerned, for a sexual relationship. There's only one, and that is within the bonds of marriage. Every other thing falls under this general word of fornication, illicit sexual relationships. And the apostle warns us here that those things destroy the body. They do not bring glory to God. We are to flee from immorality and by implication as well from gluttony. You see, these things destroy our spiritual effectiveness.
In 1 Peter 2, 11, the apostle says, Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. In other words, he says, Abstain from fulfilling indulgently the appetites of your fleshly body, because that kind of indulgence is a warfare within you against your soul, your inner person. The apostle Paul was concerned about this himself. Just turn over a page or two to chapter 9.
After talking about his motives and his plan of ministry, the apostle begins in verse 24 to use an athletic kind of metaphor. We're going to look at the last part of that, verse 26. Therefore I run in such a way as not without aim. Now, do you remember the 100-yard dash you used to run or you watched being run? Did you ever see a 100-yard dash of people all get together in a little group and they shoot the gun and the guys all take off in a different direction? Of course not.
If you're going to have a race, they line up on a particular line. The course for the race is chalked out and up there somewhere, 100 yards or a quarter of a mile or a mile, is a string. That's the goal line. If you're in a race, you better stay within your lane and cross the goal line, or you'll be disqualified. As the apostle says, I'm like in a race, a spiritual race. My aim is before me.
And I think that without doing any injustice at all, we can say that Paul's aim was to bring glory to God. Over in Philippians 1, he says, whether it be by life or by death, I want Christ to be magnified in my body. It goes on to say, verse 26, I box in such a way as not beating the air. Now he uses the metaphor of boxing, and he says, I box, but I don't swing wildly and miss the mark. I make the blows count, he says.
Now using that same picture of boxing, he again adjusts the metaphor to talk about himself personally, and he says in verse 27, I buffet my body and make it my slave. Literally he says, I beat my body black and blue. Now he's using a metaphor, remember. But what he's saying is, I keep my body disciplined, and I make it my slave. And the reason for that, he says, is, lest possibly after I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.
My friend, it is possible for you to disciple people. It's possible for you to share your faith, to get up and give testimonies. It's possible for you to preach sermons, teach a Sunday school class, to be in usher, sing in the choir, serve the Lord, and then in a moment of foolishness, to disqualify yourself from serving God by not keeping your body in check, keeping it disciplined. That's what he's saying here. And the apostle was concerned about that regarding himself. How should we feel?
The same way, the same way. We should be concerned about bringing glory to God in our bodies. And I think that involves the area of modesty too. The Bible doesn't give us a dress code, but it does give us the principle of modesty. And it warns us about dressing or acting in such a way that we create desires in others which cannot be righteously fulfilled. That's what the Bible calls defrauding. And over in 1 Thessalonians 4, he warns us, don't defraud your brother.
Rather, maintain your vessel, your body, in holiness and honor. There's a lot here, folks, and we're just kind of touching the surface. I pray the Spirit of God will cause this to sink into your heart, that with your body you are to bring glory and honor to God. He's purchased it by the blood of Christ. He dwells in you in the Holy Spirit. It is His sanctuary. This building is not a sanctuary. Your body is God's sanctuary. Glorify God in His sanctuary.
You do that by reckoning your body as His temple and by even offering it up as a sacrifice, a living sacrifice, Romans 12.1. What kind of a steward are you of your body? You know, this involves the area of other things that we do that can damage our bodies. I was over studying in high school this morning before the first service, our campus worship service, and in the room I was in, apparently it's a health room, because there are signs all over the place about smoking.
One of them said, cut down on smoking, not your life. Do you know smoking destroys the body? That is proven. There's no doubt about that. You have some Christian smoke. Does that bring glory to God in the body? Someone has said if God wanted us to smoke, He'd have put a smokestack on top of our heads. Well, some people kind of do, and they smell like a smokestack. What about drugs? The abuse of drugs, that's a big one in our day.
The social thing, to take cocaine or some of the other drugs, does that bring glory to God in the body when you destroy the body in that way? What about alcohol? Alcohol is proven to kill cells in the brain, as well as to make a person act like a fool. Does that bring glory to God when we drink? When we drink, one ounce of alcohol destroys a certain number of cells in the brain. Proven fact. Does that bring glory to God? What kind of a steward are you of God's temple anyway?
God's concerned about that. Our ultimate purpose in life is to bring glory to God. That's true in the dimension of our salvation. It's true in the dimension of our physical bodies. I'd like to think about one more area before we close, and that is the area of our lifestyle. We're in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 31. There's a whole lot of sin and selfishness that takes place these days under the label of lifestyle. Well, that's my lifestyle. Don't bug me. God accepts me just the way I am.
My friend, He only accepts you just the way you are in Jesus Christ. You see, just the way we are is unacceptable to God. And having been once and for all accepted in Christ at the moment of salvation, God goes to work on our lifestyle. And He wants to clean up our lifestyle so that we live the way we ought to live. As the Apostle says in Ephesians 4, 1, that we walk worthy of the calling to which we've been called. And then in chapter 5, verse 1, be imitators of God as dear children.
I'm talking about lifestyle. Our lifestyle should imitate the lifestyle of Jesus Christ. Now, what kind of a lifestyle was that? Well, it was a lifestyle that was known for good works. He went about doing good. It was a lifestyle that was free from deceit and trickery and dishonesty. He did no sin. Neither was deceit found in His mouth. It was a lifestyle that was centered upon doing the will of God. When He came into the world, He said, I come to do Thy will, O God.
The garden, He said, not my will, but Thine be done. That was the lifestyle of Jesus Christ. Is that what your lifestyle is like? Are you an imitator of God, a mimicker of Jesus Christ? Now, the context of the verse we're looking at deals with a realm called doubtful things, disputed things. That is those activities or involvements which the Bible neither condones nor condemns, neither approves or disapproves, where God doesn't really say, Thou shalt not or Thou shalt.
And there is a realm, a gray area in there, doubtful things. How do I know what I should do in my lifestyle when the Bible doesn't say, do this or don't do that? Let me just give you five questions to ask whenever you are confronted with an activity or an involvement in your lifestyle and you wonder, what shall I do? I'm going to get all of these from 1 Corinthians. I'll give you the reference. We don't have time to read it. Question number one, is it profitable?
Chapter 6, verse 12. It may not be outlawed, but is it profitable? Is there going to be benefit in it? Question number two, is this activity enslaving? Chapter 6, verse 12 again. It may be lawful, but will this bring me into bondage, into a habit that will cause me to be a slave to something else other than Jesus Christ? Is it enslaving? Question three, will this activity offend another Christian?
Chapter 8, verse 13. In other words, I may not have any feelings about this activity, that it's wrong, but if I have a brother who will be made to stumble by it, it becomes sin. That's the point. I have brethren around me who are weaker than I. That is, their consciences perhaps are less mature. They may not be as deep into the Word as you. Consider them. The apostle says when we cause a brother to stumble, we are sinning against Christ. That's serious. Question four, does it edify?
Will this activity build me up or build others up? Or will it tend to tear them down or tear me down? Chapter 10, verse 23. In the question number five, the text we've looked at, chapter 10, verse 31, can I glorify God through this? As I am involved in this, as I do this activity, can I recognize the presence of Jesus Christ with me and say, Lord, I'm sure glad you're here?
Because when I do this kind of thing, I enjoy doing it with you, and I want to do it in such a way that you're glorified and honored. That's question number five. What kind of a steward are you in your lifestyle? Or are you involved in some things that disgrace God rather than glorify Him? Your ultimate purpose in life is to bring glory to God. You do that when you trust Jesus Christ.
Some of you here today may need to make that decision, to trust Jesus Christ as your Savior, and thus to bring glory to God. Your lifestyle, the way you live, the morals you have, all of that is meaningless until you come to the place of seeing your need for Christ. Have you trusted Christ? Have you obeyed the gospel to believe on Him for the salvation of your soul? Or are you still clinging to your own good works? Or your church membership? Or your baptism? Or your Christian parents?
As a Christian, is your body bringing glory to God? Is your lifestyle honoring to God? You know, as I've read biographies, as I've studied the Word of God, I have uncovered a truth that is obvious and yet profound, and it's this. Every person who has made a significant impact for Jesus Christ and His generation had a single purpose in life, and that purpose was to glorify God. He didn't get involved in secondary issues. He didn't choose the better, He chose the best.
And His single purpose in all of life was to bring honor and glory to God. Is that where you are today? I hope it is. Let's pray. Father, we thank You for the way the Holy Spirit searches our hearts. It's painful sometimes, but it's good for us. And wherein today there are some decisions that need to be made by some of us, I pray that You will give us courage and grace to follow through and make the right decision. Help us to understand that to do nothing is to make the wrong decision.
If there are some of us, Father, who need to be saved here today, I pray that those people will come in humility and will trust Christ and bring glory to You by confessing their sins. I pray, Father, for those who have made that decision, but whose lifestyle or whose stewardship of the body has not been wise, has been foolish, and even sinful.
If there are some things that some of us need to get straightened out in those areas, God, I pray, in Jesus' name, that we will do it today, because life is short. And I pray this in Jesus' name, amen.