By John Piper
The Crystal-Clear Reason for Living
The Bible is crystal clear: God created us for his glory.
Life is wasted when we do not live for the glory of God. And I mean all of life. It is all for his glory. That is why the Bible gets down into the details of eating and drinking. (1 Cor. 10:31).
What does it mean to glorify God? God cannot be made more glorious or more beautiful than he is. Glorify does not mean add more glory to God.
It is more like the word magnify. It means to make something unimaginably great look like what it really is.
We waste our lives when we do not pray, think, dream, plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. We are meant to image forth in the world what he is really like.
Does Being Loved Mean Being Made Much Of?
Many people when told that God created them for his glory, feel used. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world.
This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. We were made to see and savor God—and savoring him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Showing people the all-satisfying God is to love them.
Loving People Means Pointing Them to the All-Satisfying God
Love shows a dying soul the lifegiving beauty of the glory of God, especially his grace.
Every good work should be a revelation of the glory of God. The passion and the sacrifice to make God himself known as glorious is what makes the good deed an act of love. Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need most deeply. And to have all else without him is to perish in the end. If you don’t point people to God for everlasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life.
Taken from If We Were Created for God’s Glory, Is God Merely Using Us? by John Piper, Copyright © March 06 2017. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.”
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