The Glory-Driven Life: A Riff on The Purpose-Driven Life

Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D.
DrErnie@RadicalCentrism.org
The Glory-Driven Life
Sunday AM
2007-12-02
Kingsway.us
San Jose, CA
Part three of Trilogy; last year!s Prodigal Brother, July!s “Pervasive Kingdom”
Emotional narrative, Intellectual Overview, Motivational Challenge
Copyright 2007 Dr.Ernest.N.Prabhakar@RadicalCentrism.org
May be copied and modiﬁed freely under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>
1Monday, December 29, 2008

GLORY
DOING?
ERNEST PRABHAKAR
Your ﬁrst thought is the Rick Warren book...
Not quite; not the original motivation, but the idea of Purpose is quite relevant.

Why Do We Sin?
Question I!ve been asking for several months.
similar to the question Time Magazine was asking last week!
not concerned with what makes Gandhi different than Hitler, but the Hitler inside all of us.
Deep theological question, so ask the wisest men I know.

Most of you know Barney as John!s pastor and shepherd of our movement.
We had dinner a few months ago, so I asked him.
“That!s easy. We have a rear end and we need some place to put it”
(few moments to realize he thought I!d said “why do we sit”)
Ironically, though, it gave me a clue...

Systems Theory
• We are made of
many Systems
• Every System
has a Purpose
• Sin is when our
Purposes don’t
align with God’s
This is one the one tricky concept.
- legs to run
- digestive system to eat (and excrete)
- reproductive urge
- brain to work puzzles
- etc.

Sin the broad sense is “missing the mark”
When our we fail to achieve the purpose God has for us
because our subsystems are mis-aligned

Perspectives on Purpose
• Historical
• Philosophical
• Theological
• Personal
So, what exactly is that purpose, and how can we achieve it?
The answer is actually quite simple, but the question is rather complex, so I!ll approach it from four
different aspects.

What Is Our Purpose?
Start with the Historical

Modern
“Want”
Happiness
Suffering
As moderns, we believe in “the pursuit of happiness” [Declaration] and the elimination of suffering.
“What do I want” “The Me generation” “Have it your way.”

Traditional
“Must”
Honor
Shame
Contrast with traditional societies, which are build on family obligation. Example: Sandhya when
relatives visited. Not a question of choice or desire, but expectation.

Clerical
“Ought”
Holiness
Sin
third, less-common situation, communities led by priests or monks.
focus is not on personal pleasure or social approval, but religious purity.
Think of the Puritans in Plymouth Rock, or Christian Hermits in Medieval Europe.

Holiness
Honor
Happiness
Conflict!
Not just different eras, all of us feel the tug of all three
We all want to be happy, honored, and holy. Unfortunately, I believe it is the conflict between those
three that leads us to missing God!s purpose.
In fact, I find a lot of my anxiety comes from the tug of war between the desire to please myself,
others, and God. Can anyone else relate to that?

Which is God’s
Purpose for Us?
If that!s the case, then the question becomes: which of these three is *really* God!s purpose for us?
As before, though, we!ll see that different groups answer the question differently. Even among
Christians!

Self
Hope
Happiness
Shame Sin
SUFFERING
Them: John 10:10 “ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may
have life, and have it to the full.”
God dislikes Shame and Sin because they destory Happiness.
Loving Parent.
Virtue -> Hope
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain,
for the old order of things has passed away.” Revelation 21:4.
Self (personal happiness) => Suffering the enemy.
Yet the Bible says to embrace.
Apostle Paul Philippians 3:10-11
“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the
dead.”
Hence the problem “theodicy” -- why does God allow suffering, if He wants Happiness
The obvious answer is God!s purpose for us includes Suffering; must be other!

Society
Love
Honor
Suffer Sin
SHAME
Because of this, many Christians reject the Self-centered view above. Instead, their marching orders
come from Matthew 23:11-12 “The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts
himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” Their favorite virtue is Love,
for they believe that as they serve society -- by eliminating suffering and sin -- that God will honor
them.
While that may at times be true, it overlooks the fact that sometimes God calls us to act contrary to
what Society esteems. In fact in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explictily states “Blessed are
those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and
falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your
reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
God!s purpose can!t quite be a simple as “honor”, or else He wouldn!t want us to be happy at being
shamed!

Spirit
Faith
Holiness
Suffer Shame
SIN
This has led many Christians to eschew attempting to ﬁnd any sort of purpose on earth. For them,
the only thing that matter is having a pure heart towards God, and that both Suffering and Shame
are useful tools to free us from Sin. Their motto is from I Peter 1:16, echoing the words of Leviticus
“Be Holy Because I Am Holy.” They have Faith that as long as they resist all the temptations of this
world and obey God!s Law, He will cleanse their spirits. Surely there could be no higher purpose.
Who could argue with that?
Shockingly, Jesus Himself did. You wouldn!t believe me if I told you what He did, so I!ll let you hear
it in his own words.

Luke 6:1-5
One Sabbath Jesus was going
through the grainﬁelds, and his
disciples began to pick some
heads of grain, rub them in their
hands and eat the kernels.
Some of the Pharisees asked, "Why
are you doing what is unlawful on
the Sabbath?"

Jesus answered them, "Have you
never read what David did when
he and his companions were
hungry? He entered the house of
God, and taking the consecrated
bread, he ate what is lawful only
for priests to eat. And he also gave
some to his companions."
Then Jesus said to them, "The Son
of Man is Lord of the Sabbath."
Amazing, Jesus condoned breaking one of Moses very own commandments simply because he
didn!t want his disciples to go hungry. Why would he do that, if God!s primary purpose for our lives
was to teach us holiness?
Some of you are probably thinking, “The problem isn!t with Holiness *per se*, but that the Pharisees
didn!t understand the kind of Holiness God was interested in.” Yes, exactly -- but the same could be
said about our understanding of Happiness and Honor!

Going Beyond
(our understanding of)
•Happiness
•Honor
•Holiness
The answer, I believe, is that we need to go beyond Happiness, Honor, and even Holiness -- or at
least our imperfect understanding thereof -- to understand God!s true purpose for us. We need a
deeper perspective that incorporates all three.

What is God’s
Purpose For Himself?
In fact, I believe we actually need to go one step further and ask: what is God!s purpose for
Himself?

Three Persons
Father
Spirit
Son
One System
One
God
When faced with tensions like these, I always go back to the Trinity. Speciﬁcally, even though we
experience God as three distinct persons, He is ultimately only one God, and thus a single System.

What does that mean? It means that when we look at the world through human eyes, we “see
through a glass dimly.” It is like a photograph, where we only have the green (or red, or blue)
negative. While all of those give us _some_ idea of what we!re looking at, the true nature isn!t
revealed until we look at all three simultaneously.

One Purpose
Happy
Honored
Holy
Glory
Father
Spirit
Son
In this case, it means that if God is one System, then He must have one Purpose for Himself.
Speciﬁcally, I believe God!s purpose includes -- but transcends -- our human understandings of
purpose. And I can!t think of a better word to describe that purpose than Glory.
See this in Jesus
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they
may always see my glory which you have given me because you loved me before
the foundation of the world” -- John 17:24

Always His Glory
Sustainer
Creator
Saviour
Glory
Father
Spirit
Son
In fact, understanding God!s purpose as Glorifying Himself helps makes sense of difﬁcult situations
we face. Consider someone who was diagnosed with cancer:
* If we discover a drug from yew trees that cures it, the Father gets Glory as Creator
* If the elders pray and the person is healed, the Spirit gets Glory as Sustainer
* If there is no cure, yet the person dies peacefully in the hope of heaven, Christ gets glory as
Saviour
In other words, outcomes we see as very different are all to God equivalent, as they promote His
Glory.

In fact, this brings us back to my initial question. If God!s purpose in all things is His glory, then
anything that fails to manifest his glory is Sin. Which of course is the message of Romans 3:23
“For all have sinned all fall short of the Glory of God”

How Can We
Pursue Glory?
Having established that God!s purpose for Himself is glory, though, we still need to make it personal.
What is the analogue in our own lives of God!s pursuit of Self Glory?

To Manifest
The Best Attributes
Thereof
To start with, let me deﬁne Glory.
The world glorify something simple means to make the best attributes of that thing visible or easily
seen. Think of the poets in the courts of Roman Emperors, whose job was to articulate and
disseminate knowledge of the ruler!s achievements. Or a makeup artists (esthetician?) on the
bride!s wedding day.
The question is, whose attributes are we manifesting?

Glorifying Self
Happy
Honored
Holy
I
Well, at one level, I am making the provocative claim that we what as humans *really* want is not
happiness, honor, or even holiness. Rather, what we ultimately want -- what we pursue when we
are “most ourselves”, rather than slaves to our “lower desires” -- is our own glory.
One person who really helped me understand this was Ryan McKee [hiking example]. I don!t have
a picture of that, but I found out that makes the same point.

Now, I wouldn!t call this a “happy place”. In fact, he looks like someone who broke several
important rules, and many would consider an idiot. Yet, at the same time, there is something noble
and majestic about him. His whole being -- a lifetime of training, mind body and soul -- is
concentrated on a single life-or-death action, pulling himself to safety. He has placed himself
(wittingly or not) in a situation where he will either manifest His glory -- or die trying. In fact, I would
argue that he is in many ways fully alive at this moment (even if not for long long :-).
But there!s another way to think about glory...

Glorifying Christ
Happy
Honored
Holy
!
That is take everything we have learned about glory, about aligning our lives and all the subsystems
that make up our selves, and sumit them to Christ.

In fact, this is exactly what Christ did for us. He embraced suffering, shame -- and yes, even sin --
in order that all glory might go to God. I love this picture, as it emphasizes the weakness and
vulnerabilty of Christ!s submission to God, in direct contrast to the previous picture of self-glory.

Two Different Roads
!I
Proverbs 14:12 Matthew 7:13-14
[Bring up worship team]
Because ultimately, you have to choose whom to glorify. If you choose to glorify yourself, to focus
on exalting your *own* best attributes, maximizing your own happiness, honor, and holiness life can
seem pretty wonderful -- at first. But thought it starts out bright, there is a black hole.
Proverbs 14:12"“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”
The problem is that the pursuit of self-glory can never quite fulfill its promises. Conversely, the way
of the cross seems dark and painful, but ultimately provides true life.
Matthew 7:13-14 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that
leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads
to life, and only a few find it.”

Two Questions
• Will I let go of “my” happiness,
honor, and holiness?
• So God can glorify me
• Will I let go of “my” glory?
• So Christ can be gloriﬁed in me
First of all, do you accept that God!s utlimate purpose is your glory? That He values your
happiness, honor, and holiness even more than you do? [Davey story] “Stop whining” and let God
shape you?
But second of all, once you accept that glory is the highest human end, are you willing to die to all of
it? Are you willing to let God bring you do a place of suffering, shame, and even awareness of your
utter sinfulness, so that Christ can be gloriﬁed in you?
Meditate on those questions while the band plays and the prayer team comes forward.
[Then, ask people to stand...]

The End
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The Glory-Driven Life: A Riff on The Purpose-Driven Life

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