Zambia Hunt

The Need of Man and the Purpose of God (Part 2 of 3)

Based on Ephesians 1:3-14

In Part 1, we established that the church is not about us—it’s about God’s eternal purpose. We saw that God has a purpose in the world, centered in Christ, and involving His people. Now we discover what that ultimate purpose actually is.

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What Is the Purpose of Missions?

You might say, “The purpose of missions is to win souls. It’s to win souls.”

Samuel Zwemer, missionary of bygone days, spent 25 years serving the gospel as a missionary in Arabia and Egypt among Muslims, and at the end of his life, he claimed seven converts. Seven. 25 years, seven.

David Livingstone, 30 years in the heart, traveling back and forth across the heart of Africa, and after 30 years, David Livingstone, in one of his writings, claims two converts. Part of Livingstone’s problem is he wouldn’t claim a convert until he’d watched their life for two years.

You say, “Well, hold on, hold on. I think that the purpose of missions is not just to win souls, it’s to win souls and establish indigenous churches. That’s the purpose of missions.”

Now I submit to you, if God’s plan and purpose for Zwemer and Livingstone was to win souls and the judgment on their success was the number of souls that they won, their lives would hardly be called a success. And if the goal of ministry is simply to establish indigenous churches, they were complete failures.

I don’t know if you’ve taken a drive recently from Lusaka to Kitwe, but the next time you do that, start counting how many—they’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses—how many Watchtower meeting centers there are. Every few kilometers, another Watchtower center, another Watchtower center, another Watchtower center. And you want to know something? They’re all indigenous.

A Missionary’s Vision of God’s Greater Purpose

In 1852, David Livingstone began a journey across Africa from the west to the east in late 1852 that would conclude in 1855. In his journal on June 18th, 1853, David Livingstone wrote this:

Discoveries and inventions are cumulative. Another century must present a totally different aspect from the present. And when we view the state of the world and its advancing energies in the light afforded by childlike—or call it childish—faith, we see the earth filling with the knowledge of the Lord. All nations seeing His glory and bowing before Him whose right it is to reign. Our work and its fruits are cumulative. We work towards another state of things. Future missionaries will be rewarded by conversions for every sermon. We are their pioneers and helpers. Let them not forget the watchmen of the night—we who worked when all was gloom and no evidence of success in the way of conversion cheered our path. They will doubtless have more light than we, but we served our Master earnestly and proclaimed the same gospel as they will do.

You see, to win souls and establish churches is God’s will. But it is not the basic and ultimate purpose of God.

God’s Ultimate Purpose: To Reveal His Glory

God has a purpose in the world. God has a purpose for the church in the world. And God’s purpose is to reveal God’s glory. God’s purpose in our generation is to reveal His glory.

Go back to our text, look at Ephesians 1:11: “In Him, in Christ, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him, who works all things by His sovereign will, according to the counsel of His will, so that”—look at it, verse 12—”so that we who are the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory.“

Look at verse 14: “Who is the guarantee,” that’s the Holy Spirit, “of our inheritance, our future reward of heaven, the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire that which we hope for with confidence,” notice, “to the praise of His glory.“

You see, God’s purpose is to reveal God’s glory.

We Need Supernatural Power to Understand This

We require a power that is greater than ourselves. We reference Acts 1:8: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and unto the uttermost part, the furthest reaches of the earth.” You will receive power for this mission. This power is necessary if we are to know and comprehend the incomprehensible.

To truly understand what God is doing in the church for His glory is so far beyond our human ability to understand and grasp that Paul cries out to God in prayer for them and for us. Look at Ephesians 1:15: “For this reason”—because of these spiritual blessings in Christ and because God in His eternal purpose is working everything together so that through us He might reveal His glory and receive the glory that is due to His holy name—”for this reason.”

“Because I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints. I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayer.”

So Paul, what are you praying for this church? What are you asking God for on behalf of the Ephesians? Well, look what he says. Here’s his prayer, verse 17: “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope to which He has called you, and so that you may know what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and that you may know what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at the right hand in heavenly places.”

If we’re to comprehend God’s purpose for the world, we need supernatural, divine, Holy Spirit unction and power to understand what for human beings is incomprehensible. Why? Because we are flesh and blood. We are people of the earth. We are people of what we can touch, and what we can feel, and what we can see, and what we can taste. We are so human.

And the things that seem most real to us are the things that we can put in our pocket, and the vehicle that we put our key into, and the ignition roars—and those are what seem so real. What seems so real to us tonight is our job, and our families, and the house that we’re building. What seems so real is our bank account. Those are the things that feel and seem to be the most real to us. And if we’re to understand God’s purpose, it will take a divine intervention in the hearts of God’s people so that we can understand what is incomprehensible to us as mere humans in our humanness. This is Paul’s prayer.

Hearts Captured by God’s Glory

David Livingstone, again, December 28th, 1852, just before he began this journey that I mentioned, put his wife and his children on a ship sailing for London. And he sits with his journal as he contemplates traveling north up into what then was known as uncharted, the dark Africa, unknown virtually to the outside world. And he writes this:

Am I on my way to die in Sebetwane’s country? Have I seen the last of my wife and children? The breaking up of all my connections with earth? Leaving this fair and beautiful world and yet knowing so little of it? Oh Jesus, fill me with Thy love now. I beseech Thee, accept me and use me a little for Thy glory. I have done nothing for Thee yet, and I would like to do something. Oh, do, do, I beseech Thee, accept me and my service and take Thou all the glory.

David Brainerd lived in the 1700s, died at the age of 29 of tuberculosis. He spent the majority of his adult life as a missionary to the American Indians. On October 5th, 1744, in his journal, David Brainerd wrote this:

After some consultation, the Indians gathered and I preached to them. I was exceedingly sensible of the impossibility of doing anything for the poor heathen without special assistance from above, and my soul seemed to rest on God and leave to Him to do as He pleased in that which He saw was His own cause.

Two months later, he wrote:

Towards night, I felt my soul rejoice that God is unchangeably happy and glorious, that He will be glorified whatever becomes of His creatures.

God’s purpose is to reveal God’s glory.

Three Ways God Reveals His Glory

1. God is Seeking to Reveal His Glory to the World

You see, the glory of God is the holiness of God on display for the world to see. That is God’s glory. God in all of His brilliance and all of His holiness on display for humankind to see, to view. That’s the glory of God. To render glory to God is to recognize Him for who He is and what He is and to celebrate with praises, worship and adoration.

You know, back to this whole humanness thing—we just struggle with this so much. You want to know why? Because the human in me loves the visible. And if we’re not careful, we will embrace a natural evaluation of success. Why? Because the human in us loves the visible.

I mean, think about it. The success of a business is judged by its balance sheet. And it should be, by the way. The success of a school is judged by its enrollment and its academic achievement. The success of a businessman is evaluated by his wealth and position. When the stock market crashed in the late ’90s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates lost—lost in one day—1.76 billion dollars in one day. That is more than the combined annual income of all residents in Mozambique.

Someone has written that the longing to justify ourselves and our work, the drive to succeed, which is based in pride, constitutes much of the motivating power of our so-called Christian service.

God is seeking to reveal His glory to the world. And missionary success in relation to God’s purpose is this: it is possible for me to leave my home country, to go to some faraway place, to build and to establish and to sacrifice, and I can do all of these things and yet fail to bring glory to God.

2. God is Seeking to Reveal His Holiness to the World

God is seeking to reveal His holiness to the world. Look again at Ephesians 1:4: “Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” He chose us and what was His purpose in choosing us? He chose us before the foundation of the world that we should be what? Holy.

We were chosen before the foundation of the world in Christ, in this generation, so that we would be holy. Now, we know positionally in Christ we are holy, and we have been justified by faith in Jesus. But again and again, Paul reminds, let your position be worked out in practice. God chose us that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

God is seeking to reveal His holiness. Listen to 1 Peter 2:9: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

Now listen to verse 11: “Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh which war against your soul.” Verse 12: “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds, and what? Glorify God on the day of visitation.“

You see, God is seeking to reveal His holiness, and this cannot be done through unholy Christians. I mean, if in a town or a city there are 10 disunited, unholy Christians living lives of selfishness and worldliness, can God adequately reveal Himself through those people? No. I mean, what if you have a hundred of those kind of Christians? Are you going to see more of the glory and holiness of God? No.

Listen, historically God has not been glorified through large numbers of people who profess to know Him, but rather through a relatively small group of people who truly live according to His will. They live in utter abandonment to God. They live their daily lives in the power of the Holy Spirit.

3. God is Creating a People of Righteousness

God is seeking to create a people of righteousness. God is creating a people of holiness. How does he do this? He does this by purifying our lives. This work of God, this progressive sanctification, becoming more and more holy, becoming more and more like Jesus. He does this, he creates a people of righteousness by making them more like himself.

2 Corinthians 3:18 says: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, as we gaze into the face of our glorious Lord Jesus through the Scriptures, as we see Him in His beauty and His glory and His holiness, we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

God is seeking to create a people of righteousness. We are to be, as Paul says in this text, we are to be holy and blameless before Him in love. “In love, He predestined us.” We are to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. We are to be living to the praise of His glory.

The Great Need of Man

So what is the great need of men? What is the greatest need of man? I would submit to you that the greatest need of man is not a better education system. It’s not a reduction of poverty. All those are very important. It’s not the greatest need. The greatest need of man in our generation is to see the glory of God revealed through me.

For people, for those who are lost in darkness, in their trespasses and sin, who are wandering far, they’re enslaved to Satan and to sin. They’re on their way. They are residents and citizens of hell as though they were already there. What they need to see is the glory of God reflected in my life.

What is the need of man? To see the glory of God revealed through me. And what is the purpose of God? To reveal His glory. You see, the great need of man is to see the glory of God and the great purpose of God is to reveal His glory in His saints.

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In our final post, we’ll explore what happened when God’s glory departed from His people in the Old Testament—and the sobering question of whether His glory might be departing from our churches today without us even noticing.

Sermon transcript edits by Claude AI