Psalm 45, the words of the man of
God, verse 11.
So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty,
for whom is thy Lord.
Worship thou him.
I am assuming, not only these nights, but
I am assuming in all of my ministry,
everywhere, that there are some serious-minded men
and women left in the world who want
to know a number of things about themselves.
They want to know where they came from,
they want to know who they are, they
want to know what they are, they want
to know why they're here, and they want
to know where they're going.
Now, there are not many, I admit, in
great masses and multitudes, but I believe there
are some.
I believe there are enough that, taken all
in all, they form a fairly nice congregation
almost anywhere you go.
If I am wrong about this, I might
as well, I suppose, leave my Bible closed,
but I don't believe that I am wrong.
I believe that there are still many serious
-minded young people, as well as older ones,
who want to know an answer to the
question, What is the chief end of man?
And that is, Who am I?
What am I?
Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
And where am I going?
Now, there have been a number of answers
given to this question, and there are still
answers being given.
Oh, I will take three or four of
them only and point out what these who
give this answer have to say, and I'll
try to be fair to them.
There are those who say that we are
here to work.
I suppose there isn't any place in the
world ever from the days of Adam to
this hour where there was more honor given
to work than on the North American continent.
Canadians and Americans, they don't like to work,
but they do like to talk about what
an honorable thing it is.
Now, have you ever stopped to consider what
work is?
Work is moving things and rearranging them.
Now, that's all it is.
It is that, but that's all it is,
just rearranging things.
The thing is over here, and you work
to put it over there.
And there's something in a pail, and you
work to put it on the side of
a house.
That's called painting.
There is something in the cabinet, and you
work to put that into a skillet, to
put that onto the table, to put that
into your husband, and that is called housekeeping
and cooking.
And you will find that this definition of
work is a good sound definition, if not
complete at least sound, that work is taking
something that is somewhere and putting it somewhere
else and rearranging it.
That's work.
But always it has a short-range purpose.
It never has a long-range purpose, always
a short-range purpose.
A farmer has some corn in his barn,
and he puts it in the field and
covers it up.
He takes it from where it was and
puts it to where he wants it to
be.
Then after nature has worked on it for
about 3 or 4 months, he takes it
from where it is and puts it back
where he got it, only there's more of
it.
I'm serious about that.
That's actually what work is.
But always it's short-range.
The next year the corn is gone.
The pigs that ate the corn are likely
to be gone.
Also, having been taken from where they were
and put where they were not until that
time, so it's always a short-range purpose.
But what's the end of all this?
What are you driving at?
Why do all this?
Why put that green or red or white
material in that tail?
Why take that out and put that thinly
on the surface of your house?
Why do that?
You say, in order that it might not
weather, that it might stay nice and look
nice and not weather.
Well, that's very good.
But then that's not the end and purpose
of it all, because there never was a
house built yet that won't rot and run
down and be carried away sometime and something
else built in its place.
So nobody can tell me that I am
merely made to work like a horse without
having any future or any reason for the
work.
And somebody else says, well, that sounds all
right, but we're here for a higher purpose
than merely to work.
We're here to educate ourselves.
We're here to develop ourselves, to perfect our
nature, they say.
We are like, oh, say, a field that
needs to be cultivated and trimmed and pruned
and all the rest, and that's why we're
here.
And we're to enlarge ourselves.
We take an ignorant boy and we put
him into school and we teach him the
amenities of life and we teach him the
three R's.
We put him further on into college and
we teach him science and art and literature
and history.
And if he wants to go on and
do postgraduate work and get degrees, that's all
right, but there's just one little catch in
the whole thing.
That fellow that we're educating and developing and
cultivating, he's got to die.
And he's going to take all of that
education with him down into a hole in
the ground.
He's going to take all of that culture,
that love of Brahms and Bach, he's going
to take that right down into a hole
in the ground with him.
Everything we do for a man, he's going
to take it right down into the ground
with him.
And if he gets 40 degrees, they can
put the degrees on his tombstone, but he's
not there to know anything about it.
He's lying down there.
Now, my friend, is that the reason that
we were born?
I don't think so.
The old poet said, Yet a few days
and the all-beholding sun shall see no
more, do no more in all its course.
Nor yet in the cold ground where thy
pale form was laid with many tears, nor
in the embrace of ocean shall exist thy
image.
Earth that nourished thee shall claim thy growth
to be resolved to earth again and lost
each human trace.
Surrendering up thine individual being, thou shalt grow
to mix forever with the elements, to be
a brother to the insensible rock and to
the sluggish clod.
Yet not to thine eternal resting place shalt
thou retire alone.
Thou shalt lie down with patriarchs of the
infant world, with kings and the powerful of
the earth, the wise, the good, fair forms
and hoary seers of ages past, all in
one mighty sepulcher.
The sweet babe and the gray-haired man
shall one by one be gathered to thy
side, by those who in their turn shall
follow them for the dead reign there alone.'
That was written by an eighteen-year-old
boy.
My brother, he was considering what the end
of a man was.
Well, I say that it can't be simply
for the perfecting of my nature, the educating,
the developing of my brain.
I'm supposed to do that, and I'm supposed
to work.
But that's not the reason it came.
That's not the end.
What's the end of man?
Well, there are others who say, and not
so nobly, that we're here to enjoy ourselves.
There lived an old Greek by the name
of Epicurus, and Epicurus, of course, was the
father of Epicureanism, and he taught that pleasure
is the end of man.
The old boy earned himself a terribly bad
reputation, but he wasn't as bad as it
sounds, because Epicurus did not teach that we
were to go out and go on a
glorious three-week binge, or that we were
to smoke open, or that we were to
do any physically evil things.
He taught something quite the contrary.
Though Epicureanism has had a bad reputation, as
it should have, because it's a false philosophy,
nevertheless, don't let's pin the label of rape
or nirval well on the man Epicurus, because
he taught something quite otherwise.
He taught that pleasure is the end of
man, but not low pleasure.
He said high pleasures, the pleasures of friendship,
and the pleasures of beauty, and the pleasures
of literature and poetry and music and art,
the noble pleasures of a good conscience.
He said, this is what we were born
for, in order that we might enjoy.
But he had it all wrong in that
all these joys pass away.
The joys of the mind pass away.
The old man used to sit and listen,
enraptured to the music of the classicists, now
sits and nods in the corner and doesn't
know Brahms from Frank Sinatra, doesn't know one
from the other, because his mind is gone,
you see.
He's sitting there.
Now, is that the reason, then, that he
might enjoy himself?
Certainly not.
And, of course, there's something still less noble
than Epicurus, and that is that the thrills
of life are all that matter.
Now, this has never been made into a
philosophy.
I don't think anybody would have the courage
to write this up as a philosophy and
seriously offer it to men.
But it is the philosophy, nevertheless, that is
widely practiced and held by most people that
aren't Christians.
It's the philosophy that sex and food and
sports and excitement and the gathering of many
goods, that's the chief end of life.
They say that.
If they don't say it, they live it,
and that's what matters.
But I tell you that all that are
this night spending their time trying to get
thrills out of life, there's going to be
one of two things or both things happen
to them.
They are either going to run down physically
and mentally until there's no thrill left.
There isn't anything quite so terrible as an
old rogue who hasn't got a thrill left
in him anymore.
A bored, weary-feet, blase, burned-out old
bum who has spent his life getting physical
thrills wherever he could find them at any
cost, and now he's old and tired and
burnt out and nothing thrills him anymore.
Trying to get a thrill out of him
is like sticking an ice pick into a
wooden leg.
There isn't any response nor reaction, there's no
life nor feeling there.
So is this the chief end of man,
that I should run around and drink until
I'm fat and spend my time neither in
person or looking on the television at men
knocking a little hunk of something around on
the ice, or go down in the states
in a paroxysm of excitement, wondering who learned
who in the world series?
Well, is that all life is for?
If that's all life is for, I think
God made a tremendous mistake when he created
this whole shebang.
If all there is in the world is
that I should get an education to take
it to the grave, if that's all, then
with my hand over my face and with
my knees bowed, I can cry to God
Almighty and complain and say, Why did you
make me thus?
But that is not all the reason.
We come to the light now, to the
scriptures themselves, and it's from the scriptures themselves
and not from philosophy that I draw my
answer to the question, What is the chief
end of man?
The scriptures teach us a number of things.
The Bible teaches us that God created all
things out of his own pleasure, for out
for thy pleasure they are and were created.
And he created them for the pure joy
they brought to him, the pure joy of
doing something for somebody.
When God decided to create mankind, it was
a high day in heaven, there was a
big celebration there.
In Job 38 it says that when God
laid the foundations of the earth and created
all things, that the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for
joy.
That is, the sons of God being angels
in that context, they all shouted for joy,
and here was the heavenly host jumping up
and down with delight when God decided to
create the heaven and the earth, and he
created man to worship him.
Now, this is not only taught in a
few places in the scriptures, this is taught
throughout the entire Bible, that he created man
to worship him, and that, I shall say,
is the chief end of man.
You see, man is God's darling.
Man is the darling of the universe.
There are a lot of unbelievers who deny
this.
I heard a man say the other night,
as I have said, I listen to debates
and interviews and so on, and one of
your very fine Canadian writers, a very brilliant
man, I could tell that by the way
he talks, said they asked him, What do
you consider to be the biggest mistake or
error made by people?
He said, I consider the biggest mistake to
be the belief that we are special pets
of Almighty God, that we are more than
other things in the world, and that God
has a special fondness for people.
Oh, brother, I base my whole life on
that belief, and I base my life on
the scriptures, and I don't care how brilliant
this man is, he can't jar me at
all.
It's just like throwing cooked peas at a
ten-story building.
So throw at me any belief or any
doctrines or any objections to this faith.
I believe that God made man in his
own image, and so let's make man after
our likeness.
And he made man so that man likes
to see things made in his image, too.
Man, little babies born into the world, the
father searches the little red face immediately to
see if he's like his father.
Now, he's too tough to say that to
men.
I don't know where we got that idea,
but the women are supposed to be soft
and sweet and full of tears, and we're
supposed to be tough and full of sand.
And that's the way we live.
But I never knew a father yet that
didn't look earnestly into that little wrinkled face
to know whether it looked like him.
We want things to look like us.
And if they're not born to us, we
go out and make them.
We paint pictures, we write hymns or anthems,
we do something because we want to create.
So God has made man to be like
him, and God made man so he could
give more pleasure to God than all other
creatures.
I believe that, that man can give God
more pure pleasure than all other creatures.
And God can admire himself in man.
Man is the mirror into which God looks
and sees himself.
Man is the reflection of the glory of
God, and this was the purpose and intention
of God, that he might reflect God's high
glories, and that God might look into the
mirror called man and see his own glory
shining there.
So that is the who you are.
You are a mirror of the Almighty as
originally created.
That is the what you are.
You are a mirror of the Almighty, and
that is why you ever were created in
the first place.
You were not created only that you might
take something over here and put it over
here.
That's work.
You were not created only that you might
develop your brain so that you could speak
with a cultured accent, although neither one of
those things will hurt your work.
It's good for you, and a cultured accent,
if you have one, is all right, too.
I suppose I never knew myself.
And we're not only here to enjoy ourselves,
even the pure pleasures of life, nor are
we here for the thrill that life brings.
Though life does bring a thrill, I tell
you that.
There are lots of thrills in life.
I remember that Commander Berg, when he came
back from the South Pole, he had gone
over the Great Ice Thump and brought his
crowd back safe, and they said to him,
Commander, what was the biggest thrill you got
on your trip?
He said, It's a word I never used.
He had been in the midst of dangers,
and still he said, I never used the
word thrill, but yet it's quite a thrill
now.
Quite a word now they're using, the word
thrill.
But that's not why we're here, to eat,
drink and be merry and enjoy ourselves, for
the rest is nothing.
As the old philosopher said, we're here to
be a mirror to the Almighty, that we
might, because we're more like him than the
angels above, and because we're more in his
image than the very seraphim, God could look
in man as he originally created him and
see reflected more of his own glory than
he could see reflected in the starry skies
above.
But you know, the Bible also teaches that
man fell.
The Bible teaches that, and all the holy
prophets and apostles also do teach that we
fell from our first estate and forfeited the
glory of God, and the mirror was broken,
or at least it was smoked over so
that God could look at sinful man and
see no more his glory.
But man failed to fulfill the creative purpose
to worship his Creator and the beauty of
holiness.
He forgot this and forfeited it, and by
sin he's busy now finding other things to
occupy his attention.
And it's terrible what people look to if
they lose God.
If there is no God in their eyes,
then they get something else in their eyes.
And if they do not enjoy worshiping the
great God Almighty that made them, then they
find something else.
And if you had a list of all
the things that people have fought out to
do to satisfy themselves, to get some pleasure
out of living, it would fill a good
-sized book, and then it wouldn't be all.
Why do people, for instance, smoke opium?
Why do they chew the bagel nut?
Why do they drink alcohol?
Why do they take dope?
Why do they do those things?
It's because there is something in them that's
diseased.
And God said, You're the mirror, now I
look in you and see myself.
But man in his fall broke the mirror,
and now he's not satisfied, so he has
to have something to do.
That's why I don't go around yelling my
head off against this sin or that sin
or the other sin.
My brethren, I know some preachers do.
They get up and spend a whole evening
lecturing against this particular sin, but usually it's
a sin that the church people are assumed
not to have.
Somebody out there in the world has it,
and so there's nobody in the world there,
and yet they shoot their little pop gun
at the people that aren't present, assuming nobody
present is guilty of all this.
I don't do those things.
Some preachers spend their time preaching against the
vagueness and vagueness and shortness of
women's clothes, or smallness of it.
I don't do that.
I don't make clothes line my theme, and
I care very little what anybody wears, as
long as they are decent about it all.
But I don't feel this is what God
wants me to do.
All sin is sin.
And if you don't have God, you'll have
something.
If you don't have God, you'll have dope.
If you don't have God, you'll have the
love of money that amounts to idolatry.
If you don't have God, you'll be out
somewhere at some party drinking and smoking and
raising the devil, and that makes Christians awfully
mad.
They say, Why do these evil people do
that?
Because they are big inside and they are
vast and they are sensitive and they are
powerful, but they have lost God and they
don't know what to do, so they find
something to do.
And that's why all of the great pleasures,
so-called, of life have been invented to
give us something to do.
Everything else fulfills its design except man.
God made man to reflect his glory, but
everything else does and man does not.
The flowers are still beautiful as God meant
them to be, and the sun still shines
yonder, and the spacious firmament on high and
all the blue-tailed sky that shines, spangled
heavens, a shining frame, their great original proclaim,
and Edward's son from day to day doth
his eternal power display.
And when the evening shadows fall, the moon
takes up the wonder's tale and tells wherever
it goes the hand that made us is
divine.
The bees still, I say, gather their honey
and soil for a bloom from flower to
flower, and the birds sing a thousand-voiced
choir.
And the seraphim still chant, Holy, holy, holy,
before the throne of God, that his man
alone sulks in his cave.
Man that was made more like God than
any creature has become less like God than
any creature.
Man that was made to be a mirror
to reflect the Deity reflects only his own
sinfulness now.
Man sulks in his cave, I say, and
man is silent.
The stars tell the story, but man is
silent except for swearing and boasting and threatening
and cursing, and all the nervous and ill
-considered laughter and songs without joy.
Change the figure now from the mirror to
the harp.
Let me say that God has put in
you a harp, and he has put a
bigger harp in you than in anyone else.
He has ended any other order of being,
I mean.
He's put a bigger harp in us, and
he meant that harp to be tuned to
Almighty God, he meant that to be so.
But when man sinned and fell in this
tragic and terrible thing we call the fall
of man, then man threw that harp down
into the mud, and it's full of silt
and sand, and its strings are broken.
You know the old Irish song, the harp
that once through towers fall, the soul of
beauty shed, and now hangs its root in
tarry's wall as if that soul had fled.
And that harp which God has created and
which one time was meant to be played
by the Lord himself, now hangs its root
on the walls of the world, mud covered
and the strings broken and rusted out.
What is redemption for then, my brother?
Redemption is to restore us back to God
again, to restring that harp, to purge it
and cleanse it and refurbish it by the
grace of God and the blood of the
Lamb.
But I say that the mightiest disaster that
ever has been known in the world was
when the soul of man, more like God
than anything, more fitted to draw sweet music
than all other creatures, man with the light
gone from his mind and the love gone
from his heart, should stumble through a dark
world to find himself aggrieved.
I say, this is the tragedy of the
world.
There's nothing like it, nothing like it.
This is a tragic world, ladies and gentlemen,
a tragic world.
Whether it be five kids on an automobile
that fail to make a turn and crash
through a fence and into a river and
drown like rats in a rat trap, as
they did out here somewhere only the day
before yesterday.
I talked about it at breakfast this morning,
I talked about it and it bothers me
to think of it.
Five kids from 14 to 24 drown like
rats, a terrible, terrible thing.
But how much more terrible in that it
is increased in number are those several hundred
or several thousand, I think, four thousand, is
it, that died down in South America under
that landslide.
Now the seas and waters are churning up
the bodies of those who died on an
instant notice.
I say that the world full of disasters,
there's no question about it.
Somewhere I saw, I think just in yesterday's
paper, of a little ship out somewhere that
radioed that it was being buffeted by heavy
seas and then the radio went dead.
I'm afraid 15 sailors have gone down.
It is a world full of tragedy.
But it's a world full of tragedy because
of the one great overwhelming cosmic tragedy that
we call the fall.
I say this tragedy that God said with
a smile on his face, I'll make me
a man.
And God stooped down and God took up
the clay from the bed of the river,
and God shaped it, and like a mammy
bending over her baby, he shaped and formed
man and blew into his nostrils a breath
of life, and man became a living soul.
And God stood him up on his feet
and said, Look around, this is all yours,
and look at me, I am yours, and
I'll look at you and I'll see in
your face the reflection of my own glory.
That's your end, that's why you were created,
that you might worship me and enjoy me
and glorify me and have me as yours
forever.
That's why God made man.
And then God withdrew for a moment, and
while he was gone, that old one, the
dragon who is called Satan, came and poisoned
the mind of the man and his bride,
and they sinned against God.
And God came the next day, though he
knew, for God knows all things, but he
came as though he did not know.
And he looked for his boy, his Adam,
and among the trees of the garden where
they had been wont to walk, the great
God Almighty and the creature that is made
and called him man.
And when he looked for him there, Adam
was not to be found.
And God walked among the trees of the
garden and finally cried out, Adam, where art
thou?
And Adam came, shamefacedly crawling out from behind
a tree.
And God said, What did you do?
And he said, O God, we ate of
the fruit whereof thou saidest we should not
eat.
But it was the woman who said to
the woman, What did you do?
And she said, It was the serpent that
already learned to blame somebody else.
It's one of the great evidences of sin,
and we got it straight from that man.
We blame somebody else for our iniquity.
If you're not a better man than you
are, you like to blame your wife or
the place where you work, or your ancestors.
If you're not a better young person, you
blame your parents.
If you're not a better wife and woman,
you blame your husband or your children.
You blame, blame, blame.
And because we're not a better church, we
blame the liberals.
Because we're not holier people, we blame the
people out there in the world.
They're not to blame any more than we
are, not as much as we are.
So they blamed and blamed, and that's the
tragedy of the world.
And that's why we're where we are.
That's why disease passes on us and drags
us to death.
That's why accidents come.
That's why there are jails and insane asylums
and hospitals and graveyards.
Because of the great tragedy, the great, mighty
disaster we call the fall, the man stumbles
on his way to the grave.
But, O my brother, I have wonderful news
for you.
It is the news that that God who
had made us like that didn't give us
up.
God didn't give us up.
He didn't say to the angels, Break them
off and block them from my memory.
But he said, No, I still want them.
I still want that mirror to shine in
which I can look and see my glory.
I still want to be admired in my
people.
I still want the people to enjoy me
and to have me forever.
So God sent his only begotten Son, and
he became incarnated in the form of a
man.
And when he walked the earth, he was
the reflected glory of God.
The Old New Testament says he's the effulgence
of God's glory and the brightness of his
person.
So when God looked at Mary's son, he
saw himself reflected.
And Jesus said, When you see me, you
see the Father.
What did he mean?
When you see me, you see the Father's
glory reflected.
I have glorified thee on the earth, said
Jesus.
I have finished the work thou gavest me
to do.
And there God glorified himself in his Son.
And that Son went out to die, and
all that glory was marred more than any
man in his features, more than the Son
of Man.
And he pulled out his beard and bruised
his face and tore out his hair and
made blue lumps on his forehead.
And they nailed him on a cross where
for six hours he sweated and twisted and
groaned and finally gave up the ghost.
And the bells rang in heaven because man
had been redeemed now.
And the third day he rose again from
the dead.
Now he is at God's right hand, and
God is busy redeeming a people back to
him again, back to the original purpose, to
be mirrors of God's glory, back to the
original plan to glorify God and worship him.
Now, I haven't told you yet what worship
is, and I haven't pointed out how tragically
low worship is among the churches.
I haven't even defined worship.
I haven't told you how we can recapture
this worship.
But I expect to do that over the
nights ahead, and I want you to come
and I want you to bring your friends.
I'll preach whether you come or whether you
bring your friends.
But I'm not on the knees to anybody,
never, never am I on the knees to
anybody.
I remember once I preached over in the
Athie camp meeting, and I said, Now, I
want you to come to the altar, but
if you don't want to come, don't come.
I'm not begging you.
My brother was there, a doctor from Miami,
and he said, That's the tosering.
He said, Oh, just the like.
He said, I never knew one yet ever
to beg anybody for anything.
He said, All right, come on if you
want to, but if you don't want to,
don't look at me.
So I always go before the Lord completely
unafraid.
I tremble before God, but I never tremble
before people that I tremble in front of.
So I don't know if nobody wants to
hear it, all right.
But I believe you will and I believe
they will, and I believe we have something
to say over these nights, because I want
to bear down hard on the fact that
worship is man's whole reason for existence.
And that's why we're born and why we're
born again.
That's why we were created and why we're
re-created.
That's why there was ever a Genesis in
the first place, and that's why there's a
re-Genesis that we call the regeneration.
That's why there's a church.
This church exists here to worship God first
of all, not secondarily, not to tag worship
on the end, but to worship God primarily
and everything else is second or third or
fourth or fifth, but worshiping is first.
I heard once a poet wrote of a
toneless nightingale, quite a figure of speech really,
and said there was a toneless nightingale, lost
its tone, and it was so full of
song that it wanted so desperately to sing
like a nightingale, but it had no tone,
so it died of suffocation in the valley.
I've often thought that Keats' great figure of
speech was a beautiful thing.
The toneless nightingale that died of suffocation because
it had so much song in it that
it couldn't get out.
But oh, we're the other way around.
We have such a tremendous tongue and such
a very, very little bitterness for it.
We have a harp such as no other
creature in God's universe has, but we play
it so infrequently and so poorly that we
might worship God in the beauty of holiness
and that we might learn to worship him.
When the dear old man, Brother Lawrence, was
dying, I've told you this before, but it's
worth repeating.
Somebody asked him what he was doing, and
I often wonder why.
We let a man alone when he's dying.
They said, Brother Lawrence, what are you doing?
Well, he said, I'm just doing what I've
been doing for 40 years and what I
expect to be doing for eternity.
And they said, what's that?
He said, worshiping God.
It was all one thing, he was just
dying, that was secondary, just an item.
But he was worshiping God, that was the
big thing.
He'd been worshiping God 40 years and he
was still worshiping God.
And when he felt his pulse getting low,
what are you doing?
I'm worshiping God.
And he's still worshiping God, do you know
that?
He died and buried his body somewhere, but
he's still worshiping God.
Worshipping all of these saints that have left
this fellowship in the last years are all
worshiping God, John.
Too bad they didn't learn some of them
better down here.
No other worshiping God, long after Avenue Road
has ceased to exist.
But too bad if you don't learn to
worship Him well now, so that you don't
even have to cram for the last examination.
I, for my part, want to worship God
in my own private life so fully and
satisfyingly, to me and to God, so that
I will not have to cram for the
final exams, but can stop breathing with quietness
and say, I worshiped him and I'm still
worshiping him and I expect to worship him.
That's the true friend of man, to glorify
God and enjoy him forever.