God’s Purpose for People - Part B

God has given us that eternal capacity. That's what prompts us to probe. That's why your kids ask so many questions. Why, Daddy?

Why that? Well, then what happens, Dad? They're probing. They want to know more.

They're yearning beyond just this. St. Augustine put it so beautifully when he said, Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee. God created people not for his own amusement or to abandon us, but to interact with us. And today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip shares about a special purpose God has for you.

Now we want to tell you about a resource that will encourage you to live boldly for Jesus in a culture in need of truth and light. The desire to fit in, to be thought of as normal, is a basic human instinct. But would you believe that children as young as three years old already want to follow the crowd and fit in with the group? That's what researchers found in a Duke University study. Yet in the Bible, we learn that some of the people who've made the most impact have done so by defying normal.

Here's Skip Heitzig. I think the Bible calls us to a holy defiance of the status quo. Paul the Apostle said, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

So what does it take to go from conformed to transformed? Find out in Pastor Skip's book Defying Normal. Our thanks to you when you give $35 or more to help expand this Bible teaching ministry. And when you give today, we'll also include the booklet What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren.

Get your copies of these two bold resources when you call 800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, we're in Genesis Chapter 1 as we join Skip Heitzig for today's study. A mirror gives you an image. You look in it, you have an image of yourself. You may like it, you may not, but it's an image. You can orient the mirror in a different way and get an image of somebody else. You can see other things, but the image is in the mirror.

As our lives are oriented toward God, we can reflect the glory of God. What that means is I'm not just protoplasm. I'm not just a bunch of chemicals. I am different from a dog or a cat or a whale or a spotted owl or an orangutan. I've always loved the story of the man who went to the zoo. He knew the zookeeper. He goes to the zoo and he's going through all the little exhibits and he goes to an orangutan exhibit and he notices that the orangutan is sitting there with two books, one in each hand.

One is a Bible, the other is Darwin's Origin of the Species. And he's thinking, no way. So he starts talking out loud. He goes, excuse me, you can't actually read, can you? The orangutan looked at him and said, of course I can. And so the man said, well, do you understand what you're reading? The orangutan looked puzzled and he said, well, I'm not so sure because this book holding up the Bible says that I am my brother's keeper, but this book says I am my keeper's brother. And so I have a conflict going on.

Which is it? You are made in the image of God. God formed us. Look at chapter two really quickly. And again, we're just looking at a few verses. We're not really digging deep here.

Chapter two of Genesis, verse seven, the Lord God formed man. Out of what? Dust. Wait a minute, dust, dirt?

That's pretty humbling. A dirt clod? The Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, but breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And man became, in Hebrew, a nefesh, a soul, a living being, it's translated. The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Pretty humbling in one hand to realize the origins of a dirt clod.

Pretty amazing on the other hand to think of the image of God. So we have a combination of something very low and something very high. Let's call it dust and glory.

Dust and glory combined. Yeah, physically speaking, we're made up of a bunch of chemicals. And I remember in school, some of my teachers would say, you know, if you were to add up all of the chemicals in your body, your body would only be worth two dollars. That didn't make a kid feel really good about himself. That's telling an eagle he's a prairie chicken. And actually my teacher was wrong.

Today in this day and age, accounting for inflation, your body chemicals are worth about 160 dollars. But that's not the point. If you evaluate your life only in those terms, you're speaking prairie chicken language, not eagle talk. So what does it mean to reflect God's image? Well, there's a few things, and I put them in your worship folder.

I'm just going to touch on these four things. It means, first of all, we are God's reflection in that we are rational beings. We are rational beings.

Now, not always. Sometimes we're quite irrational and erratic and crazy. Right now we're in political season.

People get a whole lot of crazy going on right now. But we are rational beings. We have intellectual power. We can think. We can learn. We can research. We can explain. We can formulate thought. Animals do not do this.

They cannot do this. Only TV animals do that. I grew up with Mr. Ed. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, talking horse. I want a talking horse.

That only works on TV. Disney characters can talk, right? Mickey Mouse can talk. Donald Duck, he can talk.

But not in real life. Only we can reason. We can evaluate. We can have original thought.

Animals react to stimuli. We, like God, can create. We can make paintings and sculptures and music, and we can imagine. We can build.

We can make paintings. We have relationships of love. Animals have instinct. Animals can mate. Animals can show affection. But that's not love. You go, oh no, I know my dog loves me.

You are explaining a disruption in the endocrine system of the animal, essentially. That's about it. It's not love like on the relational level that we have. We are rational beings like our Creator. Another aspect of this is not only are we rational beings, we are moral beings. We have a sense of morality, a sense of justice, an inner sense of right and wrong.

Just as God, who made oftentimes these binary comparisons. That's right. That's wrong. That's good. That's evil. That's just. That's unjust. That's righteous.

That's unrighteous. We have a conscience. It's part of our humanity. It's why humans battle with good and evil. My pets do not.

C.S. Lewis referred to this as the moral law. The moral law. That people innately have a sense of just versus unjust. Animals don't do this. Animals respond to the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. But God put a moral law within us. Granted, it varies from culture to culture.

There's a lot of programming that goes along with that. But in Romans chapter 1 verse 19, Paul writes, For the truth of God is known to them, that is to us, instinctively. Now with this sense of morality comes a sense of destiny and a sense of accountability. The only reason we know the world is crooked, we look out and go, man, the world's so messed up, it's so crooked, is because we have in our conscience the idea of something being perfectly straight by which to compare it to.

That is the moral law. We would say without reservation, Mother Teresa is better than Adolf Hitler. Now we don't mean that she has a better posture than Adolf Hitler or that her breath smells better than Adolf Hitler.

We're speaking in moral comparisons that one has a better character than the other. We know this intuitively. A third aspect of being in the image of God is we are immortal beings. Immortal beings. Isaiah said of God, God dwells or inhabits eternity. He inhabits eternity. He'll live forever from beginning to end. You and I, the Bible tells us, also are immortal.

Ecclesiastes chapter 3, God set eternity in their hearts. This is a quality that humans have that cannot be explained by science or evolution. We yearn to explain by science or evolution. We yearn for something like John in the biology class.

We have a yearning that this scientific world cannot explain. Now it's been estimated that if you were to look at what you do in your lifetime, if you were to add up seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months, that all together in your lifetime, you will spend 20 straight years sleeping. You will spend another 20 years working. You will spend seven years playing. Five years getting dressed. One year on the phone. Some of you all spent a lot more than that on the phone.

You will spend eight months opening junk mail. That's all part of life. That's the routines we go through. But we were made for eternity.

He set eternity in their hearts. By the way, we talk about anthropology. It comes from the Greek word anthropos, for man.

Anthropos, that Greek word, comes from two words combined that literally means one who looks up. We are ones who look up. No other species is as restless as we are. Animals are satisfied once their needs are met. So I have a couple dogs.

Let me just show you. This is my excuse to put my pets up. So these are my two dogs. The guy on the couch is Mac. Mac is the old man in the herd.

He's been around a while. And the one that I'm going to show you in a while. And the one on the rug, this is Maisie. They're both little Welsh terriers. Cute little pups.

She's just about eight months old. We take care of them. We pet them. We feed them.

They play. They go on walks. And obviously they sleep. I have never seen those creatures worry. I've never seen Mac over in the corner putting his head in his paw going, man, coronavirus.

He's never done that. I have never seen them contemplating the meaning of their existence, the meaning of life. To them, that is the meaning of life.

Right there. Sleeping, eating, snoozing, playing, getting a snack, going on walks. That is to them the meaning of life. We alone have a sense of restlessness. There's something beyond this, we think.

God has given us that eternal capacity. That's what prompts us to probe. That's why your kids ask so many questions. Why, daddy?

Why that? Well, then what happens, dad? They're probing. They want to know more.

They're yearning beyond just this. St. Augustine put it so beautifully when he said, thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee. So we are rational beings, moral beings. We're immortal beings. And a fourth, certainly not the end of the list, but fourth, we are responsible beings. We are responsible. Verse 28, it says, God blessed them, that is the first man and woman, and said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves on the earth. You are different from all the other animals.

I want you to rule over this planet. Subdue is the Hebrew word kabash, which means to tread upon. It's still a word we use in our slang, put a kabash on it. It's from that Hebrew word, to tread upon. The word have dominion means to subjugate or to rule. Back to Psalm 8, where David said, what is man that you are mindful of him? In that Psalm, David, in describing us, said, you, to God, you have made him, that is us, you have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands.

You have put all things under his feet. In other words, we are managers of this creation. We are stewards of creation. There is to be a theology of creation care that we work off of, simply because this is God's world, and God put us here to manage it, to care for it. So we are not only created by God, we are reflections of God.

We are in his image. Far different than animals. You know, when something goes awry and you hear a news article about violence or extremism, and I hear people say, this is so horrible, look at those people acting like animals. Well, your educational system has told them for decades, that's what they are.

So when they start acting like what you say they are, why should you be surprised at that? You've been telling them they're prairie chickens when God's intention is that they soar like eagles, made in his image. So we are in God's image. We embody God's communicable attributes of reason, of emotion, of love, etc. But, and I haven't even touched on this, the image has been marred.

The mirror is scratched. That's where sin comes in. That's where the fall comes in. That's also part of the story. We haven't touched on it yet. And that's the reason that Jesus is needed, to re-emphasize is needed, to restore the image that has fallen. We'll get into that next time. What I want to show you this time is not only God's creation of man and reflection in man, but finally God's interaction with man.

This is all part of the purpose. Go to Genesis chapter 3. Again, just skimming a couple of verses, Genesis chapter 3 in verse 6. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her and he ate. And the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. It's a very humorous in many ways story, but I don't have time to get into all of my mind's thinking. I'll do that next time. But here's what I want to show you. Verse 8, And they heard the sound, get this, of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

What up with that? They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called to Adam and said, Where are you? This is an amazing description. God made some kind of an appearance in the garden.

Can't tell you exactly how or what. Some manifestation of His glory, maybe a luminescent apparition of some kind. We don't know how God appeared in the garden, some visible form. But the word is used here, walking, walking in the cool of the day. A better translation would be walking to and fro in the garden in the breeze of the day.

I infer from that the evening time when things cool off. So the way it's worded in this verse, it sounds like this was customary that God sort of showed up at a set time every day to take a walk with His creation, Adam and Eve, to have a daily chat with God. The word walking in Hebrew is the word halak, which means to move among, to be at ease with, to be conversant with. In other words, God created man for a purpose, not just to reflect His glory, His image, but to have fellowship with, to reciprocate God's love. Now, I'll just touch on this because I don't want to get deep into the weeds of this. We've already stated before in this series, 2020 Seeing Truth, Glory, we've stated that God by His very nature is independent. He is the only what we call non-contingent being in the universe. What it means basically is He doesn't need anything or anyone.

He's perfectly okay just by Himself. And before He created human beings, He had a loving relational fellowship in the Trinity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's what's up in verse 26 when they pause in creation and have this inner Trinitarian discussion, hey, let us make man in our image. And so with the image of God, God made man and woman. So in that fellowship they had one another, there is a desire to expand the circle of fellowship, expand the relational circle, the circle of love. Let us make man in our image. So God's creation of man was so that His reflection would be in man, but the ultimate purpose is that God might interact with man and woman. Fellowship, intimacy, to be conversant with, at ease with, to interact with.

Let me just end there and say this, ask a question. Do you take advantage of that privilege? Do you take advantage of God's desire to walk with you? God has a desire, God has a purpose for you, and one of His purposes for you is that you know Him, that He walk with you, that you do life together with Him. Do you walk with God?

Is that a concern of yours? Is that a stated goal in your head, in your heart? I want to walk with God, I want to live to please God, I want to know God.

It should be, it's why you're here. You know sometimes I take walks, I take my dog on walks, but dogs on walks, actually they pull me, but that's another story. Sometimes I go on walks alone, and when I do, it's usually a prayer walk. I like to walk and pray, and I get the idea that I'm actually talking to God like in a in this kind of way. I'm talking to God like in a in this kind of a situation, and oftentimes I'll be praying out loud so my neighbors think it's the crazy old man that talks to himself on walks, but I'm really trying to just have a prayer walk talk with God.

But the question I want to leave with you is, do you take advantage of God's desire to walk with you? Albert Einstein once said, scientists make poor philosophers. But every now and then you get a scientist who makes a great philosopher, and one of those I think was one of the great scientific minds of all times, and that is Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac Newton is widely regarded as the one who discovered gravitation. Sir Isaac Newton said that he could take his telescope and look millions of miles into space with his telescope. But what you may not know is Sir Isaac Newton was a strong Christian believer, and though he was this great scientific mind and studied the universe, he said this, and I want to close with this quote.

He said, but when I lay it aside, when I lay my telescope aside after looking into the heavens, when I lay it aside, go into my room, shut the door, get down on my knees in earnest prayer, I see more of heaven and feel closer to the Lord than if I were assisted by all the telescopes on earth. Such a great great statement of a scientific mind who said, but I know why I'm here. I'm here to be in relationship with my Creator. So do you take advantage? Do you walk with Him? Do you know the Creator?

Have you found your purpose in life? You are not a prairie chicken. I know you look around at a lot of us, you go, I see prairie chicken. But that's the marring of the image.

That's the scratch on the glass. We're meant to soar with our Creator. We're meant to know Him and walk with Him to interact with Him. It could be that some of you don't even know God yet. Yeah, you'll come to church, you'll visit, you know people who do that and you think maybe that's a good thing to expose yourself to that. So you do that and you think about the thoughts that are being said but you don't have this relationship that we're talking about with God.

You know if you want it can begin right now. It's that simple. God made it that simple that He will draw near to you if you draw near to Him. The Bible tells us that. So how do I know if it's true?

Try it. You can philosophize all your life about it or you can actually step over the line and receive Him as Lord and Savior. Give your life to the one who gave you life. Paul calls that the smartest thing you could ever do, your reasonable service. That wraps up Skip Heitzig's message from the series 2020. Now here's Skip to tell you about how you can keep encouraging messages like this one coming your way as you help connect others to God's truths.

True fulfillment and happiness in life comes from one thing only and that is pursuing God Himself. I'd like to ask you to join us in getting that life-changing message to a world that desperately needs to hear it. When you give a gift you help keep these Bible teachings coming to you and to many others. Here's how to give a gift. You can give online at connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate or call 800-922-1888.

800-922-1888. Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip's son Nate Heitzig shares about a victorious hope you have that counters any faults and sins. People who have not confessed their sins should feel guilt. Put it this way, if your sin is confessed then you shouldn't feel guilt because it's been forgiven but if your sin is unconfessed you should feel guilt because you haven't addressed the real problem. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.