All Things Godward
According to the Gospels, a disciple of Jesus lives out the three-fold calling of a worshiper, servant, and missionary. Jesus tells us plainly that we are to serve one another just as he serves (John 13:15), and he has sent us into this world on a mission just as the Father sent him (John 20:21). So we are servants like him and missionaries with him.
More fundamental, though, to both of these aspects of our calling is that we are worshipers. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman,
But the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. (John 4:23)
God created us to worship him — worship is the most natural thing to our being — and the ultimate priority of Jesus’s mission was to restore true worshipers. Those are who the Father sought, and the Father’s seeking was behind his sending. There is no higher purpose for us beyond our Spirit-led worship of God through Jesus Christ. Everything else flows from that and back to it, even our loving one another and seeking the good of our neighbors. It all comes back to the true worship of God.
This is at the heart of Psalm 73, as we saw on Sunday. The conclusive takeaway from the psalmist’s journey is that God is first and highest, and everything else is directed toward him. I tried to sum that up in the following sentence:
The good life is to have God, and to have all other things Godward.
All other things Godward. In other words, everything is ultimately about the true worship of God — everything from your job to your jog, your parenting to your partying, your marriage to that cold glass of orange juice to kickoff your day. Everything Godward.
That’s the vision behind the second annual Godward Life Conference put on by our fam at Bethlehem College and Seminary and Desiring God. It’s coming up on Friday and Saturday, September 29–30 at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis.
There will be plenary sessions and workshops, and several of our church members will be teaching, including Pastor David Mathis and me, as well as Jon and Andrea Hoglund, Clint Manley, Warren Watson, and Marshall Segal — covering topics such as writing good stories, the power of myths, discerning God’s call to global missions, the miracle of preaching, and fruitful singleness, among several others.
If it works in your schedule, I hope you can join us that Friday night and Saturday morning!
