Because Christians believe that the universe has been made by God, we believe that all life has a purpose. The purpose of the natural world is to give God glory by being what it is. Trees grow tall, fish swim, birds fly, flowers bloom and lions roar because they have developed through centuries of evolution - and also because God has made everything in the universe to be as perfectly itself as it can be.

We still have a lot to learn about the natural world, and the supernatural world is even more mysterious. Christians understand the angels described in Scripture as God’s messengers – the word angel actually means messenger – whether they are feeding the hungry, guiding a prophet’s actions or telling a woman she is going to have a special baby. Some Christians see the mysterious beings named in Scripture as the Devil or Satan and demons as real personalities; others as a way of describing the evil within human nature and the destructive forces in the world. In either case, though they are described as enemies of God, they are under God’s control. But between the natural world and the supernatural world we find human beings. What is the human purpose in this life?

Christians, like Jews, believe from the first story of creation in the book of Genesis that human beings, both men and women equally, are made in God’s image and likeness: made like God in some way. Different people see different parts of human nature as like God – some think it is our intelligence, our self-consciousness, our will or our ability to love. However we understand this, it gives human beings a great responsibility and purpose in life: to live up to the dignity given us by our likeness to God. One of the old teachings in my own church tradition begins in this way: What is the chief purpose of human beings? The answer: to give God glory, and to enjoy God for ever. Next week we will be considering the second part of that sentence: how may human beings enjoy God forever? Now I want to look at the first part: how do we give God glory? The start of the answer to this may lie in an even older saying: The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

When we live fully: when we enjoy God’s good creation, when we live in love and harmony in our families and in wider society, when we work hard to produce beautiful and useful things, when we play and relax; waking and sleeping, in every part of the day, we are giving God glory by living our lives well. Christians called Celts from Ireland and Scotland understood well how to see God’s presence in the very ordinary routines of our lives.

Of course, just because something is part of our ordinary way of doing things, that does not necessarily mean God wants it that way. We are all tempted to assume that God likes things the way we do, but we know that what is called ordinary life is very different from culture to culture. For example, people in some societies and at some times believe that it is women’s main purpose in life to have children and to stay at home looking after them. Other societies believe that women should go out and work to support themselves and their families.

I believe that each of us, both women and men, has been called individually by God and given different gifts to exercise to the best of our ability – so women and men who are doctors, artists, homemakers, scientists, parents and in whatever else they do should be allowed to honour God through serving others in the ways they themselves feel they are able.

But there is more than ordinary living to human life. When God first chose Abraham and Sarah, God sent them out of their everyday lives, to go they did not know where, to do they did not know what. Their destiny was to be the founders of a people to do God’s will. And God has more of a purpose in mind for each individual than just to live our ordinary lives.

Christians call the purpose God sends people out to accomplish God’s mission, because ‘mission’ means sending. But the word ‘mission’ has a bad press. Sometimes Christian missionaries have forced European ways of life on people who had no need of them. Sometimes they thought wrongly that the people they met knew nothing of God before the missionaries came. However, there are positive sides to the word ‘mission’ too. Just as companies have mission statements telling others what their goals in life are, Christians too have an understanding of God’s mission, telling them what sort of people they should be and what sort of things they must do to find fulfilment in following God’s will.

Jesus made his own mission statements. We find one of them in the Gospel of Luke, one of the four books telling about his life, which he took from the writings of the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible centuries earlier. It reads as follows:

‘The Lord’s Spirit has come to me because he has chosen me to tell good news to the poor. The Lord has sent me to announce freedom for prisoners, to give sight to the blind, to free everyone who suffers and to say, “This is the year the Lord has chosen.”’

We find another shorter mission statement from Jesus in John’s Gospel: ‘I came so that everyone would have life, and have it fully.’ In many places in the Gospels Jesus spoke of the coming kingdom of God, when God’s purposes would be completely fulfilled, a kingdom we can both hope for and work for. But what, in more detail, do Christians understand as our mission from God, our purpose in life?

The idea of Christian mission can be divided up into five different sections. People from different churches think different sections are most important, but to get a fuller picture of God’s purposes for humanity, it is useful to look at all five. To make it easy to remember the five different sections, someone has thought of five words beginning with the letter T to remind us of each. Some of these purposes are true for all human beings, but I understand some of them as being for Christians only. It’s not that I think God has no purposes for Muslims or Buddhists – or atheists, come to that – but because I’m not a Muslim or a Buddhist or an atheist, someone who does follow that path must tell me what their own purpose in life should be.

The first two parts of God’s mission, which apply specifically to Christians, are Tell and Teach. Like people of every faith, Christians believe that what they have understood from God and about God is important; important enough to base their own lives on, and important enough to share with others. So one part of God’s mission for Christians is to tell others what they have learned about God. Christians believe that the one creator God has been revealed in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, and that God’s Holy Spirit is still active in the world today. We see this as good news. So if others ask us: Why do you think and live the way you do? we believe it is part of God’s mission to share our faith with others. Of course, we need to do this sensitively. Answering people’s questions about our faith – as I am doing now – is not the same thing as insisting on telling people who haven’t asked us, whether they want to know or not! And it is no part of God’s mission to try to convince people against their will.

Again, like every other faith community, Christians believe that we should teach our own people what it means to follow our faith. When we bring up children, we teach them the stories of the Bible and how they relate to our own lives. We teach one another, children and adults, how to pray and how to live as God wishes us to live. There is never a time when a Christian can say, I know it all.
I do not need to learn any more. And there is no one within the Christian church who can say, I have nothing to teach others. Of course, Christians are not always the teachers. If we are wise, we will learn about God from others too – for no individual and no community has all the wisdom in God’s world.

The other three expressions of God’s mission, God’s purpose apply, I believe, to all humanity: to Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, atheists and everyone else. The first is to Tend: we are to look after one another. Every world faith I know has some version of what is called the Golden Rule: that we should behave to others as we would like them to behave to us. When Jesus was asked which the greatest commandment in the Jewish Law was, he chose two. The first one, the Shema I quoted in our first meeting two weeks ago, is about loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. The second one is to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. The person who asked Jesus this question was a legal expert who knew both those commandments came from the Jewish Law, and because he was a lawyer he wanted a good definition: if I am to love my neighbour as I love myself, who counts as my neighbour? Jesus’ answer, in the story of the Good Samaritan which I have already described a fortnight ago, was that we are all one another’s neighbours, whatever race or faith we come from. Sometimes Christians have forgotten this truth, and only looked after other Christians. Sometimes Christians talk or behave as though we believe only Christians can love and look after others. But people of every faith and none can show great love and thus fulfil God’s purpose for humanity, whether or not they intend to do so. The other side of this is that we can fulfil God’s purpose by allowing ourselves to be tended by others. This can be harder than being actively kind ourselves, but it is just as necessary. And, of course, if our mission from God is to love one another as we love ourselves, we also need to practise loving ourselves.

The second is to Treasure: we are to treasure God’s creation. This is becoming more and more important with the onset of global warming, but sadly, looking after the earth is not always associated with Christians. The beginning of the book of Genesis contains two stories about creation. In the first, when God had made the heavens and the earth and everything that was in them, human beings made in God’s image were told to fill the earth with people and bring it under control. In the second, when God made the first human being, Adam was told to take care of God’s garden of Eden. Sadly Christians have often taken more notice of the first story than of the second, behaving as though creation was there only for our sake, so we could use and control it. But our true role is to be caretakers and stewards of creation, managing it for God. So when people are concerned for the wellbeing of animals and plants, when pollution must be overcome or natural resources shared fairly among all, Christians, along with everyone else, have a duty to treasure our wonderful universe.

The third is to Transform: we are to transform injustice in society. If all was well in the world and God’s kingdom was here already, we would neither need to Tend one another nor to Treasure the earth, for we would be doing these things automatically. But there are lonely and excluded people in the world. And there are greedy people who want to keep power for themselves. But God is a God of justice, and it is part of God’s purpose for all humanity that the unfair structures of society, and the unjust ways people behave within it, should be challenged. The Jubilee 2000 Campaign, that fought to cancel the debts developing countries owed to banks, is one example of how such structures can be transformed; though the international rules of trade, which mean the people who grow crops cannot afford to eat them, still need to be changed further. In the Hebrew Bible God’s Spirit inspired prophets to tell powerful people what was wrong in society. In the New Testament God’s Spirit inspired Jesus to challenge religious rules that kept people separated from their own communities. In the nineteenth century God’s Spirit challenged Christians and others to end the unjust system of slavery. Today it is still God’s purpose for humanity to transform the wrong things in the world.

All these – Tell, Teach, Tend, Treasure, Transform – are aspects of God’s purpose for humanity. But we can do none of these things if we are not energised by our own relationship with God, glorifying God through worship and prayer. Christians do this in different ways. Some pray in set words; some sit in silence; some sing with drums and guitars. Some share the meal Jesus gave us daily, some once or twice a year. Some hear a preacher explain the Bible every week; others study alone, or in a group. Some find God’s presence in creation, others in a lonely stranger. Christians believe that God has made each of us in God’s image, but each unique, so that each of us can carry out God’s purpose for humanity in our different ways, until God’s kingdom comes and God’s purpose for the whole earth is fulfilled.