Last Sunday we kicked off our sermon series for Term 1 on ‘Enjoying God’. This is a topical series, which means we won’t necessarily be unpacking passages like we do when preaching through books of the Bible. However, as you will see in the Bible Studies that accompany this sermon series, each week’s topic will be firmly grounded in what the Scriptures tell us.
The first sermon/study in the series wasn’t so much concerned with outlining how to enjoy God; but in proving from the Scriptures that we are supposed to enjoy God in the first place. The reason this topic is so important is that our generation of Christians seems to have forgotten this little fact. As such, many Christians have no idea where to look in the Bible to prove this thesis. While the Westminster Confession clearly states that the ‘chief end of man’ is to ‘bring glory to God and enjoy him forever’, many of us are unfamiliar with where the authors got this notion from the Bible.
While there are many verses that speak directly of enjoying God (e.g. Ps 16:11; Hab 3:17-18; John 17:24; 1 Peter 3:18), the passage we looked at was Eph 1:1-14. In it the Apostle Paul argues that the goal or end-point of the gospel is ‘to the praise of his glory’; i.e. to verbally sing out how much we enjoy God’s glory.
Now that the biblical doctrine of enjoying God has been established, the remainder of this series will be looking at various aspects of exactly how the Bible wants Christians to enjoy God. If you have questions along the way, please feel free to ask. But otherwise, I pray that this series will be a wonderful eye-opener into the central – yet often forgotten – doctrine of enjoying God.
Brendan McLaughlin
