ALL FOR HIS GLORY!

Why Forgiving Forward Exists

Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do,

do all things for the glory of God.

1 Corinthians 10:31

At the beginning of each year, Toni and I spend a day together seeking God’s heart for Forgiving Forward. The key question we ask is, “Lord, what do You want us to ask You for in the coming year?” The day is spent alternating between our individual times with the Lord and times spent together with Him. This is a sacred time because we never want this ministry to be about our plans or our strategies. Each year, God gives us a focus and a list of prayers He wants us to seek Him for in the coming year. We then organize these prayers into “prayer circles” that our team prays for during the coming year. We have seen God do amazing things in answering these prayers.

This year, we sensed that God wanted us to go deeper in our understanding of His purpose for Forgiving Forward and why He called us into it. As Toni and I sat together, listening and processing, we began to get clarity. God took us down to the basics so that we could codify what had been our heart posture all along. Biblically, a posture is a physical position in worship that reflects the heart's attitude of reverence towards God and our dependence on Him. The Lord gave us six postures—six mindsets—that will undergird and inform our prayers for Forgiving Forward.

• All for God‘s Glory

• Jesus Focused

• Shepherd/Spirit Led

• Gospel-Centric

• Abiding Trust

• Self Denied

Over the next few weeks, we will unpack each of the above postures that guide the ministry of Forgiving Forward. We begin with:

All for God’s Glory

The first posture provides the foundation for the other five. Everything we do, we are to do for the glory of God. Therefore, the fundamental question that guides everything we do is “How does this glorify God?“

The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is:

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.

We were created to glorify God. That's why we exist as individuals and as a ministry. We need to constantly and consciously keep at the forefront of our minds that the gospel story is not about us, it’s about the glory of God.

“The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Irenaeus

According to Andrew Murray, “To glorify is to remove every hindrance, and so to reveal the full worth and perfection of the object, that its glory is seen and acknowledged by all.” God’s glory is His intrinsic and unmeasurable worth, which is most deeply revealed in His holiness. For God’s glory to be seen and acknowledged, there must be someone to see and acknowledge it. This was God’s primary purpose for creating the human race. Genesis 1:27 declares: “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” God created man in His image to display His image to the world, thereby revealing His glory. In other words, mankind was designed to be a mirror reflecting the glory of God to the universe.

Genesis 2 gives us a first look at the relationship God desired to have with man. In God’s original plan, Adam was to intimately walk with God, and out of this relationship, he was to govern the earth as a reflection of God’s glory. Adam was to do nothing on his own initiative or by his own wisdom. Everything was to be done out of whole-hearted devotion and obedience to God. The reason the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was prohibited was because Adam wasn't designed to know right from wrong. Adam was designed to know and walk in holiness with God! God is holy in that in all that He is, thinks, says, and does is perfectly good and right, and in that all that He is, thinks, says, and does is free from evil of any kind. Therefore, if Adam did everything out of his relationship with the Holy Father, he would always do good, and he would never do evil, thus reflecting the glory of God’s holiness in all that he did.

Lucifer (aka Satan) tried to exalt himself above God and steal His glory and found himself banished from Heaven. When he couldn’t take God’s glory, he decided to rob God of the greatest expression of God’s glory, man. When Satan enticed Adam and Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, their sin covered the mirror, and the reflection of God’s glory in them was distorted. Any human attempt to clean the mirror only smeared it and made things worse. Mankind had no hope, on its own, to ever fulfill the purpose for which we were created. The sin-induced separation, i.e., death, made it impossible for us to know God, much less glorify Him. We needed someone to clean our mirror so that God’s glory could be seen in us. This is why God sent Jesus to the Cross.

Jesus came to earth to pay for our sins and redeem us. Yet it is crucial to realize that Jesus’ Death and Resurrection, while the most significant event in all of history, was not the main goal. It was the means to the main goal. The Gospel story was written and fulfilled in order to glorify God the Father. While we are beneficiaries of the redemption story, the glory of the Father was always at the forefront of Jesus' mind. Throughout the gospels, particularly in the Gospel of John, Jesus consistently declared that His purpose on earth was to glorify the Father by doing the will of the Father. Jesus made this crystal clear in John 12:27-28:

Now My soul has become troubled; and what am I to say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose, I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” Then a voice came out of heaven: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.”

Jesus reiterated this in His priestly prayer in John 17:

I glorified You on the earth by accomplishing the work which You have given Me to do. And now You, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world existed. (Verses 4-5)

Jesus’ greatest act of glorifying the Father was when He, through the shedding of His blood, paid for the sins of the world, making the way for the Father to forgive us for His glory. We, in turn, glorify God when, through repentance, we receive His forgiveness, then, in grateful obedience, extend that forgiveness to those who have wounded us and help others to do the same. With this in mind, we have sharpened the focus of Forgiving Forward. We exist to glorify God by helping the forgiven forgive.

This is not just true for those of us at Forgiving Forward. It is true for everyone of us who have received and experienced the power of God’s forgiveness!

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