The three reasons why we were created are to know, love and serve God.
How to Know God
John chapter 17:3 And this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
In the divine plan every creature must acknowledge God as their creator. God made his creation as an expression of his love so that love would come back to him for His glory, and for this reason, creation is an image of the Holy Trinity.
The Trinitarian expression of God’s works are found in all creatures.
The sun is like the Trinity, let's make a comparison, that even being so far from God, helps us to understand a little about the great mystery of the Trinitarian unity. Say that God the Father is the fire, God the Son is the Light, and God the Holy Spirit is heat. Wherever there is a fire there is light, wherever there is light there is heat. So the three are always together, God is one, yet three persons.
There are three kingdoms in nature: animal, vegetable and mineral.
Time is divided into three: past, present and future.
States of matter: solid, liquid and gas.
Measurements of space: length, width and depth.
Primary colors: red, yellow and blue.
Parts of an atom: protons, neutrons and electrons.
Types of radiation, sun rays: alpha, beta, gamma.
The soil nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
Living cells in the blood: red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets
The Human Family: father, mother and children.
Powers of the soul: memory, will and understanding.
Human expression: thoughts, words and actions.
There are many more examples of course, everyone is like a signature of the creator.
As might be expected, these images of the Creator are a small part of the knowledge of God that we have.
Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter 7:8 For the one who seeks finds.
What really happens is that the only way of seeking God is through his own word, since the Holy Scriptures are the Spirit of the Word, the eternal Word revealed to his people. John chapter 5:39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them have eternal life; and it is they that testify of me.
The scriptures send us to Jesus, because the Spirit of the Word of God was incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became man.
John chapter 1:14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
Most humans know something about God, so when we are children we start asking our parents who created the world and everything in it. So the faith of parents plays a very important role in the knowledge of God.
True knowledge of God begins in the knowledge of ourselves, because we are created in the image and likeness of God. The more we understand about our smallness and lowliness, the more we receive more wisdom about the greatness of God.
In Genesis chapter 1:26 God said: Let us make man in our image and likeness.
God created us to be his temples, temples of His Holy Spirit, His presence, and Jesus tells us in Luke chapter 17:21 will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you. Paul confirms that God lives within us in his letter 1 Corinthians chapter 3:16 Do you not know that you are God 's temple and that God's Spirit dwells within you?
To get to know God, we must first know Jesus, Matthew chapter 11:27 My Father has given me all things. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal it.
Jesus reveals the glory of the Father when we know him first.
And you can not know Jesus unless you deny himself, take up your cross and follow him, Mark chapter 8:34
The place of the encounter with Jesus, to really know him, is Calvary; because there he worked the greatest miracle for all mankind, our salvation, the victory over death, sin and Satan. There He gives us his love to forgive us our sins paying for our sins by his death on the cross.
Jesus in his omnipotence and omnipresence wanted to transmit this infinite love through the priesthood, so that we can have that real encounter with Jesus in all the sacraments of the Church.
In Baptism we enter into His body and become children of God, in confession we receive forgiveness of our sins and in the Holy Eucharist we eat his body and drink his blood, which is the prerequisite to have eternal life. John chapter 6:53 Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
John chapter 6:54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.
He who rejects Jesus, or who does not know him, will never know God.
How to love God
Luke chapter 10:27 Jesus answering a doctor of the law who wanted to know what to do to inherit eternal life, said: "You shall love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."
Returning to our subject, God's plan for us is that we know, love and serve Him.
We can not love someone we do not know, just as we can not love God without knowing him. God offers us ways to know him as we do in prayer and especially the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, the real presence, Emmanuel, God with us. Matthew Chapter 1:23
To love God with all our heart it involves allocating our hearts fully to him and to our neighbor too, because the more we use it to love other works of creation the further we will be from God.
The heart is the temple of God in us. When we turn away from God we begin to create idols that come to fill the temple of God. Sin is the main god who enthrones itself in our hearts, it comes in different forms: lust, anger, hatred, falsehood, envy, gluttony, sloth. A vice or addiction displaces God immediately and suffocates the temple of God, it darkens it and it will cast out God.
The mind deals with many things in life and does not give time to God. Jesus asked the apostles to even spend an hour in prayer Matthew chapter 26:40
God requires tithing from us, it means a tenth of our lives for him. The day has 24 hours; we should at least spend two and a half hours in the presence of the Lord in prayer.
The soul was created to love God, but it becomes easily passionate with created things and ends up loving them more than its creator.
Our whole being should be available to love God, all our strength and our primary goal must be to love God.
John chapter 14:21 Jesus says: Whoever has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.
And one who sins ends up being a son of the devil as St. John says in his 1st letter chapter 3: 8 He who commits sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the devil.
We can not love God if we love sin, in this we are tested, in love.
But we can not love God without loving our neighbor. God calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, being images of Christ we must therefore give our lives for our brothers, not crucifying ourselves physically but living for God and for our brothers as living sacrifices of prayer, praise, thanksgiving, worship, intercession, reparation, deliverance and healing.
How to serve God
Following the sequence of our subject, God's plan is that we know him, then we know the conditions to love him being out of sin and loving our neighbor. So now, we are in a condition to serve Him.
How can we serve a God who has everything? To serve God is to obey His commandments with joy. Psalm 100: 2
The first creation that God made were the angels. Angels serve God working in the labors of creation and being His messengers. At the same time in their omnipresence they worship God constantly and continually say Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord, heaven and earth are filled with his glory, Hosanna in the highest. But a third of them rebelled against God, they would not obey him, they did not serve him, they did not worship and therefore were thrown from heaven and became demons.
The second creation of God was man. God created Adam and Eve, He created them immortal and gave them power over all creation. He only asked them obedience, Genesis chapter 2:16-17 He warned them that if they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they would die. And so, man disobeyed and we all inherit original sin that leads to the disobedience of death in all sins.
God came to establish the Kingdom of Heaven in our hearts. This kingdom is the Kingdom of His Divine Will.
In order for the Kingdom of Heaven to be established in our hearts, we must fulfill all the wishes of God.
His main desire or will is that we all be holy as He is holy, to be perfect as he is perfect, to be merciful as he is merciful. Leviticus chapter 20:26 and Matthew chapter 5:48
We can only serve God well if we are saints. Many try to condition their relationship with God, creating a God in their own way. In this relationship they do good works but if they are in sin, their works are tainted with self-love; therefore they have already received their reward and have no value to be offered to God.
Matthew chapter 6: 2 So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.
To serve God is to serve Him because He is God. It is not to expect any reward here on earth, it is to treasure for eternal life.
Joshua Chapter 24:15 But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.
We will never serve God, if we don’t do his holy will.
Conclusion After knowing and loving God, we are humbly in a position to serve Him. In this way we hope to fulfill the purpose of God's plan and at least we will be well on the way of salvation.
