Teleology: Attitude and Purpose

There are two facts that have become apparent to me about humanity-we are teleological in our purpose, and we all love to think of ourselves as Kings. In some sense everyone does have a Kingdom-the influence people have, how people spend their time, energy, and resources, are all evidences of a person's given kingdom. So in some sense, we are all Kings of a kingdom, whether that kingdom is a tiny, just self kingdom, or whether it is much more far reaching than that. Ironically though, we also all worship.
That is our teleology, or our purpose. I think that having a view of humanity that is not a teleological view is silly, we clearly have a purpose; we do not exist simply to exist. And I believe that we were all created to worship. Every single person was created with the expressed and specific purpose to praise, with our lives and all of who we are, we were created to bring praise. Specifically, we were created to bring praise to a King, King Jesus. All of creation was created for Him, to honor and praise Him.
However, these two truths combined leaves us with an ironic dichotomy. We are all kings, all created to worship something, so naturally we tend to focus that praise inwardly, as one would think. However, that is emptiness, or at least results in it. So, we deceptively turn our praise outward. I say deceptively because we do it only with the intention of acquiring more praise for ourselves. We worship and praise education in order to feel smarter than others, or perhaps to get a good job to be richer than others. You see, a by-product of thinking of ourselves as kings is that we are prideful, and to emphasize my point on worship, I remind you of what C. S. Lewis says about pride in Mere Christianity: “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.” In other words, we like to think that we our better than other people, since we indeed think that we are kings. However, we are pretty frivolous and petty kings. We as kings care about the most trivial, unimportant, silly things and thus our kingship is frivolous. Even the most important king, take one who is actually king for example, will have his kingdom crumble upon death. We try and gain more worship and praise for ourselves by tricking ourselves. We think that we are so much better off than others, and pride loves comparison, we worship ourselves internally. And as I said earlier, this leads to more emptiness, nothing else. Our own praise is vain, which transitions me to what the Apostle Paul wrote in Philippians. He says to do nothing out of "vain conceit" or "selfish ambition." What then are we to do things for or out of? Paul answers that in the next sentence and in doing so gives us the solution to the emptiness that comes from exalting our own kingdom.
"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus..." in that one verse, found in the second chapter of Philippians, Paul gives us the solution. He reminds us to take the focus, take the worship off of our own kingdoms, and put it all on one that will last. But you must understand the absurdity and transcendental profundity of Pual's sentence. Paul here is saying that your attitude should be the same as that of a being for whom all of creation was created to worship, and even though creation refused to do so, He came off of His throne to die for them. Jesus, forewent His glory for the sake of wretches who hated Him. Paul implores us to have the same attitude, with all of the wonder of the sacrifice of a King coming off of His throne to live among His creation.
That is the solution; that is what we must do as well. We must leave our thrones for the sake of bringing Christ greater glory, and bringing the focus on Him and on others, not on us. That is wondrous, and that is what our attitude, our purpose, should be.
~Good Luck and Good Eats.