Introducing: Living to the Praise of His Glory
Mike Frisby has served as an elder at City Church Cambridge and is a trustee of Relational Mission. Over the years, he has contributed to church planting and leadership training and has become known for his expertise in counselling, healing and world missions. Mike has travelled extensively, particularly in the Russian-speaking and Islamic worlds, promoting cross-cultural missions. Still based in Cambridge, he continues to mentor leaders and mobilise people for global missions.
One of Mike’s most recent activities has been writing. His forthcoming book, Living to the Praise of His Glory: Discovering How to Live in the Only Way that Matters, is set to be published in early 2025.
We're delighted to have the opportunity to share extracts from several of the chapters leading up to its release. What follows is an ‘abstract’ from Mike outlining the book's subject, why he felt the need to write it, and a sample from Chapter One, which is all about God’s glory.
Enjoy the first glimpse of this fantastic resource, and keep an eye out for the other extracts that will be released in the coming months!
Mike Frisby, Cambridge
Why write a book?
In recent years I’ve grown concerned that, as followers of Jesus, we often neglect deepening our walk with God and becoming more Christ-like in daily life. While we celebrate salvation, we can lose sight of God's purpose: living daily to the praise of His glory.
I also observed an overemphasis on leaders within the church, often at the expense of helping ordinary believers grow into fruitful followers of Christ. This stirred my desire to see individuals reach their unique potential in God, and for the Church to mature as every part of the body plays its role.
This book is a product of my observations and stirrings. I hope it will help believers undergo a "worldview change" by highlighting key biblical lessons many only fully understand after years of following God.
The book contains 18 stand-alone chapters, each focusing on a vital truth that can transform lives when understood and applied by God’s grace. Though written primarily for ordinary believers, it also offers insights that leaders will find helpful in their journeys.
Mike Frisby
City Church Cambridge
As followers of Jesus, we have the amazing honour and privilege to be included together on God’s mission, “to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ” (Ephesians 1 v 10). It’s a mission to declare God’s glory to every people group on the face of the earth, in order for all to bring him praise and glory. We have a calling to live a life that is larger than ourselves, a life that under God’s gracious providence will make an eternal difference.
Chapter One: Declare His Glory Among The Nations
In some ways, the COVID-19 pandemic and those long periods of lockdown seem a long time ago. However, the feelings of isolation and separation from family and loved ones still seem very real to us, like they do for many. Missing our grandchildren, my wife and I did our best to keep in touch with them via Zoom, Facetime and WhatsApp. Reading books together, playing games and general chit chat became the order of the day.
Then my wife had a great idea. What a good time to teach our grandson Charlie, aged seven, how to play chess over the Internet! So, grandad was quickly dispatched to find the chess set squirrelled away in a cupboard… and the game was on!
First step was to explain the board, where pieces were placed, and what moves they could or could not make. Lots of questions and answers ensued, and moves had to be demonstrated a number of times to help explanations stick. Then came the big question, “What is the point of the game grandad?” Good question.
I don’t know about you, but I still meet followers of Jesus who appear to know lots about church, spiritual disciplines and principles of godly living, but nevertheless seem to remain unsure or ignorant of God’s endgame. That is, his ultimate purpose in sending his Son into the world.
Is the end purpose of sending Jesus simply that our personal sins may be forgiven and our eternal destiny secured? To have all our physical, material and emotional needs met? To enable us to become better people and live better lives? To have a godly influence on those around us and improve society so we can all work together for the common good? To see the needs of the poor and marginalised met and the sick healed? Or perhaps as followers of Jesus, we would see our life purpose as bringing many other people to know Christ and be added to the church; that they may also become true followers, who make other disciples?
Surely these are all good things and getting somewhere close to the purpose…
Motivation For Mission
For many today, involvement in evangelistic mission is seen as the key priority and heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. I certainly thought this way in the early years of my Christian life. After all, Jesus came to seek and save those who were lost, commissioning us to go and make disciples of all nations.
I came to faith in Jesus at a children’s mission at the age of ten. I was baptised at fourteen and became an active member of an evangelical church birthed out of a Christian Medical Mission. Evangelism was in our blood and our top priority. But to be perfectly honest, my personal motivation for reaching out to others was something of a mixed bag!
I genuinely loved the vision in Revelation Chapter 7, of followers from every people group on the face of the earth worshipping around the throne of Jesus. Nevertheless, there were a number of different motivations driving my engagement in evangelism and mission. Perhaps, the first one was guilt. I was “saved,” while countless thousands were on their way to hell!
A second motivating force was duty, although I would probably have called it obedience at the time! As I’ve said, the importance of Jesus’ Great Commission was written deeply into my thinking.
Then there was the question of the lostness of the lost. Some 15-25% of the world’s population still wait to hear about Jesus for the very first time. The majority of these are amongst the world’s poorest, and in lands dominated by other religions such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. And, what about the plight of the millions of street children, or young people trapped in the sex trade each week? Not to mention people suffering from famine, lack of sanitation, medical treatment and education. Surely, the gospel had to impact them too? And, I should play my part!
I guess it was at this point, another motivating force began to stir stronger in my heart. I increasingly felt desire to engage with people out of a genuine heart of compassion. At last, the penny dropped. The gospel was meant to not only meet the needs of people’s souls, but their material needs as well. The good news, salvation and God himself was bigger than I’d imagined – there was hope, healing and restoration for the “whole” person!
As I began to pray, God started to touch my heart with his compassion. After a number of powerful encounters with him through the person of the Holy Spirit, I began to not only understand the words of Jesus in Matthew, but also to feel something of God’s heart for all the precious people created for relationship with him:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
(Matthew 9 v 36)
I am so thankful to God our Father that in these days my response to the lost improved. I’m now less driven by guilt, duty and needs, but more by his grace and compassion. However, I want to suggest that even though this response is important and good, it still does not provide us with an ultimate motivation. Nor does it get to the heart of what our lives are all about.
Scripture, in many places, helps us to see and understand God’s ultimate plan, which Paul expresses succinctly when writing to the Ephesians:
…to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
(Ephesians 1 v 10)
It’s a plan involving demonstration of God’s words, works and wonders, and where you and I as followers of Jesus, play a crucial part as his witnesses. A plan that is universal in scope, and concerns all nations and all people groups.
Sounds as though we may be moving once more towards the theme of Revelation chapter 7!
So, let me try and describe one final motivating force. It’s a motivation that needs to eclipse even the power of compassion in our lives, as we partner with God to see all things brought together under Jesus Christ. One that became clearer to me when I was confronted with the question, “What is the ultimate goal of the church?” Note the echo back to my grandson’s chess question, ‘What’s the point of the game…’
l wonder what your answer to that question would be?
Ultimate Goal
John Piper (Let the Nations be Glad: Supremacy of God in Missions), in his splendid and challenging book, “Let the nations be glad,” answers the question in the following way:
Mission is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is.
If the pursuit of God’s glory is not ordered above the pursuit of man’s good in the affections of the heart and the priorities of the church, man will not be well served and God will not be duly honoured.
Our main goal, our priority, our motivation in life, should be the pursuit of the glory of God, above the pursuit of man’s good. Bringing glory to God, and seeing his name honoured, should be both uppermost in our prayers, and the natural outcome of our way of life as followers of Jesus.
When we examine the life of Jesus in the Gospels, we find “glory” is the hallmark of his time on earth. John gives testimony to this in the prologue of his gospel:
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John 1 v 14)
And, in Jesus’ prayer to his Father in John, we find him saying:
I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do.
(John 17 v 4)
But we are jumping forward. We first need to see that bringing glory to God was meant to be central to the life of God’s people from the very beginning…
Mike Frisby’s book Living to the Praise of His Glory is planned to for release in early 2025.