Thanks for visiting with us. The aim of this project is merely to help us all think better in order to live better. The idea in question here is simple and I’m sure it’s familiar to you. Why do you personally exist? What is your purpose? Why are you breathing? The way you answer this question will have a great impact on your life. The intent of this post is not to convince you of something that you don’t believe or maybe even want to believe. The purpose (pun intended) is twofold: To ask you questions to help you think about your life and the purpose that you have either identified or not identified; and to present to you what God has said your purpose is. You may discover pleasant and uncomfortable ideas and realities. You may disagree, even vehemently, with this. And that’s ok, as long as you’re thinking! Just promise me that you will indeed Think. Our motive is love. We care about you as a person, yes even though we don’t know you! I will be relatively brief since there are countless books and blogs written, sermons preached, debates made on the subject and this is therefore not an attempt to repeat what others have said but again, to help you to think and maybe to set you on the road to living your life on purpose in a way that will bring you the most satisfaction. Yes, we care about your happiness.
So let’s get to it.
That is where I will actually start, your deepest satisfaction and joy. God created you and I for a relationship with Himself. We were created for worship. Here are a few passages clarifying what God Himself has said:
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
The interesting parallel that you might observe here is the connection between rejoicing and praising God. God’s people have always praised Him most when they are rejoicing and excited about something. Have you ever just flooded someone with praise and encouragement because of something just completely out of this world that they did for you or for someone else? Your heart was drenched with emotion and all you could do was spill over with praise to them and to others about them. Or has something happened that made you go ballistic with excitement? Maybe that girl said yes when you proposed to her. Maybe you got accepted into the college you worked so hard to get into but didn’t think you stood a chance. Maybe you got your dream job. Regardless, let me ask you this, did you go tell your couch? Or talk to your car about it? Or even your dog? Probably not! You probably found the person who had the most influence in making that happen, whether directly or indirectly and praised them up and down for it. That is the heart of worship! But we were designed to find the fulfillment of our worship in God for His worthiness is infinite. We NEED an infinite worthy being to satisfy our worship. That may sound strange if the idea is foreign to you. But think with me for a minute. What is worship? Most people think of submission. Let’s look at some definitions:
noun: worship
the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity. "the worship of God"magnification
honor given to someone in recognition of their merit.
BRITISH used in addressing or referring to an important or high-ranking person, especially a magistrate or mayor.
show reverence and adoration for (a deity); honor with religious rites
"he went to the cathedral because he chose to worship in a spiritually inspiring building"
treat (someone or something) with the reverence and adoration appropriate to a deity.
"she adores her sons and they worship her"
These all have similar ideas of expressing the value of something or someone. But let’s look at the original word that worship was derived from:
weorthscipe ‘worthiness, acknowledgment of worth’
So it boils down to worthiness. How do we acknowledge the worth of something? With our time, money, emotions, thoughts and energy. Do you spend any of those resources on things you deem as worthless? Do you much spend time in mental exertion and emotional ecstasy on how awesome the trash is in your kitchen? Hopefully not! What do you spend those things on? Those things which bring you some personal gain right? Whether they bring joy, pleasure, fulfillment of a duty, self respect. Your work, your spouse, your kids, your hobbies, your duties. All good things. But are they the best things? On earth maybe. But when God designed this world for us to be in relationship with Him, He was giving us the best thing of all, Himself. He alone is the source of all good things: love, joy, peace, hope, pleasure, connection, value, strength, connection, achievement. There is literally nothing on earth that can compare with knowing Him personally and intimately. Ask any Christian you know and they will tell you from experience that the deepest joy and satisfaction they’ve ever felt is their current joy of knowing and being known by God. That is the primary purpose to which you are called. So what? What does that mean for you? That’s a nice lofty vague idea but how do you get to know this God so that you can get on with living on purpose? Jesus Christ. First, you have a problem. Your sin has separated you from God and therefore you have no relationship with God unless you know Jesus. The problem you face is that God is also jealous for your heart and anything that you put into His place is called idolatry. Sin not just the breaking of God’s law, it is the breaking of God’s heart. The Bible says that our sin grieves Him. It also says that it angers Him. His wrath burns with a righteous fury against our sin and His judgment is the punishment that we face for attempting to replace Him with His creation as our God. Just as a woman burns with anger at the news that her lover has committed adultery with another man. It is treason. It is rebellion. It grieves her heart. The other problem is His justice. We all know that there is a sense of right and wrong. Why can’t God just grade on a curve? You’re not as bad as the next guy or gal reading this. You probably haven’t done anything really bad like cheating on your spouse or abusing your kids or robbing a bank or murdering someone. I’m sure you are a good person, relatively speaking. But the problem is that God sets the standard and He has set Himself as the standard. He cannot be in the presence of sin because He will not be in the presence of sin. His nature is absolutely pure, holy, righteous, moral. His justice demands perfection. If he just let all of the mass murderers and rapists and thieves into heaven because “they were emotionally unstable” or “they weren’t in their right minds” you would be furious. That wouldn’t be justice, that would be wickedness! But the truth is that God sees your heart and mine. He knows our thoughts. They are often impure, selfish and evil. He knows our motivations. He sees the little white lies we tell. He sees the little thefts of time and the bouts of laziness and the greed that we pursue and the lusts that we dwell on. He sees the evil inside. But God sent Jesus His Son to this world to live a perfect moral life as a man and then chose to die in our place and take on Himself God’s wrath that was reserved for us in order that we would be saved from His wrath back into His love. Christ chose a Roman cross on which the full measure of God’s wrath for sin would be poured out on Him. God loves each of us. But our sin incurs His wrath. Christ’s atonement, or payment for that sin, removes His wrath so that all that is left is His perfect Love. By faith in Jesus and repentance of the sinful patterns of life that we have been enslaved to, we are granted salvation from His judgment. We are adopted into God’s family by His own blood. We become heirs with Christ. We follow Him and in pursuing Him, we become like Him. Our prior sinful patterns then become distasteful and even gross. We find our identity no longer in our pride or our achievements or our family or our pleasures or our treasures, but in knowing and being known, in loving and being loved. Our chief pursuit becomes knowing Christ, knowing God as Father and helping others to know Him. You do not become more moral first. You come before Him as you are, where you are and give your life to Him. This is what you were made for and this is what you have been missing. Saint Augustine once said “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
So let’s simplify. The fundamental will of God is loving obedience. The root of obedience is His love for you. To obey God you must know God and you must love God. To know God you must know Jesus by repentance and faith. I believe that He is calling to you. Once you know God through Christ, your purpose is to be sanctified, which just means becoming more like Jesus. Your practical purpose is simply to pursue God’s work with Him. What is His work? The building of His kingdom. What does this mean? Helping more people to hear the Gospel and to receive it. You will do this in your unique way with the skills and knowledge and gifts that He has given to you. You take account of your abilities and experience. You see where the church and the world has needs. You find the intersection of your value and their needs. Then you pray, plan and take action. Pray for guidance, wisdom, courage and faith to follow Him when He brings clarity. And He will bring clarity but usually at the worst possible moment so that you can learn to trust Him. Oh, and don’t expect your life to get easier. Expect it to get harder. But expect an adventure. And expect to see Him work wonders through you. Plan and strategize over how you can support the Gospel being shared to more people in more areas with more clarity. Then do everything you do out of worship unto God with excellence, knowing that you are able now to please Him with your efforts. Before your reunion with Christ, your best efforts could not please Him. Now in Christ, even your smallest efforts please Him. I will close this with a quote from C.S. Lewis:
“The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses . . . shall find approval, shall please God. To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son — it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.”
Thank you for reading. I hope that this was thought provoking. Feel free to email me at shaun@kingofhearts.io with any questions. I hope that you will at least consider, think, research, ponder these thoughts. If you are open to it, my suggestion is to buy a Bible and start reading it for yourself. If for no other reason than to disprove it! May you find your purpose and your fulfillment in this life and the next. Even if you only seek and find your purpose without God, you may find some fulfillment in it, but it will never satisfy. For your sake, please don’t waste your life! You only get one shot and then your time is up. - God Bless
