"For we are God's
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus
to do good works,
which God prepared in advance for
us to do."
(Ephesians 5:15-17)
In the first of our 40 Days of Purpose messages we are asking the question,
“What on Earth are we here for?”
- It’s a question about our existence.
- It’s a question about our significance – does our life matter?
- It’s a question of intention – what is our purpose?
The Question of our existence: What on earth are we here for?
It’s not
exactly a new question. Jeremiah 20:18 has the prophet of old asking “Why was
I born? Was it only to have trouble and sorrow, to end my life in disgrace?”
Dr. Hugh Moorhead,
who is the chairman of the department of philosophy at Northeastern University, once wrote to 250 well-known philosophers, scientists, writers, and intellectuals
and asked them, “What is the purpose of life?”
Some said they
didn’t have one so they made it up as they went along. Some admitted they didn’t have any idea as to what the
purpose of life was and if the good doctor knew, maybe he would let them in on it. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist once
said, “I don’t know the meaning, the purpose of life, but it looks as if something were meant by it.” SciFi
writer Isaac Asimov ponders and says, “As far as I can see, there is no purpose.”
Different paths
people follow bring different answers. There is the mystic who says, “Look within you and you will find it.” There
is the survivalist, "My purpose is just to carry on carrying on." There is the naturalist, "The purpose of life is to propagate
the species.” The Hedonist, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die." The materialist, "Your life is measured
by what you own." You can find hundreds of self-help books suggesting “Discover your dream. Go after your goal. Believe
it and you can achieve it.”
There is all
sorts of advice but no real answer to the question we are asking which is: "What on earth are we here for?" They offer a pathway to achieve certain goals, but successfully reaching a goal and knowing your purpose
in life are not the same thing. We may understand that if ‘a’ wants to get to ‘b’ then they should
follow path ‘c’, without ever asking, “Well why on earth would ‘a’ want to get to ‘b’
in the first place?”
So why does ‘a’
need to get to ‘b’? Why are we on this planet? Is there a reason? The biblical book of Proverbs, that collection
of ancient wisdom that has stood the test of time, suggests in Proverbs 16:4, “The
Lord has made everything for His own purpose.”
Proverbial wisdom
suggests that all of creation has a purpose. That every rock has a purpose, that every plant has a purpose, that every animal
has a purpose, and that if we are breathing and our heart is beating then we have a purpose.
The apostle Paul
writing in Ephesians 1:4, tells us about that purpose: “Long before God laid
down the Earth’s foundation, God had us in mind and settled on us as the focus of His love, to be made whole and holy
by His love.”
God declares
that we were created to be loved by Him and be made whole by His love. One of the briefest verses in the Bible states simply:
“God is love.” God wasn’t lonely. God was not incomplete without us. But God made us in order to love us.
God didn’t need us, God wanted us. Before we can talk about anything else, we have to understand this foundational point,
that the reason we are on this earth is to be loved by God. That has a huge bearing on our second question…
The Question of Significance: Does our life matter?
Another prophet,
not Jeremiah but Isaiah this time (and he’s having a bad day), complains to God “My work all seems so useless. I’ve spent my strength for nothing and for no purpose at all.” (Isaiah 49:4a).
During World
War II, prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp were processing human sewage in a factory. The allies came along, bombed the
factory and blew it apart. So the prisoners had nothing to do. The Nazi soldiers had the prisoners take all the rubble of
that factory and move it to another field. The next day, they had them take that same rubble and move it back in reverse.
The next day, they had to take that stuff and move it back and day after day they had no meaning, no purpose. It was just
work doing the same thing over and over.
The prisoners
began to go crazy. They began to lose their will to live because there was no meaning, no purpose in their work. They were
just moving bricks back and forth, back and forth. Many of them began to throw themselves in front of the guards trying to
get shot; in essence trying to commit suicide. Having no purpose can cause us
to despair of life.
We can go through
life living at one of three levels. The first and lowest level is the survival level. The survival level is where people are
just getting by. They’re not living. They are controlled by their circumstances. They just get through. That’s
survival mode.
A better level
to live on is the success level. That’s where many of us are. Compared to the rest of the world we are a success. We enjoy a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth and consume more of
the earth’s resources than any nation on the planet. We have possessions,
we have freedom, we eat well, we live well. But today there are all sorts of people saying things like, “If that is
success, how come I feel so empty?” It takes more than success to satisfy us.
We need to move
up to the third level of living, the significance level. Not survival, not success, but the level of significance. How do
we live at the significance level? We get there through four things:
- Knowing the meaning of life
- Knowing how much we matter to God
- Knowing God’s purposes for our life and then…
- Pursuing those purposes. That is the significance level. When you know that God has a purpose
for your life and you GO FOR IT!
Isaiah 44:2 pictures
God telling us, “I am your Creator. You were in My care, even before you were
born.” Psalm 139:16 “You (talking about God of course) scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in Your book.” God made us.
God made us to love us. We matter to God. God sees everything about our life, the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in-between.
God cares how it all goes.
But there’s
more! All of this takes place in a larger framework than just what happens from the day we are born to the day we die. God
envisages our life as being from before the womb to beyond the tomb! God says, “I have plans and purposes for your life,
but they don’t end at death.” When we die, our heart is going to stop and that will be the end of our body, but
that’s not the end of us. We were created for eternity. Psalm 33:11 says, “His
purposes last eternally.”
This life is
not all there is. One of the biggest ways we can waste our life is thinking that all there is, is here and now. The time we
spend on earth really isn’t that very long. If you stretched out a line from the seashore where I used to live in Wales
to my house here in Beckley, across the Atlantic Ocean, the first barnacle on that line would not even come close to showing
how tiny our life is in comparison to eternity. We were made for eternity and life is preparation for eternity.
As for the question
of existence – “Why are we on this earth”? – God answers by saying, “I made you to love you,
that’s why you’re alive.” And to the question of significance
– does my life matter? – God says, “You matter so much that I intend on keeping you for all eternity.”
That leads to
the third question, the Question of Intention: What is our purpose?
In Psalm 89:47
the Psalmist asks God the question, “Why did you create us? For nothing?” The renown atheist philosopher of the last century, Bertrand Russell, said that “Unless
you assume the existence of God, the question of life’s meaning and purpose is irrelevant.”
If there is no
God, if we are just a freak chance of nature, if we are just complex pond scum – over achieving amoebas – then
Bertrand is correct; our life doesn’t matter. But the testimony of all the people whose lives are chronicled in all
66 books of the Bible, the witness of the people of faith and prophets of the Old Testament, the proclamation that rang clear
from the Church since the day of Pentecost is this: ‘There is a God. And God made us for a reason, and God made us for
a purpose. And the only way we’re going to know our purpose is by getting to know God.’
Here I want to
offer you a couple of verses, as they read in the Message Bible. For me they really bring that point home.
Firstly: Colossians
1:16 “For everything, absolutely
everything, above and below, visible and invisible…everything got started in (God) and finds its purpose in (God).”
Secondly: Ephesians
1:11 “It's in Christ that
we find out who we are and what we are living for... part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.”
If we want to
know our purpose in life, we have to get to know God. To know God we have to be intentional about it. The more we get to know
God, the more we’re going to understand the ways and the wisdom of God and the more we’re going to understand
the meaning and purpose of our life. Are you with me? The only way we’re going to learn the meaning of life and our
purpose in life is to get to know God. It all starts with God, because it’s all about God. Remember how the Bible begins?
The first 4 words “In the beginning, God.” It’s all about God.
Today is the
First Sunday of our ‘40 Days of Purpose’ spiritual growth campaign. What is a campaign? It is a ‘planned
and organized series of actions intended to achieve a specific goal’. Our goal is to better know God. To help us do
that throughout the days of Lent we are invited each day to read a chapter from Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life.”
We are further
invited to join a group of other folks doing the same thing for discussion and prayer and sharing our insights. Then each
Sunday we are invited to come back together in worship and praise. Our Sunday services will set us up for what we’re
going to be studying during the week.
One final verse,
Acts 10:35, again from the Message Bible, “It makes no difference who you are
or where you're from—if you want God and are ready to do as he says, the door is open.” The Westminster Catechism
declares: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever!
Why on Earth
are we here? God created us to know His love.
Does our life
matter? God created us to live with a purpose.
How do we find
that purpose? By intentionally getting to know God!
