|
Three great questions
to answer about life…the first is the question of existence. Why am I
alive? Why are we here? We might say that’s a simple question and yet
it’s one that has been asked for hundreds of years and it seems like in
modern life that the answer has been, “I don’t know. I don’t know why we
are here.” One author says, “My life has a superb cast but I can’t
figure out the plot.” Jack Hamley wrote, “I hope life isn’t a joke
because I don’t get it.” Or if you remember that song by John Denver
about ‘thank God I’m a country boy,’ in the chorus he says, “Life isn’t
anything but a funny, funny riddle.” A professor named Hugh Moorhead,
chairman of the department of philosophy at Northeastern University,
once wrote to 250 philosophers, scientists, writers, and intellectuals
asking, “What is the purpose of life?” Then he published all the
responses. Some people offered their best guesses. Still others admitted
they made up a purpose of life. Some admitted they didn’t have any idea
to what the purpose of life was and if Dr. Moorhead knew, would they
please let them know. Carl Jung the famous psychiatrist said, “I don’t
know the meaning, the purpose, of life but it looks as though something
were meant by it.” Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction writer said,
“As far as I can see, there is no purpose.”
And yet people need
purpose. If we look around us we see that a lot of folks have made up
their purpose and even if they don’t really know they live according to
some kind of purpose. There are people who take the philosophical
approach; others you might call survivalist. This person says, “The
purpose of life is just to stay alive.” In other words, live as long as
you can as comfortably as you can. A naturalist might say that the
purpose of life is to perpetuate itself; in other words, you are just
here for biological reasons. Rap artist Ice T wrote, “The only reason we
are here is to reproduce so just chill out and reproduce.” Doesn’t that
just motivate you to get out of bed in the morning? There are all forms
of different kinds of hedonism, pleasure, entertainment. Someone once
wrote, “Television, movies, along with pop music and even video games
espouse the idea that the only real purpose in life is to have fun. If
the fun stops change channels. If you are not amused, find a better
video or machine. If you can’t be entertained you are definitely missing
out. Get bored? No way. If we can’t give you on-the-edge-of-your-seat
action, drama, or laughter by the minute, speed it up.” And lest we
think that’s just other people, we need to examine our own lives. Some
of us live for golf. Some of us live for fishing or hunting. We have
huge screens for our entertainment. If a Martian came down here and
examined our American culture, they might determine that these are our
lives. Sports…that’s part of it isn’t it? I remember being in college at
Duke University, living in North Carolina, we were told by those at the
University of North Carolina that the sky is Carolina blue and that God
must have made it that way. Whatever school you went to, that was your
god. Later when I was a pastor in West Virginia, about ninety miles west
of Washington DC, the local deity’s colors there were maroon and gold –
the Washington Redskins. When I was living in Nashville, Tennessee the
local deity’s colors were orange and white – the University of
Tennessee. And here I think they are purple and gold. I’m only kidding,
but we make all kinds of things into our gods. Of course there is
nothing wrong with sports or fishing or hunting or even TV, but it’s
what we live for. Some people of course have worse habits like drugs.
The quest for pleasure has an enhanced side, someone said. We look at
the ads, people with beer cans in one hand and good-looking women in the
other. They are surely having more fun than the others. And someone once
said, “When smoking becomes a greater social ill in the eyes of the
public than marijuana, the pursuit of pleasure has proven itself to be
the ultimate goal.” What about the American Dream…faster cars, bigger
houses, all kinds of things.
The tragedy is that it
seems in modern life, no one really knows. If you examine the culture,
no one really talks about what the purpose of life really is, not even
Oprah Winfrey. It wasn’t too long ago that she actually had a show on
this idea; what is the purpose of life? You know how they do in these TV
shows, they say, “In the next segment we’ll discuss this” and then they
never really get down to it. She was doing that with the purpose of
life. Every single break during the show she would say, “Come back
because we are going to tell you your purpose,” but it never happened.
As the credits were rolling at the end, Oprah came on and said,
“Remember, you’ve got to figure out your purpose for yourself.” Of
course, that’s the self-help approach. You can go to any bookstore,
lined with books, and they all say the same thing. They all say that
you’ve got to invent your own purpose, create your own purpose in life,
and then you’ve got to stick to it because that is what success is all
about. No wonder there are so many suicides; the second cause of death
among teenagers. No wonder so many people have to take anti-depressants
just to get by. No wonder so many are addicted to everything from drugs
and alcohol to TV and sex. No wonder there are so many divorces. No
wonder there are so many abortions. No wonder so many Christians live
like unbelievers because we are not that much different. That’s why I
think it’s a good thing to spend some time thinking about purpose. It’s
a good thing to sit and think and talk and hear about purpose. Because
in the Bible, purpose is only found in one place; it is in God. We all
know that, but we forget it quite often. We get involved in other
things; we are involved in ourselves and all kinds of things. We forget.
I’d like to remind us what the Scripture says. I’m going to read just a
few verses to you, just a sampling of hundreds of verses in the Bible
which talk about the purpose. They all come down to the same thing.
Proverbs 16:4
The Lord has made
everything for His own purpose.
Colossians 1:16
For everything,
absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible,
everything got started in Him and finds its purpose in Him.
Ephesians 1:1-11.
Listen to the idea of purpose but listen to the incredible celebration
that’s in these verses. Sometimes we forget the emotion and passion in
the scriptures. Listen to this passage from Eugene Peterson’s The
Message.
How blessed is God and
what a blessing He is. He is the Father of our Master Jesus Christ and
takes us to the high places of blessing in Him. Long before He laid down
Earth’s foundations, He had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus
of His love, to be made whole and holy in His love. Long ago, He decided
to adopt us into His family through Jesus Christ and what pleasure He
took in planning this. He wanted us to enter into the celebration of His
lavish gift-giving by the hand of His beloved Son. Because of the
sacrifice of the Messiah, His blood poured out on the altar of the
cross, we are free people, free of penalties and punishments chalked up
by all our misdeeds. And not just barely free either; abundantly free!
He thought of everything, provided for everything we could possible
need, letting us in on the plans He took such delight in making. He set
it all out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything
would be brought together and summed up in Him, everything in deepest
Heaven, everything on planet Earth. It’s in Christ that we find out who
we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ
and got our hopes up, He had His eye on us. He had designs for us for
glorious living; part of the overall purpose He is working out in
everything and in everyone.
Why does God want us
here? Why are we alive? The answer is very clear; our purpose is summed
up in God. Our being has to do with what God wants us to do. Everything
has a purpose; every rock has a purpose, every plant and animal have a
purpose, and you have a purpose. That’s summing up why we are doing the
40 Days of Purpose. Let’s remind ourselves of that and celebrate it and
find joy in it. We want to discover what God wants us to be and do. In
this time we will discover five different purposes. I like to call them
broad purposes…of worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and
evangelism. But we all have individual purposes too. I hope as we talk
about these five broad purposes that you will be praying about what God
wants you to be and do particularly. Next week we begin with the first
purpose of worship. But today I just wanted you to see, in a short
period of time, some of God’s motivation. That first question is why you
are alive. The answer rings through the scriptures; that you and I are
alive simply to be loved by God. God is love and God wanted to create
something to love and so He created you and me. The Bible says something
rather amazing; it says that God didn’t need anything or anybody, but
out of His love and desire for a family and relationships He created us.
Of course God is so big that He needed several billion of us. Isn’t this
amazing? You and I, as individuals among billions and billions of
people, can know God personally. It isn’t just like taking a number and
walking into a big auditorium full of a hundred million people and
hoping you get your turn. God pays individual attention to all of us.
You are alive because God wanted you to be, because God loves you and He
wants to know you more and love you more and wants you to love Him. In
fact, He already loves you infinitely. The problem is on our side, in
learning how to love Him.
It’s also a question
of significance. Not only do we ask a question of existence, “Why am I
alive?” but we also ask, “Does my life matter?” Indeed, again, the
answer is yes. The tragedy we have seen for the last few minutes is that
in the modern world so few people really believe this. Or they try to
seek their significance in other things and they never really satisfy.
God has made us needing to find significance or meaning. I joke a lot,
purposeful joking, about the first words a child says as they grow up
besides ‘momma’ and ‘daddy.’ They learn “No” and “Mine” or “Me.” I
really think after that is all done, the other word is “Why?” Even two
or three-year olds ask “Why?” Sometimes they ask us questions in ways we
just don’t know. If your child asks, “Why am I here daddy?” you might
reply, “Go ask your mother” or “Go ask the pastor.” I’ve actually had
people bring their child and ask me to answer their questions. We all
want to know why we are here; we want to have a purpose. One of the most
frustrating things in the Army sometimes is when they tell us to go
somewhere, they don’t tell us why. During WWII, there were prisoners in
a Nazi concentration camp in Hungary who were working in a factory. The
Allies came and blew up the factory with their bombs. The soldiers had
the prisoners take and move all the rubble from the factory and move it
to another field. The next day, they had them take the same rubble and
move it back to the first place. Back and forth it went. As time went
on, the prisoners began to go crazy because they began to lose their
will to live because there was no meaning, no purpose. We yearn for
meaning and to find it, we’ll do most anything.
Most of us go through
life living it at one of three levels. The first and lowest level is
what we might call a ‘survivor’ level. The survivor level is where most
people live today; they are in a survival mode, they are just barely
getting by, they are just existing and are not living. We might think
it’s due to their economic status and that’s true to some degree but you
know when I go on mission trips, one of the universal statements that
people make when they get back is, “Wow, those people are so poor but
yet they are so happy.” It’s because they found meaning in something
else other than things. A lot of people have a lot of stuff but they are
still living basically for the weekend, they are living for the next
game or fishing trip or golf outing or vacation. They are just
surviving. A step up from that, maybe a better way to live than
survival, is success. That’s where a lot of people are too. By the
world’s standards, we’ve got it made really. We are very wealthy
compared to the rest of the world; we have possessions, we have freedom,
we have pretty good health, we may have some prestige and we may be very
successful but then why all those self-help books about finding meaning?
In the end, making the next deal doesn’t really satisfy or having more
doesn’t satisfy. What does satisfy is the Lord. We were made for this.
There’s really nothing you can do about it. You can try as hard as you
can to find meaning apart from God but it will not work. God has rigged
it; He’s rigged you, made you this way. You will not find meaning and
purpose in anything else except God. I would encourage you in a Godly
way to give up because it doesn’t work. The next level, of course, is
where we find our purposes from God and we’re living in them. That is
real significance. God has created us to live forever. Sometimes
Christianity is accused of being a pie-in-the-sky religion and that we
look to the future and say it will be better then. That’s certainly true
to some degree. Our faith looks to the future. We are going to be
spending a whole lot more time in Heaven than we will ever spend here.
You might live 90 or 100 years but compare that to eternity; this life
is about preparation for eternity. That doesn’t make this life
insignificant. The fact that we are going to live forever makes now even
more significant, very important. Paul says, “When this tent we live in
(our body) on this earth is torn down, is destroyed, God will have a
house, a new body, in Heaven for us to live in – a home He Himself has
made – which will last forever.” And later on he says, “And God made us
for this very purpose.” There’s that word purpose again. So to the
question of significance – “Does my life matter?” – the answer is YES,
you were made to last forever, to find your purpose in God.
The last question is
of intention: What is my purpose? That’s what we hope to explore over
the next few weeks. This is for you. My hope for you is that you will
never be the same again. That doesn’t mean at the end of seven weeks you
are going to know everything…that you are going to be super mature
Christians. It’s all a process of growth. We all grow up in the Lord and
it is until the day we die that we keep growing and developing and
learning. But I’m hoping this will help you; I’m hoping this will help
me because I need to learn. I need to ask these same kinds of questions.
Let’s spend some time together asking what our purposes are. We find our
purposes by getting to know God better. You probably could have guessed
that conclusion, but it’s true. We find our purpose in getting to know
God better. It all starts with God. Again, Colossians 1:16, “For
everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and
invisible, everything got started in Him and finds its purpose in Him.”
So I want to encourage you to take part in these 40 Days in whatever way
you can. I hope it’s by being involved in the small groups. It’s
interesting that we learn best when we learn with other Christians.
That’s just the way it is. I hope you will do that. I hope you will
reinforce that by being at the messages on Sundays; I realize that
sometimes you travel or are sick or kids are playing soccer, but do your
best to be here on Sundays. And then read the book, “The Purpose-Driven
Life.” It’s just a chapter a day, about fifteen minutes. As I said to
you last week, I believe that this is one of those books that comes
around every now and then that is just a great book. This is one of the
devotional classics of our time; it will be around a long time. It’s a
great discussion starter and tool to make you think. You can still sign
up and I want to encourage you to do that. We are doing 40 days of
purpose; 40 is chosen purposely. Rick Warren shared last night on the
DVD we watched at the kick-off that 40 days is very important in the
Bible. Noah’s life was transformed by 40 days of rain. Moses’ life was
transformed by 40 days on Mt. Sinai. David was transformed by Goliath’s
40 day challenge. Jesus was empowered by 40 days in the desert and the
disciples were transformed by 40 days with Jesus after the resurrection.
So we will spend 40 days and I hope that you will participate and grow
and be blessed.
|