Our Purpose
If you are anything like I am, you may wonder what your purpose is. Does God have a plan for my life…some way in particular He wants to use me to bring Him glory? Trying to narrow down our purpose to something tangible and clear may feel like a daunting and confusing task. The plans that God has for us may seem illusive, just out of our grasp of understanding, but God does want us to discover what they are. Throughout our lives He has shaped and molded us each individually in order to fit perfectly into the masterpiece that He is creating. We are each part of His eternal plan. God will use all of the things in our lives, our experiences, our gifts, our dreams and even our sorrows to help define our purposes in different seasons of our lives.
However, before we define our individual purposes, the ones that God has uniquely designed for each of us, we need to remember the overall purpose for which we were created…and to understand why we were born in the first place!
We weren’t created out of a need God had, for He doesn’t need anything.
“The God who made the world and everything in it … is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything” (Acts 17:24-25).
We weren’t created because He was lonely. God was already complete in the perfect Trinity. God created us to fulfill His eternal plan…He chose to mold flesh from dust because He loved us. I know that seems difficult for our human minds to fully understand how we could be loved even before Adam walked the earth, but, God’s word promises that it is true.
“Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.” Ephesians 1:4
And so, first and foremost, our purpose is to love Him, because He loved us first… (1 Jn. 4:19). Our love for God shouldn’t be out of a sense of obligation, but instead, grow naturally as we draw closer to Him.
There are many ways to express our love for God. We worship, we serve, we pray and we seek Him. Our desire is to please the God who loves us. And, as we seek to please Him, we will also obey His commands. The more we come to know the Lord the deeper our love will grow and the stronger our desire to obey Him becomes.
You may be asking yourself where I’m going with all this! Well, I’m heading toward finding our purpose in His commandments. In Matthew 22:36-40 Jesus tells us that the greatest of all the commandments are surrounding love and in them, we find our purpose:
1. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
2. “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).
Think about those two verses for a moment. What do they mean to you? Can we love God without obeying these first and most important rules for life? And, as we pour out our love, how is that manifested to those around us? Will they know they are loved because we love God? How, in tangible ways, are you able to follow those commandments and fulfill your purpose?
With love, Joan
Thought provoking post, Joan. Can please see that I love them because I love God? I hope so. Sometimes it is hard to love people that are not easy to get along with. But He gives me the necessary support to do so.
That is one of the huge challenges in life, Iris. How to love someone who is “unlovable” or who doesn’t love us back! I think that we love someone through our actions…our kindness…our forgiveness. It can be difficult, but like you said, God will give us the necessary support. In fact, it is only by Him that we can truly love like He desires.
All for Him, Joan