Why your purpose in life matters

During the first 15 years of my Christian life, during which time I was also working full time as a pastor/evangelist/teacher to college students; if you were to ask me what was the purpose of my life I would have said something like this: to glorify God by helping to reach the world for Christ by winning, building and sending college students to do the same.  While I would have started with that phrase: to glorify God, I really had no idea what it meant and the real purpose of my life was to win students to Christ, build them in their faith and send them to do the same.  As purposes go that was not a bad purpose.  At least the purpose of my life was not to make a million dollars by selling defective products to people or to escape all pain by staying drunk.  However, it is a bad purpose because it is not the ultimate purpose for which God made me. 

Let me use an illustration I have often shared with people which I stole from Jonathon Edwards and just updated.  Imagine that you grew up in the city and have no knowledge of farming.  You meet and become friends with a farmer.  One day the farmer invites you out to his farm so he can educate you on farming.  When you arrive your friend pulls up into the farm yard driving a massive tractor with a disc-harrow dragging behind.  He jumps off the tractor and you ask him what this machinery is and what he was doing with it.  He explains that this is a disc-harrow and he just broke up a 180 acre field to prepare it for planting.  So you ask him, "Planting what?"  He replies, "I'm going to plant corn in that field and I needed to loosen the soil so the seeds would get into contact with the soil."  "Why are you going to plant corn?", you ask.  He says, "I plant corn so that it will grow up and I can harvest it in the fall.  Throughout the summer I will cultivate the corn a couple of times and spray it with herbicide and insecticide."  You ask, "Why do you want to harvest corn?"  Your friend the farmer says, "I sell the corn.  That is how I make my money so I can pay my bills and take care of my family."

So let's stop there and recognize that the ultimate purpose of the farmer is to "pay the bills and take care of his family."  However, throughout the course of the year he has a number of subordinate purposes which relate to his ultimate purpose.  He has the purpose of preparing the field for planting; of planting the corn; of cultivating it; etc.  Here is the question: what would happen if the farmer makes one of these subordinate purposes his ultimate purpose?  What if he makes breaking up the the field with his disc-harrow his ultimate purpose?  He will turn the field to dust which will blow away.  He will not stick with it, he will burn out and lose his motivation because of what use is a field of dust.  He will lose the farm and his family because he will not make any money.  In short, if you make a subordinate purpose your ultimate purpose your life will not work.

In my case, by making reaching the world for Christ my ultimate purpose a number of things happened.  First, I used people instead of loving them.  I would meet regularly with a college student to help him figure out how to share the gospel with all the guys in his fraternity or on his dorm floor.  We would make a plan and then we would meet each week and I would ask how he was doing in his plan.  Often a student would make no progress.  I would get mad at the student for not doing what he said he was going to do.  (I rarely let the student know I was mad.)  Why was I mad?  He was not helping me fulfill my "godly" purpose of reaching the world for Christ.  This happened on more than one occasion.

In addition, I got bored.  I wasn't made for the purpose of reaching the world for Christ, I was made to know and love and delight in God the most infinitely interesting and delightful being in the universe.  Thus every created thing will ultimately lose its luster because nothing and no one can compare to the glorious Creator and Redeemer, the great Triune God.  I had to have other diversions to fill up my heart and my time.

It was in the early 1990's through conversations with other Christians but mostly through the writings of Dr. John Piper ("Desiring God" should be read by everyone who professes to be a Christian.), JI Packer, Jerry White, Wayne Grudem, Jonathon Edwards, John Calvin, and others.  It was in my life a "Copernican Revolution."  Whereas before God was simply one of the interests in my life along with basketball and teaching the bible and leading my team of fellow campus workers and reading novels and being a good husband and father; now he was the Sun around which every other part of my life orbited.  To know him and love him and grow to delight in him became the purpose of my life, not perfectly and not always, but at least I knew this is what I was meant for and this is why Christ saved me.

There were several immediate changes I noticed in myself. First, in my sharing and teaching of the gospel I became more life a Packer fan describing the exploits of our Super Bowl MVP quarterback, Aaron Rogers than like an Amway salesman trying to get people to sign up for my program.  My objective became to show people the glory of God in the face of Christ, not get them to help me fulfill my purpose.  Second, I discovered it easier to accept and love others because I did not need their approval to make me happy because my happiness was in knowing and enjoying God.  Obviously, I did not and do not do this perfectly.  I regularly must confess my sins of using others to make me happy or of preferring the approval of others to the joy of being loved by God.  Third, the Bible became alive to me in a greater way as it is the means by which I grow to know the beauty of Christ and thus grow in my delight in him.  I do not read it to prove I am a good Christian or so I can impress people with my knowledge of it but so that I can know God better.