Quotes About Purpose

Preliminary 3: Deciding to Do It

Satan's efforts to defeat God's purposes for humankind. This is the basic idea behind all temptation: God is presented as depriving us by his commands of what is good.

Let us now be perfectly clear. Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no "you" apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly be at peace with him.

We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God's full world.

Our challenge is to fill our hours, minutes, and actions from day to day with the appropriate amount of love for God's creation and creating, and then work to produce more of the good he has put in this world. This is every person's calling.

External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means.

Preliminary 1: Determining Your Desire

Do I really want this?" This question needs answering for the simple reason that if God is going to be with us, we should expect that our lives will be extremely different from ordinary human life.

confident (con-fide, literally acting "with faith") about who we are and what we are doing. To be with Jesus is to have both.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, "The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it."6

The only way the devil can hurt God is through humans, and so he focuses upon us. His strategy is to try to frustrate God's purpose for humanity

Fact 2: What is true about you as a person is also true about your work.

it is good that you are alive: your life is good, it is good that you are who you are, and it is good that you do the work you do.

desire—wanting something that appears to be good for some purpose or pleasure.

Does Jesus only enable me to "make the cut" when I die? Or to know what to protest, or how to vote or agitate and organize? It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life? If I had to choose, I would rather have a car that runs than good insurance on one that doesn't. Can I not have both?

So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and "trying to carry it out." Rather, "The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin

Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for those who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within.

Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone's hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.

That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God.

God is great enough that he can conduct his affairs in this way. His nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not. This does not diminish him. Far from it. He would be a lesser God if he could not change his intentions when he thinks it is appropriate. And if he chooses to deal with humanity in such a way that he will occasionally think it appropriate, that is just fine.

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become. It

God does not delight in having to always explain what his will is; he enjoys it when we understand

Discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the church. It is carried out in those situations where people spend their life.

We are bringing forth the sons and daughters of God to live their unique lives in this world to his glory. We must do all we can to suit the means we employ to that end.