Quotes About Purpose

DOING is often God's remedy for despair.

The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.

The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature

God has made us to be conduits of his grace. The danger is in thinking the conduit should be lined with gold. It shouldn't. Copper will do.

When everything in life is stripped away except God, and we trust him more because of it, this is gain, and he is glorified.

We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is.

Was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great passion, namely, to be spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—even two decades after most of their American counterparts had retired to throw away their lives on trifles. No, that is not a tragedy. That is a glory. These lives were not wasted. And these lives were not lost. "Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35).

Therefore, at the heart of the meaning of work is creativity. If you are God, your work is to create out of nothing. If you are not God, but like God—that is, if you are human—your work is to take what God has made and shape it and use it to make him look great.

To know that our Father in heaven has ordained our pain is not a comfoftable truth, but it is comforting. That our pain has a loving and wise and all-powerful purpose behind it is better than any other view--weak God, cruel God, bumbling God, no God. To know that in his hands "this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17) is profoundly reassuring.

O, the lessons here for us! Name your discouraging setback—personal, political, scholarly, ecclesiastical, cultural, global. Dare any Christian say that God is not in this for the good of his people and the glory of his name? Not if our God is the God of Ezra! Do you think these setbacks are not without some great purpose of righteousness bigger and more stunning than any of us can imagine?

Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man.

Here was an absolutely compelling road sign. Stay on the road of objective truth - there is objective being and objective value. Stay on the road. There is Truth. There is a Point and Purpose and Essence to it all. Keep searching. You will find it.

When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever. Worship, therefore, is the fuel and the goal of missions.8

The most precious gifts you can think of are not ends in themselves. They all lead to God. Ultimately, that is what all His gifts are for.

The one thing God is doing in all of redemptive history is to show forth his mercy in such a way that the greatest number of people will throughout eternity delight in him with all their heart, strength, and mind.

No man," Wilberforce wrote, "has a right to be idle." "Where is it," he asked, "that in such a world as this, health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?

Knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love -- for the sake of building people up in faith. Thinking that produces pride instead of love is not true thinking.

So waiting is a holy work Of faith in God. Nor does there lurk Beneath the timing of his ways Some secret malice that displays Itself in holding back the flow Of future grace. God does not go From here to there by shortest routes; He makes a place for faith and doubts. Nor does he hasten on his way, But comes when it is best, today, Or maybe twenty years from now, Or more.

Genuine love is the glad effort to make others glad in God forever. Genuine love is being willing to suffer and die to draw as many people as we can into the pursuit and enjoyment of God.

Some of us are afraid of getting too emotional when we sing. But the problem isn't emotions. It's emotionalism. Emotionalism pursues feelings as ends in themselves. It's wanting to feel something with no regard for how that feeling is produced or its ultimate purpose.

Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of the truth. They engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and our work. But they can't answer which desires I should pursue and which work is worthwhile.

Marriage is patterned after Christ's covenant relationship to his redeemed people, the church. And therefore, the highest meaning and the most ultimate purpose of marriage is to put the covenant relationship of Christ and his church on display. That is why marriage exists. If you are married, that is why you are married. If you hope to be, that should be your dream.

If we are Christ's, then what befalls us is for His glory and for our good, whether it is caused by enzymes or by enemies.

God's purpose in permitting your sin was to give his people the pleasure of seeing and savoring the glory of his grace in the inexpressible suffering and triumphs of his Son.