What does the Bible teach about our Purpose in Life?
Transcribed from the video above, Philip Nation discusses the Biblical teachings of our purpose in life:
Finding our purpose in life is perhaps one of the most common questions that we think about on a regular basis. And church leaders hear it constantly, whether it's from teenagers or from senior adults, they want to know why am I here? What's the purpose?
Many times we look for purpose in life, especially when crisis has arisen or where there's a grief involved, and the scripture does speak pretty clearly about how do we find our purpose in life. I think the passage that I would highlight is the idea that Roman says that we're not to be conformed to the world, but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, or even perhaps even further back and scripture into the book of Exodus where Moses was daring enough to ask God to show him his glory.
The purpose that we find in life is being transformed into something else. Who we are now with the sin nature we were born with, with the sin that we choose is not the purposes for which God created us. What we see is that God created us to be in relationship with him. In the book of John Chapter 17:3 as Jesus is praying he defines eternal life and in the idea as he's praying to the Father right before he's going to be arrested, he says, this is eternal life, that they may know you and the one that you've sent.
Eternal life is oftentimes we think about it being gates of pearl and the streets of gold and walls with precious jewels. Jesus defines it as knowing who he is and we see that from the garden of Eden, that there was a close relationship between man and God, throughout the Old Testament of God constantly calling people back to himself, the incarnation of Christ, where he comes personally to do what we can't do for ourselves and in the work of the church of to call of calling all mankind, peoples of every race, tribe and tongue to be related to this one great God who wants us to be known by him and to know him.
That's the great purpose in life is to know God and to reflect his glory through the out, the rest of humanity. And so when you sit that in the middle of your life and you say, how can I best know God and be known by God, how can I submit and allow him to have my life? Then suddenly, if I'm going to become a doctor or a vet or a ditch digger or a phone operator, or I'm going to be a full time mom at home, or I'm going to be someone who does interviews on the radio or whatever it is that I do with the rest of my life, then that's not my purpose. That is simply a function of how I get to my purpose, knowing God and making him known.
Photo Credit: Unsplash/Karl Fredrickson
