Purpose: Living As He Lives
It's a backhanded cast with a 3-weight fly rod to get under those trees and to the fish...
The world, and all it offers, simply does not possess the capacity to define personal meaning in adequate fashion to satisfy the longing in our souls.
This being the case, it is the logical progression of our purpose in life to discover what God thinks of us and vow to see ourselves as He sees us. Anything short of this ideal falls short of grace.
And once we catch a glimpse of what God thinks of us, it follows that our purpose must be to live as He intended for us to live. He thought of us, designed us, loved us, sought us, died for us, redeemed us, and called us His own. Given this amount of effort, surely He must have a plan for how we live, and indeed He does.
It is our Father’s intention that we live as He lives. From before the foundations of the universe were laid, He determined that we should be in Him (Eph. 1:4). Said another way: God determined never to do anything apart from us. Whatever journey God has embarked upon, He has included us, even in His journey to the cross, the grave, and resurrected glory. In a volume of sixty-six books, He has compiled a Bible to describe what it means to be part of His life.
God intends for us to live life the same way He lives His. When we purpose to live as He intended, we make it a supreme, over-arching priority for Him to be our life.
This is more profound than including Him in our lives. He gave up everything in a divine gamble to communicate His desire to have us as His own and to reconcile us to Himself. Such is the nature of His love, and such is the capacity of the love He has placed in our hearts. As Paul stated in his speech from the Areopagus in Athens, “In Him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). It is our purpose to live as He intended, i.e. dependent upon Him. His journey with us, and our journey with Him, are intended to be expressions of His life.
In light of these things, it is our purpose to effectively share with others what we have discovered to be true. In other words, discovering personal meaning in life must be inclusive of sharing our lives with others.
To conclude my thoughts on purpose, I want to look at living with distinction, something we aspire to but that is not possible without focused purpose. That's next up.