Finding Our Purpose

Sunday Sermons

Mark Dunagan
04/29/12 - Sunday Morning

Finding Our Purpose

In the book The Call, writer Os Guiness observes that when it comes to finding one's purpose in life, there are only three basic answers offered by the world:

The Eastern Answer: The path to finding your purpose in life is to forget about yourself. “We take ourselves seriously only because we are caught in the world of illusion. So to seek fulfillment as individuals is to make matters worse, and perpetuate the desire that perpetuates the craving that perpetuates the attachment that keeps us bound to the wheel of suffering. Seen from this perspective, freedom is not freedom to be an individual but freedom from individuality—through detachment” (p. viii).
The Secular/Materialistic Answer: If there is not God; then our purpose is up to us to decide and to achieve by ourselves, for ourselves. We don’t discover our purpose for being here, rather we decide it. This is the idea of “I did it my way”, or, “I willed it”.
The Biblical Answer: There is a God who calls us through the gospel (2 Thess. 2:14) to have a loving relationship with Him. Our purpose here is to keep the commands given by our Creator (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14). And therefore, whatever we do consistent with His written word, is to honor Him (Colossians 3:17). Jesus summed up this path when He simply said, “Follow Me” (Matthew 11:28-30).

The Response of the Lazy Person

At this point various people will try to side-track us and say something like, “Differences don’t make a difference”. “This is no place to allow people to mumble on about ‘callings’ when they don’t realize that there can be no calling without a Caller” (p. ix).

The Challenge of Our Culture

“Out of more than a score of civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have not agreed on the answer to the question of the purpose of life. Thus more ignorance, confusion—and longing—surround this topic now than at almost any time in history. The trouble is that, as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for” (p. 4). Science can help us with many things and add many time-savers and conveniences to our lives for which I am thankful. Yet science cannot help us with this question. Science can tell us what might be possible to do or invent but it is helpless to tell us what should we do and how shall we live.

Be Grateful for Being Bad at Something

“Needless to say, recognizing who we aren’t is only the first step toward knowing who we are. Escape from a false sense of life-purpose is only liberating if it leads to a true one. Journalist Ambrose Bierce reached only halfway. ‘When I was in my twenties’, he wrote, ‘I concluded one day that I was not a poet. It was the bitterest moment in my life’” (p. 6). Realizing in eighth grade that you do not have the skills to be an NFL quarterback, is only half the way you need to come in the full realization of who you are not. It is helpful to recognize and acknowledge realities when you do not have the personality or skills for a certain vocation, but there is more at stake here. For example, have you lived long enough to realize you were clearly not designed to live a life of utter selfishness? Do you not despise yourself when you are acting or thinking in a selfish manner? For a brief moment after High School I flirted with the beach bum or slacker way of life. I quickly found that I rather enjoyed being clean and productive. I believe it is very important to discover early on the following truths about ourselves:

We were not designed to handle guilt: Psalm 32
Living purely for ourselves will make us miserable: Titus 3:3
Money and the things we can buy with it cannot make us deeply happy: Ecc. 5:10-11
The only way that we can live selfishly, be immoral, use people, and remain somewhat sane is that we must kill the most important aspect of ourselves— our conscience, our humanness, who we really are (Jeremiah 6:15; Romans 1:28; Ephesians 4:17-19).
Every unrepentant sinner is living a life that is not authentic. They are not being true to who they are. Jesus would word it this way, “Every who commits sin is the slave of sin” (John 8:34). Paul would add that the sinner is not doing “his will” but the will of someone else—the will of the devil (2 Timothy 2:26).
The very fact that we are irritated by injustices, certainly proves that an objective standard of justice does exist.
We cannot perpetually avoid who we are. No matter what we accomplish in life, we will still find ourselves empty without God. Os Guiness accurately describes what many people think as they grow older, “What does life add up to? Were their successes real, and were they worth the trade-offs? Having gained the whole world, however huge or tiny, have we sold our souls cheaply and missed the point of it all? As Walker Percy wrote, ‘You can get all A’s and still flunk life’” (p. 3).

Am I Really Looking for An Answer?

Many people today use the term seeker. “Too often seeker is used to describe the spiritually unattached of the Western world…Sure seekers are rarely looking for anything in particular. Often they are drifters..Uncommitted, restless, and ever-open” (p. 10). The problem is that such people jump from one thing to another and often have a greater commitment to remaining unattached and uncommitted to accepting the truth when they hear it. Such seekers are not new in the world (Acts 17:21). “One less satisfactory perspective is the attitude common to the well-educated, more liberal people that the search is everything and discovery means little. Often expressed in such phrases as ‘The search is its own reward’, or ‘Better to travel hopefully than to arrive’, such attitudes fit in well with modern skepticism about final answers and the modern prizing of tolerance, open-mindedness, ambiguity, and ambivalence” (p. 11). Another popular slogan that sums up this viewpoint is, “Not all who wander are lost”. Yet this way of thinking is of no help when it comes to real life. We are faced with real, pressing and important questions. Neither do we have many life-times to get it right. Modern tolerance can be nothing more than believing in nothing or escaping responsibility, and to travel hopefully is to travel in the expectation of arriving at a destination.

The Serious Seeker

The serious seeker rejects the “Flying Dutchman” approach to truth—where one is perpetually wandering yet never arrive at a definite destination.
They reject all unworthy goals or objectives of their devotion. Such people recognize that there are two extremes to be avoided when it comes to their desires: One is to stop desiring anything outside ourselves, and the other is to make our ultimate desire hinge on such temporary and fleeting things as fame, riches, and physical beauty. Such things are clearly unworthy of our absolute devotion.
True seekers are very careful about what they choose to love and desire (Matthew 6:21).
Seekers reject the categories that people try to put them into. “Marxists interpret us by categories of class. Freudians by childhood neuroses, feminists by gender, and pop-commentators of all sorts by generational profiles—such as the ‘silent generation’, the ‘baby-boomers’, the ‘Generation Xers’” (p. 21). Such categories may be helpful in determining understanding the influences about me, but none of these categories get down to the basic question, “Who am I? Why am I here?” It is so easy to become a prisoner of a category. We are frequently told that this is what men and women think or this is how a baby-boomer thinks and we believe the lie that such a generalization demands that I also think that way. When John said, “Do not love the world” (1 John 2:15), he was saying do not buy into the lies offered by the world, do not love the immoral practices of the world, do not think that the world has all the answers, do not get caught up in what is the latest thing or philosophy, and do not let the world define who you are.

Avoiding Two Extremes

One extreme that we are often told is that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to. Some say, “If you believe in yourself you can accomplish anything”. As with so many such assertions, the Bible sets us straight. On the one hand, we cannot do anything—we have definite limitations. We cannot wish God away or do anything we please. It is comical to think that every possible goal is within the reach of every person. On the other hand, with God all things are possible, that is, things that God actually wants us to accomplish.
The other extreme is that we are prisoners of our environment and that we really do not have a freewill. This is the idea that at birth there are so many factors in our environment that are against us, we simply end up living a life that someone or something else selected for us. While it is true that environmental factors can be powerful, this is one reason why Paul warns us about hanging around bad influences (1 Corinthians 15:33). Yet such influences are not all-powerful and we can break free from intense cultural pressure (Titus 1:12), and even more intense family pressure (1 Peter 1:18) to do things against the will of God.

Jesus’ Working Example: Matthew 13:44-46

Jesus provides in this section two examples of what He would consider people who were really looking for the truth, for like us, He ran into a number of people who were only "playing at" finding the truth (John 6:26).

Both men were willing to do whatever it took.
Both men were willing to part with all lesser treasures into order to acquire the ultimate.
Both men did not delay. They acted quickly. When they found the treasure they bought it.
Neither men tried to get the ultimate treasure at a discount. They did not bargain or haggle. They paid the price. They realized that true treasure is never cheap and is never found at a bargain price, and yet is worth all we must sacrifice to obtain it.

Mark Dunagan | mdunagan@frontier.com
Beaverton Church of Christ | 503-644-9017
www.beavertonchurchofchrist.net