13 Apr What does God want me to do? Running towards your purpose.

The Bible says Jesus came into the World to die on the cross for the sins of the world so those who believe in him could be forgiven and attain everlasting life. I basically paraphrased the Gospel in one-sentence. But it’s much more deeper than that.

Jesus made it possible for us to not only be forgiven by God, but to have relationship with him. We’ve seen God have relationships in the Old Testament with select people he had chosen. Specifically with the Jewish nation, who he chose to become his people and who he would use to display his glory. Prior to Jesus coming into the World, only the Jews had direct access to God.

If anyone else wanted to get to God they had to go through the Jews. That is a great honor to be displayed on a people. But also it became the greatest proponent of pride for the Jews at the same time. Jesus knew his purpose before he came into this World. He knew what his purpose would be in the World prior to creating the World.

1 Timothy Ch. 15 Paul says: “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief“. And Jesus himself says in John Ch. 6:38 that “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me“. So we are already seeing something very different about Jesus.

Jesus is confessing at that moment that his life is not his. I have not come to set my own path, but to set the path that the Father has mapped out for me. I did not come to make my own way. To establish my own destiny. To fulfill my own desires. To make a fortune, travel and live extravagantly.

My Father has already placed a purpose on my life and me coming here. This is so different from what we are taught. This is one of the reasons why most people were not able to make the connection with Jesus. He was talking crazy! He was saying things that go against our conventional wisdom. We are all in control of our own lives. It is up to you and me, to decide what we do, and how we decide to live it. It is every man’s responsibility to make a path and forge a head to carve out a nice life for themselves.

The pursuit of happiness, satisfaction and such. One of the biggest bills you will ever have in the pursuit of happiness in today’s world is Educational expenses. Most people don’t have one hundred grand lying around, so they’re forced to take out a student loan. Getting a degree from a University costs time and money. And when you get your degree hopefully you can get yourself a Job in your field so you can begin your career.

At some point you’ll want to purchase a home, so you’ll need to get a loan from the Bank which is called a mortgage. You may wanna get married and start a Family. You have a student loan, a mortgage, a car payment or two, a growing Family, and a basket full of responsibilities. Our economy is built off of this long established model of living. Responsibility and debt is what keeps people working and the economic ecosystem working as intended.

If someone came along and said there was a way for you to attain all of the things I listed above, but at a fraction of the cost it takes to go to a University, that statement would be popular amongst the people, but it would be devastating for Universities whose business is higher education. Because the ecosystem that has been designed and established would start to unravel.

We need people to be in debt and for them to take on responsibility. Financial freedom for most people, if they had it, would cripple the economy.

That is what Jesus Christ was when he arrived. He created a crisis amongst the Religious leaders and disrupted the ecosystem that was put in place that gave them control over the people. He set them free from the Religious debt that the Pharisees, Saduccess, Priest and false prophet had put them under.

When we are born into this world we do not know our purpose like Jesus did. We did not even know God. Jesus knew God. Jesus knew his purpose before the foundation of the World. You and I however, must seek out our purpose in life. And we can only find it in God. So how do you find your purpose? The most common place to start is with the things we are passionate about. This is usually the first and last stop for most people. We consult our Parents. We consult our Grand Parents. We consult our friends. We consult our siblings. We consult our Guidance Counselor. We consult Google. We consult YouTube.

God is usually the last one on the list. If you were raised in a Christian believing household, your upbringing may have been different. You may have had Parents who taught you to pray for God to reveal his purpose for your life to you, at an early age. As a child. But most of us weren’t brought up that way. We weren’t taught to pray to God for a purpose. We were taught to find our purpose and to tell God to get on board with it.

And Jesus just chuckled at our arrogance. But we were dead serious about our claims and our dreams. We were serious in our pursuits. We go to school for them. We research them. We study for them. We read about them. We pray for them. It appears that compared to Jesus’s take on this life, we have it totally backwards!

Jesus is saying we should seek God’s purpose for our life. That we should pray to God for his purpose in our life. But by doing that we give up our own lives don’t we? Yeah we do. That’s why it’s so hard to do. That’s why it’s so difficult. Your wills and your desires become your life. We choose our purpose, while Jesus was given his purpose by God. We see why God calls him his only begotten son. He walked in total submission to God’s will, and did not deviate from his purpose that God had given him.

Before you were saved you were free to do whatever you wanted. To choose whatever you wanted. To follow whatever you wanted. Once you became saved, God gave you a purpose by Faith. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you that. Church and fellowship is a part of that, but that’s not your purpose. That’s a part of the lifestyle. Being a Christian is to fellowship with other believers. Praising and worshipping God with other believers. Praying with other believers. All of it is good, but it’s not your purpose.

When most of us get saved and come to Christ, we keep the purpose that we have chosen. We may change our behavior. We may change our attitude. But we don’t change our purpose. We don’t change our self-driven purpose and will. Now that we have been saved, we tend to knuckle down on our purpose, because we believe God will bring it to pass because he is on our side.

But God not only wants your fellowship, he requires us to change the desires in our hearts. He requires us to adopt his purpose for our life as our own, and this is where most of us are failing. We want God to adopt our purpose that we want for our life. And we pray, and we worship, and we pray and we fast, and we worship, and we get other people to pray for us. God is trying to work on your heart the whole time.

He loves that you’re praying, but he’s waiting for you to pray in a way that he can respond on your behalf. Jesus is not going to slap someone because you prayed for it. He would probably tell you why that’s wrong, and explain to you how to better deal with your anger, and if the person you wanted him to slap was wrong, he would rebuke them and explained to them why they were sinful.

But at the end the answer is No! We pray for a lot of things and Jesus says no. He’s not here to explain why. Or he says “yes”, but he’s not here to give you a time. So how do I find God’s purpose for my life? Through prayer, worship and reading God’s word. There are no shortcuts. You can’t do it for 4-years then get a degree and then your set for the rest of your life.

The three things I mentioned above is your goal for the rest of your life. When you make this the theme of your life, God reveals to you your purpose. While we’re waiting for God to reveal his big purpose, God is waiting for us to fulfill the small purposes he places in our lives, like being kind to others even when their opinions differ from ours. Like not only putting away the sins in our life that everyone, but also the sins in our life that nobody can see.  This is God’s purpose for your life as well.

To not curse others. To be honest and fair. To not be partial or show partiality towards one person or one group over another person or another group. To declare what is true and what is false. To not deny him. To reject the things of the World that try to get you to compromise what you believe. All of these things are the will of God and the purpose for your life.

To be to those around you, what Jesus was to the ones who were around him. God is not expecting you to be Jesus. He’s expecting you to be Christ like. Having mercy; walking in truth; praying for others; speaking wise and with wisdom and not foolishly; having compassion; living a life free that is not steep in sin; being a person of your word. These things make you stand out. That’s why Jesus stood out amongst all the Pharisees and the Sadduccess and the Priest and the false prophets.

Because he lived like this and they didn’t. And the people could see the difference in him versus them. Can people see the difference in you versus them? If they can’t see the difference it means you are not walking in all of the things I listed above. Those things will make you different in this falling world. And people will take notice.

You cannot expect a big purpose in your life, until you have shown yourself faithful in these things first. I am not saying you need to have perfected all of these things first. We cannot expect perfection from an imperfect creation, which is what we have become because of the fall. I am referring to submission. It is our submission that allows God to place these attributes in our heart and in our soul. Our submission is what allows the Spirit of God to reflect the fruits of the Spirit, and to guide our way of living and thinking.

Running towards your purpose requires you to first run towards God, and we do that with submission to his purpose and to his will. If you are in a place in your life where God does not want you to be, then he will cause you to move. God has many ways of doing this. One way is to make you extremely uncomfortable. When God wants you to move he can make what was once a comfortable place, and very uncomfortable place.

He will disrupt your comfort, and your peace of mind in that place or situation. He knows we’re creatures of habit, so a good way to break a habit that is no longer benefiting us, is to make that habit no longer comfortable. It could be a relationship, a Job, or even a Church you’re going to. It could be Social Media. Which is a source of grief, misery, lust, jealousy and envy for most people.  Where it was once a comfortable experience, it’s now become a source of frustration.  Everyone seems to be doing well on Social media except you!  They have the perfect lives and the perfect Family and the perfect Wife and the perfect Husband and the perfect kids.  What went wrong in your life? 

Social Media has become the new platform for all that is fiction.  It becomes a source of displeasure the closer you get to Christ. And when something is no longer pleasurable or makes us comfortable, we leave it!

Do not confuse this with sin! And be careful so you don’t fall prey to the snares of satan. God will not tempt you to sin. If you are married do not leave your marriage and commit the serious sin of divorce, because you feel uncomfortable in your life committed relationship. Being uncomfortable in your marriage does just mean moving onto someone else.  

If your marriage is at a place where it is uncomfortable for you, this is telling you something needs to change in the marriage. It may even be you that needs to change and not your spouse! I know, it’s always someone else.  We love to believe that.  But more often than not it is usually both, as we are all unfinished products in Christ. I’ve struggled most of my adult life trying to figure out what it is God wanted me to do, and at the same time I was still holding on to the idea of what I wanted to do. I was double-minded. I was frustrated. I was fearful as well. Fearful of missing Gods calling.  Fearful of not fulfilling my own carnal calling.

The longer you wait, the more frustrated you will become. The more frustrated you become, the more sour you will be on the inside. God’s placed something on the inside of all of us that needs to come out.  when it doesn’t, frustration grows. I believe we start to poison ourselves with bitterness and regret. I’ve been there.

Now wherever God places me, the question is “God why am I here”? If you have that perspective, you will not miss God’s purpose for your life from one moment to the next. If he knows the number of the strands of hair that grow out of your head, then he is in control of where you go, where you don’t go, who you meet, and who you don’t meet.  Our steps are ordered by God, so you won’t end up in the wrong place and with the wrong people unless you put yourself there, pursuing things that are evil.

That is purpose and providence. If you’ve been going to Church and then home all your life, and that’s all you’ve been doing and on the inside there is an urging that you should be doing more, then God’s calling you to something. Satan is not going to urge you to do more for God. He hates what you’re doing for him now.

Being able to discern our own thoughts from God’s thoughts is vital in order for us to successfully live out God’s will for our lives. Without it, we will always go back and forth from this to that. We become double-minded. The Apostle James warns us about this type of mindset.

Here is a commentary exert that explains James 1 verses 6-8 perfectly. It says “Confess double-mindedness regarding God’s plan of sanctification, which purposely utilizes trials in order to build up our faith . The double mind sees evil in the trial and God only on the periphery. The spiritually focused mind sees God in control and working for our good“.

James 1:8 says “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways“. He’s a person who is living a double life. It’s a person whose heart has been split between two different loves. Not faithfully committing themselves fully to either one of them. God requires our full commitment. So whatever other love we have or we are holding on to, God is waiting for you to get rid of it, so he can fully commit to your life.

You must be willing to forsake all for him. He does not want to strip you of all your things. He wants to strip you for your need for all these other things. God will not bring his full plan and purpose into your life until you make the decision to do just that. To forsake the things you hold dear to your heart, in exchange for him.

That’s when God can reveal his purpose. The little Faith steps that you take, will lead you up to very tall buildings. You will look back over the course of your life and see how far up from the ground each step and each set of stairs has really taken you. Our problem is we want to see what’s at the top of the staircase, when Jesus is just trying to get us to take the next step on the staircase.

When doing this, God’s purpose for your life is being revealed in real-time. It takes Faith to do it. That is what we stand on. We can’t do it any other way. This is how we unveil God’s purpose for our life. Amen. I hope this was able to help strengthen and provide clarity to whoever God called to receive it.

I pray for everyone in the body of Christ. It is my passion, and I look for the day when I will be able to meet everyone in Christ when we are with Christ, if not possible before then. Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay faithful. And God Bless.