Finding & Fulfilling Your Purpose | Sunday, January 7, 2024

And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent... that they may be one as We are one... that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. (John 17, selected)

Our culture is wracked by a crisis of meaning — but Jesus's prayer reveals the purpose for which God made us.

A Culture in a Crisis of Meaning

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the issue of purpose. About 22 years ago, Pastor Rick Warren released The Purpose Driven Life, which became one of the biggest Christian books ever sold — more than 50 million copies in 137 languages. Christians hold different opinions about Rick Warren, and that's fine; I disagree with myself frequently. But that book struck a chord because something in our culture has caused people to feel a need that is now even more acute than it was in 2002.

People are wrestling with the issue of purpose and meaning. It is being called a crisis of meaning. Every single human being needs to answer some very important existential questions, and every worldview must answer them in a compelling way or you will lack meaning, value, and an understanding of your work. I call them the IPOD-M questions: Identity (who am I?), Purpose (what on earth am I here for?), Origin (where did I come from?), Destiny (where do I go when I die?), and Morality (what is right and wrong?). There are other important questions — reality, truth, goodness, beauty — but these five are crucial, and I think the most important for human beings is purpose.

Who Feels the Crisis

If you cannot answer the question "what on earth am I here for?" in a compelling way, you descend into a meaninglessness of existence. We are seeing that today. It has been written about among those in their 20s and 30s — Gen Y and Gen Z — but it is also felt acutely by baby boomers reaching retirement at more than 10,000 a day. Their culture indoctrinated them to find identity and purpose in career, and when that is gone, they wonder what they are here for and find themselves depressed.

We are also seeing it more and more with Gen X, roughly 50 to 65 years old. They are experiencing the empty nest syndrome. That generation, more than many, found its identity and purpose in their children and their children's sports careers. Now that their kids are launching out, they feel a pit of emptiness and ask, "Where is my meaning, my value?"

You may say you've never thought about this. That's probably because you've been very busy — getting an education, starting a career, building a family. But when the education you invested in produces no meaningful job, or no job to pay the $80,000 student loan, you start to ask. When the relationship you swiped right and left for never materializes and you're in your 30s alone, you start to ask. When there's a diagnosis of a mental health condition, chronic pain, or a terminal disease, you start to ask. What a couple of generations ago was called a midlife crisis is now called an existential crisis.

Two Competing Stories

In our culture there are two major competing worldviews, or meta-narratives. The dominant counter-story to the Bible is a naturalistic worldview that has no compelling answers. Identity? You're just the highest form of animal, until something evolves greater than you — they're working on that today; it's called transhumanism. Purpose? To pass your genetic material to the next level. Origin? Random chance and mutation over billions of years. Destiny? When you die you're absorbed back into the ground. Morality? Whatever you think is right for you — your truth, with no objective standard.

And we wonder why people question their inherent value. That cultural worldview, infused into the hearts and minds of everyone in this room for the better part of the last 75 to 100 years in the Western world, is pathological. It leads to mental, emotional, and physical sickness. So the question of purpose is a very important one.

Created for a Specific Purpose

I think we can answer the purpose question in two ways. One is the very specific purpose individual to each of you — which Christians often express by asking, "What is God's will for my life?" The other is the general purpose for which we all exist. Both can be answered.

Point one: God created me for a specific and individual purpose. Even people who don't believe in God or the Bible sense that they want there to be a reason for their existence beyond passing on genetic material. This is what philosophers and theologians for centuries have called telos — the Greek word for end, purpose, the reason for something's existence. Everything in existence has a purpose. This cup was made for a clear purpose. I could use it to pound a nail, but it won't be effective, and I'll break it. That's the amazing thing about purpose: things were created for an intended purpose, and if they're not used for that purpose, they break. If we see a lot of broken people in our culture, that may tell us the purpose we've been told we were made for is wrong.

We discover our specific individual purpose as we engage in the general purpose God reveals in Scripture. As Rick Warren writes on page 22: "You cannot arrive at life's purpose by starting with a focus on yourself. You must begin with God, your Creator. You exist only because God wills that you exist. You are made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense." Our culture says it's all about you, that you must find yourself first. Not so. It is only in God that we discover our origin, identity, meaning, purpose, significance, and destiny.

Jesus's Prayer for Us

Point two: God desires that I would discover and fulfill His purpose, and in fulfilling His purpose I fulfill my own. We discover something of the essential nature of God's purpose by looking at the Gospel of John, chapter 17.

Many of you have heard of the Lord's Prayer — "Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name." That is found in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, and I think it should better be called the disciples' prayer, because Jesus is teaching his followers how they should pray. The prayer in John 17 would better be called the Lord's Prayer, because Jesus actually prayed it — the night before he went to the cross.

In this prayer, Jesus the Son, who is God in the flesh, prays to God the Father. This brings us into the doctrine of the Trinity, which the church took 400 years to hash out, so I won't fully treat it in 21 minutes. But the Son has the same nature as the one from whom he comes, and Jesus is God in human flesh praying to the Father. And he prays for you — he says he prays not only for his disciples but for those who will hear their word and believe later. Here God incarnate, the Creator of all things seen and unseen, is praying for us, doing the work of a priest, and the next day he would perform a priest's work by offering himself as a sacrifice.

Created to Know God

Point three: I was created by God to know Him experientially in relationship. Look at John 17:

Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You, as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. (John 17:1–3)

Jesus has authority — the Greek word exousia, power and jurisdictional authority — to give eternal life. Every being has a deep drive to live. As a pastor I've spent many hours with people approaching death, and it is amazing how this body holds on to life. But the desire is not only to live here; it's to live on and on, and that is satisfied only in God. I'm not convinced we are by nature immortal; the Scriptures say God alone is immortal. But Jesus has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, and he has the authority to grant eternal life to whomever he chooses.

And he defines that eternal life: to know God, to know Jesus Christ. That word "know" speaks of an experiential, relational life. We were created to have an experiential relationship with God forever, unbroken by time. The problem, as Genesis 3 makes clear, is that we are separated from God by sin. At the beginning, humans lived in connection with God and walked with Him in the garden in the cool of the day. Whatever the poetic language means, at the very least it means there was a relationship — and rebellion and sin severed it. So Jesus came to redeem us from sin and death, to reconcile us back to God, and to ultimately restore all things to the way they were before the fall.

Created to Glorify God

Point four: I was created by God to glorify Him forever. The word "glorify" appears eight times in this passage, in verb and noun form.

I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was. (John 17:4–5)

What was Jesus's purpose in coming? Elsewhere he says, "I have come to seek and to save that which is lost," "to give My life a ransom for many," and "that you may have life, and have it more abundantly." Here he says, "I have finished the work You gave Me to do" — and that work, he says, is "I have glorified You on the earth." Then in verse 10 he says of his disciples, "I am glorified in them." He desires that we would share in this purpose.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism, written several hundred years ago, asks, "What is the chief end of man?" The answer: "To glorify God and enjoy Him forever." All of God's creation was made to bring Him glory, just as a masterpiece honors the master who made it. The existence of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel declares the existence of the painter. As the psalmist said 3,000 years ago, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth shows forth His handiwork." The sun, moon, stars, seas, rivers, mountains, and animals all cry out that there is a God who made them.

All of creation glorifies Him — except one part: you and me. We rebelled. As Paul writes in Romans 1, "although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts... professing to be wise, they became fools... and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." For the last 165 years the intelligentsia of our culture has said there is no God, that all this is the product of random chance, and that we should honor and glorify the creation. The Bible calls that idolatry, and we see it all around us. Yet despite our rebellion, we were created to glorify Him forever — and Jesus came to fix it, to redeem, reconcile, and restore.

Created for Oneness with God

Point five: I was created by God to live in unity of purpose, communion, and oneness with Him.

Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are one. (John 17:11)

The triune God is one in three distinct persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — co-equal, co-substantial, co-glorious, united as one. Jesus says he has come that we might be joined back together and experience oneness with God.

I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one... that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. (John 17:20–23)

On the night he would be betrayed by Judas, turned over to the Sanhedrin, condemned before Pilate, and crucified, Jesus prayed for you — that you and I would experience oneness with God through him. This is what we mean by life in connection: life in connection with God, with one another, and with the world through Jesus. By his death on the cross, Jesus redeems and reconciles us back to God and to one another, bringing us back to the place where we fulfill his purpose. That's what we're all about at Cross Connection Church.

Pessimistic About Culture, Long on the Kingdom

I see it as part of my call as a pastor to lead you into the discovery of this purpose — that you were created to be connected to God, and as Augustine said 1,600 years ago, your heart will not rest until it rests in Him. Our culture is falling apart, and I am rather pessimistic about Western culture. I am long on Jesus and long on His kingdom, and short on Western culture, because we have indoctrinated our culture for nearly two centuries with a pathological worldview that is destroying it. Unless it is refocused on the good news of the purpose we find in Christ, there is no hope for Western culture. It sounds bleak, but our optimistic vision rests on the kingdom of God.

We connect with God in many ways revealed in Scripture. We connect when we gather and worship Him in song — studies show that in corporate singing your heartbeat begins to tune with those around you. We connect through His word, through serving one another, through praying together. And all of it completes us, because it fulfills the purpose for which we were made. That is what Jesus accomplished 2,000 years ago through his broken body and shed blood, which the church has long called communion — which we will partake of together this morning.

Closing Prayer

God, we live in a culture that is sick because it has been told by liars a devilish false truth — an anti-truth — that purpose is found in some trivial, insubstantial thing in this world, when in reality our ultimate purpose is found only in You. I pray that You would help us in this room to know this — not just intellectually, but experientially — and to know it in such a way that we begin to live it, experience it, and express it to other people. There are nearly a million people within ten miles of this building in desperate need of this truth. So God, would You do a work in us in 2024, where we more fully discover the purpose You created for us, and as we glorify You and connect with You through worship, serving, and prayer, we would discover the unique and specific thing You created us for, for such a time as this. Do a work in us, we pray, in Jesus' name. And all those that agreed said, Amen.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost, to give His life a ransom for many. On the night that He was betrayed He took bread and broke it and said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me." In the same manner He took the cup, saying, "This is the cup of the New Covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me."

Lord, we cannot fully comprehend the goodness revealed in what You did for us on Calvary 2,000 years ago; we only begin to scratch the surface of Your love demonstrated through the cross. You desire that all people would come to the knowledge of the truth and find the fullness of their purpose in You — to be in united relationship with You, to glorify You, to magnify Your awesomeness as all the rest of creation does. I pray that we would glorify You in that same way, and that as we experience and express the relationship You created us for, You would draw other people into the knowledge of that purpose as well. We thank You for Your grace, Your mercy, and Your goodness to us. In Jesus' name, Amen.