Life on Purpose | Sunday, January 5, 2025

Jesus spoke these words, lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said: "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)

Why are you here? John 17 reveals a God who made you on purpose, to know Him in an everlasting relationship.

A Culture in Crisis of Meaning

Happy New Year, Cross Connection. We've survived another one, and I believe God has great things He wants to do in each of our lives this year. I like to begin each year talking about why we exist as a church, and why God has placed each of us here individually. That discussion is especially important because more and more people in our culture have less and less of a good answer to the question, Why am I here?

The reason is that our culture, for several generations, has been indoctrinated with a worldview that says we are the product of random evolutionary process over billions of years, not the intentional, purposeful design of a personal Creator. I don't think it's accidental that we now see record levels of physical, emotional, and mental health issues. There is a direct correlation between that worldview and the crisis of meaning, the senselessness and purposelessness, that so many are experiencing.

Made by Intentional Design

For 1,500 years and more, our culture was founded upon a biblical worldview that says you are the product of the intentional design of a personal God who made you for a reason. Genesis 1 and 2 make clear that He created humanity in His image, male and female, both corporately for a global mission and individually, each of us distinct. Psalm 139 says He knew you as He knitted you together in your mother's womb. Just as He fashioned Jeremiah and called him from the womb, I believe God has called each of us for a specific purpose.

That worldview is far better than the one that says you're the product of random chance and mutation. As a father, there is something innate in me that wants my children to thrive, to discover and fulfill their purpose. When they fall short of what they could achieve, it bothers me, because I see something in them they may not see in themselves. That is just a fraction of how God feels when He looks at His creation. He wants us to thrive, and as a pastor I long to see people discover and fulfill the purpose for which they were made.

The Purpose Statements of Jesus

This heart of God is clearly seen in Jesus's words about why He came. About fifteen times in the Gospels, Jesus announces His purpose. God did not come down to be served, as the gods of Greek and Roman mythology supposedly did. Jesus says in Mark 10:45, "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many." The title "Son of Man" comes from Daniel some five hundred years earlier; it is a Messianic title.

In Luke 19, when Jesus calls the tax collector Zacchaeus down from the sycamore tree to dine at his house, the crowds are bothered that He would eat with a sinner. Jesus answers, "The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). In Matthew 9, He is moved with compassion at people who were like sheep without a shepherd, and He speaks of leaving the ninety-nine to retrieve the one. And one of my favorites, John 10:10: "The thief comes to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly."

The Good Life, as God Defines It

In these statements the heart of God is revealed. He does not want us to wander aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd, to wallow in bondage to sin and death, or to be ripped off by the thief. He desires that we experience life to its fullest, both now and forever — the good life now and forever.

But here is the challenge. If you ask people to define the good life, you'll get all kinds of subjective answers, many different from God's. So who should be trusted to define it — your neighbor's opinion, American culture's opinion, or the One who created you? As Scripture describes it, the good life is a life free from sin, full of joy, love, hope, and peace, a life where you fulfill your God-ordained purpose.

Point one: God wants me to know and live eternal life. This can be easily validated by Scripture, and it is a captivating statement, especially for younger people aged twenty and below. They have a lot of opinions about God, the Bible, and Christians, but those opinions didn't come out of nowhere — they were taught to them by the culture.

Strong Opinions About a Book They've Never Read

They've been told that the Bible is a racist, sexist, homophobic book, and that Christians who follow it are just after power to subjugate others, especially minorities. People really believe this. I've asked, "Have you read it?" and sheepishly they answer, "No." So you have strong opinions about something you've never read. We have a name for people with strong opinions about things they know nothing about — the Latin equivalent would be ignoramus.

I've spent the better part of twenty-five years studying and teaching this book and spending time with the people who follow it, and that is not what I've discovered. I understand how people reach those conclusions by taking passages out of context, but when you study this book from Genesis to Revelation, what you find is that God wants us to know and live eternal life. Jesus reveals that beautifully in John 17.

The Lord's Prayer in John 17

This well-known passage is often called the high priestly prayer of Jesus. I like to call it the Lord's Prayer — not the model prayer of Matthew 6 ("Our Father who is in heaven"), but the prayer where the Lord Jesus Himself is actually praying. That raises a question: if Jesus is God, how is He praying to God? This touches the doctrine of the Trinity, the hardest Christian doctrine to grasp. There is one God who exists as three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — co-equal and co-eternal. Muslims sometimes accuse Christians of believing in many gods because they don't understand this doctrine.

Here, God incarnate is upon the earth praying to the Father, and He is praying for you. In verse 20 He says, "I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word." That's you. Our deepest longings are revealed in our prayers, so in Jesus's prayer we see the heart of God revealed.

In verse 1, Jesus says the Father has given Him authority — the Greek exousia, jurisdictional power — over all flesh. There is nothing in creation Jesus does not have authority over, including the authority to give eternal life to whomever He chooses. Then He defines it: "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent."

Made to Know God Forever

Point two: I was made to know eternal life by knowing God in an everlasting relationship. That is the Bible's answer to Why am I here? I believe you and I are not eternal or immortal by nature; we find immortality only in Christ Jesus. In 1 (or 2) Timothy 1:10 it says Jesus brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. You know no life or immortality apart from the gospel. But the focus of this everlasting life is relationship — living in harmony and oneness with the God who made everything.

Notice John 17:1 opens, "Jesus spoke these words." This prayer comes after everything He taught from John 13 through 17, what theologians call the Upper Room Discourse — His conversational teaching with the disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem, where He celebrated His final Passover before His betrayal, unjust trial, and crucifixion within twenty-four hours.

"These Things I Have Spoken to You"

During this last conversation, Jesus did intentional things. In John 13 He washed His disciples' feet, leaving an example that we should serve one another. Feet were the dirtiest thing imaginable, so foot washing was given to the lowest servant. To grasp it, it would be as lowly as wiping someone's bottom — you only do that for someone you love deeply. He also instituted the Last Supper and spoke vital words.

Five times in the Upper Room Discourse Jesus repeats the phrase "these things I have spoken to you," and each one reveals God's heart for you:

• John 15:11 — "that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full." God desires His joy to be in you and your joy to be full. - John 14:25 — spoken while present with them, even as He prepares them for His departure: "Let not your heart be troubled... I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am, there you may be also." He wants to be with you forever, and He sends the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to be with you and in you. - John 16:1 — "that you should not be made to stumble." He wants you to stand strong, not tossed by every wind of doctrine. - John 16:25 — "the time is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figurative language, but I will tell you plainly about the Father." He wants you to know who He truly is. - John 16:33 — "that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." He wants you to have His peace.

One as We Are One

Jesus's prayer caps it all off. In John 17:20–23 He prays, "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... that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me."

Point three: God desires that I experience a oneness relationship with Him in Christ. The best earthly illustration of this is the marital relationship between husband and wife. It's tangible, though deficient, because both spouses are sinners — which is why you may have had an argument within the last ninety-six hours. Yet you experience a spiritual oneness with your spouse you experience with no one else. You're at a family gathering and across the room you catch your spouse's eye and instantly know it's time to go. There's a spiritual connection you can't quite put your finger on.

Our culture treats marriage as a mere social contract with some 1,300 legal rights, a recent invention. But marriage existed from the beginning, according to God's created order. Jesus said God made them male and female, and a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. When you said "I do," something spiritual happened under God's ordinance — He joined you as one flesh, body, soul, and spirit. God made marriage to illustrate the relationship He desires to have with you.

Connection Through Jesus

This is what we are focused on as a church: life in connection with God, with one another, and with the world through Jesus. When you come into a oneness relationship with God, He also brings you into connection with His body, the church, and commissions us to carry that good news to the world. It's all through Jesus, for connection with God and one another is impossible apart from Him.

How does He make it possible? Ephesians 2 explains. After the famous words, "For by grace you have been saved through faith... we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works," verse 11 says, "Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh... were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world."

Remember being an outsider, looking in, with no access to God's blessings and no hope. Some of you remember that vividly; some of us came to Christ as children and can barely recall it. "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation... so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross." Now "you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God."

Reconciled and Sent as Ambassadors

Point four: Jesus reconciles and restores us unto right relationship with the Father. How? Through His death on the cross. He who knew no sin became sin for us, dealing with sin so that we who were strangers without hope could be brought into the family and made one. In and by Christ we are brought back into connection with God, through Christ we experience restored connection with one another, and in obedience to Christ we carry the good news — what 2 Corinthians 5 calls the ministry of reconciliation — to those who are scattered and lost.

You know lost people — neighbors who don't go to church, coworkers, friends. Sometimes we feel a little lost together. But you have been restored into connection with God and given a message to share: that Jesus is looking for them. That's good news they need and want to hear. Paul writes, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away... God has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ... we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."

Ambassadors in 2025

This message is foolishness to the world, and sometimes it makes us embarrassed to share it. You tell someone, "You're far from God, alienated, without hope, and Jesus died for your sins so you could be restored," and they look at you sideways: "You believe this?" Yes. It is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved, and you are an ambassador of it.

So in 2025 it is my hope that we lay hold of this ambassadorship. God has intentionally placed you in your neighborhood, your family, your workplace, your school campus, to be a light shining to those in darkness, to proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Christ's body was broken and His blood was shed to make it possible that we could be restored to connection with Him — the very thing for which we were made.

Remembering at the Table

The night before He was crucified, Jesus instituted this meal so His disciples might remember. As Paul records in 1 Corinthians 11:23, "The Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He 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 also took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." Let's partake together.

Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim His death until He comes — which reminds us He is not still in a grave, but alive, risen from the dead. The same power that raised Him raises us from death to life and gives us the hope of eternal life in His presence, immortality with Him forever. We look forward to the day we will see Him and be back in His presence, just as He promised in John 14.

Closing Prayer

Father God, I thank You that You desire to have a relationship with us. For some sitting here this morning that is hard to imagine — that You, the Creator of all things, would want a relationship with me. But God, You gave everything so that we could have that relationship with You, and we rejoice in You today. Would You stir our hearts and motivate us by Your love, demonstrated through Your body broken and Your blood shed, to share the good news of Your grace with others? There are so many people within a short distance of this building who feel they have no purpose, no hope, no sense to anything in this chaotic world — and yet what You've revealed in Scripture is that in You we find exactly what we deeply long for.

I pray that 2025 would be a year in which we are stirred to share that message passionately and zealously with those around us, for there are many here in Southern California who desperately need Your grace. We praise You, Jesus, that You've given it to us abundantly — not so we would hoard it, but freely give it to others.

Lord, until the day we see You face to face, help us even more so in 2025 to experience the reality of life eternal, knowing You by the power and presence of Your word and Your Spirit. Transform us by the renewing of our minds, and grow Your church here at Cross Connection and every church committed to Your word. There are more than a million people within ten miles of this building, and some ninety percent have no direct connection to You through Your church. Help us know how to reach them more effectively with Your grace. You are so good. We praise You. Amen.