A Look Back into my Growth Process

I was cleaning out my computer last week and I came across some funny stuff from the early months after giving my life to Christ. Among them I found this; an answer I gave a friend about the purpose of life. It amazes me that I wrote this at only 2 months, but what a God we serve! A God who truly can run after you, reach down, pick you up, and set you on a never ending race for His glory. So here you go, a look back into my growth process:

The Question:

What is the point of living through this life? Why do we have to suffer through all of this? What is the point?

My Answer:

The point of living life is ultimately to BRING GLORY TO GOD. Life isn’t about us, it’s about Him. God might not give you what you want or change what you’re going through, but He will give you the grace to endure. If we took out the crisis of our lives we would take out the fight, and without the fight there’s no victory, victory that would bring glory to Him. God has allowed hard things to happen in our lives so we can show the world how great our God is and that knowing Him brings peace and joy, even when life is hard. When we see troubles and problems coming our way we are quick to see the bad in the situation. Yes, every crisis in our lives brings danger; the danger of being judged, the danger of losing something we love, the danger of letting our emotions take over. But what we fail to recognize is that every crisis also brings opportunity; the opportunity to seek the glory of God through every setback in our lives. God’s not going to call off the fight, He’s not going to magically take away the problem, He’s going to step in the ring and start fighting for you. I think of it like this, there is two ways to deal with setbacks: 1. Crawl up in a corner and feel sorry for yourself and get nowhere or 2. Rely on God whole heartedly to fight for you and rejoice and give glory to Him when He comes through.

We also tend to forget God’s past faithfulness. We get too consumed about how this situation is going to affect my life, affect my dreams, affect my family. We tend to allow today’s challenges to over-ride the victories of our yesterdays. God will never take you through a situation that He hasn’t already planned your escape route to. You can get through any and every problem in your life with the power of Jesus Christ. That same power that got Jesus out of the tomb lives in you. Because when Christ rose from the dead, you did as well.

You can’t just go through life barely surviving the setbacks, you have to get up and fight! I always wondered, “Well uh how do I do that exactly??” God had given us all a great weapon, and that is His Word. Every time the devil opens his mouth, you open the Word of God and FIGHT BACK.  When the devil is all up in your face asking you why all of this is worth it, you open the Word of God to Jeremiah 29:11 and you tell the devil it’s worth it because God has a plan for my life, God has given me a purpose and I will do His will and bring glory to Him. You will find yourself in places throughout life wondering how you got there and why your there. You have been strategically placed at that specific location at that particular time for a reason. There is a situation that YOU are the solution to! We don’t know what situation that will be or when it will come, but if we seek God in every crisis we will be prepared to turn our tragedy into a gift, a solution to someone or something. We will be prepared to shine light on others, to bring glory to His name. Think about this: God turned what seemed to be the greatest tragedy ever, into the greatest gift of all time, that through the death of Jesus Christ we have been saved. He can do that with our tragedies as well.

The purpose of life isn’t of our own interest; it isn’t to be successful in the eyes of society. The purpose of life is exactly the same purpose of Jesus’ life; to teach the Word, help the poor, heal the sick, bless those who have done you wrong, but most of all to fulfill the purpose that God has called you to do. For Jesus that purpose was to save us from our sins, for me, “But you keep your head in all situations, endure hardships, do the work of an evangelist, and complete all the duties of a servant of God” (2 Tim 4:5). What is He calling you to do? Seeking the answer to this single questions will propel you forward and keep you hanging on when trials are raging.

Sometimes certain setbacks we are dealt in life seem like no good would come from them at all. I think I am a perfect example of that. I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand it, and sometimes I still don’t understand why all the crap in my life had to happen the way it did.  But God doesn’t ask “Do you understand?”, He asks “Do you believe?”. Most of the time when great things happen to people in the Bible, it’s not because they came to an understanding of how everything added up, it was because they believed. They believed that there is a greater purpose in life than themselves.

The best way I can sum it up is that the purpose of life is not just to get to heaven when you die, but to bring heaven to earth through your life while you’re here.