What on Earth am I here for?

                         

I wonder how often you pause to ask yourself, ’What on earth am I here for?’   I don’t mean - though some of you may well sometimes ask yourselves! – ‘what on earth am I doing here in church this Sunday by Sunday?’ I mean, rather, ‘Is there something I’m missing about the meaning and purpose of life itself?’

Sometimes it takes a sudden shock, or a disconcerting fact, or a challenge to our firmly held ideas about life that hits us and forces us to think about this. Too often of course people shy away from such deep questions because, well, they are simply too busy, too absorbed in the whatever it is they are doing – from making a home to making money: sometimes they shy away from such questions because they are just too scared of what the answers might reveal.

But if you do find yourself caught in one of those sudden, critical moments of wondering what on earth is the meaning and purpose of life (I learnt on my pilgrimage a couple of years ago that the Germans have a special word for it.    I can’t remember what it was but I do remember that it was very, very long and began with ‘Selbst’, which is German for ‘self’) where do you turn to to get your answers? Do you rush to the bookshelf or, these days, to Wikipedia, to consult one of the thousands of self-help books such as Schultz on self-awareness, or Lieberman on the self-conscious or Hinderberg on self- esteem, or perhaps to Carlsberg for those parts the other books can’t reach? Or do you go to your bible, to Jesus, to Paul, to John, and to James to discover the real meaning and purpose of and for your life? Because if you do you will find that they do not start with ‘Selbst’ (self); they start with God, the God who created the world and you and me in his image to inhabit it and to care for it; and has already revealed – He did not leave us to speculate – his answers to why we are here and for what purpose – or purposes.

One of the reasons why we have such trouble in discovering our true meaning and purpose for this life is that we start in the wrong place: we start with self-centered questions such as ’What do I want to be? ‘What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focussing on ourselves will never reveal our life’s meaning and purpose. Indeed the main reason why people find it so hard, so challenging, to make any progress in discovering God’s answers is because their thinking is too deeply ingrained with such self- centred questions. Whereas God has actually revealed – if we are prepared to listen to what He has said – His FIVE purposes for our lives which, when taken together, give the real meaning to life and to our lives.

These five purposes are what we are going to be considering over the next few weeks and they start not with us but with God.

God’s very motive for creating us was His love. His love is admittedly difficult to fathom; but it is fundamentally reliable and He proved it supremely by choosing, in one of His forms of being God, to come to us in the person of Jesus. (verse 13 of our Gospel reading) He even gave us the free will to choose either to accept Him or to reject Him (verse 19) because that is the only way that love can work. It’s very messy, I know; but apparently He thought it better to make us in His image and give us free will rather than to create robots or puppets on His strings. And He did so because (verse 16) He wants us to enjoy eternity with Him.

The trouble is that because our minds are so turned in upon ourselves, they need to be (verse 2 of our Epistle to the Romans) ‘transformed’ and actively and willingly ‘renewed’. But how hard it is for God to reach us often because our minds are (verse 2 again) ‘conformed to the pattern of this world’. It is when we come to realise that we were created as a special object of God’s love, that He made us so that He could love us, that we have the fundamental truth on which to build our lives.

One of the many things that first convinced me of the truth of Christianity, of God’s revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus, and the utter integrity of Jesus and the Apostles – fallible human beings though the latter certainly were! – was that they were not themselves trying to profit from their message but, quite the opposite, were even prepared to lose their lives in order that you and I might find the true meaning and purpose of why we are here and for what purpose.

Now you might not find this alone sufficiently convincing proof; but for anyone with any philosophical curiosity or moral conscience it surely ought to prompt them to examine why they were prepared to do so and what their message was. And when we do examine this we discover some very clear and defined yet at the same time tremendously liberating and fulfilling answers that are not just for Christians but for everyone on this earth. Of course, many people will say that they have already discovered meaning and purpose in their families, their careers, their goals, their ambitions, their dreams. But can any of these things really answer the question before us, the question with the uncomfortable habit of nagging, and so often at the most inconvenient of times, especially, for example, when life is all about to end either for ourselves or for those we love? Is what you believe about what happens next based on a sure hope – or, if you are honest, purely on wishful-thinking or, like the atheist philosophers…’Sorry, folks but that’s it’?

Just before we meet the FIVE purposes God has revealed for our lives, those very purposes that give our lives His meaning rather than any we can make up for ourselves, as the likes of Richard Dawkins argues, or, like Sartre, Camus and others, the cold, hopeless assertion that there is no meaning to life, we perhaps need to think about what drives peoples’ lives, because everyone’s life is driven by something.

Some people are driven by guilt, some by fear, some by the need for approval, some by resentment and anger, some by materialism; the list goes on and all of them without exception are ultimately either destructive of themselves or of their relationships or of other people. They all at heart have a preoccupation with the self. It is from these deceptive but innately destructive motivations that God in the person of Jesus came to save us and offer us His loving and gracious purposes to liberate and fulfil us and give meaning to our lives.

Yes, we are products of our pasts but we do not have to be prisoners of it; yes, we can be fired by resentment and anger but we can be healed by Him; yes, we can feel guilty but we can be forgiven by Him; yes, we can allow our personal value to be determined by our personal valuables, or we can find our true value in Him; yes, we can be driven by many deceptive yet destructive things or we can find our meaning and purpose in Him. ‘Come unto me all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest: take my ‘yoke’ upon you and you shall find rest for your souls.’ Yes, we can live life as if it is the be all and end all, or we can realise that God invites us to share eternity with Him.

When a person fully comprehends that there is more to life than just the here and now, and realises that this life is just preparation for eternity, things change so much for the better and that person can begin to live differently. It changes everything: our view of ourselves, of others, of our jobs, of our ambitions; it changes our values, our priorities, how we spend our time, our money, everything.

Does it mean I have to give up my career, my goals, my dreams, my ambitions? No, not necessarily so at all. But instead of wanting to be, say, a doctor, an accountant, a teacher, a cook, a mother, it puts in our hearts the desire to be a Christian doctor, a Christian accountant, a Christian teacher, a Christian cook, a Christian mother. Why? Because, again to quote Paul (verse 2), we will be able to ‘test and approve what God’s will is – His good, pleasing, and perfect will’; there will come with this discovery not only a revelation but a motivation to reinterpret for the best how we can live out our lives; not only for our own sakes but for the sake of others and to the praise and glory of the one whom we know to be not just ‘God’ but our Heavenly Father who loves us immeasurably more than we can either conceive of or imagine.

Over the next few weeks (on and off!) we are going to be considering God’s  perfect, perfectly loving, purposes for us. And this is what we shall discover:

That we were:

1.    Planned for God’s Pleasure, that is, a relationship with Him.

2.    Formed for God’s Family, that is, His Church.

3.    Created to become like Christ

4.    Shaped for serving God

5.    Made for a Mission, that is, sharing the truth and good news about Him.

For those of you who are baptised, these talks will help you to remember and apply the promises that were made on your behalf at your baptism. For those of you who have been confirmed, these talks will challenge to reconsider and assess your calling to turn to Christ, follow Him, and to do so unashamedly.

For those of you have been neither baptised nor confirmed I hope that these talks might shed light on the questions you have and help you to perceive what God has revealed about the meaning and purpose of life and of your life.

We have as usual provided some study questions on today’s readings so that you can give this profound, challenging, but very exciting issue some more thought and prayer during this week.

I decided to have an extra reading from the Psalms this week because it reminds us that it all starts not with ourselves but with Him. And it is as we begin to worship in spirit and in truth as Jesus commanded, that what God  reveals to us through His word will begin to make more and more sense.

Psalm 145: 1 - 8                      Romans 12: 1 – 5:                     John 3: 11 - 21