What is My Purpose in Life?

As a young man, I found myself continually wrestling with one question more than any other……. ‘who is it that I have created to be?

Even after I became a Christian I found that I was still asking the same question….. In my younger life I moved from one career to another only to discover that finding my purpose was likely going to be wrapped up in more than just the job that I did every day or how I decided to make a living.

The bible tells us that mankind was created to bring glory of God. (Isa 43:7) For me as a Christian, those words just served to bring up a different question because I had no idea how to discover what it meant to bring glory to God. As I continued my search I came across a statement that resonated with me made by one of fathers of the early church by the name of Iraneus. He said: To BRING GLORY TO GOD ... a person needed to be fully alive.

That caused me to think about Jesus because there is nobody in scripture that could have been said to more fully alive than Jesus. He told us that he had come to earth to do the will of His Father. As I thought about his life, it occurred to me that Jesus was not the only person that I would have said was fully alive. There were so many that were larger than life. People like Abraham and Moses and Elijah, Esther, Peter and Paul and would certainly be described as people who were full of life and so that caused me to wander what it might be that these saints had in common.

For the purpose of this exercise I decided to focus in on one in particular and his name was David. David fascinated me because when we are introduced to him he is no more than 15 years of age. When we meet him the prophet Samuel is about to anoint him as king but as we read about his life we discover that David was many things. He had been a shepherd, a warrior, a poet, a singer, and he had even been a giant slayer and one day he was going to be a king and yet when people in the 231sat century are asked who David was, they will inevitably respond by saying that he was a man after God’s own heart.

In his wonderful book, the Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren ….. says only the maker can know the purpose for which he has fashioned his creation, that’s you and I.

In Eph 2:10, Paul tells us that we are God’s workmanship and so we can see that scripture is nudging us toward the thinking that …. apart from the Lord ….. we are not going to be able to to discover the purpose for our lives. Apart from a revelation from God himself, discovering our purpose in life is going to be for each one of us unknowable.

In the book of Jeremiah it says : o people’s lives are not their own; (Jeremiah 10:23). And I was beginning to the drift.

I had also read that In Ephesians Paul said that we are God’s handiwork….. and he has prepared good works for us to do well in advance of being born. (Eph 2:9)

It begins to seem as though as Christians we have a huge edge over non believers because we have God’s word because find the answer I was looking for certainly was turning out to be something of a mystery.

People of every generation the world over have struggled to find the answer to the question of purpose in life and that seems quite strange when we begin to glimpse the truth that God has hidden it in plain sight in His word if we will only take the time to look.

As I thought to the life of David, I was actually surprised to see how early in his life it had been that he had come to understand that his purpose would be wrapped up in his relationship with God.

When we look we find that peppered throughout the pages of his life story, his life no matter whether as shepherd or as king, David lived driven by the desire first before all else to have a deep and enduring loving relationship with his God.

Even as all the men of Saul’s army were trembling at the sight of Goliath, David was declared that the God who had protected him against the paw of the bear and the lion would save him from the hand of the Philistine. David didn’t see a giant, he only saw an opportunity to defend the honour of his God against this 9ft 9” hulk of a man, so convinced about the willingness of his God to go before him.

As we read the story David’s passion and sense of purpose just ooze off the pages and you can’t miss the fact that it all stemmed from his love for his God.

When he considered his strength David declared that it came from his God. And in truth why would we be surprised because we read that when he was anointed he was filled with the spirit of the Lord. If David had been a character in the book of Acts he would not have been out of place. David loved his God as much as any of the disciples had come to love Jesus.

It was although the first commandment had been written for him alone for of all the commandments that God had given Moses, the very first one called Israel to love him not with a little love but with all their hearts with all their minds and with all their souls.

David had chosen to life by those words so much so that they became his purpose for living.

It was David’s love for God that infused him with life. David was certainly alive with passion but as we watch his life unfold we discover that the passion that infused rose up as a result of his love for his God so much so that in all he did, his goal in life was to glorify God.

David was a wonderful Shepherd. He was also a gifted singer and writer poem but his skill at caring for the sheep and his giftedness as he sang and wrote praise songs to God poured out of him because of his love for his heavenly father.

It was David’s servant heart that had prepared him to face the giant. Discovering his purpose in life was never a question that David ever asked.

I had discovered the mystery that had eluded me for so long. It had buried deep in the pages of God’s word laid into the days of the life of a 15 year old boy. It was David’s relationship with his God that fuelled his passion for life and the Lord and it serves as a model for all of those who come after him wondering what their purpose in life might be.

David had discovered the mystery to this most elusive of life’s questions a full 1,000 years before the Apostle Paul would pen the words, It is in God alone that we live and breath and have our being… for we are his creation. (Acts 17:28)

David’s heart was filled with life and with passion and it was fuelled by his love for God. It provided him with purpose for and his reason for being, so much so that it informed everything that he did so that in all things David heart was shaped to express glory to God. And David was not perfect. Far from it. Yet, he was able to live a life filled with a purpose that demanded before all else that he be in close relationship with his creator.

David’s identity, his personhood was wrapped up in who he was as God’s servant no matter his role in life. David was child of God and he demonstrated how to life that way so that for millennia after his life when people would ask who was this man, only one answer would come.

This was a man after God’s own Heart. (1 Sam 13:14) (Acts 13:22)

I have finally discovered what I had been seeking for so long. It will only be as we choose to live a life in keeping with the Lord’s command that we love him with all of hearts that we can hope to discover our purpose in this life. God created his children ‘in his own image’. Since God is love his desire for us that our hearts would be filled with his live directed toward him so that we might bring him glory.

What I had discovered through the life of David was that as He did, David became a man so full of life that no matter what role he would play David never needed to ask the question who is it that I have been created to be.

My prayer for each one reading or hearing this message is that before anything else in creation we might come to discover by our choice in this life what it to be ….A Man After God’s Own Heart.