Do you know your purpose?

I was looking through my old emails and came upon this. I was reminded again the purpose of why we were created and how we should live our lives.

> In an interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose
> Driven Life, Rick Warren said:
>
> People ask me. What is the purpose of life? And I respond, In a nutshell,
> life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and God
> wants us to be with Him in Heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and
> that will be the end of my body - but not the end of me. I may live 60 to
> 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillion of years in eternity.
> This is the warm-up act, the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on
> earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God,
> and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.
>
> Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you're just
> coming out of one or you're getting ready to go into another one. The
> reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your
> comfort. God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in
> making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but
> that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in
> Christ-likeness.
>
> This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the toughest,
> with my wife, Kay, getting cancer. I used to think that life was hills and
> valleys - you go through a dark time, then you got to the mountaintop, back
> and forth. I don't believe that anymore. Rather than life being hills and
> valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track,
> and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No
> matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that
> needs to be worked on.
>
> And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something
> good you can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can
> focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into
> self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my issues, my pain."
>
> But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off
> yourself and onto God and others.
>
> We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands
> of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her. It has
> been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character,
> given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn
> her closer to Him and to people...You have to learn to deal with both the
> good and the bad of life.
>
> Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance,
> this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it
> made me instantly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I
> had never had to deal with before.
>
> I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for you to own ego or for
> you to live a life of ease. So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do
> with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages
> that helped me decide what to do, Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72.
>
> First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our
> lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through
> last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church. Third, we set up
> foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan - to plant
> churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate
> the next generation. Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in
> the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was
> liberating to be able to serve God for free.
>
> We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity?
> Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am
> I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my life)?
>
> When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, if
> I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You
> better. God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's more
> interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human
> beings, not human doings.

Recently I was reflecting about my own life, thinking about what to make of it. I thought back about how I had lived so far and what I had accomplished. Then I ventured into the future and wondered about the things that I would do and accomplish. Yet at the end of the day, I still felt a sense of dissatisfaction. What is life about? Why do we bother to chase so hard after our dreams? Why do we bother to persevere on? Do we feel any more satisfied after accomplishing all that we want to?

As I read the interview, I was reminded of a few things.

1. Life is not about myself. It is about God.
If we spend our whole life trying to please ourselves and the people around us, we will probably become disillusioned and disheartened. It is so easy sometimes to think and focus on me me me me me me. What I want, how I feel, my struggles, my pain, my loss, my sickness, my dissatisfaction etc. It gets us no where but the deserted island of self-centredness.

Psalm 37:4 lets us in on a secret, "Delight yourself it the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart." True fulfillment can only be found in pleasing the Lord. Be faithful to His calling, to the giftings and talents that He has given you. Do it in a way that will help usher in the kingdom of God. Do it in a way that will influence the people around you to know that precious truth of His salvation gospel and that of Psalm 37:4 too. Do what will bring a smile to His face.

2. Life is not about the doing, it is about the being
What does Rick Warren mean when he says that life is about preparation for eternity? Is it about how much we do? Or perhaps what we do? Maybe it's about how we do it. Not really. To borrow a quote from a wise man, it is about WHO WE BECOME. Our time on the earth is about becoming as Christ-like as possible. And God will allow situations and difficult trials to come our way so that we can be moulded into the person He wants us to be. It is His way of teaching us how to depend on Him. It is His way of drawing us close to Him.

Which brings us all to a very interesting question. If there is not temptation in heaven, and we will all naturally worship God and live a life of holiness since there is the absence of sin, what is all this preparation for? Why does God need to prepare us for eternity? Don't we automatically become Christ-like when we enter heaven? Hmm.... seriously, I don't quite know. But my guess is that God might have roles for us to take up in heaven. And who we have become at the end of our lives have implications on that. What do you think?