What is the purpose of life?

A very kind person sent me the following in an e-mail. I also found it through an Internet search at many other locations, including: Celebrate Recovery: Interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren.

I found the following rather inspiring. 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.

Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every moment, THANK GOD.

While many people find this sort of theology to be helpful and encouraging, the question to ask is whether or not it is the theology that the Holy Spirit has revealed through His Holy Scriptures. Is this really the way?

Not many churches today use the historic liturgy. Even among those who still use a liturgical format, some of the elements of the historic liturgy have been changed and even lost in common usage. One of the very significant losses seems to be the General Prayer. In The Lutheran Hymnal it is found on pages 23 and 24.

Near the center of this marvelous prayer is the following paragraph:

All who are in trouble, want, sickness, anguish of labor, peril of death, or any other adversity, especially those who are in suffering for Thy name’s and for Thy truth’s sake, comfort, O God, with Thy Holy Spirit, that they may receive and acknowledge their afflictions as the manifestation of Thy fatherly will.

I feel for Rick Warren in his time of hardship and adversity. This is a time of great struggle for him and his wife and all who are near and dear to them.

However, his understanding is wrong and it leads him to make false statements regarding God, life, and the purpose of life.

He and all who seek to know God as the truly merciful and loving Father that He declares and proves Himself to be, would do well to hear and to pray this section of the General Prayer, which is an emulation of what the apostles and their Lord have taught on this matter.

First of all, the purpose of life is NOT “preparation for eternity.” The purpose of life is to live. We are not capable of preparing for eternity. This preparation is the work of the Lord. The Lord Jesus made this very clear, saying:

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. (John 14:1-7)

The Lord Jesus is the one who prepares both us and our place in the Father’s house. The Holy Spirit is the one who works within us to convert us and to give us the faith that saves us. He is the one who continually calls us unto repentance. He is the one given to us in Baptism to sanctify us and make us fit for God’s kingdom through the merits of Christ Jesus.

This is not our work. It is not our doing. Rick is right in saying that we are made to be human beings and not human doings. By this I mean that we are not the ones who do the work of preparation but we are the ones being prepared. The preparation is done by the one who was and is and ever shall be.

Rick says that life is a series of problems. From our perspective this is true. But our perspective is warped and corrupted and incomplete at best. Our perspective needs to be set right by the clear statements of the Holy Scriptures. Praying the General Prayer helps us to remember just what the Scriptures declare to us.

Like the Lord very strongly explained to Job, all of the things that happen in our lives, even the things that the Lord allows the devil to inflict upon us, are the Lord’s doing. By faith worked in us by the Holy Spirit we receive these as manifestations of the good and gracious will of our heavenly Father. While many of these things we may never understand fully, on account of what the Holy Spirit teaches us in our hearts we know that all things God works together for our good. Thus, we count even the things that cause us to mourn and to cry out in anguish to be manifestations of His fatherly will.

When this is the perspective worked in us by the Holy Spirit, we realize that we do not need to rationalize in an attempt to understand everything that happens in our earthly lives. We realize that God alone can know the fullness of His purposes and plans. We realize that He alone can see the good before it is revealed in time.

This changes our perspective completely so that with St. Paul we can say:

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. (Philippians 4:11-12)

What St. Paul here teaches is not something that he learned on his own. This was taught to him by the Holy Spirit. This is not merely accepting bad things. This is the knowledge that for those who are in Christ there are no bad things. This is very different than saying as Rick does: “And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.” No. St. Paul instructs us that we are empowered to give thanks to God even for the things that we perceive as being bad.

This is the nature of true faith. It does not rely upon what is seen and perceived. Rather, it relies upon God and His endless goodness and mercy. The true faith praises God in every situation and trusts that what is happening is in accord with His good and gracious will.

Moreover, the true faith does not move us to imagine that the goal of life is “to grow in character, In Christ-likeness.” The true faith teaches us to believe that through Baptism that the Holy Spirit has sanctified us and works within us to show us this new nature that He has regenerated us to receive. This is why the Holy Spirit calls us to confess our sins: so that we may hear God’s holy absolution and call to partake with Him in the Holy Communion of His body and blood. First He washes us into His body and then He feeds us the unity of His body and the forgiveness of His blood. Through this we are brought again and again and again into the knowledge that this is not something that we need to do for ourselves, but what God does for us. He has brought us again into the image of His Son through Baptism and He keeps us alive as branches grafted into the vine, continually receiving the lifeblood of the body which is poured out to all of the members.

It is a shame that so many people who call themselves Christians refuse to acknowledge these means of grace which Christ Himself ordained. If only those who struggle to be Christlike would believe His words and receive Him as He promises to come to us. Then their struggles would be turned to blessing and their sorrows to true joy that cannot be measured. Then they would rely upon Christ, as the true faith is worked in them through the means in which the Holy Spirit works, and they would not need to invent a purpose for their lives. They would not even wonder what the purpose is, anymore than a newborn babe wonders about such things. No, they would simply crave the Word’s pure milk and drink it in as God gives it.

As the thorns and thistles and briars of life grow up around us, as the waves of life’s tempestuous sea rage against us, we tend to look away from Christ and to try to choke out the weeds and to keep our heads above the waves. But we do not have this power. God does. And He is faithful to do what He has promised.

As for myself, I am not preparing for eternity, for Christ has promised that He sent His Holy Spirit to do that for me. Christ Himself paid the price to redeem me and the Holy Spirit dwells in me to keep me in the true faith with Christ Jesus my Lord. This is the eternal will of God, our Father in heaven, who has accomplished all this even from eternity so that the promise was made to Adam and Eve, and continues on to you and to me. So what is left for me to do? What is the purpose of my life? I am told to LIVE! I am told to walk in spirit. I am told to partake of the blessed gifts of life that are administered in Christ’s Church.

Why on earth would I choose to try to find some other explanation?

Romans 1:17 says that the just out of faith shall live. Faith is the source for our life, and faith is God’s gift that is not of ourselves and not a work that we must do (Ephesians 2:8-9).

It truly does not get any better than this!


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