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What is the meaning of this?

Before I was a Christian I use to struggle with the “purpose” of my life. The struggle came on slowly. I would say from about 13 years old, up until the moment I came to know Jesus the sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness intensified. I would often ignore it when I could. The question is, how did I get like that? I wrote it off as part of growing up, but the truth is that if I never came to know Jesus, it would still be with me and I would say by most standards I’m a grown man. I would like to examine for a moment how we are driven to this state.

Before we are even created God knows His purpose in our life. (Psalm 139:16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them. ) That would indicate that the “feeling” we have of purposelessness is a lie. This is a simple way to begin to scratch the surface on this issue. When we hit that age (mine was 13) when we begin to wonder more than “what is that?” but we venture into “what is the meaning of that?”, we seek to define things in reference to life.

We tend not to try to define life in general at that age, but what we do then has a huge effect on what happens later. At this point we can do one of two things; we can attach God’s purpose, or figure out our own purpose. For lack of a better term we will call the worldly educator in this rant “Society”.

Society offers us definitions at a young age on an array of issues. One by one what God has ordained for our life gets replaced with what our selfish desires see fit for a “good” life. Society tells us that a “good” life is one of great wealth, material things, sex, snubbing marriage because it’s outdated (unless you’re gay), partying hard and absolutely no regrets. The funny thing is that those who epitomize this lifestyle are often the ones who seem the most hopeless, relying on anything to feel a sense of meaning. But we don’t have to do or be all those things to feel completely empty. What has happened? 

We don’t even realize it, but one by one what God has defined we’ve re-defined to accommodate our selfish desires.

• God said sex is to make 2 people 1, to intensify a relationship that is already intense and to create a child. Society says sex is for personal pleasure, for persuasion, and for judging a mate’s worthiness.
• God says marriage is sacred, an illustration of His relationship to us. The world says marriage is for special civil rights and anyone should be able to do it because it’s just a meaningless institution.
• God sees the destruction that lying can do to a relationship so he forbids it. Society sees lying as a tool to further your purpose, with the ever echoing “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone”. Please tell me how you can lie and not hurt anyone, especially when we look at Christ on the cross and we know that each lash, each beating and torture to the point of death was cause by that lie or whatever sin we do. I’d say someone was hurt.

Now I will bring what I’ve been saying to a final point. Fallen man selfishly gives whatever purpose he wants to all these little things in life, but the problem begins when we arrive at the overall picture. The big question. What is the purpose of my life? We don’t have the authority to give our own life purpose. I cannot tell myself why I was created. That is where some people choose to end it unfortunately. They think because they can’t define life that the definition doesn’t exist. They’re right, it doesn’t exist apart from God.

In Christ we arrive at the purpose God has for us. By following His purposes on the “small” things in life, we can arrive at His overall purpose for our life. Which means to surrender everything we have learned and observe His ways (Psalm 119). An analogy to this would be as if one were to put jelly in the gas tank of a car and try to use it as a boat. That sounds ridiculous and the driver would surely end up dead if he got as far as the water. That is what we must look like to God as so many of us redefine things in our life only to lose all meaning entirely. I pray that everyone looks to the Creator for their purpose. May God Bless you.