How Your Built Series

I wrote in an earlier letter (Purpose Vol. 1, Issue 10) that I wasn’t big on recipes or seven step strategies for spiritual success. Well, I’m not. But until now I may have been a little philosophical or “big picture” in my approach to understanding our real purpose and fulfilling the true potential God has given each of us.

In order to put the subject in a practical form that you can relate to your life. I’ve identified some aspects of God’s specific purpose for your life and how He works to fulfill that purpose. And, wouldn’t you know, there were seven of them. So, in the tradition of eating my words, we’ll discuss, over the next seven weeks, seven aspects of identifying and living in the specific purpose God has planned for each of our lives.

Thankfully, we’re clear of formulating a recipe and these seven aspects of purpose certainly aren’t strategies for spiritual success that I or anyone else have created. They’re just facets of our lives and His character in which we can begin to see how He weaves the tapestry of His eternal purpose in each of us.

Each week we’ll discuss one of these seven aspects. We won’t deal with them in order of importance or chronology; although there is one that is by far, first and most important … but that won’t come until week three. Today and next week we’ll explore two components of your own make-up and circumstance that reveals God’s specific and eternal intentions toward you.

Week three will be the biggee; without it, nothing else matters, with it everything else makes perfect sense. Weeks four, five and six cover the interaction necessary between you and God to make His purpose in your life a reality. Week seven refers back to God’s character and the perspective you must have regarding your own existence that makes flowing in His purpose possible.

We touched on some of these aspects already, a few we covered in some depth. In the next seven weeks we’ll present each aspect so that at the end of our discussion, on week eight we can put them all together to see how your purpose, more accurately - His purpose for you, is worked out in every fiber of your existence and every facet of His character.

Week 1: How You’re Built

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

If God has a purpose for you specifically in the time and space of creation and if He considered you personally enough to give you your own unique personality and abilities, wouldn’t it also make sense that His purpose in your existence and His consideration of your unique personality and abilities may be a matched set? In short, you’ve been made to order.

God didn’t create you in such a way as to be incapable or disinterested in what He wants you to accomplish in your life. At times it may seem that what He wants you to do is beyond your capabilities or outside of your interests, but that’s just a part of growing and shaping process each of us must undergo to become useful to His purpose.

Who you are; your personality, your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes - those traits the make you distinctly you - are yours and only yours for a purpose. God knew who you would be long before you were ever born and He knew what He had in store for you as well. Who you are as a person is matched to what it is He has for you to accomplish.

I’m not talking about the bad habits you’ve picked up or the inherited rebellion of the old sin nature left to you by great-grandpa Adam. I’m talking about the character traits, natural talents, abilities and limitations you were born with; what you inherited from mom and dad. Yup, God knew who mom and dad would be too. He knew that you’d be a mix of their chromosomes and He knew how the mix would turn out.

Psychologists pretty much agree that who we are is a result of nature - who mom, dad, grandpa and grandma were - and nurture, how we were raised; our life experience. We’ll talk about the nurture aspect of all this next week.

Mom and dad each contributed twenty-three chromosomes to your genetic make-up. Chromosomes are rod-like structures made up of thousands of genes. Genes are made up of complex DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecules. DNA, we learned in high school biology, is the recipe that makes you, you. How you came out is kind of like shaking dice from a Yahtzee cup. Dominant genes push ahead, recessive genes shrink back and a lot of genes just kind of average out.