Purpose/Destiny I

Michelangelo’s masterpiece David is enshrined at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy. And thousands of tourists wait for hours every day to get a glimpse. But many of them fail to notice the series of unfinished sculptures that line the corridor on the way to David.

Like petrified prisoners, their forms are identifiable—a hand here, a torso there, a protruding leg or part of a head. The statues were intended to adorn the tomb of Pope Julius II, but they are non finiti. It’s almost as if those sculptures are trying to break free and become what they were intended to be, but they are stuck in stone. Michelangelo called them captives. Have you ever felt like a captive? You can’t seem to break free from habitual sins that have held you back and held you down? A dream God conceived in your spirit years ago hasn’t taken shape the way you wanted it to?

You know who you want to be, what you want to do, and where you want to go, but you can’t seem to get there. I have no idea where you’re stuck or for how long you’ve been stuck. But I do know that God wants to finish what He started. In His first sermon, Jesus stated His mission in no uncertain terms: to set the captives free. We tend to think of that statement in judicial terms. Salvation is our Get Out of Jail Free card. But it’s much more than that.

Maybe we should think of that statement in artistic terms. Jesus didn’t die just to get us off the hook. He also died to resurrect the person we were destined to be before sin distorted the image of God in us. And He doesn’t just set us free spiritually. He also sets us free emotionally and relationally and intellectually. We are held captive by so many things. We’re held captive by our imperfections and insecurities. We’re held captive by our guilt and anxiety. We’re held captive by expectations and

and mistakes. He doesn’t just set us free from who we were. He sets us free to become who we were meant to be. Salvation is not the end goal. Salvation is a new beginning. He begins using our circumstances, no matter what circumstances those may be, to chisel us into His image. When it comes to the will of God, we tend to focus on what and where. But what you are doing or where you are going are secondary issues. God’s primary concern is who you’re becoming. It has nothing to do with circumstances. It has everything to do with the character of Christ being formed within you until you look and act and feel and talk and dream and love just like Jesus.

The only way to discover who you are is to discover who God is, because you’re made in His image. You have a dual destiny. One destiny is universal: to be conformed to the image of Christ. To follow Christ is to become like Him. That is our chief objective in life: to be just like Jesus. But our other destiny is unique to each of us: to be unlike anyone who has ever lived. Those two destinies may seem to be at odds with each other, but they are anything but. To become like Christ is to become unlike anyone else. He sets us free from who we’re not, so we can become who we were destined to be.