What On Earth Am I Here For?” Series

“WHAT ON EARTH AM I HERE FOR?”

TEXT: EPHESIANS 1:4, 1:11

Sunday, April 25, 2004

Welcome to 40 Days of Purpose. These 40 days may well be the most significant 40 days in your life; so I welcome you to this series as we discover the answer to the question: What is God’s purpose for my life? Imagine what would happen if we discovered the answer to this question, if the light came on for everyone in this room and in our entire church. Imagine what would happen in our lives and our community to answer this profound question which has plagued people for millennia. What on earth am I here for? What would happen if our lives came into alignment with our very created purposes, and I use that word on purpose – alignment.

Most of us have vehicles, don’t we? We understand the importance of getting the wheels of our vehicle in alignment, right? What happens if they are out of alignment? What happens? The tires begin to wear prematurely and things break or you have a sudden burst. The car can shake and rattle; the parts begin to become a little bit lose, kind of shimmy; and you don’t get the use of your car or the length of use of your car that you really could have.

The same thing is true in our own lives. If our lives are out of alignment with God’s purposes, than our lives, too will shake and shimmy, and parts will wear out prematurely. A lot of people’s minds, bodies, and relationships are wearing out prematurely. We are not getting real joy out of life; not getting the type of joy that God hopes for us or has for us.

Again what will happen if we get our lives, like our cars, in alignment? What would happen if we got our lives aligned with God’s purposes? In preparation for this message I decided to try to discover what people think about this issue: What is the meaning of life? I discovered a website called philosophyforum.com. If you want to go there, type in “meaning of life” and click on the www.philosophyforum.com. There are a lot of responses.

There is a young man who named himself (screen name) One Monkey. (It’s a cute term). He asked this question in England. He sent the question “What is the meaning of life?” to every philosophy professor in the UK. There are 656 of them either in universities or in public houses, and he wanted to know from them what the purpose of life is. Now let me read you some of the responses because they really are representative of our thinking – a person’s thinking today - on this question.

Several philosophy professors said the question is absurd, only human beings worry about this; and in response, one philosopher wrote, “Some philosophers disregard the question as nonsense, but I still say that there must be something that motivates humans so much to know it besides random nonsense.” I think this person is on to something. It’s like having an itch. Have you ever had an itch that’s in a place that you just couldn’t get to and until you scratched the exact spot the itch remained? I think this happens with this question of the purpose of life. We have this itch in our soul. It’s an itch that will not go away until you scratch the exact spot. How do you approach it in the exact way to get to it?

As a culture and a society, we have tried to scratch in many ways, many approaches, and we just haven’t reached it. The itch is still there. That is why I think for millennia people have been asking this question - every age, every time, and every culture- Why am I here? Could it possibly be that the reason why we have this itch as human beings and homo sapiens (we are the only ones that have this itch), could it be as the Bible describes it, that we are uniquely created to have a capacity to know God, and it’s this itch that we feel in our soul and our spirit, our very being? It requires an answer.

Again, we have tried a lot of approaches that simply haven’t worked. Some people have tried the philosophical approach. I think of the statue of man thinking. We try to reason for ourselves what the purpose of life is. We have thought about the question; we have reasoned it out and some have concluded (this is coming from some of the philosophy professors) that there is no meaning to life. Life is absurd. One philosopher writes, “As far as I am concerned, it is just some crazy improbable biochemical and molecular coincidence. I didn’t know that you eek meaning out of coincidence.”