You Were Formed For God's Family Series

“YOU WERE FORMED FOR GOD’S FAMILY”

Sunday, May 9, 2004

40 DAYS OF PURPOSE - week 3

We welcome you back to 40 Days of Purpose. This is the third week of our series spanning 40 days from April 25 to June 6. We are asking, and seeking the answer to, the question “What on earth am I here for?”

We have been a part of this journey for 3 weeks; if you are new to it, we encourage you to get the book The Purpose Driven Life. You can come to the Thursday afternoon small group because we haven’t yet covered the first purpose, so you haven’t missed anything there.

Last week we started looking at the five purposes. We have been created for five purposes. They are built in. They are innate. They are God’s design. They are power packs in you. They are lights inside of you. They are pistons, you might say. If you fire them up, you will experience what life is all about, and the true joy and contentment that God offers.

It is important for us to realize, though, that we were created. You were not an accident. You did not crawl out of a primordial soup. You were created by God and for God. I think one of the reasons why, as a culture, we have lost our way; why we experience so much confusion, despair and dissatisfaction, a sense of weariness and hopelessness, is our starting point.

We believe and have been taught that life is all about us; we start with ourselves. We look at what will make us happy; that is the wrong starting point. If you go down that road of self, pleasing yourself, you will get lost, and life will be very dissatisfying. It will continue to be confusing for us. If your starting point is God, then it forces you to ask the question, “God, why did you put me here?” As we discover why God put us here and begin to operate within those five innate purposes, you could say the planets come all in alignment and you experience new life. Life becomes good.

Why has God put us here? Last week we talked about purpose number one – we were planned for God’s pleasure. The word pleasure is the word worship. Worship is anything that delights God, anything that puts a smile on God’s face. One of those things is corporate worship, but that is not all there is. We please God with our entire lives, including our work and our roles as long as they serve him.

Today we are looking at purpose number two and you will need your outlines. I encourage you to pull out the outlines that are in your insert. We will be referring to a lot of the verses and I have some things for you to do with those and things to note.

Purpose number two is: you and I were formed for God’s family. Hebrews 2:10a: “God is the one who made all things, and all things are for His glory. He wanted to have many children share His glory…” Ephesians 1:5: “His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ.” God desires that family to be rather large. Have any of you seen the movie Cheaper by the Dozen? God’s model is “cheaper by the billions;” God desires his family to expand and always be expanding. He wants as many as possible to become part of his household. I Timothy 2:4-5 says this: “For He (God) wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth. For there is only one God and one Mediator who can reconcile God and people. He is the man Christ Jesus.”

You and I were created by God because God wanted to have children. God wanted a family. We are an extension of his love. God wanted to share his love with someone. As a result, he created us as his children so he could love on us. We can relate to that in that why do we have children? Is there any good reason for having children? Now I am sure that at some point in your lives you have questioned that if you’ve had children. Why on earth did I have these children because they’re messy, they’re inconvenient, aren’t they? They keep you up at night. They make you worry and fret and fear and doubt your own judgment. They do all kinds of things. Why on earth did you have them? They cost a lot of money. Can I hear an ‘amen.’ They make you delay personal gratification. Why did you do it?

If you think about it, you can’t come up with a good reason. You say because I wanted to. Because at some point in your life you said I am tired of myself, I’m tired of my spouse too. There has to be something more. We want to share our lives. Our love is oozing, we want to share it with someone else, so we want to have children to share that love, so we relate to God very well. He just wanted to; it is an extension of his love. He wanted to love someone- love us. That is what love does.