What exactly am I on this earth for? What truly is the meaning to life? Have you ever stopped to think about this? Is it just a mere accident that we are even here and like David Benatar you would say it is “Better never to have been?” Joseph Cambell has said that, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asked the question when you are the answer.” Is our short life really about us or can it be about something greater?
There came a point in my life where I needed to come to my senses and realize what exactly I was really living for. Was it just to keep partying at my frat house and live for the moment? I mean YOLO right? Or I thought maybe it was to gain as much knowledge as I could and use it to help as many people along the way as possible. Not a bad idea. But after trying both, I realized that those endeavors really didn’t satisfy what I was looking for in life. I would argue that the meaning of life really isn’t much about us but about the one who created us and that we find our greatest fulfillment when we are most satisfied in that Creator.
As a pastor-in-training I have seen both in my own life and in the lives of many others just how empty it is to seek after other things. I mean, maybe what you value the most is wealth and that is what you live for. But what will happen if the market crashes and you lose everything, or if the economy goes into hyper inflation down the road and the money you stored away isn’t worth really anything? Or what if all that you lived for was your kids or your spouse and one day you unexpectedly lost them or they just got up and left? Or what if all that you ever wanted was to land your dream career. Most will tell you that even when they attain the job they worked for their whole life they still felt like something was still missing.
The only thing, or person for that matter, who can truly fulfill that void you feel each day is a relationship with the one who will never change nor leave unexpectedly in the night. Billions of people worship him as Jesus Christ. He is God’s very own Son who lived a perfect life and dealt with the same things that we deal with today. He was executed for claiming that he was God or the Messiah that everyone was looking for and publicly and historically rose from death three days later. He is the only man who claimed not to show you the way to God, but that he was God himself, and then went to prove it by rising from death.
No historian on this earth will tell you that Jesus Christ is not the most important figure to ever live in history, so there does come a point where you have to do something with those facts. Either he was God himself, or he was a lunatic that deserved to be killed. As C.S. Lewis says in his book Mere Christianity:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
So this week, take some time to really study and think about what you believe is the purpose of being here. If your not a Christian, maybe just pray and ask that God would show you that he’s real in your life. What do you have to lose?
Purposeful Theology 