“Divine Purpose”

Sometimes when I am telling a story and describing how I reacted to a situation, I’ll say something like this: “I got so angry, just cause that’s who I am” or “I snapped at that person because I have no patience for any of that and that’s just who I am.” I’ve heard other people say something like that when they are justifying the way they reacted to a situation. One day I was thinking about this though and realized something: even though I may think that is who I am, it’s not who I was made to be. I wasn’t made to be short-tempered, quick to anger, and quick to judge people. In fact, I was made to be just the opposite. I was made to be loving towards others, to be selfless, and slow to anger. I was made in the image of God, and as a Christian, I am to strive to be like Christ. When I tell myself “well that’s just who I am,” I am limiting the power of God in my life and I am not allowing myself to live the purposefully-filled life that God has called me to live.

Earlier today I was watching Ravi Zacharias’ sermon at the 2020 Passion Conference and he was speaking about what it meant to be human. While he was diving into this he said something that I had heard before, but for some reason this time had struck me differently. He said that God created us all individually with a “divine purpose” and “intrinsic value.” I looked up the definitions of the adjectives divine and intrinsic. The Oxford definition of divine is “of, from, or like God or a god,” and the definition of intrinsic is “belonging naturally; essential.” So this is what I understood it to mean: I have a God-given purpose and therefore, I have an essential value that is necessary to this world. I wasn’t simply put here on this earth by coincidence, but I actually am here for a specific purpose that God has laid out for my life. I believe that is God’s truth for everyone else as well.

I am a full believer that our mind is going to believe the things that we tell it. If we tell ourselves that we aren’t important to the world and we don’t have a purpose, then we will feel worthless. If we tell ourselves that we aren’t beautiful or that we aren’t enough, then we will see that to be the truth about ourselves. However, I don’t think those things are true for anybody. Nothing that you, or I, could ever do is powerful enough to change the fact that God created us with a divine purpose and intrinsic value. I believe in God’s truth, and not what the world tells me I am. God’s truth tells me that I am His masterpiece created in Christ (Ephesians 2:10), and I am a member of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). Jeremiah 1:5 says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” Before I was even a thought to my parents, God knew me and He set a divine purpose just for me. In Psalm 139 verses 13-16 David paints a beautiful picture of when God created us: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” David dwells in the fact that we were created with a purpose that God hand created for us, and that God knows everything about us, even to the very deepest parts of our hearts. God knows what we struggle with. He knows when we struggle with our self-image, with our internal dialogue, or even when we can’t seem to find our purpose in this world. But we can find our real worth and value in God’s word.

As we continue to live in a world that constantly tells us that we aren’t good enough, our prayer is that we are continuously reminded of God’s truth. That we are reminded that God created us, not the world, and we can find our confidence and true worth in Him. The same God that created the universe and put the stars in the sky is the same God that decided that this world would not be the same without you or without me. Our hope is that when we begin to feel as though we are not good enough, we are able to be still and remind ourselves of the true value and purpose that we have in our heavenly Father.