Living with Purpose

At the gym where my husband works out, this is the time of year where everything is crowded.  People have made new year’s resolutions to lose weight or exercise, and for a few weeks they stick with it.  But my husband has noticed that by March or April, things get back to normal at the gym.  The “resolution” people have lost their resolve, and the gym just has the regular attendees again who are continuing with their more permanent resolve.

I am by nature a purpose-driven person; it’s just the way I was wired by God.  Pretty much everything I do has a purpose behind it, and I typically don’t do random things.  Not everyone is made that way; so that means that not everyone approaches the task of understanding or trusting God’s purposes in the same way either.  Sometimes I think that trusting God’s purposes might be more difficult for a purpose-driven person, because the constant quest for purpose and logic causes questions that others may not even consider.  One thing I have found is that trusting God’s purposes in my life cannot be separated from knowing and trusting the other parts of him: his sovereignty, his love, his grace and mercy, and everything else that his Word tells me about his character.

Romans 8:28 tells us that God is always working in everything for what is good for us.  He is not working to make us happy but rather to fulfill his purpose for us – which is whatever conforms us to “the likeness of his Son” (Romans 8:29).   God’s actions do not depend on ours.  He will do what he knows is best regardless of what we think is fair or what makes sense to us.  Our job is not to question or seek to control the outcome but simply to “join in” where God’s purposes are being worked out and trust those purposes to be the best solution.  Joining in where God is working involves listening for his voice above all of the other voices and trusting him to take what we call bad and make it good.

I want the purposes that drive me to be God-purposes.  I don’t want to resolve to do something just because it’s the right time of year or something that everyone is doing.  I want to choose to trust what God is doing at any given time in my life and know (without doubting) that he is doing what is best for me – so that I end up looking more and more like his Son and less and less like me or anyone else in this world.  Now that’s a resolution worth keeping!