4 Ways To Stop Struggling To Understand Your Christian Purpose

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Ryan Gentzel

It’s easy to overcomplicate the topic of purpose when we live our lives with so much noise, but God's will shows us how to be fulfilled in Him.

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Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”
 Isaiah 43:6 (ESV)

A Masterpiece of Deliberate Design

What are you doing here?

Not here as in this website – here as in this life.

There are billions of people on the planet today and billions more that have gone before us. And here you are today, reading this post. Your heart is beating and breath is filling your lungs (now you’re thinking about your own breathing). You have people you love, and people who love you. You live, you study, you work, you eat, you sleep… then you do it all over again, day after day.

What’s the point? Why are you here?

If you’re a Christian, you have a big advantage over the rest of the world when it comes to purpose – our faith is meant to define us, keep us moving forward in good times and bad, and above it all, give us purpose.

That doesn’t always mean that it’s easy to see or understand. And the sometimes unspoken or uncomfortable truth is that it can still be really difficult to understand your purpose even as a Christian.

In the Christian world, we hear so often that God has a special plan and purpose for each of his followers. But in the daily doldrums, the 9-5’s, and the often mundane rhythms of adult life, who can help but wonder if they’ve somehow missed God’s purpose.

The good news is that our heavenly father’s promises never return void.

Ephesians 2:10 tells us that “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

His Workmanship. 

The word calls to mind a master craftsman or artist. Carefully planning each brushstroke, each pass of the lathe, or word on the page.

In the original Greek translation, the word used is poiēma, a word associated with deliberate design and formation. The transformation of that which is raw and unformed into something beautiful, purposeful, and specific.

That’s you. And me.

But that specific purpose isn’t always obvious. And most of us spend a lot of time spinning our wheels to try and find greater meaning in the day-to-day. When it’s all spreadsheets, emails, and meetings, are we missing that specific purpose?

Most of our adult lives are spent working. And those of us who don’t work in vocational ministry likely spend a lot of time doing tasks and jobs that leave us wondering if we’ve somehow missed God’s purpose for our lives.

In this post, we’re going to dive into some of the obstacles to finding fulfillment and purpose in a world that would rather have us forget how carefully our Father crafted each of us for His glory.

While this is not an exhaustive list, it does touch on a few of the most critical points that we sometimes lose sight of in a world that constantly seeks to distract and disillusion us. Let’s dive in.

Start by Grounding Your Reality in Him

The concept of absolute truth is something that humans have always struggled to accept because it holds us accountable to a standard and forces us to accept the most difficult news of all – we aren’t always right, and we can’t always have what we want.

Our mental gymnastics to avoid believing in a consistent set of absolute truths have gone by many different names – postmodernism, relativism, speakyourtruthism… you get the point. 

It’s funny how many of us want to believe there is no absolute truth while clinging to the idea that we do still have some sort of ultimate purpose or calling in life. Unfortunately, when the rubber hits the proverbial road, you can’t have one without the other.

At the trial of Jesus in John 38, Roman prefect Pontius Pilate asks Jesus point blank about why his own Jewish people have brought him to be killed. Jesus responds by telling Pilate that he “..was born to testify to the truth.” Pilate’s blunt response to this statement is the question so many people are still asking today:

“WHAT IS TRUTH?” (John 18:38)

Jesus responds with silence as Pilate walks away frustrated. Jesus had already given his answer several hours earlier in his last moments with his disciples, as they asked a similar question to the one Pilate had. His response to them?

“I AM THE way, the TRUTH, and the light…” (John 14:6)

Jesus knows that Pilate won’t be able to receive the truth. And just like many people today, rejecting Jesus means rejecting truth, and thereby our purpose for being. Without Jesus as the standard for truth, we’re left wandering without purpose or a standard for why any of us are here.

Focus On What Will Last Forever

Have you ever noticed that when people say they’re going away for a while to “work on themselves” it doesn’t ever seem to go well?

It turns out that turning inward to find our purpose usually just makes us feel worse. We aren’t very good compasses. 

The world-famous Harvard Study of Adult Development came to one conclusion about lifelong fulfillment and happiness. Spoiler alert – none of their findings about lifelong fulfillment have anything to do with “working on yourself.”

Instead, it’s all about relationships. Caring for others, loving others, giving up your time and energy to invest in the people that cross your path throughout your lifetime… all the things the Bible told us we should spend our lives doing.

Consider the writer of Ecclesiastes, who, after achieving levels of success, personal wealth, power, and influence that most of us mortals will never come anywhere close to reaching, ran through every check on his personal bucket list and determined… it was all meaningless:

“I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards.

 I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. 

I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. 

I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house.

I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. 

I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. 

I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well—the delights of a man’s heart. 

I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;

I refused my heart no pleasure.

My heart took delight in all my labor,

and this was the reward for all my toil.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done

and what I had toiled to achieve,

everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;

nothing was gained under the sun.” 

— Ecclesiastes 2:1–11 (ESV)

No promotion, lifetime achievement, or higher sense of self–awareness will ever bring us the happiness or fulfillment we thought it would. If you are struggling to find purpose, you may want to take a look at the way you spend your time day-to-day. Is it all spent on you?

If so, that long-term goal you’ve been working towards may not bring you the satisfaction you thought it would, and it definitely won’t help you to discover God’s purpose for your life.

Ecclesiastes is not a sunshine and rainbows entry in the Bible – but there are two (and only two) things that the author does ultimately decide can add meaning to our lives – our relationships with one another, and our relationship with God. Either way, it all comes back to our relationships, since when it’s all said and done, nothing else but the way we loved others will carry on into eternity.

Find Your Place in the Grander Story

 Along the lines of “main character issues”, you may also have a hard time understanding God’s purpose for your life if you aren’t intent on understanding his grand plan. 

See, when we imagine God’s purpose for our lives, we tend to put ourselves at the center of the story. In that story, we imagine God as nothing more than the screenwriter for an Oscar-winning Biopic titled “ME.” 

We’d like to think he has a grand adventure planned for us, one where we’ll get to be the hero, the champion, and the winner in the end. 

We’ll live to be one hundred and one years old, make all the money we ever needed, have countless children and grandchildren, and have lived a great life of blessed Christian harmony.

One problem – the story isn’t about us. It’s about Jesus. And even as the hero of his own story, God’s ultimate plan for his own Son included a horrible death at the hands of the people he died to save.

A side note – Here’s a few other people who God loved a lot and found their purpose in Him, but still didn’t live super great lives on Earth:

  • Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and then sent to prison because he didn’t sleep with someone else’s wife.
  • Paul was beaten, imprisoned, ran out of town, and shipwrecked.
  • John the Baptist literally lost his head.

The list could go on and on, frankly, but the point is that the heroes of the Bible, most of the time, fulfilled God’s purpose for their lives by going through some very very unfortunate situations.  

Through their suffering and pain, God was able to bring about His own glory every time.

But if God’s plan for his own son and others in the Bible should involve such difficulty, why should we expect that our purpose looks any different? 

The truth is, seeking God’s purpose may take us to places we don’t want to go.

And many people tend to miss out on the purpose God has for them because they don’t want to experience the discomfort, heartbreak, and pain that sometimes accompanies being a follower of Christ.

Namely, there is a cost to being a disciple. If that cost was for God’s own son to lose his life, should we really be surprised that we are also asked to experience difficulties of our own in this life?

That’s not to say that following Jesus always means we should expect life to be horrible – the exact opposite, in fact.

Devotion to Christ allows us to experience true joy and happiness no matter what circumstances come our way because we are freed to experience the fullness of God’s glory and his plan for our eternal salvation despite the hardships of this life.

If you find yourself continually frustrated with a sense of purposelessness, you may need to ask – when was the last time I did something out of obedience that I really didn’t want to do? Because it’s in those more difficult and uncomfortable experiences that you may actually find the purpose God had for you all along.

Remember That We Were All Created for the Same Purpose

In his beloved book, “Don’t Waste Your Life,” John Piper beautifully summarizes the core truth at the heart of our search for purpose:

“God’s passion [is] the display of his own glory and the delight of our hearts.” (28)

The Bible makes it clear that God’s ultimate purpose for all of us is to glorify him. As his most cherished creation, carefully stitched together in his image, our reason for existing is that we might turn our eyes back to himself. 

“Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” (Isaiah 43:6)

God’s greatest design of all was that we would experience true joy and fulfillment by recognizing our honored roles as magnifiers of the glory of God throughout our lives on earth. 

As Piper points out, we are not intended to be magnifiers in the way that a magnifying glass can make a small object seem much larger, but instead magnifiers like telescopes, which exist to bring that which is too grand and majestic to fully view with normal eyes into full and clear view.

We magnify the glory of God and fulfill his purpose for our life when we learn to focus all that we are on helping others to see God for all that he is.

Purpose Begins and Ends with the Cross

It’s easy to overcomplicate the topic of ultimate purpose when we live our daily lives with so much noise, so much self-centeredness, and such a clear lack of what really matters. 

Our purpose begins and ends with Him.

The Bible depicts a God who cuts through that noise and paints a clear picture of the purpose that he has for all of us as his masterpieces, his poiēma – his own glory.

He is our savior – an all-powerful God who spoke the universe into being, breathed life into humanity, walked among us, died to save us, and then defeated death and suffering.

We accomplish this by seeking to know Him and His word better daily, by realized we aren’t the main characters in this story, and by remembering that there is a grand plan in play at the end of it all.

The will of God is that we would give everything for the magnification of His glory, and only by recognizing this will we fulfill our true purpose and be fulfilled ourselves.

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Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.

… for which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.”

Luke 14:27-30 (ESV)

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