“God’s Purpose is the Cure for the World’s Aimlessness”, Will DuVal | 12/14/25
Various Texts | 12/14/25 | Will DuVal
We’re in the back half now of our Advent series “The Antidote: God’s CURES for the World’s CONTAGIONS”. We’ve considered how God’s TRUTH is the cure for the world’s LIES; God’s PEACE is the cure for the world’s WORRY. And last week: God’s REST is the cure for the world’s BUSYNESS. I received a text from one of you on Monday: “Excellent message yesterday! Personally I struggle more with the OPPOSITE issue (laziness… just DRIFTING thru life…), but I still got a lot out of it.”
And I replied, “Oh don’t worry - we’re coming for YOU this COMING Sunday!”; that is, this MORNING, with Antidote #4: “God’s PURPOSE is the cure for our AIMLESSNESS”.
Aimlessness is defined simply as “the state of lacking purpose or direction”. How widespread is the problem? The stats don’t lie:
*”Nearly one out of every four Americans say they rarely (13%) or never (9%) feel like their life has a purpose” (AEI, 2023). One in four.
*Amongst YOUNG adults, the dis-ease skyrockets: “In a 2023 survey, 58% of 18 to 25-year-olds reported having felt little or no meaning or purpose in their lives within the past month.” (Harvard, 2023)
*A different survey from that same year conducted by George Barna put the number even HIGHER: as many as 75% of millennials agreed with the statement: “I don’t know why I should even get out of bed in the morning’” (Barna, CRC, 2023).
*According to a Gallup poll from just this year, “Only 18 % of U.S. workers feel like their job has true purpose.” (Gallup, 2025)
*And if there is ANY silver lining to be found in all this meaninglessness malaise, it is that Christians at least fare SLIGHTLY better than the rest of the population; evangelical believers are “33% more likely than unbelievers to say our actions matter in the grand scheme of things.” (American Enterprise Institute, in The Washington Stand, 2023). Still, amongst those who are unaffiliated with any religion, the so-called “NONES” - not the “Sister Act” kind; N-O-N-E; “Which of these religions best describes you”: NONE! - only 42% of them agreed with the statement “my life is significant” (AEI, 2023).
*If we break it down generationally, only amongst the Baby Boomers did a MAJORITY of those surveyed express “direction in their daily lives”: 56% of Boomers, compared with only “45% of Gen X, Z, and Millennials.”
What does all this tell us? Simply put: aimlessness is nothing short of an EPIDEMIC in our society today. Questions like “Why am I here?” and “Do I even MATTER?” have never been more prevalent and more pertinent. And sadly, the answers have never been more doubtful and more discouraging. We don’t KNOW why we’re here! We don’t KNOW if we matter.
What if I told you that God’s word provides the perfect prescription for your purposelessness this morning? That the Bible offers us a GLORIOUS answer to the question, “Why should we get out of bed in the morning?”; the REAL question is: “Do we BELIEVE God’s answer?” Do we TRUST his prescription? Enough to FILL it? And let IT fill US? Cuz the best medicine in the world does you absolutely NO good if you don’t pick it UP and swallow it DOWN, every single day. Are we actually PURSUING the PURPOSE for which we’ve been PUT here?
THAT is the question before us this morning. But actually, we’re gonna spend the MAJORITY of our time on the first question: “What IS our purpose?” Because my hope - and more importantly, I believe GOD’S hope - is that the more we come to understand and appreciate just how GLORIOUS His purpose for us truly is, the less CONVINCING it will take - you and I won’t NEED to be guilted or brow-beaten, we’ll just naturally pursue it. Because why on EARTH would we SETTLE, would we want to live for anything LESS, than God’s preeminent plan for our lives?
At the boarding school I worked at before moving to St Louis, one of my favorite events I ran each year was a “Faculty Debate”, where I’d recruit a few of the students’ favorite teachers representing differing viewpoints on a particular worldview issue to publicly duke it out while I moderated. And of course I’d always platform one of my few fellow evangelical colleagues. We’d get hundreds of students to come out; “Does God exist?” with the atheist chemistry teacher, the agnostic humanities teacher, and the evangelical physics teacher; we did “What is TRUTH?” one year… But one of my favorite debates was “What is Life’s PURPOSE?”, because one of my best moderating moments was when my friend Danny Cowell (he was a great guy; just hadn’t really thought his life’s PHILOSOPHY all the way THROUGH I guess) in his “opening statement” - I asked all of them for the 2-minute elevator pitch version of their answer to the question (“What is Life’s Purpose?”) - and Danny’s response was, “The purpose of life is to find your purpose”. So my very first question was: “Danny, I wanna start with YOU: you said you believe that the purpose of life is to FIND your purpose. But isn’t that a self-refuting philosophy? Because either you NEVER discover your purpose, and therefore FAIL to realize your life’s aim; OR you DO discover your purpose, which would then necessarily make the REST of your life from that point forward MEANINGLESS - no more purpose left to be discovered, ergo, no more REASON to LIVE?!”
And we could similarly challenge all the other popular but infinitely LESS satisfying answers (than God’s) that the world has to offer us - for instance: “To be HAPPY”; is the goal of life merely our own personal happiness? (How SAD and SMALL and SELFISH)... or “To be a GOOD PERSON”; is THAT the goal? And if so, HOW (“who defines ‘GOOD’?”) and even more problematic: WHY? (Why be good? Non-theists don’t have a good answer to that). But rather than spend our time dissecting the world’s disappointing answers, let’s instead REJOICE in God’s eternally REWARDING reason for it all.
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I invite you to stand with me for the reading of God’s word. We are once AGAIN this morning gonna be bouncing around all OVER the place in the Bible - I think I’ve got a DOZEN different references listed there in your bulletins, and I’ll probably pull in about ANOTHER dozen passages as well, to help us answer this question of life’s purpose. But as you see in your bulletins, I’ve tried to group them all into THREE big-picture, driving purposes for which we have been created BY God, with each of those primary purposes encompassing two secondary sub-points: the means by which we actually ACCOMPLISH these 3 purposes. May sound a bit confusing, especially if you’re watching or listening later online and DON’T have a bulletin to follow along with, but hopefully it’ll make more sense as we work our way through.
So we’re gonna START in Genesis 1, just vv26-28; hear the word of the Lord:
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”” This is the word of God…
There are, as I said, LOTS of passages in the Bible that touch on this big idea of life’s purpose, but there are really only a handful where God explicitly says, “This is why I put you here…” But the first one is right here, all the way back at the very beginning of it all; Day SIX, to be exact. When God created mankind, just AFTER explaining WHY He was DOING it: to “IMAGE God”, to “REFLECT” His likeness into this new world that God has just created.
Many many books have been filled attempting to answer the question: “What does it MEAN that we humans are created ‘in the image of God’?” Does it mean that we are most essentially SPIRITS, like God? That that’s what distinguishes us from the rest of creation - we are alone embodied SOULS? Does being made in God’s image mean we’re ETERNAL? Or that we uniquely have the capacities for REASON, MORALITY, CREATIVITY, the capacity for RELATIONSHIP WITH God?!
Yes, it means all that and more. But one of the most basic yet often overlooked implications of our being made in God’s image is that we are HERE to REFLECT GOD in and to the world.
Think about it this way: what is the MOON’s purpose? Something about gravity and tides and stabilizing the earth’s axial tilt… but when we LOOK at the moon, we see at least ONE of its purposes: it REFLECTS the light of the SUN, doesn’t it. The moon doesn’t SHINE on its own, with its OWN light; it reflects the sun. Which is no small thing, especially for the vast majority of history, before the dawn of the LIGHT bulb, or even man-made FIRE.
In a similar way, John 1 says that “No one has ever seen God”; He’s kind of like the SUN - you can’t look directly at him, and live to TELL about it. Moses ASKED to once, in Exodus 33, but God warned him, “Moses, man CANNOT see me and LIVE” (v18).
And yet, according to Romans ch8, all of creation LONGS for redemption; creation itself was corrupted by the effects of the Fall, man’s sin in Genesis 3, and now it longs for restored right relationship with its Creator and Redeemer, GOD. But how’s it gonna HAPPEN, according to Romans 8? “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For… creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (vv19,21) Did you CATCH that?! Creation’s not waiting for GOD to be revealed… in order to obtain the freedom of GOD’s glory. It’s waiting on US to be revealed before obtaining OUR glory!
Now, without getting too sidetracked trying to explain Paul’s somewhat complex theology there, for OUR purposes let’s at least note this: that the reason Creation is waiting on US is that there isn’t a SHORTAGE of GOD’S glory; the problem is that WE were created from the very beginning for the purpose of REFLECTING God’s glory, like little mirrors, but ever since the FALL, in Genesis 3, all us mirrors have suffered from differing degrees and types of BROKENNESS. Such that NONE of us PERFECTLY reflects God’s glory any more.
Except for ONE; John concludes his Prologue with the astounding announcement that “No one has ever seen God; [but] God the only Son, who[f] is [now] at the Father's side,[g] he has made him known” (v18). Hebrews 1:3 declares of Jesus: “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature”; you and I were SUPPOSED to be; we were CREATED to be “REFLECTORS” of God’s glory; little MOONS that would reflect the light of the Sun, that is GOD. But the moon, the MIRRORS got BROKEN. So what did God DO? He sent JESUS to not ONLY reflect and reveal God to us perfectly, but to actually put OUR broken pieces back together as well. Here’s how Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 3:18- “we all… beholding the glory of the Lord [JESUS; to the extent that we BEHOLD him, we actually BECOME LIKE Him; we…], are being transformed [Paul says] into the same image [there it is] from one degree of glory to another.” We’re getting glued back together. So we can actually accomplish the purpose for which we were created in the FIRST place.
Now, if we’re called to reflect God’s GLORY, what IS it that we’re actually reflecting? Well, for starters, God’s HOLINESS. He is “holy, holy, holy”, that is, SUPERLATIVELY, perfectly Holy. And God calls US to “be holy, AS I am holy” (1 Pet 1:16). 1 John 3:7 calls to be “righteous, as he is righteous.” 1 John FOUR:7 calls us to be LOVING, as God is LOVE. And we could keep working our way down the list, of God’s attributes we ought to reflect:
-We should be PATIENT, as He is patient.
-Be FAITHFUL, as He is faithful.
-Be WISE, as He is wise.
But interestingly, returning to Genesis ONE now, what are the very FIRST two ways in which we’re called to be like God, in which we were CREATED to be like Him, “in His image”?
We were made to RULE, and to REPRODUCE. Made to MANAGE and MULTIPLY. Let’s consider each in turn.
First, God created us in His image, to RULE. “Let us make man… after our likeness. And let them have dominion”; authority; “let them RULE over the fish, the birds, the livestock… the sea, the sky, the land - God says, “it’s all YOURS! I’m giving it to YOU, to “SUBDUE it and have DOMINION” (v28). That was God’s design from the beginning. And consider how it’s all gonna END:
-Daniel 7:27 “the kingdom and the dominion… shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High”;
-Revelation 5:10 “by your blood [Jesus,] you ransomed people for God… and you have made them a kingdom… and they shall reign on the earth.””
-2 Tim 2:12 “if we endure, we will also reign with him”
We were MADE to rule from the beginning of time; we are DESTINED to rule at the END of times; and in between, God is calling us to reflect His glory by RULING. What does that mean?
I’d be willing to BET, that of the 22% of Americans who feel like their life has no purpose…
the 58% of of Gen-Z who have experienced purposelessness in the past month…
the 75% of millennials who aren’t sure why they should bother getting out of BED in the morning…
and the 82% of of U.S. WORKERS who feel like their JOB lacks any real purpose…
I’d be willing to bet that the one thing they ALL share in common, is a feeling of PASSIVITY. The OPPOSITE of “ruling” is passivity. “Ruling” is the “active exercise of dominion”, authority, AGENCY; passivity is when you’re just along for the ride, and feel like you’ve got NO power, no ability to actually make an impact, to make any kind of real DIFFERENCE in the world.
But friends, that is a LIE from the pit of HELL. The TRUTH of God’s word is that we have ALL been given SOME degree, endowment of ability; 1 Peter 4:10 exhorts us, “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace”. And God has given each of us not ONLY spiritual gifts, but intellectual gifts, financial gifts, physical gifts, relational gifts… all KINDS. And not ONLY for the purpose of “serving one another”, but for serving those OUTSIDE the church as well, for serving the WORLD, CREATION; Adam’s first assignment (after “be fruitful and multiply”, which we’re coming back to in a minute…) was to “work and tend” the garden (Gen 2:15). To CULTIVATE it, to IMPROVE it. What is YOUR garden? Listen: we ALL need a garden; something to rule over with nurturing CARE and diligent labor. We were CREATED for it!
Maybe it’s not a whole CHURCH for you. Maybe it’s your team at work. Or maybe you’re still LOW man (or woman) on the totem pole, or maybe you DON’T work outside the home, and you’ve got the most important garden of ALL: the souls of your children. Or maybe they’re all grown up now, or you never HAD kids; can you adopt some SPIRITUAL ones? Find a younger believer to invest your faith, your LIFE into? Or better yet: MAKE one! Preach and pray and keep planting seeds until God gives that unbeliever the gift of new life THROUGH your faithful gardening, and then continue the work of “tending” their heart?
That brings us to the SECOND facet of reflecting, IMAGING God in the world around us: we’re called to MULTIPLY. To rule and reproduce; manage and MULTIPLY.
““Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…” - God wants more MIRRORS, cuz the more mirrors - the more reflectors of God’s glory - the more his SPLENDOR is able to shine.
God is blessing this church with a LOT of little mirrors. We take God’s first ever commandment here, His “Creation mandate”, very SERIOUSLY at West Hills; I don’t know about “the EARTH”, but you’re certainly doing your best to fill the NURSERY.
But even if you’re NOT, personally - you’re done having kids, or God never blessed you with them, biologically - you are STILL called to “be fruitful and multiply” in the most IMPORTANT way: SPIRITUALLY! Speaking of being given DOMINION - AUTHORITY - here is Jesus’s FINAL command before he ascended back into heaven (it was God’s FIRST command in Genesis, and Jesus’s LAST command here on earth): to MULTIPLY! “Jesus said to them, “All authority [there it is…] in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [Now I’m giving it to YOU! You…] 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:18-19).
MULTIPLY this gospel - this good news, of the salvation that I came and lived and DIED and ROSE again to BRING you - I want YOU to bring that life-changing message to OTHERS; to “be fruitful and MULTIPLY”.
Church: we DO have power. You DO have influence… with someone. You HAVE been given “talents” - maybe 10, maybe 5, or maybe just 1. But one day the Master is going to return, and demand an accounting, for how you STEWARDED the “talents”, the gospel INFLUENCE you were entrusted with. And on that day, when God ASKS you, “Who loves my Son Jesus MORE because of YOU? What’d you DO with all the time, talent and treasure that I gave you?”, you REALLY don’t wanna have to answer, “Sorry, God, I was too busy playing fantasy football.”
“Checking National Parks off the bucket list…”
“Working on my STAMP collection…”
Can I talk specifically to our RETIRED folks here for just a minute? How are you STEWARDING your retirement for God’s glory? You do realize that we NEVER retire from the job that JESUS left us with, right? To “make disciples of all nations”... If you’re retired now from your EARTHLY job (making widgets), that just means you’ve got all the more time and energy to devote to your HEAVENLY job (of making DISCIPLES). You also ought to have the distinct advantages of 1) more wisdom (that comes with age and experience), 2) fewer distractions (without kids left at home), and 3) more URGENCY (you may only have another 30, 20, TEN years left now, down here to make a difference, to turn a PROFIT on the talents God gave you; there’s not enough time left for you to be WASTING a single SECOND of it; it’s time to get BUSY about the Father’s business!).
We REFLECT God by RULING and REPRODUCING.
We MIRROR God by MANAGING and MULTIPYING.
#2- SECOND big picture reason God says he PUT us here, according to His word: to GLORIFY HIM. (Isa 43:7; 1 Cor 10:31)
Any Wednesday Night KIDS here with us this morning? Holly’s been going through the New City Catechism with them on Wednesday nights this year; Question 4 (which really SHOULD be question ONE; it was in the Westminster Catechism: “What is the chief END of man (our GOAL, our PURPOSE)?”); or the way the New CITY asks it: “Why did God CREATE us?” – any of you kids remember?
“To GLORIFY Him”.
Isaiah 43:7 (NLT) ““Bring all who claim me as their God, for I have made them for my GLORY. It was I who created them””.
1 Corinthians 10:31 “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Whether you play fantasy football or you collect STAMPS, do it ALL to the GLORY of GOD. I assume if it’s possible for us to EAT and DRINK to His glory, there’s probably even a way for us to enjoy our HOBBIES for His glory as well (maybe it depends on your HOBBY… 😉).
But God makes it clear that there are at least a few SURE-fire ways of guaranteeing that we’re glorifying Him. SOME of which we’ve discussed already:
-We glorify God by REFLECTING him, becoming more LIKE him.
-We glorify God by RULING, and stewarding the ability and authority that He’s given us in the service of “tending and cultivating” our “gardens”, whatever meaningful work God has entrusted to YOU, specifically.
-And we glorify God by MULTIPLYING and reproducing our faith into others.
But there are two even more BASIC ways that we bring God glory, BOTH of which Scripture explicitly connects with our purpose in life:
The FIRST is by OBEYING God. (Ecc 12:13) We glorify God by OBEYING Him.
In John 17:4, Jesus prays to the Father, “I glorified you here on earth, [HOW?] having accomplished the work that you gave me to do”; by OBEYING you.
And now he calls US to obedience; John 14:15, ““If you love me,” Jesus says, “you will keep my commandments.”
But Ecclesiastes 12:13 most directly ties our obedience together with our purpose in life. This is the very end of the Ecclesiastes, after King Solomon has given us his whole life’s story - his TESTIMONY - of searching of meaning and purpose in all the wrong places: in PLEASURE, in WORK, in ROMANCE, in RICHES, even in WISDOM he sought it, but purpose evaded him. Until his conclusion in ch12:
“The end of the matter; all has been heard. [No stone left unturned; I’ve looked EVERYWHERE else! And what did Solomon conclude we’re here for?] Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”
You say, well WAIT a minute; what about FAITH? What about trusting in JESUS; I thought the whole reason he came to save us was that we FAILED to be obedient, we didn’t FULFILL our duty to God, so Jesus came and lived the perfect life of obedience that we should have but DIDN’T, and then he DIED the death befitting disobedience that WE should have suffered in our place, as payment for our sins. And now God calls us to trust in JESUS for eternal life and purpose, for forgiveness and salvation?
You are absolutely RIGHT! And here’s the thing: God not only CALLS us to believe; He actually COMMANDS it.
1 John 3:23 “this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ”
If “the whole duty of man” is to “fear and obey God”, you’ve got two options for DOING it: keep God’s Law perfectly on your own - His 613 commandments of the Old Testament plus another 1,054 in the NEW - either YOU obey them all perfectly, OR you better TRUST in the One who DID.
“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son [his COMMAND to believe] shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” (Jn 3:36)
So we glorify God by OBEYING him, and specifically, by obeying his command of FAITH in Christ.
But SECOND now: God wants so much MORE from us, WITH us, than just our dispassionate deference; he wants our HEARTS. He wants RELATIONSHIP. So He invites us to PURSUE HIM.
“Seek first,” Jesus exhorted us, “the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [everything ELSE you could ever POSSIBLY want out of life] will be added to you” (Mt 6:33).
Jesus said, ““If anyone would come after me [PURSUE me], let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life[d] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's sake will save it.” (Mk 8:34-35)
You want your life to be filled with PURPOSE? Follow martyred missionary Jim Elliott’s famous advice: “He is NO fool who gives up what he cannot KEEP, in order to GAIN what he cannot LOSE.”
It’s not FOOLISH to relinquish all the perishable things that THIS world has to offer us that you can’t take with you anyway, in order to gain the ONLY thing you can’t LOSE; remember the “one necessary thing” that Jesus commended to Martha last week? The “good portion” that her sister MARY chose instead - what was it?
JESUS! Intimacy with HIM! THAT’s the only thing that’s gonna follow us into the life to COME, the one thing we can’t LOSE: our relationship with CHRIST.
That’s why the apostle PAUL vowed “whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Phil 3:7-8)
For those 55% of young adults surveyed who said they lacked “DIRECTION in their daily lives”, here’s how PAUL would pray for them; 2 Thessalonians 3:5 “May the Lord direct your hearts [WHERE??] to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.” You want PURPOSE? Run to HIM!
Psalm 37:4 - “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
Pursue HIM, and find pleasure and purpose to last you for all eternity.
And even more important than YOU getting PURPOSE, is GOD getting GLORY. As Pastor John Piper puts it: “God is most glorified in US when we are most SATISFIED in HIM”.
So, we are here to REFLECT God by RULING and MULTIPLYING.
We’re here to GLORIFY God by OBEYING and PURSUING Him.
But #3 and lastly now, Church:
3) We are here to PROCLAIM God. (1 Pet 2:9; Mt 28:18-20)
To “proclaim” is to“declare something one considers important with due emphasis” (Oxford). If we consider GOD important, we WILL “DECLARE” Him, we will “announce him”, make him KNOWN… with DUE emphasis.
It’s the very reason He SAVED us, according to 1 Peter 2:9; we are “a chosen race… a people for [God’s] own possession, [WHY?? Why’d He CHOOSE us? Why’d He ADOPT us as His people?] that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
We have been delivered to DECLARE.
Saved to SHARE.
Pardoned to PROCLAIM.
God made us NEW to make him KNOWN.
And we DO it in TWO ways:
First, through our ACTIONS. (Eph 2:10; Mt 5:16)
“we are [God’s] workmanship,” Eph 2:10 reminds us, “created in Christ Jesus [WHY?] for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
Remember how John 1 said that “No one has ever seen God, but Jesus came to earth to make him KNOWN”? Well, similarly, we could say that for the last 2,000 years now, no one has seen JESUS, but we CHRISTIANS (literally, “mini-Christs”,) we are here to make him KNOWN. To BE Christ’s hands and feet.
““You are the light of the world,” he told us, so “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Mt 5:14-16)
And while actions may speak louder than words, we’re called to proclaim Christ in EVERY way possible, including of COURSE through our WORDS.
Allegedly (though there’s some doubt over whether or not he ever actually said it, but) St. Francis of Assisi is attributed with saying, “Preach the gospel at ALL times, and when necessary, use words”. Now, I hope he DIDN’T say it, cuz it’s a STUPID thing to say. Cuz the GOSPEL is literally “good NEWS”, it is by definition an ANNOUNCEMENT, a proclamation. So I SUPPOSE you could live your life like some kind of bizarre game of CHARADES where you try your hardest to silently put Christ’s love on display for others, just HOPING that they’ll somehow be able to piece the gospel news together for themselves, like, “Hmm, she’s really NICE; and I know she goes to CHURCH; and I know CHURCH has something to do with JESUS; and I know Jesus had something to do with a CROSS… [[*Mime*]] TWO words… 2nd word… **[[ear]] sounds like **“SHAVES”; ‘Jesus SHAVES? Jesus SAVES!!”
Or we could just TELL them! Like he TOLD us to:
“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” (Mk 16:15)
Matthew 28:19-20 “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them… teaching them [how do you TEACH without WORDS? Team them] to observe all that I have commanded you.”
Perhaps most unequivocal of all is Romans 10:13-14- “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”
Church: we’re called to PREACH. We’re not all called to a pulpit, but we are ALL called to PREACH. To preach the gospel at ALL times, whenever POSSIBLE using WORDS. Not “when necessary”; but “when ABLE”, we use words.
And we practice what we preach while we’re AT it.
That they may see our good deeds - and hear our good NEWS! - and give GLORY to our Father who is in heaven.
CONCLUSION: Don’t you want your life to MATTER? Don’t you wanna believe that it actually made a DIFFERENCE that YOU were here for the 60 or 80 or 100 years that God gave you here? Friend: you DO matter. God HAS you here for a PURPOSE, for HIS purpose.
Reflect Him, Glorify Him, Proclaim Him, and your life - both in this life and in the life to COME - will be filled with ETERNALLY fulfilling purpose.
Let’s pray…