To truly find God’s purpose for your life, you’ve first got to understand His nature as a community of Three Persons in One Being expressing Love. It is here that you will find His passion – to expand His eternal fellowship to Another.
According to the Bible, God’s motivation for creation was to release the passion contained inside of Himself upon a Lover. This is why the Bible begins and ends with marriage. It is the “profound mystery” that Paul refers to in his writing. That Lover is His Bride made up of humans that united as one in Him.
You were created for a purpose
This is why individualism is at the heart of the Fall. We were created in God’s image for the purpose of joining His community together.
But, when individual pursuits are placed above community, He has no one to release His passion upon. We are just a bunch of scattered image-bearers roaming around the earth.
If individualism is rejected and a group of people operates as one body in which all the parts are there to service the purpose of the whole body, His Bride is manifested and available to receive His Love.
The context of God’s plan for you
Frequently, you’ve heard about your “personal relationship with God” and how God has a “wonderful plan for your life.” Both are good and true, but missing a very important ingredient. Context. These types of individually-focused concepts are lacking the context of community.
Presented by themselves, they paint a distorted picture of life with God. It only takes place in the context of self-sacrificial community. Outside of that, individually-focused concepts are thwarted; for His purpose is not primarily about you or me, but about His Bride.
No, this is not to say that God does not care about you individually – and if you’re not living in close-knit Christian community that your life is a waste. He cares about the parts of His Bride in the same way and with the same intensity that He cares about Her as a whole.
What God wants to do with your life
God is limited in how He can accomplish His purpose in individualistic Christians. He’s also limited in how His Kingdom spreads throughout the earth.
Why is that? Because to Jesus and the early church, evangelism was not a program. It was a by-product of getting people together to live in loving, self-sacrificial community. This attracted people to His Kingdom like flies to…a fly trap :).
So, every time you come back to thinking about what the purpose of life is, I encourage you to think about it in the way that Randy Frazee puts it in his book The Connecting Church 2.0. He says:
The Scriptures tell me I should begin with God’s story and then move to our story before I can truly find my story in the world or hope to know who I really am.
Discovering God’s purpose for us comes down to where we seek it out. If you want to know what God wants you to do with your life, you will find it within what God wants to do with creation and with everyone in creation.
Michael Fleming
Mike Fleming is the creator of Finding Healthy Church. Over 20 years ago, he was sparked by the frustration of failing to experience what the biblical story claimed a healthy church was like. He caught a vision and passion for seeing local churches be what they were designed by God to be. He shares what he's learning along the way so the health of local churches around the world are improved. He’s currently working on an eye-opening book that will help better understand what it means for a church to be healthy.