What about your purpose?
I am not able to eat much salt. I am on a heavily restricted sodium diet. This has caused me to think a great deal, because the food I now eat is rather bland. It takes a great deal of getting used to. It makes me think of what Jesus said about salt. He said we are to be like salt, which provides flavor and also preserves what it infects. Things do not rot when they are salted. And everything seems to have better flavor with salt.
That takes me to our lives and their saltiness. Surely we are to provide flavor to the world we live in and be part of preserving those who live in it.
Too many people go through life wandering aimlessly. I am not talking about literal wandering. I mean wandering aimlessly with no real purpose. I could maybe understand this for those who are not believers, but not for people who love Jesus and are following Him as committed disciples.
Everyone needs a reason for being in this life. I am firmly convinced that God has a purpose for each of us. We need to be connected to our eternal purpose. That means that we have to ask ourselves, “What is God’s purpose for me in terms of things that are eternal?”
I am not saying that we all need to be in some form of ministry or become pastors, missionaries, or Bible College teachers. I am saying that we must ask ourselves about the purpose behind what we are doing that relates to eternity.
Let me illustrate. If you are a carpenter by trade, that is a wonderful thing. However, if you are a believer, your carpentry has to be connected to God’s purpose for you and eternal things. I am not saying you should spend your life on mission trips doing carpentry, although there is nothing wrong with that and you could do that every once in a while.
What I AM saying is that your carpentry has to connect you and those who come in contact with you to things eternal. You can and should be a carpenter whose work is outstanding and whose character and witness demonstrate Christlikeness. Your words AND your life can be a testimony of who you are and where your eternal life is headed.
We need people in the trades. We need trash collectors. We need school teachers and counselors. We need attorneys and bankers and stockbrokers. We need maintenance people and landscapers. But more than all of these, in the Kingdom of God, we need all of these to be eternally connected to God’s purposes. Every one of us has to ask ourselves, “What am I doing for God and eternity?”
Your witness and mine should be in our skills, in our words, in our attitude and character. It should be in all that we are. If we would live like this, the Church would not be just a group who gather on Sundays and who are criticized for their judgment of the world around us. We would truly be the army of God, influencing and infecting those who need Jesus with who He is to us and who He could be to them.
