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Made on Purpose

Kingdom Purpose: Orientation

The Question

Near the middle of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell stands on a hillside above Edinburgh with his sister Jennie. She is afraid his running is pulling him away from the mission field in China. He answers her with the line that made the film famous:

“I believe that God made me for a purpose, for China. But He also made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure.”

Eric Liddell, as written by screenwriter Colin Welland · Chariots of Fire, 1981 · watch the scene

The real Liddell never said it; Welland wrote it. And the real Jennie never opposed her brother’s running; she supported it. But the line has outlived the film because it names something most believers feel and few say out loud. Notice the word in the middle: but. On one side is the purpose, which is sacred, serious and probably far away. On the other side is the thing you are good at, the thing that makes you come alive, which feels like a pleasure you’re allowed rather than a calling you’re given.

Most Christians live somewhere inside that but. They suspect God has something specific in mind for them. They also suspect it will turn out to be the opposite of what they love and do well. So they either stall, waiting for a call that never comes, or settle for a general answer that could belong to anyone.

So the question is:

If God made you for something specific, how do you find out what it is — without guessing, without borrowing someone else’s calling, and without settling for an answer so general it could belong to anyone?

This session doesn’t answer that question for you. It shows you how the rest of this course will help you answer it.

Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)

Father, You made me on purpose and for a purpose, and You know exactly what it is. I don’t. Take the “but” out of how I think about my life. Show me what You built into my hands, what You set in my heart, and what You have been doing in every season I’ve lived through. I’m willing to go slowly, as long as I’m going with You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

He Also Made Me Fast

The desires and abilities God built into you are not rivals of your calling. They are evidence for it. The film’s but sets pleasure against purpose, as if God were the kind of Creator who makes a thing for one job and then gives it a love for another. Scripture describes a different God.

“May the splendor of the Lord endure! May the Lord find pleasure in the living things he has made!”

Psalm 104:31

Psalm 104 is a long, delighted tour of creation, from wild donkeys and nesting birds to people going out to their work until evening (Psalm 104:10–23), and it closes by praying that God will enjoy it all. He takes pleasure in things functioning as He made them to function. A sprinter running flat out, doing the thing he was built to do, is not a distraction from the Creator’s glory. He is one small example of it.

Another psalm, one of David’s, makes a promise to the person who takes pleasure in God:

“Then you will take delight in the Lord, and he will answer your prayers.”

Psalm 37:4

Most English readers know this verse in an older wording, “he will give you the desires of your heart.” The NET’s “prayers” is a fair rendering: the Hebrew word means a request or petition. Read carefully, the verse does not promise that God will rubber-stamp whatever you happen to want. It promises something better. The person whose delight is in the Lord finds that what they ask for starts to come from the same place as what God wants to give. Delight comes first, and it reshapes the desire.

That is why the desires of a heart that loves God are worth examining rather than suppressing. They are not infallible, and they are not irrelevant either. They are data, and this course will ask you to read that data carefully, with God, over time.

Illustration

The historical Eric Liddell never lived inside the film’s but. He was born on 16 January 1902 in Tianjin, China, the son of Scottish missionaries with the London Missionary Society, so China was not a distant sacrifice to him. It was home. At the 1924 Paris Olympics he declined to run the heats of the 100 metres, his strongest event, because they fell on a Sunday. The film dramatizes this as a last-minute crisis on the boat to France; in fact the schedule had been public for months, and Liddell trained instead for the 400 metres. He won it in 47.6 seconds, a world record at the time.

The next year he went back to Tianjin and spent most of the rest of his life teaching mathematics and science at the Anglo-Chinese College and doing mission work. When Japan occupied the region he was interned at the Weihsien camp, where he taught science and Bible classes to the children held there and organized their games. They called him Uncle Eric. He died in the camp on 21 February 1945, of an undiagnosed brain tumor. The speed and the calling were never two lives. They were one life, lived in order.

What I Am Not Saying

What I Am Saying

Pause & Reflect

What is your but? Name the thing you love or do well that you have quietly assumed has nothing to do with God’s purpose for you.

The Question Everyone Asks

The hunger to know what your life is for is universal, because it is built in. But a general answer will not satisfy a specific hunger.

The evidence for the hunger is everywhere. In 2002 a Southern California pastor published a book whose subtitle was the question itself, What on Earth Am I Here For?, and it became one of the best-selling nonfiction books in history. Its opening argument is blunt:

“Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope.”

Rick Warren · Pastor, Saddleback Church · The Purpose Driven Life, 2002

Half a century earlier, a Viennese psychiatrist came out of Auschwitz and the Dachau concentration camps with the same conclusion, reached by a much harder road. Viktor Frankl watched prisoners who had a reason to live outlast those who did not. He borrowed a line from Nietzsche to summarize what he saw:

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Viktor E. Frankl · Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor · Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946 (English 1959)

Warren’s book answers the question in general terms. Every believer was made to worship God, to belong to His family, to become like Christ, to serve, and to join His mission. All of that is true, and all of it is shared. It is the purpose of every Christian who has ever lived. What it cannot tell you is the thing you actually lie awake wondering: what is mine? Which part of God’s purpose is yours to carry, in your generation, with your hands?

Scripture treats that as a real question with a real answer. Luke records Paul preaching in a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, summarizing the life of Israel’s greatest king in a single sentence:

“For David, after he had served God’s purpose (βουλῇ) in his own generation, died, was buried with his ancestors, and experienced decay,”

Acts 13:36

Word Study

βουλή boulē G1012

“purpose” · Acts 13:36

Range. Counsel, purpose, a considered plan. It can describe human deliberation, such as the soldiers’ plan in Acts 27:42, but the New Testament uses it especially for God’s settled plan, as in “the whole purpose of God” (Acts 20:27) and “the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). In the Greek Old Testament it often translates the Hebrew ʿēṣâ, “counsel, plan.”

The sense here. God’s settled plan, not David’s ambition. Luke does not say David pursued his own purpose, or that God blessed David’s plans. He says David served God’s purpose, and he fixes where and when: “in his own generation.”

Why it carries the argument. The verse holds together the two things this course depends on. The purpose is God’s. David did not invent it, and you won’t invent yours. Yet it was specific: one man, one assignment, one slice of history. When it was done, David died. Your specific purpose is not something separate from God’s great plan. It is your share of it, measured to your generation.

Source. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.

That is the difference between the general answer and the specific one. Both are true. Only one of them can tell you what to do on Tuesday.

Pause & Reflect

If someone summarized your life the way Paul summarized David’s, in one sentence, what would you want that sentence to say you served?

Hands, Heart, and History

Your specific purpose lies where three things God has already done in you converge. He designed you, He set affections in your heart, and He has shaped you through everything you’ve lived. This course calls them your Design, your Affinity and your Shaping, and it will spend most of its sessions helping you see each one clearly.

Scripture speaks to all three, often in the same breath:

“Your hands made me and formed me. Give me understanding so that I might learn your commands.”

Psalm 119:73

“He is the one who forms every human heart, and takes note of all their actions.”

Psalm 33:15

“And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose,”

Romans 8:28

The first is your Design, the hands. It covers the capacities God built into you before you ever believed: spiritual gifts, natural abilities, your temperament (personality), the talent you have that others don’t, and the values that govern how you use all of it. The second is your Affinity, the heart. It is what you are drawn to: what breaks your heart, what recharges you, where you have served gladly, the sphere of society you care about, and the vision you can’t shake. The third is your Shaping, your history: what God has been doing through every season you’ve lived, and what it has taught you. Romans 8:28 promises that “all things” — the milestones, the mentors, the victories and the failures — are being worked together toward His purpose.

None of this was improvised after you arrived. God said to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb I chose you. Before you were born I set you apart” (Jeremiah 1:5). Jeremiah’s appointment as “a prophet to the nations” was his own, and not every reader will be called to the same thing. But the pattern of the verse is not unique to him. The choosing came before the forming, and the forming served the choosing.

Illustration

Nehemiah is the clearest case in Scripture of all three lenses converging on one assignment. His heart: when he heard that Jerusalem’s wall lay breached and its gates burned, he “sat down abruptly, crying and mourning for several days” (Nehemiah 1:4). Hanani and the men with him had seen Jerusalem for themselves (Nehemiah 1:2). It was Nehemiah, hearing it secondhand in Susa, who could not stop weeping. His shaping: “Now I was cupbearer for the king” (Nehemiah 1:11). Years of service in the palace had put him within arm’s reach of the one man who could authorize the rebuilding, and had taught him how to ask. When the moment came, he asked for letters of safe passage and timber from the king’s own forest (Nehemiah 2:7–8). His design: he organized a demoralized population, assigned the work family by family, and handled armed opposition, and “the wall was completed… in just fifty-two days” (Nehemiah 6:15).

Take away any one of the three and the wall doesn’t get built. Without the heart, he’s a well-placed official who never bothers to ask. Without the shaping, he’s a mourner in Susa with no access to the king. Without the design, he has the king’s permission and a pile of timber, but no one working on the wall.

This is why the course looks at all three and doesn’t stop at any one of them. A spiritual gifts test alone gives you a result shared by millions of people. A passion alone gives you energy without direction or capacity. A life story alone gives you a biography. Purpose is found where the three overlap. The leadership researcher J. Robert Clinton spent decades studying how God develops leaders, and he gave that overlap a name:

“During Phase V convergence occurs. That is, the leader is moved by God into a role that matches gift-mix, experience, temperament, and so on.”

J. Robert Clinton · Professor of leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary · The Making of a Leader, 1988

One verse holds all three together. Read Romans 8:28 again, all the way to the end: “And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” The first half speaks to your history. The last clause speaks to everything. The Greek word translated purpose is prothesis, literally a “setting forth”: a purpose placed in view beforehand. Paul uses the same word for God’s purpose in Ephesians 1:11 and 2 Timothy 1:9. Your design, your heart and your history aren’t three separate stories. They’re three views of one purpose that God set forth before you were born, and all three are being worked toward it. That’s why this course keeps looking for the place where they overlap.

KINGDOM PURPOSE DESIGN · AFFINITY · SHAPING DESIGN 1 · Spiritual Gifts 2 · Natural Abilities 3 · Personality 4 · Unique Talent 5 · Core Values 6 · My Design AFFINITY 7 · Passions 8 · Pursuits 9 · Ministries 10 · Mountains 11 · Vision 12 · My Affinity SHAPING 13 · Experiences 14 · Influencers 15 · Metrons 16 · Victories 17 · Failures 18 · Promises 19 · Identity 20 · My Shaping PURPOSE 21 · MY PURPOSE
The whole road ahead. Design asks what God has built into you. Affinity asks what He has drawn your heart toward. Shaping asks what He has been doing through your history. Each numbered step is something you will do, not just read about. The bold steps (6, 12 and 20) are summaries: at the end of each section you condense what you've gathered into a single statement, and at Step 21 those three statements become one.

Pause & Reflect

Of the three — hands, heart, history — which do you already understand best about yourself? Which do you understand least?

Isn’t this just a personality test with Bible verses attached?

Here is the objection at full strength, and it deserves to be heard that way. Secular career counselors have asked these same questions for decades. The strengths assessments and interest inventories used in every corporate HR office ask what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and what your history suggests. This process even uses some of the same secular tests. The church has a long habit of taking a corporate tool, adding verses, and calling it discipleship. And Scripture never tells anyone to take an inventory. Moses met a burning bush. Isaiah saw the Lord. Paul was knocked to the ground on the Damascus road. God calls people. He doesn’t have them fill out forms.

Part of that is simply true, and it’s better to concede it plainly. The overlap with secular tools is real, and it is not an embarrassment. God designed every human being, believer or not, so a well-built strengths assessment can accurately observe something God built. Theologians call this : God’s workmanship is visible in what He made, whether or not the observer credits Him. A craftsman who has never opened a Bible can still be extraordinarily gifted, and a secular test can notice it.

The difference is not in the questions. It is in four things the tests cannot supply. First, the results are evidence, not a verdict. Every test in this course is read with the One who designed you, and the next session is entirely about hearing Him. Second, the Shaping section asks what no inventory measures: what God has done with your failures, your losses and the words spoken over you. Third, the destination is different. A secular inventory aims at your fulfilment. This process aims at your share of God’s boulē, and it will insist that your final statement require God to accomplish it. Fourth, Scripture does show purpose being recognized, not only announced. Bezalel is not given a vision. He is “filled… with the Spirit of God in skill, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship” (Exodus 31:3), and his skill is how his assignment is recognized. The apostles didn’t wait for a sign when they chose the Seven. They looked for men “well-attested, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” (Acts 6:3). Dramatic calls happen. So does calling recognized through gifting and testimony, and it is far more common.

Where this stays unresolved. Scripture does not give a step-by-step method for discovering an individual believer’s purpose. No verse lists twenty-one steps. The process in this course is a synthesis. I developed it over roughly ten years of teaching, praying and listening, and I’ve watched it bear fruit in the lives of people who worked through it honestly. My own conviction is that it is a disciplined way of listening to God, built from patterns Scripture really does show: gifting recognized, hearts formed, lives shaped. But it is a tool, not a text. Hold it the way you’d hold any tool: gratefully, and loosely enough to let God overrule it.

One Dot at a Time

Purpose is drawn out over time, not downloaded in a moment, and the slowness is part of God’s method, not a flaw in it. That’s the claim this section defends, and it is the claim most likely to test your patience.

Illustration

Think back to the connect-the-dots pages you worked as a child. The picture was already on the paper, hidden in a scatter of numbered dots. Your job wasn’t to invent it. Your job was to find dot 1, then dot 2, and watch something appear that you couldn’t see when you started.

Now imagine a page with not thirty dots but millions. That’s the best picture I know of a human life. The Creator has already drawn the masterpiece. You hold the pencil, and from where you sit you can see only the few dots nearest your hand. A line here, a curve there — you have no idea yet what’s being revealed.

And you probably remember what children do with those pages. They get impatient. They guess at the picture, skip ahead to where they think it’s going, and connect dot 14 to dot 30. The line cuts straight across the drawing. Anxious adults do the same with their lives: we decide what the picture must be, skip the dots that feel slow, and draw lines God never numbered.

When I’ve used this picture in the classroom, that’s the moment the room goes quiet, because everyone has a stray line or two. So here is the good news, and it’s better than any paper puzzle. God doesn’t take the page away. He graciously lets you find the right dot and start again from there. And then He does something no crayon puzzle can do: He works even the stray lines into the picture.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415
Dot 45 of 415. This is the corner of a real dot-to-dot picture drawn for this course. Forty-five dots are connected. What is it? From here, you can't tell. You'll see more of this picture as the course goes on.

That last claim isn’t wishful thinking. Some of the stray lines on your page you drew yourself; some were drawn by other people. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, the straightest stray line in Genesis, and years later he told them, “As for you, you meant to harm me, but God intended it for a good purpose, so he could preserve the lives of many people, as you can see this day” (Genesis 50:20). The line wasn’t erased; it became part of the picture. That is Romans 8:28’s promise, and it’s why the Shaping section will ask you to look hard at your failures.

What I Am Not Saying

What I Am Saying

One more word about the picture itself. Every human being bears God’s image (Genesis 1:27), including your neighbor who has never opened a Bible. But Scripture says more of those in Christ: “we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand” (Ephesians 2:10). The image is God’s gift to every person. The composition, as Kingdom Essentials Session 8 showed, is His new work in you.

Proverbs has a verse that describes how the picture is uncovered:

“Counsel (עֵצָה) in a person’s heart is like deep water, but an understanding person draws it out.”

Proverbs 20:5

Word Study

עֵצָה ʿēṣâ H6098

“counsel” · Proverbs 20:5

Range. Counsel, advice; by extension, a plan or purpose. It can be the advice one person gives another, the plan a person forms for themselves, or God’s own settled purpose. The same word appears one chapter earlier: “There are many plans in a person’s mind, but it is the counsel of the Lord which will stand” (Proverbs 19:21).

The sense here. A person’s own plans and intentions, the purposes that actually govern them. The proverb’s point is where those purposes live. They are not on the surface, available to a quick glance. They lie “like deep water,” and they have to be drawn, the way water comes up from a deep well: by someone with understanding, patiently, a bucket at a time.

Why it carries the argument. The verse describes the work of this course exactly. You are not inventing a purpose, and you are not waiting for one to be dropped on you. You are drawing up what is already there, and that takes skill and time. Proverbs 19:21 adds the guardrail. Not every ʿēṣâ in a human heart is the ʿēṣâ of the Lord, and only His will stand. So what you draw up has to be tested against His counsel, which is why every step in this course is done in prayer. And it is a word the Greek translation of the Old Testament often rendered boulē, the word Luke used for the purpose David served.

Source. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.

Scripture’s clearest examples of purpose are not stories of instant clarity. They are stories of pictures revealed one dot at a time:

None of those delays were wasted. Each was a stretch of dots that made the rest of the picture possible.

Clinton found that the leaders who finish well understand this. The first of the seven lessons he drew from studying effective leaders reads simply:

“Effective leaders see present ministry in light of a life time perspective.”

J. Robert Clinton · “God’s Shaping Processes with Leaders,” Barnabas Publishers

In practical terms, there are twenty-one Discovery Steps in this course, and each asks you to do something. Think of each step as a few more dots. Give every step at least a day; some will take two or three, a few a week. In an actual group to work through these steps, the people who finished met weekly and kept one another moving, and they took three to five weeks. Working alone, plan on six to ten. The pace is yours, and no one will grade your answers, which means you have to know for yourself when a step is done. The end of this session shows you how.

Pause & Reflect

Where have you tried to skip ahead to the picture, deciding what your life must be about before God had shown you? What stray lines are on your page, and are you willing to let Him work them in?

Starting this at seventy — or at twenty?

The objection comes from both ends of life, and both deserve a real answer. At seventy it sounds like this: My working years are behind me. Purpose discovery is for people with decades ahead of them. At my age this is nostalgia, not direction. At twenty it sounds like this: I haven’t lived enough yet. My Shaping section will be three lines long. Anything I write now will be thin, or wrong.

To the older reader, Scripture’s answer is almost comically direct. Moses received his assignment at eighty. At eighty-five, Caleb stood before Joshua and said, “Today I am still as strong as when Moses sent me out… Now, assign me this hill country which the Lord promised me at that time!” (Joshua 14:11–12). He wasn’t asking for a quiet retirement. He was asking for the hill country with the fortified cities in it. Acts 13:36 says David died after he had served God’s purpose, not before, and not at a retirement age. If you are still here, your assignment is not finished. What’s more, your Shaping section will be the richest in any group working through this course. Clinton observed that the convergence of gift, experience and role often comes later in life. It comes later because it builds on everything that came before.

To the younger reader, the answer is the one God gave Jeremiah when he protested, “I am too young”: “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ But go to whomever I send you” (Jeremiah 1:6–7). Your Design and Affinity sections will be every bit as clear as anyone’s, because gifts, abilities and passions are present early. Your Shaping section will be shorter, and your final mission statement will be more provisional. That’s not a flaw in the statement. It’s an honest first draft, and you should plan to revisit it.

Where this stays unresolved. Scripture does not promise that every believer will see the full fruit of their purpose within their own lifetime. Hebrews 11 lists men and women who “all died in faith without receiving the things promised, but they saw them in the distance and welcomed them” (Hebrews 11:13). You can discover your purpose and serve it faithfully without ever seeing where it leads. The course can help you find the assignment. It can’t promise you the view.

The Turn

Everything above has been explanation. God takes pleasure in what He made, and that includes what He made you able to do and love. He has a settled purpose, a boulē, and He gives each generation’s servants their share of it. That share lies where your Design, Affinity and Shaping converge, and it lies deep, where it has to be drawn out slowly and tested against His counsel.

Now it becomes yours to act on. You can’t discover your purpose by reading about purpose. The rest of this course is built around twenty-one things you will actually do. Before you do the first, you need to know where you’re starting from, and you need to set up the rhythm that will carry you through the next several weeks. That’s what the rest of this session asks of you.

The Experience · Where You’re Starting

Find the paragraph you wrote at the end of Kingdom Essentials Session 8, if you wrote one. It answered a single question: Looking honestly at your actual life, what has God clearly been training you for? If you didn’t write it, or can’t find it, write it now. Give it one honest paragraph. Don’t write what would sound good read aloud; write what is actually true.

Then, underneath it, write three sentences, one for each lens. Each one is a guess, and that’s fine:

Date the page. Don’t polish it, and don’t show it to anyone yet. At Step 21, weeks from now, you’ll come back to this page and compare it with the mission statement you’ve written by then. For most people the comparison is the most encouraging moment in the course, because they can see how much was drawn up out of deep water in between.

Discovery Steps · Getting Ready

From here on, each session ends with Discovery Steps. Each step gives you five things: the prompt, stated as a question; exactly what to produce, such as a list of five, a sentence of twenty-five words, or a ranked three; a “You’re done when …” checklist; a surface answer next to a deep answer, so you can see the difference instead of guessing at it; and worked examples from real people who have done the step, used anonymously and with permission. There is no coach reviewing your work. The checklist is the coach. Don’t move on until you can honestly tick every box.

Get Ready · 1 Choose your Purpose Journal. Keep it electronically if you can: a single document or notes file, one place for all twenty-one steps. Every later summary step will ask you to reread earlier answers, and an electronic journal lets you copy and paste them into an AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT and the like) when you reach those summary steps and want help seeing the patterns across everything you’ve written. If you think better with a pen, write by hand and then type each finished answer into the document.

Get Ready · 2 Choose your time and place. Most steps need twenty to forty minutes of uninterrupted time, often on more than one day. Pick a regular time and a place where you won’t be interrupted, and put it on your calendar now.

Get Ready · 3 Name one witness. Choose one person who knows you well and will tell you the truth: a spouse, a close friend, a mentor. Several steps will ask you to check your answer with someone. Ask them now whether they’re willing. Even better, ask them, or one or two others, to take the journey with you, so you can encourage one another and listen together. People who work through these steps alongside someone else tend to keep going, and Session 2 will show you why it helps you hear.

Get Ready · 4 Complete The Experience above. Your seed paragraph and three sentences, dated, on the first page of your journal.

You’re ready for Session 2 when …

Big Ideas

  1. The things God built into you, including what you love and what you do well, are evidence about your purpose, not rivals of it.
  2. Every believer shares God’s general purpose. Each believer also has a specific share of it, a boulē served “in his own generation” (Acts 13:36).
  3. Your specific purpose lies where three things converge: your Design (hands), your Affinity (heart) and your Shaping (history).
  4. Your life is a masterpiece already drawn by the Creator and revealed one dot at a time. Skipping ahead draws stray lines, but God lets you restart on the right dot and works even the stray lines into the picture (Genesis 50:20; Romans 8:28).
  5. At seventy or at twenty, you are not too late and not too early. If you are still here, your assignment is not finished.

Kingdom Principle

You don’t invent your purpose. You draw out the one God already put there.

Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)

Father, You find pleasure in what You made, and You made me. Forgive me for every time I’ve treated what You built into me as a distraction from Your will. Your purpose is deep water, and I can’t draw it up by myself. Give me an understanding heart, patience for the slow work, and the honesty to test every plan in my heart against Your counsel, because only Yours will stand. I want to serve Your purpose in my generation. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Go Deeper

Accessible

Duncan Hamilton, For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey from Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr (2016). The real Liddell, beyond the film: China, Paris, Tianjin and Weihsien, and a life in which the speed and the calling were never in competition.

Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (1998). The best treatment of the difference between our shared calling to God and the particular callings He gives each of us, which this session could only sketch.

Substantial

J. Robert Clinton, The Making of a Leader (1988; rev. ed. 2012). The research behind this session’s “lifetime perspective” and “convergence,” and the most useful single companion to the Shaping section of this course.

Academic

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (2006). The full biblical theology of the boulē your personal purpose serves: God’s single mission, traced from Genesis to Revelation.

Leading This Session

This session is orientation, not encounter, so keep the group time practical. The two places groups predictably stall are the What About on personality tests, where someone who distrusts assessments will want to argue, and the timeline, where someone will ask whether they can do it faster. For the first, concede what the session concedes and point to the Unresolved note. For the second, say plainly that the steps can’t be compressed, but the group can agree on a shared pace, for example two steps a week, with each member free to go slower. Before people leave, have each one name their witness aloud to the person next to them. Group questions: What is your “but”? and Which of the three lenses — hands, heart, history — do you know least about yourself?

If you have questions or comments about this content, or about your personal situation, email us at feedback@thedisciplespath.com.

Session 1 · Kingdom Purpose

Made on Purpose

If God made you for something specific, how do you find out what it is?

He Also Made Me Fast

God takes pleasure in what He made. What you love and do well is evidence for your calling, not a rival to it.

The Question Everyone Asks

Everyone shares God’s general purpose. David served his specific share of God’s boulē “in his own generation.”

Hands, Heart, and History

Purpose lies where Design, Affinity and Shaping converge, as they did for Nehemiah.

One Dot at a Time

Your life is a masterpiece revealed one dot at a time. When you draw a stray line, God lets you restart, and works even that line into the picture.

So · Now

So

You don’t invent your purpose. You draw out the one God already put there.

Now

Set up your Purpose Journal, write your starting paragraph and three guesses, choose your time, and name your witness.

Discovery Steps · Getting Ready

Kingdom Principle

You don’t invent your purpose. You draw out the one God already put there.