Early in His ministry, Jesus came home to Nazareth and went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). The attendant handed Him the scroll of Isaiah. He unrolled it, found the place He was looking for, and read:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then He rolled up the scroll, handed it back and sat down, and “the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him.” His first words were a claim: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read” (4:20–21).
It was, in effect, a mission statement: who had sent Him, what He was anointed for, and for whom. And for the next three years His life matched it, line by line: the poor heard good news, captives were freed, blind men saw. On the night before He died, He could pray, “I glorified you on earth by completing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4).
You’ve spent weeks on your design, your heart and your story. Now it’s time to put them into one sentence.
So the question is:
In fifty words or less, what did God make you for?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You prepared good works for me before I was born, and You’ve been shaping me for them my whole life. Now help me say it. Give me words for what You made me for, words that are true, that need You, and that I can live by every day. Let my purpose statement be Yours before it’s mine. In Jesus’ name, amen.
You were saved by grace, not by your works, and you were saved for works that God prepared for you in advance. Your mission statement is your best attempt to name them.
Kingdom Essentials Session 8 studied one word in Ephesians 2:10: poiēma, God’s “workmanship.” This session looks at the word that follows it:
“For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast. For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works (ἔργοις) that God prepared beforehand so we may do them.”
Word Study
ἔργον ergon G2041
“works” · Ephesians 2:10
Range. Work, deed, act; also business, occupation, and the product of someone’s labor. Strong’s defines it as “toil (as an effort or occupation); by implication, an act.” Thayer gives three main senses: a business or employment, “that which occupies one’s attention”; “any product accomplished by hand, art, industry, or mind”; and “an act, deed, thing done.” It’s one of the most common nouns in the New Testament, occurring about 174 times.
The sense here. Specific deeds God has prepared in advance for His people to do. The verb that follows, proetoimazō (G4282), means to prepare ahead of time. And the Greek closes the verse with peripatēsōmen: literally, “that we should walk in them.” The NET’s “so we may do them” is accurate; the Greek adds the picture of a path.
Why it carries the argument. The same word appears one verse earlier: salvation is “not from works” (2:9). Then Paul turns around and says we were created “for good works” (2:10). Works can’t save you, and you weren’t saved to sit still. Jesus used the same word when He said He had completed “the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4), and Paul used it again when he promised that “the one who began a good work in you will perfect it” (Philippians 1:6). Your mission statement is an attempt to name the erga God has prepared for you, the path He means you to walk. In the language of this course, they’re the dots He numbered before you picked up the pencil.
Source. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
Those good works aren’t random. They’re your part of the oldest assignment in Scripture. God’s first words to humanity were a mission statement for the whole race: “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it!” (Genesis 1:28). Kingdom Essentials Session 1 called it the Garden Mandate, and it has never been withdrawn. Your personal mission is the particular piece of that mandate God has prepared for you: the corner of the earth, the people and the kind of fruitfulness He built you for.
Pause & Reflect
If God prepared good works for you before you were born, which of them do you think you’ve already been walking in?
A Kingdom mission statement isn’t a plan for self-fulfillment. It’s what’s left when you give your life to Jesus and He gives it back with a purpose attached.
Jesus was blunt about this: “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life because of me will find it” (Matthew 10:38–39). And again: “unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it produces much grain… If anyone wants to serve me, he must follow me, and where I am, my servant will be too. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him” (John 12:24, 26).
That’s the paradox at the heart of Step 21. Your mission statement describes you: your design, your heart, your story. But it isn’t for you. It’s the shape your life takes when you’ve laid it down. The kernel that dies produces much grain. And the servant who follows Jesus ends up where He is, honored by the Father.
We can drift through life, the victims of luck and circumstance, or chase our own agendas and desires. Or we can discover the purpose our Father determined before He created us and commit our lives and resources to it.
Nothing can satisfy a man or woman of God more than
discovering and fulfilling the purpose of God,
planned by the mind of God,
designed by the hand of God,
to accomplish the mission of God,
to the glory of God.
Your mission statement brings your three summary statements together into one sentence of fifty words or less. It usually begins, “My mission is to…”
Think of the three statements you’ve already written as three circles. Your Design statement (Step 6) says what you’re built to do. Your Affinity statement (Step 12) says for whom and where. Your Shaping statement (Step 20) says what your life has prepared you for. Your mission lives where the three overlap, the place Session 1 called the intersection of your hands, your heart and your history.
Here’s mine:
“My mission is to know God intimately, and to make Him known by writing and delivering the most effective discipleship content ever created.”
Dave Wessels · Author of this course
I know how that sounds. It’s a bold, aspirational statement, and it embarrasses me a little to read it to someone. That’s the point. Here are the tests I’d put any mission statement through:
Illustration
In an actual group that worked through these steps, twenty people began and seven wrote a mission statement. Watching how those seven got there is the best guide I know to this step.
One woman’s first draft had three parts. Her coach wrote back: “#1 could and should be said by every Christian. #2 and #3 focus on the idea of hope. I want you to look back at all of your responses to all of the prompts and synthesize them into a single statement that is unique to you.” Her final statement named exactly who she was for: “My mission is to walk with hurting women, to offer hope and compassion and to listen to them all the while pointing them to Christ.”
One man’s draft was already strong, and the coach pushed him to narrow it: “Is there an area of focus regarding bondage? Is it identity issues? past trauma? anything specific?” His final statement named it: “believers in bondage to the enemy’s lies about identity and authority.”
Two women were offered an AI-drafted version alongside their own. One read both and kept hers: “I LOVE MINE but REALLY appreciate seeing the ChatGPT version.” The other read both “over and over,” as the coach suggested, chose the AI’s draft, and marked it in her journal: “I like this one better.” Both were right, because both chose the one that resonated in their spirit, and both could say why. And one woman, finishing after years of wondering, added a single line under her statement: “It’s been a LONG time coming (to know with surety).”
Consider This
If you’ve kept your Purpose Journal electronically, an AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT or similar) can help you draft. Copy your three summary statements (Steps 6, 12 and 20), and paste them in after this prompt. You may also include your vision (Step 11) and your name (Step 19).
“I’m working through a discipleship course on discovering my God-given purpose. Below are three statements I’ve written: my Design (what I’m built to do), my Affinity (for whom and where I’m called), and my Shaping (what my life has prepared me for), plus my vision and the name I sense God has spoken over me. Please offer five different drafts of a mission statement of 50 words or less, each beginning ‘My mission is to…’. Each draft should clearly include something from all three statements. Make at least two of them bold enough that they would require God’s help to accomplish. Then tell me which words appear in all three of my statements. Don’t flatter me.”
As always, write your own draft first, and treat what comes back as a mirror, not a witness. The final statement has to be yours, prayed over and tested. An AI can help you find words; it can’t tell you whether they’re true. If you’re torn between your draft and an AI’s, do what one coach told a student: read both “over and over and determine which one (or edit as you see fit) resonates deeply with your soul.”
In Session 1 you saw forty-five dots of a picture and couldn’t tell what it was. In Session 8 you saw more than half, and may have started to guess. Here it is now:
You can see what it is now. The fruit isn’t finished, and there’s detail still to come, but nobody looking at this page would mistake it for anything else. That’s what writing your mission statement is like. You still don’t know every dot of your future. But you’ve connected enough of them, and stepped back far enough, to name what the picture is.
Your mission statement isn’t meant to be framed and forgotten. It’s a tool you can use every day to make decisions, reset your emotions, and remember who you are.
To make decisions. When an opportunity comes, ask, Does this serve my mission? A clear mission makes it easier to say yes to the right things and no to good things that aren’t yours. Clinton observed that for maturing leaders, “learning what not to do is as important as learning what to do.”
To reset your emotions. When you’re discouraged, criticized or overwhelmed, read your statement aloud. It reminds you that your worth isn’t on the line in today’s setback, and that God has a purpose that’s bigger than this week.
To remember who you are. Put it where you’ll see it: the first page of your journal, your phone’s lock screen, the mirror. Read it before you start work. Pray it back to God.
One woman in an actual group that worked through these steps did all three in a single message. Her statement, she wrote, “resonates to my soul. It definitely describes me so I printed it out and will hang it on my wall.” Then, in the very next sentence: “Now I need to figure out how to do this at my job.” That second sentence is what turns a plaque into a tool. Session 13 takes it from there.
Some readers will hesitate to write anything final, and the hesitation is reasonable. I’m going to change. My life will change. Five years from now I might be in a different job, a different city, a different season. Writing a mission statement now feels like setting in concrete something God may not be finished revealing. What if I get it wrong?
Much of that is simply true. You will change, and God isn’t finished revealing His purpose to you. This whole course has insisted that purpose is revealed dot by dot, not downloaded all at once. Clinton found that most leaders go through distinct phases, and that only in the last one, which he called convergence, does a leader’s role finally match their “gift-mix, experience, temperament, and so on.” He also observed that “not many leaders experience convergence.” Your statement at thirty and your statement at sixty may not read the same.
Here’s where I land, and why. I believe the core of a true mission statement rarely changes, while its expression often does. Paul is the clearest example I know.
I’d argue that Paul was the same man after the Damascus road as he was before it. Before, he was a zealot for his God, all in. “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my nation,” he wrote, “and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Galatians 1:14). He told a Jerusalem crowd that he had been “zealous for God just as all of you are today” (Acts 22:3). What changed on the road wasn’t his design or his passion. It was his understanding of who God is. His first words to the risen Christ were a question: “Who are you, Lord?” And the answer turned his world upside down: “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting!” (Acts 9:5).
The zeal that had driven him to persecute the church was sin, and he never pretended otherwise (Galatians 1:13). But the man was the same: the same mind, the same drive, the same all-in devotion. And Paul himself said that God had “set me apart from birth” (Galatians 1:15), long before he knew Jesus. What followed Damascus was reshaping: blindness, years of obscurity, and the slow redirection of everything God had built into him. His calling was stated within days: he was God’s “chosen instrument to carry my name before Gentiles and kings and the people of Israel” (Acts 9:15). The where and how changed many times, from Damascus to Antioch to Rome, but the what never did.
That’s why I don’t think you need to fear change. If your statement changes in five years, it will most likely be because God has sharpened it, not because He has thrown it away. You’ll be the same person, with the same design and the same heart, understanding God a little better and reshaped a little more.
So write the best statement you can today, and date it. Then revisit it once a year. You’ll be surprised how often the core holds.
Everything above has been explanation. You weren’t saved by good works, but you were saved for them, and God prepared them in advance for you to walk in. Your mission is your piece of the Garden Mandate, found by losing your life to Jesus, not by building it for yourself. A true mission statement embarrasses you a little, requires God, drives you toward Him, resonates with your spirit and is recognized by the people who know you. And it’s a tool for every day, not a plaque for the wall.
Now you write it.
Take a fresh page. Near the top, write your Design statement. Below it, your Affinity statement. Below that, your Shaping statement. Leave the bottom third of the page blank.
Now read the three slowly, out loud. Circle every word or idea that appears in more than one statement. Underline the single most important word in each. Then look at what you’ve marked, and ask the Holy Spirit, What sentence holds all of this? Write whatever comes in the blank space at the bottom, without polishing it. That’s your first draft.
Then find the paragraph you wrote at the beginning of Session 1, your first guess at your purpose. Put it beside your draft. Notice what has changed, and what hasn’t.
Discovery Step · Step 21
Use the Listening Rhythm: ask to be searched; do the work; sit with it; test it with the witnesses; sleep on it. This step deserves all five, more than once.
Step 21 · My Purpose
The prompt. In 50 words or less, write a mission statement that encapsulates your Design (Step 6), your Affinity (Step 12) and your Shaping (Step 20).
What to do. Start with The Experience. Write at least three drafts, each beginning “My mission is to…”. If you like, use the AI prompt in Consider This, then rewrite in your own words. Put your best draft through the seven tests in Writing Your Statement. Read it aloud to your witness and ask two questions: “Is this me?” and “Is it big enough?” Sleep on it at least two nights. Then compare it with the paragraph you wrote in Session 1, and write one sentence about what God has shown you between the two.
What to produce. One mission statement, 50 words or less, beginning “My mission is to…”, dated. Beneath it, one sentence comparing it with your Session 1 paragraph.
Surface answer: “My mission is to serve God and help others.” (Every believer’s mission, in words that could belong to anyone and need no one’s help to accomplish.) A real near miss from an actual group: “I believe God created me to love and encourage others, using my life experiences… to shape my faith and compassion.” Her coach’s question was the right one: “Is this statement unique to you, or could it fit a thousand other people?”
Deep answer: “My mission is to know Jesus deeply and to build communities where young adults who have walked away from faith find their way home: listening to their stories, teaching Scripture in plain language, and walking with them until they lead others. Only God can do this through me.”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least three days. This is the payoff of the whole course. Don’t rush it.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
God prepared good works for you before you were born; your mission is to name them, and then walk in them.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, thank You for preparing good works for me before I was born, and for shaping me all my life to walk in them. Here is my mission. I give it to You. Make it bigger than I am, so that I’ll always need You. Let me use it every day, to choose well, to stand firm and to remember who I am. And one day, let me say with Jesus that I’ve completed the work You gave me to do. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance (1994). A businessman’s account of stepping back at midlife to ask what his life was for, and of writing his own mission. Especially helpful if you’re finishing this course in the second half of life.
Substantial
Gordon T. Smith, Courage and Calling: Embracing Your God-Given Potential (1999; rev. ed. 2011). A wise, pastoral guide to discerning vocation across the seasons of life, including how a calling is refined and restated over time.
Academic
Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (1991). A theologian’s case for understanding work through the gifts of the Spirit rather than a single lifelong “calling.” Read it alongside this session’s What About.
Leading This Session
This is the session people have been waiting for, and some will arrive with a polished statement while others arrive with nothing. Make room for both. Give the group time to do The Experience together, in silence, and then invite anyone who is willing to read a first draft aloud, with no critique from the group, only the question, “What did you hear?” Watch for two opposite errors: statements so general they could belong to anyone, and statements so detailed they’re job descriptions. The seven tests are your tool for both. If someone isn’t ready, remind them that the pace is theirs. The coach in an actual group that worked through these steps had two moves that did most of the work: narrow it (“Is there an area of focus?”) and test it against a crowd (“Could it fit a thousand other people?”). His closing question was always the same: “When you read it over and over, does it resonate? Do you find yourself saying, that’s me?” Group questions: What word appears in all three of your statements? and What does your statement need God for?
If you have questions or comments about this content, or about your personal situation, email us at feedback@thedisciplespath.com.
Next: Session 13, Living on Purpose, asks the question that comes after the statement: now that you know what you’re for, how do you live it for the rest of your life?
Session 12 · Kingdom Purpose
Your Purpose
In fifty words or less, what did God make you for?
Made for Good Works
Not saved by works, but for them: works God prepared for you to walk in.
Losing Your Life to Find It
A Kingdom mission is what’s left when you give your life to Jesus.
Writing Your Statement
Design, Affinity and Shaping in one sentence. Test it, date it, use it every day.
So · Now
God prepared good works for you before you were born; your mission is to name them, and then walk in them.
Put your three statements on one page, then complete Step 21: your mission statement.
Discovery Step · Step 21
Kingdom Principle
God prepared good works for you before you were born; your mission is to name them, and then walk in them.