Living on Purpose

The Question

Session 1 opened with the Eric Liddell of the movies: the sprinter on a hillside above Edinburgh, saying, “when I run I feel His pleasure.” Here is how the real Eric Liddell’s story ended.

The year after he won Olympic gold in Paris, Liddell went to China as a missionary, back to the country where he’d been born. He taught mathematics and science at a school for Chinese boys in Tianjin and coached them in athletics. In 1941 he moved to a poor rural mission station to work alongside his brother, a doctor. When Japanese forces advanced, he was interned with other foreigners at the Weihsien camp, in 1943. There, though he was separated from his wife and daughters, he taught Bible classes, organized games for the camp’s restless teenagers, and poured himself into the people around him. A fellow prisoner remembered him as “absorbed, weary and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the imagination of these penned-up youths.”

He died in the camp on 21 February 1945, of a brain tumor made worse by overwork and hunger. He was forty-three. His last words, as they were reported, were “It’s complete surrender.”

The film made him famous for a race. His life is remembered for how he finished.

So the question is:

Now that you know what you’re for, how will you live it for the rest of your life?

Consecrate Yourselves

Living your purpose begins with consecration: setting yourself apart for God and for the assignment He has given you.

Israel spent forty years in the wilderness before they stood on the bank of the Jordan, looking at the land God had promised them. The river was at flood stage (Joshua 3:15). Before God did anything, Joshua gave the people one instruction:

The New Testament puts consecration in the language of worship: “Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God – which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1). A living sacrifice isn’t offered once. It’s offered every morning. Consecrating your mission isn’t a single ceremony; it’s a decision you’ll renew for the rest of your life. But it has to start somewhere, and The Experience in this session is where it starts.

Little by Little

God rarely fulfills a mission all at once. He does it little by little, because that’s how He builds the capacity to carry it.

Before Israel ever reached the Jordan, God told them how the conquest would go: “Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you become fruitful and inherit the land” (Exodus 23:30). Moses repeated it forty years later: “He, the God who leads you, will expel the nations little by little. You will not be allowed to destroy them all at once lest the wild animals overrun you” (Deuteronomy 7:22). God wasn’t being slow. He was being wise. Too much land too soon would have been more than Israel could hold.

Proverbs applies the same principle to every resource God gives: “Wealth gained quickly will dwindle away, but the one who gathers it little by little will become rich” (Proverbs 13:11). If God gave you your whole mission at once, the weight of it would crush you. So He gives it to you a field at a time, a step at a time, a dot at a time. In Session 1 you read that purpose is a crockpot, not a microwave. It’s lived the same way it was discovered.

This is why Session 9’s principle matters so much now: “The one who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10). The next step of your mission is almost always small. It may be one conversation, one class, one phone call, one prayer over your workplace. Take it. Then take the next one.

One woman in an actual group that worked through these steps found her next step in the same breath as her mission statement. She had printed it out to hang on her wall, she wrote, and then: “Now I need to figure out how to do this at my job.” That’s exactly the right question, and it’s a little-by-little question. Nobody figures out how to live a mission at their job in a day. You figure out what it means on Monday, and then on Tuesday.

Telling Your God Story

What God has done for you during this course is a story worth telling, and telling it is part of living on purpose.

Kingdom Essentials Session 26 studied why testimony matters so much in Scripture: “the testimony about Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10). Psalm 78 shows what happens when God’s people stop telling their stories. The psalmist promises, “We will tell the next generation about the Lord’s praiseworthy acts, about his strength and the amazing things he has done” (78:4), so that they “will not forget the works of God” (78:7). And then he tells how Israel failed: “They forgot what he had done, the amazing things he had shown them” (78:11). “They did not remember what he had done, how he delivered them from the enemy” (78:42).

In Session 8 you set up memorial stones for the turning points in your life. This course has been one of those turning points. The psalmist wrote, literally, “I have inherited your testimonies forever, for they are the joy of my heart” (Psalm 119:111; the NET renders it, “I claim your rules as my permanent possession, for they give me joy”). The things God has said and done are an inheritance to claim, and to pass on.

Your God Story is short: two or three minutes. It has three parts:

• The drama: where you were when you started this course, and what you thought about your purpose then. (Your Session 1 paragraph will help. So will the places you stalled. In an actual group that worked through these steps, one man spent two years watching doors close on work he believed God had promised him, and wondered whether he’d made it up. A story like that is the drama.)
• But God! What He did and showed you along the way: the step that surprised you, the witness who saw something you didn’t, the name, the promise, the moment something rang true. (One woman in that group put her “But God!” in a single line under her finished statement: “It’s been a LONG time coming (to know with surety).”)
• Now: your mission statement, and one thing you’re going to do about it.

Then tell it to someone. Tell it to your witness, your small group, your family or a friend who doesn’t yet know Jesus. A story told is a stone set up by the river, and someone will ask what it means.

Finishing Well

A purpose isn’t fulfilled at the start line. It’s fulfilled at the finish, and finishing well is not automatic.

J. Robert Clinton spent years studying the lives of leaders in Scripture, and he found a sobering pattern:

Most of the leaders Scripture describes didn’t finish as well as they started. That isn’t a reason for fear, but it’s a reason for attention. Paul, near the end of his life, could say, “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith!” (2 Timothy 4:7). Years earlier he had told the Ephesian elders what he was aiming at: “I do not consider my life worth anything to myself, so that I may finish my task and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus” (Acts 20:24). His whole life was bent toward the finish.

You studied David’s epitaph in Session 1: “David, after he had served God’s purpose in his own generation, died” (Acts 13:36). That’s the goal. Not fame, not a large ministry, but serving God’s boulē in your own generation, all the way to the end. Hebrews tells us how: “we must get rid of every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and run with endurance the race set out for us, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus” (Hebrews 12:1–2).

What About … Isn’t living for rewards just a mercenary faith?

Some readers will be uncomfortable with the idea that God rewards faithfulness, and the objection is worth stating plainly. We’re saved by grace, not by works. Shouldn’t we serve God because we love Him, not for what we’ll get? Talking about rewards turns the Christian life into a transaction: do this, get that. It sounds like the prosperity gospel with a longer time horizon.

Much of that is right. Salvation is by grace alone, “not from works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:9). Love for God, not a payoff, is the right motive for serving Him. And some teaching on rewards really has turned faith into a transaction.

But Scripture speaks about rewards far too often to ignore them. “The one who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). Paul wrote that “each will receive his reward according to his work” (1 Corinthians 3:8), and that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be paid back according to what he has done while in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10). He describes believers’ work being tested by fire: “If what someone has built survives, he will receive a reward. If someone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss. He himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:14–15). Notice that last sentence. The reward is at stake, not the salvation. Grace saves; faithfulness is rewarded.

And the rewards aren’t only in eternity. Jesus promised that no one who leaves home, family or fields for His sake “will not receive in this age a hundred times as much – homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, fields, all with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30). The purpose-filled life is rewarding now, persecutions included, and it’s rewarded later.

Here’s where I land, and why. C. S. Lewis made the distinction that helps most, in his sermon The Weight of Glory. A man who marries a woman for her money is mercenary, he said; a man who marries for love and wants marriage as the reward of his love is not. The reward isn’t tacked on to the activity; it’s the activity itself brought to completion. The reward for living your purpose is, finally, more of God: hearing “Well done” from the One you’ve been serving (Matthew 25:21). Wanting that isn’t mercenary. Lewis’s complaint was that we want it too little:

The Finished Picture

Here is the picture you’ve been watching since Session 1, with every dot connected, and colored in for the first time:

Now you can see it: a tree planted by streams of water, with fruit in its branches. You’ve read the verse this picture comes from:

The lines are your shaping: the path your life has taken, dot by dot, including the stray lines God worked in. The colors are your design: the “many-colored” grace of 1 Peter 4:10 and the embroidered threads of Psalm 139:15, the palette God chose for you. The intensity is your heart: where the color runs deepest. And the richest color is in the fruit, because fruit is the point. The tree is planted by the streams so that it will bear fruit “at the proper time.”

One reminder from Session 5 belongs here. Deeper color marks where a picture is concentrated, not how much it’s worth. The tree’s roots are no less part of the picture than its fruit.

This page is finished. Your life isn’t. The picture God is drawing with your life has millions of dots, and most of them are still ahead of you. But you know now what He’s drawing. Keep connecting them, one at a time, with Him. “The one who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6).

The Turn

Everything above has been explanation. Living on purpose begins with consecration: setting yourself apart before you’ve seen the miracle, as Israel did at the Jordan. God fulfills your mission little by little, building the capacity to carry it. Your God Story is a memorial stone worth telling. Finishing well is the goal, and it takes attention. And God rewards faithfulness, in this age and the next, with more of Himself.

The course is finished. The journey isn’t. Now you consecrate your mission, and tell your story.

The Experience · Consecration

Take the page where you wrote your mission statement. Beneath it, write a short prayer of consecration in your own words. You might include:

• thanks for what God has shown you through this course;
• your mission statement, offered back to Him;
• anything you’re setting aside so that you’re ready for what He wants to do;
• a request for help to finish well.

Then read it aloud, sign it, and date it.

If you can, do this with your witness, or with a pastor or a few mature believers. Ask them to pray over you and your mission. Paul reminded Timothy that his gift had been “confirmed by prophetic words when the elders laid hands on” him (1 Timothy 4:14). There’s something powerful about being sent out by people who know you.