Uniquely Crafted for Divine Purpose and Service

"To be made for more means that God has created you uniquely for his purposes. That means your life has divine meaning. It has purpose. It has value. And not one of us is here by accident. And all of us have been fearfully and wonderfully made for something greater than ourselves. And that is the will of God." [00:37:40] (22 seconds)


"For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of yourself. It is the gift of God, not by work, so that no one can boast. For we are God's handiwork. Some translations say workmanship. We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God has prepared in advance for us to do. This passage reminds us that our salvation and our missional purpose, the reason that God has called us to live, is tied together in grace." [00:40:41] (30 seconds)


"It emphatically means that on the day that you put your faith in him and you trusted Christ your Savior, God put forth his powerful and created effort to make you a new creation. 2 Corinthians 5 .17 says, If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Brand new. The old is gone. Behold, all things become new. And in this passage, what we learn is that once we're made a new creation, he calls us to become this masterpiece, this piece of art that's put on display for everyone to see because your life is intended to point people to Jesus." [00:41:57] (40 seconds)


"Everyone saw the transformation in Joe's life. Well, one day, the the director of the mission was given an evangelistic message. And this guy hears it. And he comes running to the altar. And he lays in the altar. And he's literally screaming and wailing and crying at the same time. Lord, forgive me. Make me like Joe. Lord, forgive me. Make me like Joe. To which the director was kind of confused. He knelt down. He goes, don't you mean make me like Jesus? And he says, is he anything like Joe? Why? Because Joe was saved by grace. And he served God by grace." [00:43:49] (40 seconds)


"I believe what this means is that God created us to be contributors, not consumers, givers, not takers. I think that we were created with the purpose of making a difference. It doesn't matter how long you live, but how you live. It's not the duration of your life that matters. It's the donation of your life that matters. But the problem is too many of us are living without a sense of God's purpose because we've learned to live independently." [00:45:29] (26 seconds)


"And to me it fit right into what we're talking about today because in order to plug into God's will and discover God's will and live God's will, it requires a daily minute by minute decision to say, God, I want your will. Not mine. It's my will. We talked about this last week. We come to this fork in the road many, many times a day that we can do what we want to do or what someone else wants to do or we can do what God wants us to do. And every time we hit that crossroad, it determines whether or not we're going to participate in God's will or just live in his permissive will." [00:46:34] (33 seconds)


"People don't drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people don't gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise, and we call it tolerance. We drift toward disobedience and call it freedom. We drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation. We slouch towards prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking that we have escaped legalism. We slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves that we have been liberated. That's powerful." [00:47:39] (43 seconds)


"It requires effort to move upstream against the flow, against the current. Spiritually speaking, as it relates to God's will in our life, nothing is required to drift downstream toward the world. But great grace-given effort is required if we're going to move upstream towards God and his word and his will. It requires your effort. It requires your surrender. What that means, it means day by day, minute by minute, we have to decide if we truly want to experience and live in God's will, or if we're just content going with the flow." [00:49:18] (43 seconds)


"But here's what you want. You can't miss this. Make no mistake. From the very beginning, God said, those who put their faith in me, I have a plan for them, and that is I want to use their life to be put on display for others to see and experience God. So, you were saved for God's service. You were determined to make a difference. And then finally, you were gifted by God's grace. Now, in the next two weeks, I'm going to go into much greater detail about this. So today, I just want to kind of overview." [00:50:38] (35 seconds)


"How God has wired you and what he's allowed to occur in your life define and guide your calling, not just the good things, but even some difficult things. There was a woman that used to be a member of our church. She's, since moved on, but when she was very young, she had an abortion. Once she repented and got right with God, and she realized what it was, she spent the rest of her life running a ministry that ministered to women who found themselves in a very similar situation, trying to help them to rescue those children and to rescue those families." [00:56:16] (43 seconds)


"Because every one of you, including myself, if you have come to know Christ as your savior, he has a calling on your life to serve him. And your job is to find it, plug into it, and then allow God to work in and through you in an amazing way, immeasurably more than you can ever ask or imagine. And with that said, let me just say this. You can say, God, I want to know it and I want to start doing it. Or you can say, you know what, God, let's let someone else do it." [00:57:05] (40 seconds)