What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (5 page)

Our primary purpose in life must exceed temporary attainments, goals, and dreams. There must be a dream that is unbreakable and inexhaustible, yet attainable. It is a dream that is transcendent and makes us who possess it people the world rarely sees or understands. We become like strangers or pilgrims in this life, pressing on toward a goal that is progressively attained and eternally expanding. We must have an untouchable dream that will not be fully attained in this life in order to find eternal meaning. Because time is motion and life continually moves forward, toward something, we must have something in front of us, else we will be aimless—and aimlessness leads to despair.

The law of time cannot changed, and time demands we move forward. This means that the purpose of life must be rooted in something that moves forward and is so vast that it has no end. An unending goal that is attained a little at a time will be the life dream that sustains you both now and forever.

A
UDIENCE OF
O
NE

This dream is found in the eyes of the “Audience of One.” In our quest for meaning we must find it in Jesus’s eyes, confident that He is watching us and that what we do matters, because it is before Him and not before the changing opinion of man.

Men love you one minute and ridicule you the next. One year you’re cool, and the next you’re outdated and old. One season you are successful, and the next you are a failure. This is true in finances, relationships, ministry, impact, influence; everything in life is on a quick fade.

We cannot anchor our desire for meaning in these things, because it would be like chasing the wind. Though these things are important and relevant, they are secondary and not the anchor of our lives. When we live before His eyes and seek to be pleasing to Him, above all else, then everything we do in life has meaning and eternal significance. We will live knowing He sees, remembers, and rewards. This is the power of our lives.

E
VERYBODY
D
IES

It is appointed for men to die once, but after this, the judgment.

—H
EBREWS
9:27

Everybody dies. There’s no way around it. When we die, we will stand before our Creator at the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10). This is the place where we are evaluated and rewarded by Jesus in the age to come. It is a picture similar to the top athletes standing at the Olympic podium where the medals are given. It is appointed that at the end we stand before the author of our lives. Only He can tell us we “hit the mark.” He is able to be the evaluator of our lives, because He is the Creator, the one who holds the blueprints of humanity. Only He has the standard by which we can be measured. He is also a man who walked on the earth, showing us how to be human. He was tested in all the ways we are and is acquainted with our suffering (Heb. 4:15). He is fully God and fully man, the only person who can judge us in perfect justice and truth. We cannot evaluate one another and conclude that we are successful or not.

The greatest appointment of my life is yet in the future. It is the day I stand before Jesus, the great evaluator of my life. I will stand before one man, and I will have a conversation. My entire life comes down to what He thinks about me. My entire purpose lies in pleasing Him (2 Cor. 5:9–10).

Life is a vapor; it passes quickly like the steam from a boiling pot. At best we have seventy to one hundred years, but we are not even guaranteed that long to prepare for the one conversation that matters most. There is only one appointment where we are told whether our lives were wasted or if we fulfilled our purpose. It doesn’t make sense to ignore the one man we will stand before who has the full power to evaluate our lives. It makes no sense to ignore that or to pretend and assume that day will just somehow go away. It will not go away. None of us will miss that appointment. We may miss many appointments, but we will not miss that one, I assure you.

Jesus is not only truthful, but also He is truth (John 14:6). When we are in the presence of truth incarnate, the truth about us will come to the light. It is impossible to trick Jesus or to be fake and unauthentic before His eyes. He sees right through all of our rhetoric, religiosity, and manipulation. You cannot convince Him you are something you are not. He sees and He knows.

I am not interested in what men define as the meaning of life. All that matters is how Jesus defines purpose. If the entire world applauded me, thought I was noble, and praised me saying I was a picture of what a human should be, it would mean nothing, absolutely nothing, if Jesus did not agree. When I stand before Jesus, it will be just Him and me. No one will be there to tell Him how great I am, how many records I sold, or the numbers of people I impacted. No one will be there to tell Him how bad I am and the sins I have committed. In that day what is true will be seen.

The most important thing about my life is what Jesus is thinking. Whatever He is thinking, in that moment I stand before Him, is the most important thing about my life, even right now. When I stand before the Lord, He is going to ask me about how big my heart was in responsiveness to Him. That is what matters.

O
UR
A
MBITION TO
P
LEASE
H
IM

The apostle Paul was preoccupied with Jesus’s evaluation of him. It is what drove Paul and motivated him to run the race with endurance. This is also what should make us unwavering in every life circumstance.

In 2 Corinthians 5:9 Paul said, “We also have as our ambition . . . to be pleasing to Him” (nas). We want Him pleased because He is Creator. We were created for His pleasure, and we will never be satisfied until we satisfy Him. He is also judge, and we want to please Him because only He can evaluate the worth of our lives and therefore give us meaning. We are motivated by worth.

The greatest fear I have is to be worthless. To have no purpose and meaning is the absolute terror of my life. My worth is found in Jesus’s eyes and in His evaluation of me. My worth is defined there and there alone.

Paul said it clearly, “We make it our aim . . . to be well-pleasing to Him.” There was a moment in Paul’s life where he consciously determined this would be the primary dream of his life. He determined this would be the supreme preoccupation of his life, walking with the Lord and living his entire life to be well pleasing to Him. To “make it his aim” means it is the primary reason for why he had life on the earth. He is not saying, “I made this one of my top ten things on my to-do list.” No, this was the primary ambition of his life.

We have many dreams in our heart that are biblical and of God. We have dreams related to ministry, money, marriage, health, and impacting others. We have dreams and promises related to these very important subjects. They are biblical, and they are important to God, but they must be of secondary importance to this one, primary aim.

Nobody can make this your aim. It must be your choice. This is why it is powerful to the heart of God, because it is voluntary, and therefore it is love. You can be saved without setting your heart to live in extravagance before His eyes. There are many people who know Jesus as Savior and will be in heaven, but they lived their lives without giving much further thought to Him. They are saved and please Him in the sense that they have the free gift of righteousness, but there is another element of pleasing Him that comes when we set our hearts to live wholeheartedly before Him. This is what Paul was talking about. Once you determine this is your primary life dream, if you are like me, you have to make it your aim and reestablish it, realigning yourself over and over again.

I will realign myself to this many more times, because it is the nature of our weakness to get disoriented and distracted from this aim. Over and over I stop and realign my heart to make this the primary ambition of my life. It is the unbreakable dream. When you picture your future, don’t just picture yourself in love with a happy family, lots of money, and lots of friends—the typical American dream. These are good things, but there is more to your life than this. When you think of twenty or thirty years from now, do you have a dream to be walking in a way, in both heart and action, that is pleasing in God’s sight? Do you know what it is to please Him, and have you determined in your heart to do it? This is the primary picture you should have of your life when you think about your future. Yes, money, relationships, family, and ministry are valid desires in the will of God, but there is a bigger definition of success that is beyond these things.

W
E
A
RE
W
ELL
K
NOWN TO THE
L
ORD

Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God.

—2 C
ORINTHIANS
5:11

Paul not only understood he had a great appointment; he also understood that the judge, the one evaluating him, was deeply invested and engaged with the details of his life. If we know Jesus is engaged and cares about the efforts we are making that nobody else cares about . . . if we know He sees the small acts of obedience . . . if we believe we are well known to Him, that He really cares about these things and remembers them, writes them in His books and rewards us forever, then our lives change. If we know we have an appointment to stand before our Creator and the Creator Himself knows even the intricacies of our lives and what we do matters to Him, then we have purpose. Jesus is the One who searches the heart and the mind (Rev. 2:23).

King David said God fashioned our hearts individually and He considers our works (Ps. 33:15). This means He sees what we are doing and actually thinks about it and ponders it. David also wrote of how God searched him and knew him (Ps. 139:1). This was the power driving David’s life. Like Paul, he knew God knew him well and was paying attention. This is a stunning reality to those who believe it.

T
HE
G
REAT
E
QUALIZER

The exciting thing is no matter the size of your natural talents or your station in life, the judgment seat of Christ is the great equalizer, because our responsiveness to God is what He measures us by. He does not measure how big your ministry is or how big your bank account is. He doesn’t even measure how many people you are able to impact. He measures the size of your heart. This is the true measure of a man.

Someone could be far more gifted and impact many more people than you, but if your responsiveness is the same, you get the same reward. To be rewarded means there is an appointed day in history when Jesus wants to communicate openly to you, and to others, how He feels about the way you loved Him. He wants to express it openly.

What a tragedy it would be on that day for Him to have little to say about the way I lived on the earth. When we have the confidence that He is attentive and remembers even the smallest words spoken and rewards the smallest reach toward Him, this is faith. When we believe Jesus, as Creator, is this attentive and this eager, we will want to please Him. Our purpose is found in His eyes.

L
OCKED
G
AZE

I remember when this “locked gaze” became a living reality to me. After a yearlong battle with cancer and a lifelong wrestle with truth, I was more determined than ever to figure out what Jesus wanted from me. I was more aware than ever that life was short and I would die and face Him soon. I became consumed with thoughts of eternity, and small things became small while big things became big. My entire worldview started to change as I pondered eternity, the frailty of life, and the day that I would stand in front of Jesus for His evaluation of me.

It was at this time that the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri, started. I was one of the first interns, and I jumped right into day and night prayer, because I was eager to know God. I felt this was the ideal environment for me to pursue Him. Words are not sufficient to describe the transformation that took place in me as I stood before the Lord day and night. IHOP-KC was small, and we were keeping perpetual prayer with worship going in these small trailers with only a handful of people. It seemed really weak and fragile, yet it was where I found the gaze of Jesus.

Formed and fashioned in the early days of the house of prayer, I did not consider myself a real singer or musician. I knew only a few chords on the piano and only a few songs. Yet because prayer and worship had to go on continually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I could not stop. I ended up singing and leading for six or eight hours in a day. I would sing for two hours, sit down and read the Bible for two hours, then sing again.

The prayer room was mostly empty, and the music was mostly bad. It seemed small and insignificant. I also cleaned the building as part of my job, and I was the “copy girl” who made copies for everyone. I would clean and make copies, then go back to singing and reading. This was my life for the first few years of IHOP-KC, and I worked the muscle of faith over and over and over. I knew this was the will of God for my life at that time.

There were times I felt like I was wasting my life, but I knew I was in His will. I cannot tell you how many times I asked myself, “Why are you doing this? Sitting in a room, telling God what He tells you to tell Him? You are wasting your time. What are you doing? You could have changed the world. You could have done great things. Why are you sitting in a room talking to an invisible person?”

Again and again I would have this dialogue with myself. I would answer my frantic fear of wasting my life by telling myself that He was watching me and that this is what He had asked me to do at this time in my life. So day and night I would offer my gaze back to Him, even though it was through a dim glass and at times it was shaky.

Over time faith grew in my heart. I was coming in contact with God. For the first time in my life I was really interacting with Him and knowing Him experientially, as well as knowing Him through the renewing of my mind. My inner man was being recoded as my desires were changing, and I was being transformed into His image the more I beheld Him (2 Cor. 3:18). I was so weak, and I failed often. There were times I was bored and irritated that I had so much to offer God and all He had asked me to do was pray and serve. I thought, “I could have changed the world, but You want me to sit here and tell You what You already know?” It was not always easy, and there wasn’t perpetual bliss, but little by little my cold heart was melting and the seeds of faith were growing as my perspective of God and life started to change. I was transferring my primary life dream from what I could do to what I wanted to become. I was changing what drove me from impact to intimacy, and I was getting caught up in a burning desire to please Him as the primary purpose of my life. I definitely do not think it is God’s will for everyone to join a day and night prayer ministry, but it is His will for everyone to live before His eyes.