The world is brimming with distractions. Career advancements with better pay and more hours. Friends and family who keep you busy with new reasons to celebrate. The wave of voices coming from our phones telling us what we want to hear. How do we remember our purpose in it all? Better yet how do we not lose our purpose in it all?
What is our purpose?
We would venture to say our purpose is the greatest commandments given by Jesus when he walked this earth:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39).
The Lord our God brought us from death to life. He loved us so we could love Him (1 John 4:19). We will spend this life with God working out His love for us and our love for Him only to find that the whole matter is incomprehensible on this side of heaven.
Loving our neighbor is more tangible, and only possible, because of Christ’s love for us and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit inside of us.
His love propels us into relationships with other messy, hurtful, pain-ridden human beings. It’s because of Jesus’ sacrifice that reminds us that we aren’t to hold our love back from others because Christ Himself didn’t hold back His love from us.
But we do. Often. We hear the prompting of the Holy Spirit to demonstrate love, to testify to the story of our redemption – going from darkness to light – and then we don’t. We stay quiet. We don’t obey the command to love.
And why?
We fear our reputation, our performance, the confrontation that may take place. So we stop loving God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, a God who wants us to love others as ourselves. We ourselves as believers, long for the hope of Jesus. To love others as ourselves means to share the hope of Jesus with our neighbors.
We desire to live eternally in the presence of Jesus because we know the alternative is real. The alternative is darkness, hopelessness, and our holy, good, and loving Father is nowhere to be seen. He cannot dwell in the presence of the unrighteous and, without Jesus, that is exactly what we are.
Our purpose is to love others as ourselves by bringing them to Jesus. We don’t lose our purpose in the chaos of this world because we know what’s at stake. The souls of fellow image bearers handmade by the Creator are waiting to encounter Jesus. Let’s make the introduction.