Connect with God and Your Purpose Through His Story

I have started to notice a frequent struggle people process, it seems regardless of age. And this struggle is a mixture of two things. 

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One is a lack of clarity about their purpose in life and what they’re doing.

This struggle doesn’t manifest itself the same way as it did maybe ten or twenty years ago. It’s somewhat different because we’re a bit on the tail end of a movement that was all about figuring out your passion. What are your dreams and your goals? Some of us have done that and explored that. We’ve done all the spiritual gift profiling and all the personality testing like the Enneagram and the Myers Briggs, you know, the one with all the different letters.

We’ve done all of that. And that’s all great. But for some, it doesn’t really help them understand their purpose. 

Others don’t even know what their passions are. 

Maybe you’re 18, mid 20s or 30s, and you have a desire to follow Jesus.

You don’t really know what your purpose in life is. You have a job, but don’t know exactly how that is particularly participating in the work of Jesus. 

Or maybe you don’t necessarily enjoy your job but you don’t really know what else you’d do. 

There’s a whole bunch of stuff you could be wrestling with. It could be a season of disillusionment. However, I don’t want to paint a super dark picture because I think a lot of people are going through life just fine. 

Maybe it’s that you don’t sense a deeper purpose that transcends everything you do. And for the most part that’s fine. That’s okay. You’ve got good friends and a good church community, but there is this longing to know more. You desire to know what else you can do and offer the world.

On one hand I’m painting this picture of people who want something like, “What is my purpose in life?” And they want more than “Pursue your dreams and passions” as an answer. They are tired of personality tests. As helpful as those are sometimes, we can create these boxes that hinder us.

And some of us don’t know what our dreams are. Or, we dream of doing all kinds of things. And that creates confusion. Or we can do these profiles and testing, and then we end up arguing with the profile and test. We argue that it doesn’t really describe us. 

Not to mention the question of whether or not we should just limit ourselves to whatever some test says or whatever our dreams are. What if God wants us to do something that we’re not necessarily dreaming about right now? 

So, on one hand people are wrestling with a sense of purpose. On the other hand, some people feel longing for something more in their faith. 

We live in a day and age where there’s a lot of Christians who want more in their faith experience. They want a good and meaningful relationship with Jesus, but they’re struggling. 

Maybe it has to do with things that have happened in life. Maybe it has to do with tragedies that have taken place, painful losses that have happened, whether that’s someone dying or maybe it’s a loss of a relationship. Or church trauma or familial trauma.  

I don’t think it necessarily has to be a negative thing that causes us to want more and to kind of be struggling in our relationship with God.

Sometimes it’s just that we don’t feel close to God. 

Some of us may have particular sins that we can point to, like pornography or envy or bitterness or whatever it may be.

I’m 32 years old at the time of this recording. I’m guessing most of y’all are somewhere around that age, give or take a decade. Maybe even older. And–newsflash–we’re going to wake up in life and not feel super riveted and close to God at times and it’s not necessarily because we’ve been involved in any particular sin. It’s not necessarily because we’ve been hurt dramatically by things outside ourselves. 

It could involve all of that. But not necessarily.

My whole point is that there’s this desire to be closer to God and yet we struggle in our relationship with God at times. 

But what do we do? How do we move closer to God? How do we have a meaningful relationship with God? Those are the types of questions that people are asking. 

I’m talking about people who would turn on a podcast like Unfeigned Christianity. People who want to follow Jesus, who are interested in His church and in His work. If I’m talking to someone who doesn’t really care about Jesus, I’m addressing this conversation differently. But I’m assuming that I’m talking to people who want to follow Jesus and those who want a vibrant church filled with people who are engaging the world effectively.

And yet looking around, whether it’s in conservative settings or more liberal settings, it seems like either we have a super rigid faith and life expectations that end up disappointing us or our faith is rather shallow and we explain away any sort of expectations for holiness and changed life-style that seem to be put forth in scripture that we end up wondering what’s the point of it all? 

Some people are looking around and they’re seeing these different sides of Christianity. They’re seeing the conservative side and the liberal or progressive side, and they’re not really drawn to either one. 

These people are wondering, “What is there in life? What is there to the Christian faith? Are these the only two options we have?” 

And there’s kind of this internal intuition for many of us, that there is a lot more, but we just might not know what it is. 

What if you could experience a truly healthy relationship with Jesus?

Yes, there are ups and downs, but what if you had the type of relationship with Jesus that you weren’t dependent on certain things to have a good relationship with Him. 

What if you could have a relationship with Jesus where it just flows? Some days you might miss your morning devotions because the night before was late or because you have complications and your schedule is just kind of out of whack and you don’t get the time in prayer that you desire first thing in the morning. What if that didn’t derail your day and you continued to walk through your day with God?

What if you had a relationship with Jesus in which you sensed a deep, calm confidence about your purpose. It’s not heroism. It’s not that you’re going to be this great missionary or do this great thing for God. But you just know that you are actively involved in daily work, in relationships, even in ministry that allows you to truly benefit the people around you. You offer your story, your experiences, and what God is speaking to you through His Holy Spirit and it’s helping them. You process life and their journey together.

Maybe there’s some few among us who become well-known heroes. I’m not trying to say that can’t be, but I’m suggesting that perhaps we’re on the tail end of a time in history where that was kind of “The Thing” to pursue: “We’re going to change the world! We’re going to do great things for God!” 

Many seem a bit exhausted because we realize actually few of us do big and great things. We also live in a time where so many who seem to be doing big things turn out to have been frauds to one degree or another. 

What if it’s possible to just have a calm assurance of your purpose? 

Whether you’re doing things like I’m doing right now and having a podcast or teaching or involved in formal discipleship ministry, like preaching or bible studies or teaching at a Bible college.

Or maybe you’re working as a mechanic. Maybe you’re teaching school, you’re serving as a nurse, or you’re a stay-at-home mom. You’re a farmer, but you know where you fit in and how you are participating in God’s story that you’ve been called into.

What if it was possible to have this kind of relationship with God? 

You see, I think an increasing number of people long for that, but I think many of us struggle with it and don’t have it. 

And I think the reason for that is because the medium that we’ve been told is the primary way in which we experience God has been kind of confusing to us.

I’m talking about the Bible. 

Whether or not we realize it, we have had, perhaps, over-emphasized to us the importance and the value of the Bible as it pertains to relating and interacting with God. 

Think about it, you wake up to read the Bible. You go to church and you have at least 40 minutes of hearing teaching from the Bible, and that’s kind of what it looks like to engage God. There’s also prayer and maybe we add fellowship with each other. But that’s kind of the extent of it, for the most part.

And I think there’s a lot of people reevaluating that. Is that actually true? Is that actually even Biblical? According to Scripture, do we get that the Bible is the primary way in which we engage God? 

I would suggest that part of why we struggle to have this flowing relationship with God and experience in life a deep assurance of our purpose is because we engage the medium–the Bible–in a way that it was never intended to be engaged with. 

You see many of us approach scripture as though it’s a reference book for life.

We come to it thinking that it is intended to answer all of our theological questions about God and human life. Or maybe it’s intended to give us a moral compass. It helps us know how to navigate all the moral and ethical issues we will face in life. Or we think that it is all about inspiring us for the day, and so we sit down and expect to get some warm fuzzy feeling in what we read.

Huge chunks of the Bible don’t ever really give that feeling. In fact, they tend to leave us with more questions.

“What are all these laws for?”

“What are these details of the tabernacle all about?”

“I don’t get this story of this man of God who has this woman who’s abused, and then she’s left for dead and he cuts her up and sends her out to all the houses. It just doesn’t make sense. How is that supposed to inspire me for the day?”

And so we tend to gravitate then to reading things like Psalms or easy parts of the New Testament that kind of help us get something practical and tangible for life. 

And just so we’re clear, wanting answers to questions about God, wanting direction for sorting through ethical issues, and wanting inspiration and a connection with our creator are good desires. Furthermore, the Bible does that for us. But that is not its sole intention. 

When we treat the Bible like a reference book, we only come to it when we have an ethical problem or a decision to make. We only come to it when we have questions about God or about life or when we’re wanting to be inspired for the day.

If this is how we approach scripture, we will have a jarring encounter with it. Or maybe it’ll simply be boring to us. 

It’s sort of like if you took a cookbook and you went shopping with it. You assume the cookbook is a shopping list, and so you’re going through the aisles trying to find a quarter teaspoon of salt. You don’t see in the store a quarter teaspoon of salt anywhere, right? Salt isn’t sold in that way. And so it will be a frustrating experience. 

You’ll go through the cookbook and there’s gonna be a page of just a backstory to what led to a certain recipe and whose grandma introduced it and what year it was and where they lived and you’re going to wonder what’s the point? “What’s the point of all that? I don’t get it. I’m just trying to get ingredients at the store. I’ve got to get out of here before the store closes. There’s a big long line.” 

It’s going to be a frustrating experience for you because a cookbook is not intended to be a shopping list.

Similarly, the Bible is not intended to be a reference book. 

The Bible is a story. 

It’s the story of God. The Bible is the story of God and His creation. It’s the story of man and the reason God put man into His creation. This story reveals what God is doing through man and creation.

Sure, the Bible gives us answers to theological questions. It helps us navigate ethical issues and inspires us every day. But it doesn’t do these things through simply sitting down, opening up and reading a passage for a half hour or whatever. That’s not how the Bible is intended to answer our questions or inspire us for the day. 

Yet so many of us engage with God through the Bible in that approach and in that posture. 

And so the Bible doesn’t work like we thought it should. We’re not inspired for the day, or the more we read it the more muddled its meaning seems to us. 

Or maybe the Bible doesn’t address the issue we’re dealing with at all. And then there’s the issue of theological questions. There are so many different biblical interpretations, how do we know who’s right or who’s wrong? 

What if that’s actually not the point of the Bible? 

Many are engaging the Bible in that way it’s not working for them. And because the Bible is the primary way most engage God, it becomes a blocker to our relationship with Him and we end up getting slightly disillusioned with God.

We end up saying things like, “I just want Jesus.” Or we let other “smarter” people deal with the Bible. But then, we can kind of gravitate into this unhealthy space of weird ideas or pontifications about life and God and all of that because we’re not engaging scripture. 

More than that, the farther removed we get from the story, we struggle to see where we fit into it. And that has to do with purpose. This sense of knowing why we were born. “After God saves us through Jesus, why don’t we just zoom off to heaven? What’s the purpose of people staying in this corrupted world even though Jesus has done the work and is the victor already?”

Have you ever thought of that? Did you know the story of scripture reveals answers and direction for why we’re not zoomed away to heaven the moment we’re saved?

If God is overly concerned about conversion ratings, you’d think that the moment somebody professes faith in him, he’d just strike them dead and they’d go to heaven, right? Because so many of us struggle with incredible doubts after expressing faith in Jesus. The very existence of doubt means that there’s a certain level of faith or at least wanting faith so why does God let us wander in our doubts at times? The Bible is not a reference book to look up the answer for doubt on page 385. 

Rather, the Bible is a story. As we immerse ourselves in the story, we discover its message, which is fully manifested in Jesus Christ. 

The whole goal of this story is to reveal Jesus to us and for us to gain his wisdom and insight that we will then apply as we navigate through other parts of life. 

And so if you desire a relationship with God that flows on good days and on bad days, if you desire a deep sense of purpose even when you face tough decisions and don’t quite know which way to go, you have a rock solid assurance of your purpose in life, if that’s your desire, I suggest to you that the first step in the process is getting to know this story. 

Understanding God’s story doesn’t remove disillusionment from life. But it does give us greater guidance for processing difficult decisions. It gives us something sure to come back to when we’re uncertain about what’s real around us.

In the next episode, we’re going to dive into this story and open it up so we can see what it is and where we fit into it today. 

Because this isn’t just something in the past. Sometimes we treat the Old Testament as though that was the past and a totally different period of the story of God. God worked and did things in a different way. Then there was Jesus and the New Testament but we live now and it’s totally different. 

But the reality is it’s all a part of the same story. And I would like to show you that so you can see it and experience a more meaningful relationship with God as a result.

As I have taught other people about this, the number one feedback that I get is that the Bible is coming alive to them. They never saw how it’s all connected before, and so their engagement with scripture is just more fulfilling, for one thing.

But ultimately their engagement with God is more meaningful because they’re seeing how this isn’t just a set of rules and regulations, but it’s actually a larger picture, a larger story that we all fit into. 

And then in the third episode of this brief series, we’re going to look at different questions you may have. If you have questions from this episode or from the next one, send them in. I would love to hear your feedback. I would love to take some time and respond to your questions. 

One of the common questions is, “So what does that look like today? If we’re in the middle of a story, how do we navigate these certain issues in light of God’s story?”

We’ll look into some of those issues then as well. 

I think one of the saddest things to me is when Christians who profess to walk with God, don’t have a meaningful relationship with Him. Rather, they are trying to attain a relationship with God. 

Did you know that He’s with you right now? 

Maybe you’re someone really struggling right now. You wake up and you really struggle to even acknowledge God other than the fact that you do go to church or when people ask, you call yourself a Christian. It’s sad to me when we go through those seasons, because in those moments, God is there and He’s with us and He’s not standing there like, “C’mon! Get your act together.”

No, just like all stories, the story of God has themes that ebb and flow throughout it. There are protagonists and antagonists. There’s conflict interwoven throughout it. There are main plots and subplots, multiple subplots that are affecting the main plot and the main character, and that’s how life is.

We connect with stories. 

I would suggest that is because we are made to be a part of a story. God didn’t just make creation to just then let it happen. He made it because he’s telling something through it. And He’s telling something through you and through your story and everything that has happened to you. 

And if you would like greater clarity about what God’s story is or if you would like to discover God at a whole new level and be a part of the people who desire not fancy heroism, just steady faithfulness, a steady, confident assurance that they know God and they’re walking with Him, even when there’s chaotic events and confusing questions and difficult decisions, then I invite you to join me in these series of episodes as we explore God’s story together. 

Have you ever seen your life as being a piece of God’s greater story before? What questions do you have about God’s story and about connecting it with yours? You can share in the comments below.

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