Today's JAR (Just a Reminder) Our Purpose is to Learn How to Love.

  

I keep hearing a conversation that is foreign to me.  It involves Christians searching to understand their purpose in life that would fulfill and complete them and justify their existence.  This language does not refer to a calling, the means to fulfilling this purpose, but in this contemporary theology it seems we all have a purpose for being born.  And until we understand and fulfill this purpose we are wanderers in life, we are letting God down.  There is a dire sense that we were born for a purpose and not simply with a purpose.

 

I do not like this theology...

 

God created us with a purpose, a very important purpose...to have a relationship (walk with) Him, to know Him, to love Him.  This is common to all of us. 

 

 

 

But this kind of love isn’t forced onto us, we have to learn it and be accountable to it, choose it.  Look at Adam and Eve.  They weren’t born with it or they wouldn’t have blamed someone else for their own sins.  They would have apologized.  They would have repented.  They wouldn't have look outside of God for that which only God could give.   They were children.  They weren’t mature in love. 

 

Let our purpose in life be learning to love in a way that is God-like.  Let us do away with childish things.*  Let us fulfill Adam and Eve's purpose and allow God to guide us. 

 

 

* The Greatest Gift -- 1 Corinthians 13

 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.  And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;  does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil;  does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

 

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part.   But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

 

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.