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What on Earth are We here for?

Kimmie_EliseJul 3, 2020, 12:01:47 AM
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It is obvious to me, the time has come to change the way I have been writing. I am no longer going to take the road of non-partisanship and religious neutrality. Two things have lead to this juncture. First, it has become evident to me there is a leftist religion called Social Justice, which has an epistemology that precludes anything I might have to say. Secondly, I am finding there are too many Christians from Ephesus in our midst. We have too many Christians intolerant of incorrect teaching, but have lost their love. Rather than wasting my efforts on a religion I have no hope of penetrating with a blog, I am going to dedicate my efforts to helping my fellow believers break out of the this issue-based approach to everything, to the extent there is a willingness to change among my brothers and sisters. This may mean saying things which will sound like chastisement. Some will ask me, “who am I to rebuke?” I say, if you can find value in my encouragement, then it will not feel like correction.

Let me say this: You were put on this Earth to love. Love is your first and foremost purpose, and it is a purpose you share with each and every human being ever created, and who are yet to be created.

In order to get here, we have to understand there really is no individual purpose for being here on Earth. There are individual callings, but no individual purpose. Purpose is universal and it is tied directly to the reason God created us; created human beings in the first place. Our purpose is the same whether we are sinners or saved. Our purpose is eternal and does not change when we pass from this life to the eternal life ahead. God knew how things would go when He decided to create human beings, and planned accordingly, alleviating any need to re-purpose people as they pass from one state to another. There is no need to change an individual’s purpose when they pass from lost sinner to fully saved believer. There is no need to change an individual’s purpose when they pass from physical temporal to eternal forms.

How then, do we know God’s purpose for creating us? This is actually fairly evident when we stop trying to make purpose about us and make it about Him. We are put on this rock in space to have perfectly loving relationships with God, with others, and with each other for eternity. Please, allow me to say this again:

God created human beings for the purpose of having perfectly loving relationships with Him, with each other and with ourselves for eternity.

Matthew 22:36-40 is where we see this purpose most clearly stated. The Pharisees ask Jesus, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment?” Do you know the response Jesus gave? “To love the Lord your God with all that you are, and a second is to love your neighbor as yourself.” This means, the most important thing God wants us to do, the one thing that trumps everything else is wrapped up in loving. Jesus drives the point home by saying, “all of the scripture written until now depends on these two commandments.” (I am paraphrasing so as not make this post three times as long as it needs to be. Please, read the passages on your own.) Jesus is saying that every example given us through the lives of people whose stories are told in the Bible is without meaning without leading us to love. All of the commandments are a waste of stone unless they point us to love. Every proverb and poem exists so we will love. From the creation story to the reconstruction of the second temple and every thing leading right up to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is about love, and then love became flesh.

Having perfectly loving relationships is a purpose which is equally valid whether we are sinner or saved, and whether we are here on Earth or in Heaven above. Love transcends all states of human existence. Further, love is consistent with God’s character. It makes sense He created us for the reason of sharing of His love forever more. In this one purpose there is never a reason to re-purpose human beings. This one purpose means we don’t have to speculate about some need God may have had to meet for Him to create us. He wasn’t lonely. He desired, not needed. It fulfills all of the requirements to understand why a perfect being would create imperfect beings.

The things we call purpose, but are centered on our individual existence, are actually our vocations. Our vocations are how God calls us to fulfill our purpose as individuals, and how God employs our individuality into His greater plan. You see, we are limited creatures and we need limited ways we fulfill our purpose here on Earth, and maybe in the hereafter. We can’t possibly be all things to all people, but we can be good at doing a few things for a limited number of people. We can be pastors, teachers, healers, sources of encouragement, source of comfort, but we can’t do it all.

Ask yourself this: If a man becomes a professional singer because he believes that is his purpose, and later begins to believe that God is calling him to be a lawyer later in life, did the man’s purpose change, or his calling? If it were purpose that changed, it would stir up some questions, like could the man have been wrong to begin with? Was the good the man did as a singer have no value for him having been pursuing the wrong purpose,? Is the man able to fulfill a single purpose, though the means change? It is important to realize our calling is often unclear to us, but even if it is unclear we can still fulfill our purpose. Sometimes we wait on God to move us into the next vocation, but we never have to wait to clearly see and be able to fulfill our purpose. There are no temporary suspensions of our purpose while we try to figure things out, because there is no need to suspend love.

Tell me this: Who is going to need a healer in Heaven? Some callings are temporal. In fact, most, if not all, callings are only good for this Earth. We aren’t going to need lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and a million other professions for all of eternity. What ever we will be doing, it will be based in love. Not only this, callings can change. I had a teacher in high school who was a Bible teacher, but an automobile accident left him with the mind of child. Did his purpose change? Not at all. He can still love perfectly. What we think we have today, may change in an instant. Our purpose is unchanging, and is just as valid for a child with severe mental limitations as for the most brilliant of geniuses. Love serves as a purpose no matter what our maturity level, and requires no special qualifications.

The importance of making this distinction between calling and purpose exists in the fact that one must serve the other. Vocation must serve purpose and not the other way around. We teach or heal because we love, and to fulfill our purpose, and we can’t be pastors who also love, or praise leaders who are loving. We have to be lovers first, because as soon as we put calling ahead of purpose our perspective becomes self-centered, and to a greater or lesser degree selfish. God did not call us to be selfish or self-centered. We exist as part of a body for the building up of the body.

Now, I realize this flies in the face of a famous work done by a very well known and respected pastor. The problem I see in his work is he is identifying the shared callings of the church as purpose. The things he is teaching as purpose are mostly temporal. Some things, like evangelism, aren’t going to be necessary in the hereafter. Does his work have value? Absolutely!!! I love that work, but God is not busy compensating for what the world is doing. He didn’t compensate for sin, but planned what was going to happen long before any of us existed. That which depends on the existence of sin to define our functionality is not purpose, but calling.

What does this all mean? As we have lost sight of our purpose, we have become increasingly like Ephesus, as found in the opening verses of chapter two of the Book of Revelation. We have all the right answers for all the right questions, we are informed, and we are on top of every ideology, but we lack love. We are the most educated Christians the world has seen in all of history. Christian books flood the shelves of Christian book stores in an almost unending supply. We can easily look up Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic meanings of words. We have archeology to confirm so many details from the Bible. We have disciplines like Hermaneutics, Apologetics, Homiletics, to help us discover the truth of scripture and communicate it, yet we are ineffective at stemming the tide of counter view points. With all our great doctrine and perfectly reasoned out arguments, we are not bringing people into our churches in increasing numbers, but rather churches are shriveling up and dying. We use the excuse that dying churches are dying because they don’t have sound teaching, but we see thriving churches tickling people’s ears under the leadership of plastic pastors who are getting wealthy off the members. We don’t lack for sound doctrine. We lack for love.

How then does Jesus speak of Ephesus? He speaks of this knowledgeable, educated, church who can sort through good and bad doctrine like no other, but He says you have lost the love you first had. He threatens to remove our lampstand from its place. Make no mistake, without keeping our eye on our purpose we make ourselves irrelevant. We are not here on this earth to set everybody straight. We are here to love. Our purpose of love has never changed, and never will. We cannot re-purpose ourselves as moral or thought police for the world through beating people up with solid doctrine.

Make no mistake, I have a passion for solid doctrine. I know what I believe and I know the doctrines of most major denominations. What I cannot stand for is doctrine for the sake of doctrine. In and of itself doctrine is an incomplete ministry. Sound teaching must be accompanied by love, and like Ephesus we have largely lost our love.

We need to get back to basics. Love is interactive, action, personal, and direct. Yes, we have to take to the streets, not just to preach, but to love. The Apostles on the day of Pentecost would not have had credibility without the love Jesus had shown, and Peter used that credibility to help convert hundreds. We have to get one on one with people who are lost in the religion of Social Justice, who are seduced by the message they can get along just fine without God, and who are lost. Making a stand doesn’t necessarily mean standing up and shouting a message. Taking a stand is equally valid when we love people who oppose us, who ridicule us, who make us feel less than safe, who gang up on us, have little appeal to us as human beings because their focus on their caustic ideologies. Loving people takes buying people coffee or a meal when they run their mouth about the ills of Christianity, and say, “I don’t agree with you but I thought you would like this.” Loving people means going where they are, whether that is Starbucks, a homeless shelter, a library, or tent city in some filthy alley. Love means baking cookies for the staff of the local LGBT center, or sitting and listening while people share the details of their physical ailments. Love means being slow to offer advice, quick to listen, and never reducing people down to a single failure or sin. Love means making the first move to be kind, generous, patient, empathetic, compassionate, gentle, and forgiving.

Jesus did not establish our righteousness through teaching the right things. Jesus opened the way of salvation through the greatest act of love He could do for others, giving His guiltless life in place of you and your guilt. That is the good news. We need to get back to our purpose, which is to have perfect loving relationships with God, with each other, and with ourselves for eternity. The doctrine, the clever arguments, must serve the purpose, rather than the other way around. We are called to love. Go out and love.