Our Maker had a purpose in making us in his image, and our lives enjoy true happiness as we fulfil those purposes: to live in good relationship with him, and to reflect his glorious good nature. You will probably agree that the highest and best good feelings come to us when we know we are in a real loving relationship and also when we have done something really good that we are rightly proud of. So it is, on a higher scale, when we are in love with God and do his will.
But this may well seem very frustrating to those who are conscious that their lives are far from this ideal. Many people neither know God nor live lives of pure goodness. So are these purposes just pure ideals, unrealistic and unreal? If these are our goals, and they are thwarted, that seems the opposite of human fulfilment! Could this be the cause of a lot of our human dysfunction? So let’s examine this a bit.
How can we live in a relationship with God if we do not even know him? Many do not know he is there, or that he has come into the world in Jesus to seek us out and to call us into that love relationship. Might our problem be that we don’t love God? Let’s be frank: do you really want God to direct your life into his purposes? No, the average person wants to keep God at arm’s length: we don’t want God to bother us – indeed, the very idea irks us. God, for us, would be a serious disturbance to our normal life. Why, he would direct our lives by his commandments! We’d rather he was not there, we’d be just as happy – so we think. This was, of course, the attitude of those evil men who wanted to get rid of Christ and who crucified him!
Furthermore, if we are supposed to reflect God’s goodness, we realise we are not really very good at that. We are conscious of our failures, our lack of kindness, even our disobedience to what God would want us to be and to do. That realisation brings on feelings of guilt, shame, and low self-esteem. Let’s face it, sometimes our words, attitudes and deeds are the very opposite of “holy” and “good” and “kind”. If this is our reality, is it good news that we have such a purpose for our existence that we fail in so dismally? Or, worse: did God’s purpose fail?
Well, while it’s true that we fall short of what we should be, we do often show kindness and love to people. It’s not all a total disaster. We work for justice and against injustice. We applaud those whose devoted service is an example to us all. We know right from wrong and agree in principle that we should do better. Yet there’s still that nagging feeling, we are not really truly, deeply good.
God knows that, of course, and here’s the good news: despite our failures, God loves us still. In fact, his deep desire is to show us how much he loves us so that we will gladly fall into his arms and love him, and begin to enter into his purpose for our lives, which the Bible describes as “good, acceptable and perfect”. We can be brought into the true fulfilment God wants for us.
Clive Every-Clayton
Authentic Hope for Answers 
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