What is your purpose in life? Why are you here? What exactly does God want or expect from you?
These are all common questions that people ask, and they are questions that sometimes cause doubt, confusion and even feelings of guilt and inadequacy for not knowing the answers. There are people that I have spoken with who feel restless, and unfulfilled because they think that more is required of them, and so they are constantly looking for the answer to the question of “what must I do?”.
In our conversations, I would gently suggest to them that perhaps God just wants you to relax and enjoy Him. To which, these people would force a half-smile, and a muffled laugh, because they didn’t really believe that God could want them to do nothing but simply enjoy Him – it couldn’t possibly be that simple…
Or could it…
What I want to share with you today, as you probably have guessed by now from the title of today’s study, is that yes, it really is that simple! God does simply want you to rest and enjoy Him, and enjoy the identity which He has given to you. In-fact it is vital that you do so – for your own well-being (and He knows it)! By seeing this truth today, you will finally be able to release the burden of “what must I do” – a burden which you were never meant to carry in the first place.
Jesus is the meaning and the purpose of life. I want you to meditate on that statement for a moment... take it in, digest it. We have previously studied on how without Jesus, life is empty; this is not an over-exaggeration. People who follow after other things may experience a type of joy for a season, but it is not the true joy that can be found in Christ. I use the term “true joy” because I can tell you from my own life there was a time before I knew Jesus, that I experienced something that I thought was happiness, but it always left me feeling empty. There was a secret sadness, an internal pain that I could never quite fully define. I simply knew that there had to be more to life than what I was experiencing.
Furthermore, Jesus is also the strength of life. This means that Jesus is the source of effectual power that manifests, sustains and maintains life – we know this from Colossians 1:17. Yet this is more than just a grand theory or a pleasant idea for believers to ponder. This is in-essence, the key to unlocking true life in Christ. If we fail to understand the truth that Jesus is the center and supplier of life, then we will continue to life apart from that life, wondering and wandering from one thing to the next with no direction and no source. Is it possible for a believer to miss-out on the abundant life of Christ? Oh yes! So today, we will be studying in detail how to life in new life in Christ Jesus.