Purpose; Quest or Question

There are many times in life where a person is faced with a seemingly insurmountable feeling of a lack of purpose. It is a feeling of utter displacement from all that is around you and a restless drifting in your soul. What we often react with is an attempt to return to some identity that we believe will give us meaning. Sadly, no identity that can be created by reactions to external stimuli can give us inner peace or solitude. Many of these identities can have attached to them socially acceptable, yet personally damaging activities. These activities can have the attractive side-effect of making us forget our lack of purpose. They grant us no purpose in and of themselves, they simply let us lose ourselves for a short time in some frame of mind where we can forget our hunger for a true meaning to our existence.

This is where addiction begins. In the smallest fringes of identities created to ingratiate quick friends and passing acquaintances. The more we don the mask of our many identities, the more we lose ourselves. The more we lose ourselves, the harder it becomes to find a single thread of purpose winding through our countless counterfeit selves. So then, those fringe activities of our many identities began to take over all of our attention. The identities that we associated with the "good" portion of ourselves; those that welcomed church people, that attended service events, that tried to make a better place out of this world, become lost in our need to forget the ever-looming certainty of our lack of purpose.

Ultimately depression sets in. We know what good is and we know that we are losing it and there is no way, by our own strength, to make ourself become good. Our mind is our prosecutor crying "too much, too often, too many mistakes!" and we slip into a downward cycle of drowning it out by whatever means presents itself.

Especially for those who have moral religious backgrounds, this downward slope can be an easy temptation. We grow too accustomed to feeling unworthy of God's love and we feel that when we mess up we are no longer useful for His work. We start to believe that there is some finite period of time that we have to be "good" before we can do anything useful for God.
We must realize that the only place where we can find purpose is in one identity, that of Christ. We were created to worship God and enjoy His loving presence. Not as perfect sinless people by our own strength (1 Cor. 1:26-31) But as humble, grateful bondservants in His kingdom. By our own doing we cannot attain to anything good; for all good comes down from the Father above. So we must submit ourselves to His loving will in our lives.

We must continue to focus, not on our mistakes, but on His precious sacrifice that released grace and mercy so abundantly over our undeserving hearts that we can do nothing to overcome the sweet gift of eternal life He has gently offered. A bondservant, in biblical reference, was a Jewish man who could not pay his debts and so offered himself to willing servanthood in the house of a Jewish brother who could pay him. After he had fulfilled his debt and he was offered his release, a true bondservant was a man who had so grown to love his master that he chose to stay in service for the rest of his life. We all have sinned and so, knowingly or otherwise, we have fallen upon the mercy of a gracious Father God, while in His created world, to spare us our due judgement and let us continue to live and be blessed.

We must understand that, righteous or unrighteous, ALL good things come from God and so all blessings are given to people by God. Since the death of Jesus, our debt of sin has now been paid forevermore. We now have only to accept his offer to live with Him and serve Him for eternity. How can we not turn to such a master who offers us each breath and eternal life in His house and say "though you have paid my debt, yet because of your great love for me, I long to serve you with all that I have and with every breath you give me." Since this was the reason we were created, the identity of a bondservant, as Christ exemplified, is the only way to find purpose, freedom and true life.