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Hungers of the Heart - Finding Purpose in Your Life [2nd in 7 part series]
By Bob Chance | March 12, 2006
Dr. D. Robert Chance, Senior Minister
Hungers of the heart — growing closer in our daily walk with God. Today I speak of one of the most basic and fundamental hungers that we all feel — the need to have a deeper and more lasting sense of purpose in our lives.
Jenny Lewis sings songs from her heart. She is young, in her late 20’s or early 30’s and her music while beautiful betrays a person who recognizes the shallow, empty, materialistic nature of her life and she hungers for more. She isn’t quite sure what she believes or doesn’t believe about God but her music clearly reveals a deep hunger of the soul for a closer connection with God. In one of her songs she sings of being born secular and remaining disillusioned. There is sadness in her music as she delves into themes of loneliness, anger, disillusionment and frustration. Her music is all the more painful because she is deeply insightful and catches beautifully the soul search not only of her generation but of most of us in the modern world.
After listening to a few segments of the music last week at the St. Paul’s breakfast meeting I asked our elders and deacons to think of one thing they see in the hungers of the hearts of the people they know. After a moment of silence our elders and deacons produced an insightful list of the things we all see people hungering after — and to be quite honest about it we hunger for as well.
We all hunger for acceptance.
We all hunger for meaning.
We all hunger for love.
We all hunger for forgiveness.
We all hunger for something to believe in beyond ourselves or beyond the superficial things of our lives.
We all hunger for certainty.
We all hunger for peace and security.
Last week, on the first Sunday of Lent I spoke of these 40 days being a great time to come closer to God in our daily walk. I spoke of the importance of getting out of the daily traffic jams of life and spending some quiet time with our maker and renewing and refreshing our relationship with him. During the rest of the Sundays of Lent I am going to turn us toward one of the many hungers of the heart and in recognizing and responding to the fundamental hungers of our own hearts hope that we can grow closer to God.
Hungers of the heart — growing closer in our daily walk with God. Today I speak of one of the most basic and fundamental hungers that we all feel — the need to have a deeper and more lasting sense of purpose in our lives.
I. We need something more in life.
Purpose in life — we all want to feel some real purpose in life.
We all feel our lives mean something.
Victor Frankl was one of the great theologians and psychiatrist of the modern world. I had the great privilege of hearing him in person many years ago here in Washington. Frankl was a young Jewish man who was imprisoned in Auschwitz. He was a survivor of the Nazi death camps. He would later write what I consider to be one of the great books of life “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Frankl maintained that having survived the holocaust and studying man for years he reached the conclusion that Freud was wrong. Freud said that the most basic drive of all people is sex. Frankl said, “No, the most basic drive of all people is to find meaning in life.
He said that when men and women were in the Nazi concentration camps all life was eventually reduced to its most basic drive. As he watched men grapple and strive and climb over one another to catch a cock roach to have something to eat he began to realize that the one thing that enabled someone to survive was to feel some reason to live, some purpose in surviving, and some reason to live.
Frankl spent his whole life on discovering, exploring, and writing about how the search for meaning was the one common fundamental drive of life. After reading his work for the first time I became convinced. It is our search for meaning in life — purpose in life that we all share in common.
I want to feel as if my life has some purpose.
I want to think that I have lived for some reason.
I need to find a deeper and more lasting purpose in my life so that when I come to the end of my life someone will feel, someone will know “Bob Chance was here”.
In much the same way during World War II soldiers facing the brutal realities of war, of facing death in terrible and gruesome ways, of seeing their friends blown apart or gassed to death or writing in death upon the beaches of one place or another found common meaning, common hope, common humor in the famous saying scratched upon crude wooden signs, painted on rocks, and left throughout the world wherever American soldiers fought and died — “Kilroy was here”. I believe the signs reflect the deep and fundamental need to feel purpose in our lives. We are here. We were here. And we count for something!
II. We all hunger for purpose in life but much of what we confuse with purpose comes up hollow sooner or later.
We spend our whole lives in the daily minutia of life and deep down in our gut we know the daily minutia isn’t enough. We want more. We want to count for something.
Jenny Lewis talks of turning 30 and thinking that there has to be more in life. Thirty is a symbol of the passing of time. At thirty we realize we’re getting older. It’s a turning point. At thirty we’re much more than just one year older than twenty-nine. The more time passes the more we hunger for meaning.
When we’re young life’s purpose is focused on getting through the hoops of growing up. Let’s see, we need to learn the basic skills of being a man or being a woman. We go to grade one and we focus on getting to grade two. We go to grade two and we’re focused on getting to grade three and to having fun with our friends. Life is hopefully secure. We enjoy whatever the things of life are that we have or want and life just sort of unfolds for us. At some point we grow into Junior High School and then High School and life’s purpose begins to take on deeper meanings than the backyard basketball game or the weekend campout or the trip to Chucky Cheese. Most of us begin to confuse life’s purpose with life’s career that we point ourselves toward. There was a time when I thought life’s purpose was doing ministry. There was a time when life’s purpose was an overlay with being the minister of Aspen Hill Christian Church. As we grow in life we begin to realize that much of what we spend our life on isn’t the same as our purpose in life.
What we do is important — but it isn’t our purpose in life. If we confuse our purpose in life with what we do life will cease to have purpose when we stop doing what we do.
Your purpose in life isn’t your career. Ben Arrelano was a member here twenty five, thirty years ago. He and his wife Barbara were wonderful people. Ben was in the Army. He was a sociologist. One time Ben and I were talking about how some people love the military so much they never really found their place when they retire. Ben told me that one of the things the military knows about and tries to help people with is getting on in life after they leave the military. If you love your career so much you can’t live outside of it you will find life very hard, very lonely, and very purposeless after you retire.
Accumulating things in life isn’t our purpose either. Things are nice. I like things. I want things. I always wanted to be able to give my children the cool things of life. There is nothing wrong with things.
There is something wrong, something terribly wrong if we let things become the purpose of our lives. Things are so hollow. Things are so transitory. They rust, they break, they get lost, they get stolen, and they rot. Anyone who dedicates their purpose in life to having things will always feel empty and hollow sooner or later. Being a millionaire might be a cool feeling but it’s not your purpose in life.
A life devoted to things is a dead life, a stump; a God-shaped life is a flourishing tree. Proverbs 11:28
There are lots of things we confuse with our purpose in life. Some people think having fun is life’s purpose. Does it sound strange to say “having fun gets old — if that’s all we do?” I don’t think so. Commander Cody (now there’s a musician I’ll bet our very wonderful Choir Director doesn’t listen to much) sings a song called “No such thing as too much fun”. Yes there is. If having fun, if having a good time is our purpose in life we live a shallow and pretty meaningless life. “Wasting away in Margarita Ville” may be a cool song by Jimmy Buffet but sooner or later “wasting away in Margarita Ville” gets pretty boring.
We all hunger for deeper purpose in life.
We need to feel our lives “count” for something more.
We all need to have a sense of purpose that goes deeper than
: career or
: pleasure, or
: accumulating, or
: having a beautiful home, or
: driving a Rolls Royce or a BMW Seven Series.
Good things all — I don’t disparage them — I disparage letting the lesser things in life become our purpose in life.
III. The deepest meaning in our lives, the most lasting purpose in our lives, and the best answer to our hunger for purpose is found in what Jesus Christ told us.
“Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?’”.
There you have it.
Our purpose in life is to find our soul.
What does that mean?
Well, nothings that easy but I think it has to do with finding our connection with God, with knowing God and with living our lives in such a way that we give up ourselves to find ourselves.
It’s not just mumbo jumbo. It’s not jambalaya. If we want to find our life — we have to lose it.
Jesus was teaching a crowd of people about the suffering he would have to endure in life. He spoke plainly about but one of his disciples, Peter argued with him about it. Even though Jesus loved Peter and would later call Peter “the Rock — the one upon whom he would build his church” called Peter the devil and told him to get behind him.
When we have the things of men as our purpose in life we are following Satan. When we confuse our purpose in life with accumulation and what we do and acquisition and with things material we are following the devil. It is the path quite literally to the hell of emptiness and hollowness and shallowness. When you stand at the grave of someone who is dead do you really think whether they drove a VW or a BMW matters much? Of course not.
Jesus said our purpose in life is found by losing our life. What did he mean?
He meant when we give up acquiring we learn what it means to be rich.
He meant when we give up power we learn what power really means.
He meant when we give up pleasing men we learn how powerful pleasing God is.
He meant when we give up the things of the world we open ourselves to the things of God.We find purpose in life when we give up ourselves for others.
We find purpose in life when we give up pursuing man’s kingdom for God’s kingdom.
We find purpose in life when we follow Christ’s example rather than man’s example.
We find purpose in life when we live to serve others rather than be served.
We find purpose in life when we live to give rather than live to get.
We find purpose in life when we live to love rather than be loved.
We find purpose in life when we live to serve God rather than live to serve man.
We find purpose in life when we seek to do God’s will rather than our own will.
We find purpose in life when we lose our life in order to find our life.
Ultimately we must take up our cross and follow Christ if we are to find our purpose in life.
Closing
Some days I wonder if my life really has purpose.
Some days I get so mired down in the lunacy of life that I think having a greater purpose in my life is itself lunacy.
Some days I stand over a grave and I wonder what difference anyone’s life really makes.
Some days I struggle to find my faith in the midst of the minutia, and the conflict and the struggle of daily living.
Some days I feel just like Jenny Lewis felt in some of her lonesome and soul wrenching music.
But the more I search for God the more I feel my life must have some deeper purpose.
The more I love the more I think the purpose of my life must have something to do with love.
The more I think of giving away the more rich I become.
The more I serve the more I feel like a king.
The more I look to Christ for my example the more I see who I am not and the more who I would like to be.
Do you hunger for deeper purpose in your life?
Do you hunger for some more lasting reason for living than just being able to buy a newer car or have a bigger house?
Come closer to God in your daily walk and you will come closer to a richly satisfying and eternal meaning in your life. The day you breathe your last breadth the car you drove or the job you did or the things you had won’t mean a thing to you but the people you loved, the service you gave and the things you gave away will bring a smile upon your face and you exit man’s kingdom and stand in eternity, prepared to enter into Christ’s kingdom.
Many people spend their whole life seeking pleasure. Jesus said however that a world of pleasure or possession or position or power is ultimately not our purpose in life. Whatever you have on earth is temporary; it cannot be exchanged for your soul. Follow Jesus and you will find your life’s true purpose. Follow Jesus and you will know what it means to live abundantly now and to have eternal life as well.
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