What is God's Purpose for My Life? - Made for More: Episode 2

Hi, Victorious Living family, welcome to Stepping Forward. I'm your host Sheridan Correa, and I am a grateful believer and follower of Jesus Christ. I am also your sister in Christ, and it's so good to be with you here today. Here at Stepping Forward, what we do is we talk about real stuff, man. We talk about real struggles, real purposes, real pain, and just real life and real hope. So today we are going to continue the conversation about purpose, but before we get into purpose, I want to tell you that I am a living testimony of the transforming power of Jesus Christ. He took my life from a purposeless life and gave me purpose, amen. He put my feet on solid ground on that firm foundation of truth and relying on and claiming Christ and what He has done for me in my life, and that has defined and directed me, gosh, for eight and a half years. And so saying yes to Jesus was just the best thing I've ever done. You know, I've tried everything else, fam. I've tried everything else, and everything that I tried made me more empty. I became more lost. I became more hurt. I became more wounded. I became more traumatized. I became more of an identity crisis. And if I think back to my, especially my drug days, even before my drug days, and I had every color hair that you can think of and was plucking out just every, all my, all my eyebrows and everything, like it's just, we're trying to be somebody and trying to figure it out and, and, and who am I and why do I exist? Like that is a real, real, real thing. And if you have experienced that, I want to hear about it. If you are even thinking about that and questioning that and having those questions and getting curious about those questions, even now, I want to hear about it. So please comment in the section if you're walking, watching on Pando. And I thank you just for all the, the comments that y'all do type out. I'm sure it's a lot of work to type out some of those really long ones.

So thank you for that. And we do read them and we are just so grateful to hear your heart. So I want to continue the conversation about purpose and, and the overarching question, what is God's purpose for my life? I said this in the last episode, it is the most important question you could ever ask yourself, because the good news is that there is an answer and God wants you to know what the answer is. It says in the word of God, without a vision, the people perish. Without a perspective of his purpose, we are left to be lost and wandering. We can end up in kind of some crazy places and, and also not have a very meaningful and satisfying life where it is enough just to be a child of God. And it is enough to have a plan for my life, to know that God has a purpose for my life out of everything that I've experienced, my past, my pain, my regrets, I mean, everything that I've walked through, every single experience, the good, the bad and ugly. It says in the word of God that he can take everything, he doesn't waste any of it and he'll turn it in to usefulness for his good purposes. So I'm trying to sign up for that thing right there. I want all of my, and all of my humanity and all of the, even the bad things in my life, all of my shame, my guilt, my regrets, God in the word of God, God says that he can turn it all into his good plans or into his good purposes. They are useful. So don't discount yourself. Don't disqualify yourself because our God surely is not. And I'm living proof of that. And so asking ourselves that question, what is God's purpose for my life? It's such a sacred question, excuse me. He created you on purpose, with purpose, with a purpose and for a purpose. Purpose is your reason for being. It answers the question, why do I exist? It's also, that answer is, it's foundational, it is unchanging and it is God given.

Your purpose is rooted in who you are and why you exist. We're going to talk about five things that that is true for all believers, all who are children of God, God's eternal purpose for you. And the number one thing, the first thing is to know and to love him. That is why we exist. We are created, formed and fashioned. We are called children of God so that we can know him and love him. In Matthew, 22, 37, it says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and your mind. That is a a purpose filled. That is an identity language, a responsibility toward us and a gift. Really, I don't want to view it as like a responsibility, like, oh, this is such a burden. But this is a gift. This is a gift. We were created to know our creator, to have a relationship with our creator, to get curious about what does God think about? What does God love? What does what is the heart of God really look like? What is the kingdom of God look like? How does that how does that influence or yeah, influence the way I should behave and think about things like that is our purpose, that's one of his eternal purposes for you. God's ultimate purpose for you is to begin a relationship and to begin in relationship, not in doing we not be not. I this is going to sound follow. Just stay with me, not in being a human doing. That is not your purpose is to be a slave of doing and always be toiling away and being a human doing. But in our true and first identity of being a human being, what that means is getting to know what that getting to know,

getting curious about what is a human being, what is being a child of God? What does that mean that I am his? What does that mean for my life? And so, family, we have an opportunity to really discover what that means personally and intimately for my life. And the only way we can know those answers is to have a conversation, to have a relationship, to have a ongoing engagement with our creator and with our heavenly father. Listen, if you're married and you only speak to your spouse once a week, how well do you think that marriage is doing? How well are you going to know your spouse? And God doesn't want us just to check in once a week when we go to church. No, it is an ongoing conscious relationship and conversation with our Lord. And again, to know him intimately as he knows us intimately. But he's calling us and drawing us in so that we can know him closely and and and intimately also. To become like Christ is number two. God's eternal purpose for you, true of all believers, is to become like Christ. Now, that is a higher and holier calling, right? It says in some of the epistles, excuse me, that Paul wrote to the churches. Excuse me. It says that one of the purposes of God is so that we can become godly, that we can become holy as he is holy, that we are to grow in godliness. In Romans 8, 29, it says, for God knew his people in advance and he chose them to become like his son. He already knew that. He already had that in mind. Again, what we learned about last episode, God doesn't do things haphazardly. He's just not making me like, oh, my gosh, that worked.

I can't believe that. That's not God. So he's calling us in not only to a relationship with him, but then calling us even higher and says, hey, I want you to live above the culture of the world. I want you to live different than everybody else. I want you to actually become more like Christ, which Christ was a perfect example of perfection and not sinning and his even relationship with God, the way that he communed with him, the way that he conversed and engaged with his heavenly father. We are called to the same invitation. We are invited into the same purpose. God's purpose is that you reflect Jesus. That. We reflect Jesus not by striving and trying to do better, try harder, but by being transformed by the Holy Spirit, through the Holy Spirit, letting the word of God get into us and for us to live it out, to respond to it, to apply it to our lives, to apply scripture and to our lives and walk after the spirit, right? All those things. And that takes a lot of intention, it takes a lot of attention, being spiritually awake to what's going on and for us to even follow after the spirit and to walk in obedience so that we are becoming more like Christ. We are being changed and transformed by the spirit and through the spirit. We can't do that in our own strength. It'll never work. It's just behavior modification and God wants us, his purpose for us is total transformation. Amen? The third thing, God's eternal purpose for you, true of all believers, is to glorify God in all that we do. We are to live our lives exalting and lifting up the name of Jesus, not us, not us.

We are not that cool. If we have done something amazing, we have accomplished something, we've had an achievement, we have changed and transformed into just living a life of restoration and completeness and wholeness. We don't get to claim that. That is not ours. We don't get to say, yeah, look what I did. My life is this way because I make good choices. That is not glorifying God, that is glorifying us. We are called, one of our purposes is to glorify God. It says in 1 Corinthians 10 31, it says, so whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do it all for his name. Do it all underneath his name, claiming Christ, claiming that he gets the glory and not us. Even when we walk through a trial and we come out on the other side, we have a breakthrough. We receive revelation. We become more wise in our decision making. That is because God is worthy of being glorified because he's so, so good. You were made to display God's beauty and truth in your everyday life through your words, through your work, through your actions, even through your thoughts and your presence. The way that you show up in the world, we are called, we are purposed to glorify God. So here's a question for you. What does that look like in your life? What does that look like in your life and how are you doing that well and where can you do that better? Maybe the Holy Spirit is speaking to you even right now. How can you give God the credit in anything that happens, even, you know, definitely the good things, but even the hard things and the challenging things? How can you exalt and glorify him and his name even in the challenging things? There's a challenge for you.

The fourth way or the fourth thing that God's eternal purpose for you, true of all believers, not just me, not just some people, but you who are listening to walk in good works prepared just for you. Ephesians 2 10 says, for we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things that he planned for us long ago. God's plans and purposes are always good. It says that in the word of God, I have good plans and purposes for you. Part of that is part of the good works. If you're like me, you've come from, you know, we're doing some dirty. We are part of the harmful story of our own story and even other people's story. But God is asking us to do good works. He is empowering us to do good works, to bless others, to serve others, to work in ways that bring and foster that flourishing and that abundance and the life and the peace to forgive, to go love on others. Like those are some examples of what it means to do good works. Listen, and you're not an accident. He does not leave us alone to figure that out on our own where we have to devise all these things. No, no, no. He has given us the equipment. the equipment to really walk that out. I think of 1 Corinthians 13, the definition of what love looks like. That is a way to partner with the Holy Spirit and partner with God's purposes for my life is to walk in the ways of love, to be patient, to be kind, all of those things. Those are good works to encourage a brother, to encourage a sister, to pray for him. Those are good works. But if you are a believer and a follower, you have a purpose. You have a calling to be a sent one, to go out and share the love of God, to go out and talk about what God has done in your life, to go out and praise God with people about

what He's doing in your life right now, to be a walking billboard of God's faithfulness and goodness and His love. We are to tell other people. We are not to just keep it inside and be like, oh, yay, okay, this is just for me. Thanks, Lord. No, no, no. We are to go tell people because if we don't tell them, who will? That's why we come and do the prison events. That's why we come and encourage and testify and talk about God's love and His faithfulness and His goodness. Listen, you are sent, whether you're a teacher, whether you are an incarcerated person, whether you are a correction officer, whether you are an artist, a dad, a mom, whether you work at Walmart, whether you don't even have a job right now and you're job seeking, whether you're in rehabilitation and recovery, you're a chaplain, you're a coach, you're just a friend, you have a calling. You have a calling and you have purpose. God will use your life to lead others to Him, but we have to be an example of that, right? We have to share about what God is doing in our life. So there's five ways now. If you hear those five ways, okay, and you are still kind of unclear and unsure, let me give you some encouragement. If you are in a season of waiting and wondering, God's purpose is not a secret maze. God has given us a blueprint of what His purpose looks like for our lives in the Word of God. So get in the Word of God and study. Go to the back of the Bible, look up the Word in the concordance purpose and read all of the scriptures that are underneath that Word. Look up the definition of it just so you get a better understanding, so you get some clarity on what that looks like for your life. It's not a secret maze. He doesn't withhold it from us.

It is clear in the Word of God. And if we don't know, what do we do? We go Matthew 7 and we go ask, seek, and knock, and He will answer. He will give us the wisdom and the understanding that we are seeking after Him for. God's purpose is a journey walked with Him. It's one faithful step at a time. It's prayer. It's intention. It's moving toward Him. That is how you can know what His purpose is for your life. I hope this has been an encouragement to you. And I want to leave you with one final encouragement. If you are in a season of uncertainty or you're just unsure and you are wandering and waiting, I want you to be encouraged by Proverbs 3, 5 through 6. Take heart, okay? Take heart and apply this to your life. That says that if we trust Him, that He will give us the answer. He will give us direction. And that scripture says, trust in the Lord with all your heart and He will make your paths straight. So the prayer of a righteous person is awesome. We want to come aligned in His will. There's such great power in the prayer of unceasing faithfulness, where we continue to go to God and ask Him and seek after Him, knock at the door and wait for Him to answer and make our paths straight. So let that be an encouragement to you. We love you so much. Stay tuned. for the slides at the end of this. And hey, we want to hear from you. Comment in the section in Pando or write to us so that we can write to you and encourage you and remind you that you

have purpose. You matter. God sees you. God cares. God understands. God hears you. And he knows you and he wants you to know him. So get in the word of God, start praying, start talking to him. Ask him these questions. God, why did you create me? Don't just take it from me. Don't just take it from me. I'm taking it from the Bible. But if you really want to know and you wanted to get it from here to here, go talk to God about it. Go ask him these questions. No question is foolish or dumb or stupid or too small for God. Get curious about life and not only about life, but what a purpose filled life means. We love you so much and we'll see you next time. Bye. Thank you for watching our broadcast. Are you an incarcerated brother or sister who needs encouragement? Write to us at Victorious Living Correspondents, P.O. Box 2751 Greenville, North Carolina, 27836 or email us at hope at vlmag.org. To view Victorious Living magazine in its entirety, please have your chaplain contact us at 352-478-2098 or email us through our website at vlmag.org. We are happy to provide our Victorious Living magazine free of charge, in bulk, with or without staples.