A common question that Christians ask is what God’s purpose for them is. We want to find our place in the world, to have a purpose for our lives. If we are honest with ourselves, we want to know that we matter, that there is something specifically designated for us to accomplish with our lives, and we want to know what that is so that we can get on and do it already. We sort of see God like this divine project manager assigning project tasks to individuals, don’t we? But that is not who God is, and God doesn’t need us to complete a checklist of items to finish His project.
God does have a purpose for Creation, and that purpose is written in Eph 1:10, “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” – God’s purpose is to unite Creation under Christ, reconciling the broken relationship between the Creator and His Creation. And God has given us a role to play in this purpose, not because He needs us (after all, Christ has already done it all), but as a privilege for us to be part of His work. And the instruction for us all is found in Matt 28:19-20 “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” This is our God-given mission – all of us have the same mission, and everything that we do works together to support this mission.
And the thing about this God-given mission is that it’s not a one-person kind of task. It’s a Body-of-Christ kind of task. It needs all of us working together, supporting each other, so that this task is accomplished by the whole. Rom 12:4-8 reminds us that we are all members of the same body, given different gifts to accomplish the same task together.
So the question is not so much “what do I do, God?” as “what do we do, God?” And the answer to that has already been given in the Great Commission – go and make disciples of all nations. And each of us exercising the spiritual gifts that God has given us is an integral part of obeying the Great Commission. The question remains for us: we know what we are to do, but will we obey?