Title: Everything That Begins with God
Content Life of Purpose 4 Months First Sermon
Title: Everything That Begins with God
Text: Col 1:16
Now Haeoreum Church is at a very important moment. With the completion of the study of the life of life to go to the house church, we have reached an important point of spiritual change.
Through the study of the life of life, we have formed a framework of salvation, joy, and faith, and a rich system of life. But if you stop here, you will soon live helplessly, withered in joy, abundance, and motivation. But if we find the purpose for which we were created with the God who created us, we will find vitality in our lives and will be filled with hope, joy and strength. Furthermore, you will be able to easily decide what to do and you will be less stressed. Most importantly, you will be well prepared for eternity.
To that end, we desperately need a new and intense training to put the new wine of new spiritual awakening and growth into new bottles, individually and collectively.
So, I decided to train, and I would like to call this training “four months of a purpose-driven life.”
1) Through this training, we will seek personal, family and religious change and growth by discovering the firm purpose God has given to each of us in life.
2) The church community also wants to use it as an opportunity for qualitative and quantitative growth in order to build a healthy house church that meets God's purpose.
3) Furthermore, I would like to cultivate the ability to provide opportunities for spiritual challenge and awakening to unbelievers and religious colds around me and in our church community.
What is the most important question in life?
“Why do I exist in this world?”
Thousands of people have answered this question since human history. But it's still in chaos. What is the cause of the confusion?
1. Finding the purpose of life that started with reasoning
Because it started with reasoning.
Dr. Hugh Moorhead, Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern Illinois University, posed the question “What is the meaning of life?” to 250 of the world's leading philosophers, writers and scholars, and compiled the responses in a book.
A very small number of respondents were confident that their answer was the best answer, some admitted, though not convinced, that they had made it their own, and some frankly admitted that they knew nothing about the purpose of life. Some of them asked me to let them know when they found an answer.
The reason even such prominent people are unable to give clear answers to the meaning and purpose of life is that they do not know where to start. That's why we can only guess. He has no choice but to say, “It will be like this,” based on his knowledge and experience.
There are those who object to this.
“I found my purpose in the book, and by doing what the book suggested, I achieved great success in my life. What do you mean?”
Of course, it is true that books help us a lot and guide us to pave the way forward.
‘Think of your dreams. Clarify your values Set goals. Figure out what you're good at Set your goals high. try to achieve it Train yourself consistently. Believe that you can achieve your goals. Share your dreams with others. There are many books that have made people successful through teachings such as 'Never give up.' Some people follow the book's precepts to set goals and work wholeheartedly to achieve more than those goals.
However, we must make one clear point here.
Being successful and fulfilling your purpose in life are never the same thing. Even if you achieve your personal goals and achieve tremendous success according to the standards of the world, if you do not achieve the answer to the question of why you exist on this earth, when you take the exam, put aside the answer to the question, you can experience all kinds of academic and experiential learning. It is no different from mobilizing knowledge to fill the answer sheet with rhetoric.
Jesus said this about it: He is a man who has won the world but lost eternal life.
“What good is a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? For what can a man exchange his soul?” (Matthew 16:26)
2. Finding your purpose in life from revelation
If you show the mobile phone that most Koreans have to the San people living in remote areas of the Philippines and ask if they know what it is, how to use it, and what purpose it was invented for, Junggu Heating will give you the answer. That's guessing and guessing. Reasoning and conjecture cannot give a definitive answer. Just as no matter how much you stare at your cell phone, the cell phone does not tell you its purpose, no matter how much you observe life, it cannot tell you the purpose of life on its own. We have no way of knowing what we were made for because we did not create ourselves.
But if you give the person who made the phone a description of why it was made and how to use it, you'll understand what it does, how it's used, and why it was invented. Because that manual tells you everything about the phone.
In the same way, in order to know the purpose of our existence in life, instead of looking at life and listening to speculations and reasoning, we just need to look at the life manual given by the Creator who created life.
Just as the easiest way to find out about the purpose of an invention is to ask the person who made it, so is the purpose of life. Just ask the creator who made man. However, if everyone in the land asks and answers all questions, this too will become Junggu Heating. So, God the Creator revealed why he made life, how to live, and what to expect. That is the Bible.
Thank you so much.
God has not left us in the dark to guess and wonder. Through the Bible, he clearly explained what life is, why we are alive, what to avoid, and what to expect in the future. He taught us things that we could never know through self-guidelines, philosophy books, or self-development books.
God is not only the beginning of our lives, but also the source of our lives. Therefore, in order to know the purpose of life, we must listen to the Word of God, not to the wisdom of the world. We must build our lives on eternal truths, not on popular psychology, on our motivations for success, or on inspiring stories.
“In his hand is the life of every living thing and the life of every human being” (Job 12:10).
Everything in life is in the hands of God. Therefore, in order to reach our purpose in life, we must start with God our Creator. Because we were created by and for God, we can never understand life or make clear our purpose in life until we understand and believe it. Only in God can we discover how we started, who we are, the meaning and purpose of life, the preciousness of life, and ultimately the destination we reach.
All other paths but God will eventually lead to a dead end.
“The carnal mind is death. But the mind that belongs to the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6).
Obsession with self and the world leads to death. But focusing on God will lead us to a vast and free life. There will be life and peace.
Disobedience to the rules inevitably leads to failure.
We were made for God and made by God. God never exists for us. In other words, life is the use of us by God for His purposes, not the use of Him for our purposes.
Therefore, our purpose in life is more than our personal sense of accomplishment, peace of mind, and happiness, and far greater than our families, our businesses, and our greatest dreams and ambitions.
We must start with God. Because God created us for God's purpose.
Even Bertrand Russell, an atheist (British logician and philosopher, author of more than 40 books, Nobel Prize for Literature) said, "The question of the purpose of life is meaningless unless it is assumed that there is a God."
At the age of 27, Russian novelist Andrei Vitov (formerly president of the Russian Pen Club), who lived under an atheistic communist regime, fell into despair and suffered from pain that seemed to disappear completely. He confessed that the phrase “I can’t understand” led him into the light of God and made him a part of the world of light.
Even atheists are professing that they can discover the purpose of life in God and live a new life.
Therefore, we should congratulate ourselves. You should congratulate the body next to you. We are already in God.
Now, I would like to join you on a long journey of 4 months. Why is it 4 months? Since the remaining time in 2009 is 4 months, we want to invest all of that time to clearly find the purpose of our life. Even if we invest that much in discovering the purpose of life, it is not wasted because the value of our lives is eternal. This is because it does not end on this earth, but extends to eternal life.
4 months is a short time compared to our lifetime. Compared to our eternal life, it is a time that is not even a point. But these brief moments will enrich our lives, simplify them, and make life very easy and peaceful.
Everything was created by God and created for God. Therefore, the beginning of everything is God. So, the Bible, the revelation of God, begins with the great prophecy in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” If this great prophecy becomes our confession, we will become very blessed and glorious beings who will succeed to eternal life.
I pray in the name of the Lord that we all become channels of blessing and glory by building our lives on the confession that we were all created by and for God.