This desire to understand the nature of something is an important part of learning.
The nature of a thing, by definition, is the “particular combination of qualities belonging to a person, animal, thing or class by birth, origin or constitution” or “the instincts or inherent tendencies that direct its conduct.” Thus, a study of the nature of purpose will reveal both the qualities that belong to purpose and the inherent tendencies that affect its behavior.
This topic would be best discussed under the following subtopics:
PURPOSE IS INHERENT
When a manufacturer creates a new product, he lets the product’s intended use govern the design, function and nature of the product so that the fulfillment of its purpose is inseparably built into it.
Purpose predicts the nature of something, and nature is that which a product inherently is.
Nature is always given for the express purpose of executing the manufacturer’s reason for creating the product.
When God creates men and women, He designs them to fulfill their function and gives them certain qualities and characteristics that enable them to perform His intended purpose.
These abilities are yours before birth.
They do not come to you when you receive Jesus and are reborn.
Thus, your natural inclinations to socialize with people or to seek solitude, to think with your mind or to do things with your hands, to communicate with words or to express yourself through the various art forms, to come up with the ideas or to put them into action, to lead or to follow, to inspire or to manage, to calculate or to demonstrate are part of your makeup and your personality from the time
God chose to make you and designed you in a particular way.
They relate to your purpose, which is a natural, innate, intimate part of who you are.
You are designed for your purpose.
You are perfect for your purpose.
Your purpose, your abilities and your outlook on life cannot be separated, because your purpose determines how you will function, which establishes how you are designed, which is related to your potential, which is connected to your natural abilities.
To remove your purpose would be to significantly change who you are, because your purpose both informs and reveals your nature and your responsibilities.
Everything you naturally have and inherently are is necessary for you to fulfill your purpose.
Your height, race, skin color, language, physical features and intellectual capacity are all designed for your purpose.
This is why it is very important and essential that you never try to become like someone else.
You can and should learn from others, but you must never become them.
You can never fulfill your purpose without being yourself.
Who and what you are is important and essential to why you are.
Purpose is why.
In new birth, God reclaims what is rightfully His.
He redirects the natural skills and abilities that satan perverted and employs them for the completion of His plans and purposes.
Taking away what is destroying you, He encourages you to rediscover all those things that you like to do. As He restores His anointing on your life, the power to perform with excellence reinstates the beauty and the perfection of your innate abilities.
Then He says, “Go ahead.
Do all you like to do for My glory and the advancement of My Kingdom.”
The biblical character of Moses is a good example of the inherent nature of purpose.
Moses was a man with a deliverance instinct.
He was born to be a deliverer.
Even before he met God, he wanted to set people free.
One day he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew.
When no one was looking, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
The next day he saw two Hebrews fighting.
When he asked one of them, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?” the man replied, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?
Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:13-14)
When Moses heard this, he became afraid and fled to a nearby country where he shepherded his father-in-law’s sheep (Exodus 2:1-3:1).
Years later, God reclaimed for His own purposes the deliverance and leadership skills that He had given to Moses.
He sent Moses to the Pharoah of Egypt to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 3:10).
God didn’t throw away the skills and the talents that had been with Moses from birth, He simply renewed them and redirected them to their intended use.
The purpose of Moses’ life didn’t change; the use of the gifts that fulfilled his purpose were simply redirected toward the purpose for which they had been given.
Those same gifts God had given Moses at birth—basic components of his makeup— brought freedom to the Israelites and glory to God.
In essence, Moses was equipped for his purpose, and so are you.
PURPOSE IS INDIVIDUAL
The individual nature of purpose is best seen in the various parts of a product.
Each has a unique function and design that enables it to meet the manufacturer’s reason for including it in the product.
This uniqueness doesn’t make the various parts unequal, just different.
In other words, you are the way you are because of why you are.
This same principle applies to men and women. God needs you because your purpose is unique.
He’s designed you specifically to meet His requirements.
No one has your fingerprint, your personality or your particular combination of natural skills and talents. Oh, they may look like you, but they aren’t you, because there’s a part of God only you can express.
In essence, there is something you came to this planet to do that the world needs in this generation.
Your birth is evidence that your purpose is necessary.
PURPOSE IS OFTEN MULTIPLE
Just as purpose is specific to a particular individual or product, even so that purpose may be varied and numerous.
As we have seen, God gave the lights He placed in the sky a variety of purposes.
The sun, for example, was created to 1) separate the day from the night, 2) mark the seasons, days and years, 3) govern the day, 4) separate light from darkness, and 5) give light to the earth (Genesis 1:14-18).
This multiple purpose is visible throughout creation.
Trees give us oxygen, shade and fruit; animals provide food and clothing; flowers beautify the earth, satisfy the bees’ need for nectar and supply pollen for the production of fruit; and men and women assume the varied roles of spouse, parent, worker, church member and friend.
With the multiplication of purpose always comes different scopes of vision, which require varied actions and responses.
Moses was both confidant and judge, suiting his actions and responses to meet the purpose he was fulfilling.
Knowing and understanding the variety of purposes that had claims on his life influenced how well he fulfilled his overall purpose as the leader of God’s people.
In some respects, his ability to meet the demands of this multiplicity of purpose was made possible by the interdependent nature of purpose.
He needed Joshua, Jethro and others to help him carry out his God-given purpose.
You were born with and for a purpose.
However, that purpose may incorporate many minor facets whose purposes or intents are to fulfill the greater, overall purpose for your life.
PURPOSE IS INTERDEPENDENT
Everything has a particular purpose that is linked to a greater purpose.
Or to say it another way, everything has a purpose larger than its specific end so that every individual purpose is fulfilled only when the personal task is pursued within the scope of the greater purpose and for its fulfillment.
Nothing exists for itself; everything is related to something else.
The moon provides a good example of the interdependent nature of purpose.
When God created lights and placed them in the sky, He made a greater light, the sun, and a lesser light, the moon.
The sun was given the task of ruling the day and the moon was designed to govern the night.
The moon is not created to shine—it has no light of its own—but to reflect light like a large mirror.
Thus, the moon catches the light of the sun and sends it back to the side of the earth that is away from the sun, providing light in the night.
That’s why the moon rotates in a certain position all year.
Although it appears differently to us on any given night of the month, the moon’s position does not change.
To fulfill its purpose, the moon must always remain in a position to catch the sun’s light and reflect it to the earth.
It also follows that the sun and the earth must remain in position for the moon to fulfill its purpose.
If the earth leaves its designated rotation around the sun or tilts on its axis farther than God’s design intended, the moon cannot do what it was created to do.
Or take a battery.
The purpose of a battery is to store energy until it is needed.
If the battery is never placed into a position that requires its stored energy, it cannot fulfill its purpose. The satisfaction of its purpose is related to its position in a product that has a larger purpose.
So a car battery cannot fulfill its purpose unless you turn the key in the ignition and allow the battery to send power to the engine, which starts the engine that powers the wheels that move the car.
Without all the other parts, neither the battery, the engine, the wheels nor the car can fulfill their purposes.
Everything needs something.
The world needs you and the purpose for which you were born.
You also need the purposes of others in order to fulfill your purpose.
Purpose cannot be fulfilled in isolation.
This same phenomenon of interdependent purpose is evident in the Church.
The apostle Paul uses the image of the body to describe this interrelatedness.
Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others (Romans 12:4-5).
… God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.
If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it (1 Corinthians 12:24-27).
Thus, we see that the interrelatedness of the Church is part of God’s purpose.
He gives to each member a task that contributes to the Church’s overall purpose, thereby allowing the Church to grow and build “itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Ephesians 4:16).
Nothing exists for itself.
Everything is part of a larger purpose.
Can you imagine? Not even God could fulfill His purpose without the cooperation of His creation.
Just suppose the tree on which Jesus died had refused to become a tree or if Joseph of Arimathea had not purchased the tomb in which Jesus was destined to lay.
Your purpose is designed to affect history within and beyond your generation.
You are a necessary part of the world’s population and a vital link in this generation.
We need your purpose.
PURPOSE IS PERMANENT
Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails (Proverbs 19:21).
God has also given purpose the quality of permanence.
Once a manufacturer designs, produces and markets a product that fulfills a certain purpose, he doesn’t change that purpose because a consumer doesn’t like the way it works.
He may change the design or the components or the materials used in the components, but he will not change the purpose, because the purpose behind the product is what gives it meaning.
In other words, plans might change, but purpose is constant.
What God wants is established, but how He gets it may vary.
This quality of purpose combats the many plans and schemes that we come up with to meet our God-intended reason for life.
PURPOSE IS RESILIENT
Related to the quality of permanence is the characteristic of resiliency in purpose.
When a manufacturer sets a purpose for a product and develops a plan to achieve that purpose, no amount of problems with the manufacturing process will change the product’s purpose.
No matter how bad things become, the manufacturer will not say, “We’re having trouble getting this product to do what we want it to do, so let’s have it do this instead.”
Each difficulty that seeks to hinder progress toward the completion of a product that fulfills the manufacturer’s original intent is used to learn more about the product and the way it must naturally function to carry out its purpose.
The journey may include bumps and detours, but eventually it will come to the desired end.
In other words, no matter how bad the process becomes, the manufacturer uses the problems for good as he incorporates the insight gained from the challenges to build a superior product that does all it’s supposed to do.
If you have made decisions that have interfered with God’s plan and purpose for your life, He has arranged a reformation program to redeem the detours.
He uses the experiences to refine you as a purposeful part of the whole.
Purpose transforms mistakes into miracles and disappointments into testimonies.
This resiliency of purpose is evident in the lives of many people who have missed their purpose.
They had great talent, but they didn’t know what they were supposed to do with it.
I think of the apostle Paul. He intrigues me. Paul, or Saul as he was known before he met Christ on the road to Damascus, was a very talented person.
Although Paul’s natural talents and skills were initially used in opposition to his God-given task of carrying the Good News of Jesus to the Gentiles, his purpose did not change.
God changed his name but not his purpose. Purpose remains true no matter what path a person or a thing takes to achieve its intended goal.
God’s purpose is not hindered by your past.
He turned a coward (Gideon) into a mighty leader (Judges 6-8), and a murderer (Moses) into a deliverer (Exodus 3).
He also turned a prostitute (the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well of Jacob) into a preacher (John 4:1-42).
Imagine what He could make of you.
You are not too old to resume your purpose.
Nothing you have done can cancel your purpose.
The world is waiting for you to produce your purpose.
PURPOSE IS UNIVERSAL
No manufacturer goes to the trouble to design, produce and market a product for which he has no purpose. Who would want a useless thing?
Thus, everything has a purpose.
Or, to say it another way, the gift of purpose is universal.
Nothing is created without a purpose behind the making.
This principle is evident in nature.
Every human being, every living thing, indeed everything that exists, has been chosen by God to fulfill His purposes.
We all have part of this universal purpose.
When God chose the sun, He chose it for a purpose.
Then He created it with the ability to complete its purpose.
God also chose the mosquito and designed into it everything it needs to fulfill its reason for being.
The oceans, too, were created by God to perform the tasks He dictated for them before they were completed.
Nothing is outside God’s universal purpose.
Whenever this commonness of purpose is not recognized, death occurs.
Most of humanity has lost sight of our universal purpose, we are not fulfilling all that God purposed for our lives.
That failure to live out all that God put us here to do has not changed God’s purpose.
His desire to see all men and women know life as He intended it, so strong that He has tried again and again throughout the history of man to redirect us into His predestined path.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is His final attempt.
Through Him we can move from death to life.
Through Him we can rediscover our God-given universal purpose.
Not one person on this planet is outside that will of God, for He has chosen each of us to share in His glory. Thus, no matter how your life started or how bad it has been, you are not a mistake.
God intended for you to live, both physically and spiritually.
He would not have allowed you to be born if you were not included in His universal purposes.
You are necessary.
You are essential.
The universality of purpose is something we can cling to when life becomes meaningless and without value. Together with the intrinsic, individual, multiple, interdependent, permanent and resilient qualities of purpose, it gives us an assurance that we are not mistakes.
God had a purpose for us when He planted us in our mothers’ wombs.
That purpose has not changed.
The challenge that lies before us is to understand the basic principles that underlie purpose so we can recognize purpose at work in our lives and allow it to guide and redirect our paths.
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart …
Jeremiah 1:5
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