Arise to Purpose

Greeting

Good morning Lighthouse Church!

It feels so good here this morning, doesn’t it?

On Thursday morning our men gathered at 5:30 AM and we prayed for you. Every single one of you was prayed for, wether you are here sitting and receiving today, or if you are serving today, you’ve been covered in prayer and we hope you can feel that this morning.

Ask your neighbor, “Have you made a reservation for next week yet?”

Many of you are going to be coming off your fast and I was hearing that some of you have dinner plans for Hells Kitchen. The restaurant.

My God… from the throne room in prayer and fasting, to the kitchen in hell for beef wellington…

Reading

Esther 4:12-14 The Message

When Hathach told Mordecai what Esther had said, Mordecai sent her this message: “Don’t think that just because you live in the king’s house you’re the one Jew who will get out of this alive. If you persist in staying silent at a time like this, help and deliverance will arrive for the Jews from someplace else; but you and your family will be wiped out. Who knows? Maybe you were made queen for just such a time as this.”

Arise to Purpose

Story

One of the benefits of age is that we get to experience something we call - hindsight.

What is hindsight?

It is the ability to understand the effect of an event or situation after it has occurred.

Have you ever looked back over your life at something that in the moment you thought was a bad thing, only to realize, no that was a good thing!

That actually might have been a God thing.

I was supposed to go straight from High School to San Diego State University, but based on a bad decision that I made I was unable to register for the fall and had to wait a year.

But that fall, while I was in the desert of Junior College God called me to the ministry.

Instead of going to SDSU the next Fall I went to Bible College, and the rest is history…

[Transition]

And I think that for all of us in the room, we have our own versions of events like that in our lives that not only worked out for good, but they also seemed to be critical for us to be able to do what we feel like we were called to do.

We call that our purpose.

And our reading this morning is simple a story that I am using as our take off today for this idea that God has a plan and purpose for your life, and all of these life events are going to be used by God to move us in the direction of our purpose.

In our story, Esther is a young Jewish girl who was married to the Persian King Xerxes, and when someone with bad intentions got into the ear of King Xerxes that all Jews must be killed, Esther used her position to sway the King away from that decision.

Esther was able to prevent a genocide of Jews…

And in our reading she is motivated to stand up for her people by her uncle when he dropped this line, “Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.”

What a line…

That feels like a line that belongs in an Oscar winning performance…

Your purpose, every event in your life was leading you to this moment right here.

[Transition]

And we love stuff like that, don’t we?

We do.

Because when we start talking about purpose it leads us to this bigger feeling we call fulfillment.

When we achieve purpose, we can finally feel fulfilled.

When we do what we were born to do, we finally satiate that in-born desire in all of us to do what matters.

Purpose.

We all want to find our purpose.

Transition

Wednesday morning I read this Proverb in my Bible reading.

Proverbs 14:11 CSB

The house of the wicked will be destroyed, but the tent of the upright will flourish.

I believe this speaks to the fact that if fulfillment and purpose are misplaced in possessions, which is very common for us to do in our Western American Culture of pursuing more and more and more… we’re going to be very disappointed when we have those possessions and we feel incomplete. Sure, you have the house. You have the earthly possession, but it was pursued for the wrong reasons, and maybe even acquired by wicked means.

And yet, you can have a tent, but if you are living upright, you’re going to flourish.

So that got me thinking…

If we associate purpose with the wrong things, what happens when we turn the accumulation of things into our purpose?

Need

So what I want to talk about this morning is how we can discover our purpose, and making sure that our purpose is submitted to the word of God, and not the systems and expectations of this world.

Let me give you a sticky statement for that - Don’t let the enemy hijack your purpose.

Application

You Are Fearfully & Wonderfully Made

Psalm 139:13–16 NIV

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

Before we look out to try and discover our purpose, we need to begin by looking up and looking in.

We look up because we acknowledge what the Psalmist is saying here, You Are Not An Accident. Regardless of how you got here, and no matter how challenging your life has been, you need to acknowledge your creator and that in spite of this all, He has a plan for you.

I was not an unwanted child, but I was an unplanned child.

My older brother is 15 months older than me, and it was not my parents plan to have me as soon as they did after my older brother was born. We were 3 months away from being Irish twins. How many of you know what I’m talking about?

But do you know who wasn’t surprised?

God wasn’t .

God had a plan, He had a purpose, and He even had the time for me.

I am not an accident, and neither are you.

So you need to settle that first and foremost.

Something else you might need to settle, and I think this is going to help some of you - you also had no say in who your parents were.

If you’ve ever struggled in that area, please know that at some point, you have to pray about that, process that, and heal from that, so that you can be whole.

So if you were not an accident, neither were your parents.

[Transition]

We then begin to look within to discover the gifts that God has given us - What are things that you are good at? What are the things that come more naturally to you? What are the things that you enjoy doing?

These are all great question to ask as you begin to discover how God has made you.

Deeper questions to ask are also - What are the experiences of my life that cause lots of emotion? Do I have pain in my life that God wants to redeem and use for His glory? Have I overcome hardships that I’ve learned from so that I can help others?

As you answer these questions, you are starting to get a glimpse of what God may be doing in your life.

Let’s consider someone from the Bible for a moment, Moses.

He spent the first 40 years of his life growing up in Pharaoh’s palace. He then spent the next 40 years of his life navigating the wilderness as a shepherd working for his father-in-law.

Anyone know how he spent the last 40 years of his life?

Leading a nation from Egypt into the wilderness, and then navigating that wilderness until they were able to enter into the Promised Land.

When you look at the first 80 years of Moses’ life, it might seem unfair. It’s not exactly the best life plan. Instead of going from poor to rich, he went from rich to poor.

But all of that was just preparation for God’s assignment on his life.

Without you even knowing it, God will use your life to prepare you for your purpose.

One more thing I want to say about this, and this is huge - you need to Discover Your Spiritual Gifts.

This is actually what we spend the most of time doing in Growth Track, which by the way is tomorrow, and it if you were on the fence about signing up I hope you’ll do that.

We take you through a couple of assessments to help you identify the spiritual gifts that already exist within you.

After discovering these gifts, we then show you people in the Bible that also have those gifts so that you can read and study their lives. We also show you some teams in the church that you need to be serving in so that we can give you a place to use these gifts.

[Transition]

Why does that matter?

Your Purpose Is In God’s Plan

One of the things that we have to do is ensure that we have the priority right when it comes to our purpose. This is especially challenging in a hyper-individualistic culture like the western American culture. Cultures like ours are obsessed with self.

The self-help industry is worth $12-13 Billion last two years

And so the danger is that there are people that are not only in pursuit of their plans for their life, but they believe that God plays a supporting role in that.

In a hyper individualistic culture your purpose is greater than God’s purpose, and you look at God’s word as a means to your end.

That line of thinking is not only dangerous, but it is a false gospel.

I want us to read Peter’s words here in this passage.

1 Peter 2:9 NIV

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Peter begins by saying, “But you are…” which is a singular statement. He’s writing to the person reading or hearing. He wants to make a very personal and singular connection.

But then he leads them to God’s purpose - “You are a chosen people.” That’s plural. He didn’t say that they are a chosen person, he said you are a chosen people. You are a royal priesthood, not priest, singular.

This is all very intentional to show us that when we talk about our purpose, it is always within the body of Christ and for the body of Christ.

Therefore, we have to remember that the gifts and the spiritual gifts over our life is to glorify God by serving others. They are not self-serving.

Now, I want to give us a very easy and clear next step here.

If this is your church and you are not yet on our Team helping serve the body of Christ, we want for you to be on a team. I can understand that there are some ebbs and flows in life when we need to pull back from a team, but simply “not wanting” to be on a team is not one of those. And as your Pastor, I want for all of you to grow in this area. To move beyond being served, to stepping into a Team to begin serving the church and serving the community.

I’ve asked our team to make this easy, so go ahead and hold your phone up to the Tap Sticker on the seat back in front of you and we’re going to ask you to do this one thing - let us know that you’re ready to jump back into a team and then let us know if you’ve already taken Growth Track. I’d like for you to do that right now, and not wait any longer.

If you’d like to wait and do that after our service, go ahead and head on over to our Start Here Canopy so that we can help you complete that and we can get you onto a team.

(Conclusion) Develop My Gifts

The last thing I want to share with you is that you have a responsibility to continue developing your gifts and growing in your purpose.

I want to apply this verse that we read in Luke.

Luke 2:52 NIV

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

I think this gives us something that we should be aiming for as well. Are we getting better once we know our purpose and the gifts we have? Are we investing into those things?

There is the parable of the talents in the scripture where Jesus clearly teaches that we should multiply the talents that we are given.

Let’s make the application.

Jesus gives us the gift, but he doesn’t grow them, that’s our job. And often times, that’s a very quiet process that gets no light shined on it.

It’s kind of like developing film on a camera.

Before there were digital pictures, images were stored on film, but they had to be developed. That was done in a dark room.

That’s a great analogy of what our development needs to be like as well.

There’s an image of who God has called us to be on film, but away from the stage, and away from the lights, that needs to be developed.

So we get better and we grow in our purpose by developing what God has already placed inside of us.

[Transition]

I think this is a word for someone right now…

I’ve seen over the years that people use this term “burn out” when it comes to ministry. And, there are some cases where that is real. I think this is especially true of people with obsessive personalities.

But I think some of what people would call “burn out” is just boredom due to not developing what God has given you.

I’m actually being very kind to what Jesus said… because in the parable, the person who received one talent and did not grow that talent was call “wicked and lazy”.

That is a strong rebuke that we need to sit with.

Am I developing and growing what God has given me? Or am I acting more like the servant with one talent?

[Prayer]

Call

I want to make a call for people who are seeking their purpose to come and receive prayer today. I’m not promising you’re going to have a moment where you leave here with everything figured out, but I do want you to come with an open heart and an open mind.

I’m going to invite people to help me pray. Especially anyone wanting to perhaps share a word with someone. You’re welcome to come and help us pray for others here this morning.

My desire is to see people either activated or reactivated today.