WHY DO I EXIST ben
WHY DO I EXIST?
Various Scriptures
We start this series today on the seven wonders of man--the seven big questions that everybody on the planet asks. And with war going on as it is today, with everything going on in the world, people often ask themselves the question that I am going to deal with here this morning: Why do I exist? What in the world am I doing here? What is the purpose of my life? As one philosopher said, “I think, therefore I am.” I am not sure I understand all of that. But I think, and you think, and if you will think with me this morning, I guess we will exist for a few minutes together.
The question is: Am I just a product of random selection as Darwin would have us to believe and other evolutionists would have us to believe? Are we just here because we happen to be the ones who survived the battle of the fittest, or is there something more? Am I here living and breathing for a reason? Is there a higher purpose for my life than what I have found so far, or could it really be true that life is a gift from a loving God who created me? When you think about existence and what it all means, there are really only two ways of dealing with this. There are only two possibilities for determining what our existence is all about. That is human reasoning. We either read the philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and others who are writing even in our day, or we come up with the idea that human reasoning really doesn’t work and we depend on the divine revelation. As Christians, we depend on what the Bible says and divine revelation, and you have to somewhere along the line make a choice personally. Am I going to trust human reasoning--what some human being said to work this thing out, or am I--and it takes faith, it really takes faith--am I going to put my faith in what the Bible says about man’s purpose and his existence here on this Earth? Am I going to trust Him for what He says about why I am here?
Now I want to go to the book of Ecclesiastes and talk about Solomon for a few minutes. When Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, except for in a few places, he was all messed up. He really was. Solomon was probably the richest man that ever lived on the face of the Earth. The Bible tells us that gold and silver were so plentiful in Jerusalem in Solomon’s day that they were like stones. Bill Gates today would be a pauper compared to Solomon. Solomon was probably the wealthiest man who ever lived. Solomon had about 700 wives and 300 concubines. That means 1,000 women hanging up their pantyhose in his bathroom everyday. Along with all the women from all the different parts of the Middle East that he had married in his day, they brought in all of their different gods and all of their different religious beliefs and all of their different systems of worship; and Solomon came to the point in the end of his days where he was just totally messed up. He walked away essentially from his close personal relationship with God. Even though in Ecclesiastes he does finally come to the right conclusion that the whole duty of man is to obey God and keep His commandments…he finally comes to the right conclusion, but he is a mess. Thirty-three times in the book of Ecclesiastes Solomon says life is meaningless. If you read the Bible sometimes the way I do--you just have to laugh. This guy was a mess! Here was a guy who had all the blessings of God. He was the wisest man on the planet. He began to think about his existence and why he was here and tried to evaluate it by human reasoning. With human reasoning (or life under the sun, as he called it) he came to the conclusion that everything that he had seen in his life, except God, was absolutely meaningless. Let me just throw a few of them up here. He says in Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Meaningless, meaningless says the teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.” “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun. All of them are meaningless. A chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). And then this last one he is just so depressed, he is so down, he is so messed up, he says: “I praised the dead who are already dead. More than the living who are still alive. Yet better than both is he who has never existed” (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3, NKJ). This guy is a nut, isn’t he? I mean, he is! You talk about the need for Valium. This guy needs Valium! He needs anything he could get. Prozac. He needed whatever. Maybe a few stiff drinks. I don’t know what he needed--something to pull him out of this. He was a mess. Thirty-three times! Look at just a few of the things that he says are meaningless. In Chapter 2, verse 1, he says, “I thought in my heart ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure...’” He said, I will find out if pleasure is a good reason for existence, which is what most Americans live for. And he said, “…I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good, but that also proved to be meaningless.” Talk about a guy given over to pleasure. This guy just gave himself to every kind of pleasure that you could imagine. He came to the conclusion, it’s meaningless. Look at verse 11. He said, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done…” He said, all of the labor, all of the work that I’ve done. He built palaces and he built the temple for God, and he did so many things. “When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” He says in chapter 4, verse 4, “…I saw that all the labor and all the achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor.” He said that. Do you know what he is talking about here? He says, “This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” He says that man’s just trying to keep up with the neighbor next door who just put a garage on his house and now we’ve got to have a garage. Or get a new dress. It’s called the market- driven economy. That’s what we have. And he said, I’ve found out about that. And he said I studied that, and that’s meaningless.
Chapter 5, verse 10, “Whoever loves money, never has money enough. Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.” But we all think that way, don’t we? I’ve often thought, If I just had a little more money. How many have ever thought that before? Be honest. He said our wealth is never enough. And yet we are, as Americans, the richest nation on earth. “This too,” he said, “is meaningless.” All the money you can make and Solomon was a multi-, multi-billionaire…he said it’s meaningless. And in Chapter 9, in verse 9, I could just keep going on. Sometime you ought to read through this book and see what a mess he came to. He was a man who had a close relationship with God at one time and began to follow other ways in his life and it ruined him. He finally comes to this conclusion and this is funny when I read it. He says, verse 9 of chapter 9, “Enjoy life with your wife whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days.” Talk about a need for Valium, Prozac. This guy just needs to go to sleep for a while or something. “Enjoy life with your wife whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless”…I am just trying to get you to get the idea that this guy is a nut. He came to the conclusion, after giving himself to wealth, after giving himself to pleasure, after giving himself to human achievement, after seeing what the market-driven economy is like, and all that he knew, and everything that there was…he said it’s all meaningless.
I’ve got a few quotes that I want to give you. The search for purpose for our existence and meaning has been ongoing for thousands of years: J. Stevenson said, “Two factors in particular stand out in Aristotle’s philosophy. One is his view that everything has its own purpose that is part of a larger purpose. His philosophy consists largely of trying to figure out what these purposes are and how they exist together.”[1] And isn’t that what everybody is trying to do? What is my purpose and how does it fit into the larger purpose of what’s going on in this universe? Simon Blackman said, “When we ask if life has meaning, the first question has to be to whom? To a witness with the whole of space and time in its view, nothing on a human scale will have meaning.”[2] He said when you look at the vastness of space and time (it’s kind of like riding in an airplane on a clear day at 30,000 feet and looking down at Seattle)…when you look at man and compare it with time and space, he says it doesn’t have any meaning. And then he made another statement. Talk about a philosopher who is mixed up. He said, “The problem with life is that it has too much meaning.”[3] That’s basically what happens with people who use human reasoning to decide why they exist.
I like what French philosopher John Paul Sartre said. He said, “Life is inherently absurd.” You know what? It’s absurd for me to believe that our kids are just here by random selection. They just happened by chance. Their lives really are just going to be lived…and then they are going to die…and they don’t have any meaning…and they don’t really have any purpose. “Life is absurd.” I don’t believe that at all. He also said, and I like this, he said at one point, “We are condemned to be free.” He said the problem with man is we have a free will. We are condemned to be free. To think whatever we want. To do whatever we want. And, of course, there are consequences to doing whatever you want. But he said the problem with man is we are condemned to be free to make our own choices. Martin Heidegger said, “There is no reason or explanation for life until we decide individually what reason and explanations we believe in.” Until you decide what you believe your existence is all about and what reason and explanations for life that you believe in, life absolutely has no meaning. If you are here this morning and you are feeling like, “Man, life is just meaningless!” I want to ask you, What’s your belief system? What’s your value system? What is it that you put your faith and your trust into? What do you think about life? When we come to divine revelation instead of human reasoning, God says that life has a purpose. He says that in Psalm 57:2, “I cry out to God, Most High, to God, who fulfills his purpose for me.” God has an individual purpose for every person on this planet. “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me…” (Psalm 138:8). “Now it is God who made us for this very purpose…” He said that in II Corinthians 5:5. You are made for a specific purpose and your life does have meaning.
You will find your purpose for existence when you acknowledge your Creator.
That is what we want to talk about this morning. I want to keep this simple, if I can. Because really, I believe it is simple. God has revealed to us what life is all about and what this existence on this planet is all about. You will find your purpose for existence when you acknowledge your Creator. I was reading, as I was thinking about the reason for man’s existence…I was reading Genesis 1. I came across some familiar verses to all of us. It says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the Earth and subdue it.’” We’ve pretty much done a lot of that. Filled the Earth. We’ve been fruitful. We are subduing it. But the thing that I want you to see is that God created man in His own image. Hugh Ross has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and cosmology—the study of the universe and stars and all that stuff. He gives several quotes in here of what conclusions modern science has come to, and modern scientists who didn’t believe in God, or a creator, or a great designer have come to. He says this,
“The discovery of this degree of design in the universe is having a profound theological impact on astronomers. As we noted already Hoyle concludes that ‘a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology,’ and Davies has moved from promoting atheism to conceding ‘the laws [of physics] seem themselves to be the product of exceeding ingenious design.’ He further says, ‘There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming.’”[4]
There is a God who designed it all and created you for a purpose. Astronomer George Greenstein, in his book, The Symbiotic Universe expresses these thoughts. He says,
“As we survey all the evidence, the thought, insistently arises that some supernatural agency--or rather [capital A] Agency--must be involved. It is possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled on scientific proof for the existence of a Supreme Being. Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?”[5]
Of course, he isn’t saying what “God” he believes in, but I do believe with all my heart that God did step in. God did create the heavens and the earth, and that there is a reason for you being here. You will find your purpose. Listen to me this morning. You will begin to find your purpose when you understand and you acknowledge your Creator. I believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit cooperated together in creating the heavens and the Earth and in creating you. I love John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.” Jesus Christ was right there in creation because He is God and He’s always been God. You will find your purpose when you begin to acknowledge that you are a special creation of God.
You will find your purpose for existence in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Secondly, you will find your purpose for existence in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus said these words, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). If you are one of those people, like Solomon, and life is just kind of a mess right now; it’s kind of meaningless, Jesus Christ said, “I have come that they may have life and that they may have it to the full.” In some versions of the Bible it says that they may have “abundant life.” In fact, the word life or have it to the full means “super abundant life.” Life greater than any life you could imagine. He came for that reason. The apostle Paul said these words, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). He also said, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 3:8). Let me remind you that the apostle Paul certainly wasn’t the kind of guy who was looking for God to do something special in his life when God found him on the road to Damascus. If you read Acts chapter 9, Paul was a mean guy before he found Christ. He was an angry man. He delighted in persecuting Christians. Going place to place and putting Christians in prison. That was his job. He loved it. He was a religious zealot. He was a Pharisee. He was trained at the feet of Gamilio, one of the greatest doctors of the law in Jerusalem in his day. He loved to go around and persecute Christians…to see them beaten, to see them tortured, to see them put in prison. He was even standing there when Stephen, the first martyr in the book of Acts, was murdered. Paul was standing there consenting unto his death, helping the crowd put him to death. Paul didn’t exactly love Christians, but when he met Jesus Christ his life totally changed. I want to say something. No person that ever gets to know Jesus Christ personally remains the same. He radically changes the meaning of life for every person who understands that God comes in, and says, “Lord, I am a sinner. I believe you died on the cross for me. I believe you rose from the grave and I want to have a personal relationship with you.” I want to say to you this morning until you do that, life doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Will Durant wrote The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time. Chapter 6 of this book deals with the twelve most vital dates in history. I want you just to hear a little bit of what he says. He says the first date that is the most important date in history is 4241 BC, the introduction of the Egyptian Calendar, because without that we’d have a hard time telling time. 543 BC, he says, the death of Buddha. 478, the death of Confucius. 399 BC, the death of Socrates. 44 BC, the death of Caesar. And then he states the birth of Christ. You notice he didn’t say the death of Christ. He said the death of Buddha, the death of Socrates, the death of Confucius, the death of Caesar, the birth of Christ. He goes on to say on page 111 and 112, “For us who live in the Western world [speaking of Christ, the birth of Christ] perhaps it is the most important date of all because it divides all history in the West and gives us our greatest hero and greatest model and marks the beginning of that Christian age which seems to be today to be approaching its close.”[6]
Everybody that is studying Christianity in the world today, you know what they are saying. They are saying that we live in the post-Christian era. At one time Christianity was flourishing, but it’s leveling out now. And it’s at a static growth level. The fastest growing religion in the world is Islam. Christianity is static. In a lot of cases, churches grow by just pulling members from other fishbowls. Members from other churches go to other churches, to other churches, to other churches, instead of winning people to Christ and telling people how much Jesus can change their life. Can I just say to you that the day that I met Jesus Christ was the greatest day of my life? The day that you come to know Jesus Christ will be the greatest day in your life. And the birth of Christ, and the resurrection of Christ, and the living Christ is the greatest thing, and the greatest knowledge in all the world is to know Him.
You will find your purpose for existence when you passionately follow, live, and breathe to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
You will find your purpose for existence when you passionately follow, live and breathe to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. Jesus, when He was here on this Earth…they asked him, what’s the greatest commandment of all and he summed it up with this next Scripture, “They said to him, ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ Jesus replied, ‘Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:36-38). He went on to say in the next verse that this sums up the law.
Do you know why you are here today on this planet? Whether you do or not, I can tell you exactly why every person on this planet exists. You exist because God is searching for you--to bring you into a personal relationship with His son, Jesus Christ, so that you can fulfill the Great Commandment and love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your mind and all your soul. And love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what God is doing in the world right now. He is trying to spread love. I know people accuse God of everything. They accuse God of war. God has never initiated a war. Human beings initiate war. We are in the middle of one right now. God is in the business of healing people and loving people, making things new and making people brand new creatures in Christ; and giving them a reason to be alive, giving them a reason to exist on this planet. The most wonderful knowledge of all is God and who He is and what He is all about. Do you know what He said the greatest commandment is? Love God with all your heart, with all your mind and all your soul. If you will learn to do that, you will learn to love the people around you like you should…your friends, your neighbors, your husband, your wife. I mean, anybody and everybody. With this war going on, I hope you haven’t just been praying for our troops. I hope you have been praying for the innocent people of Iraq who have been under suppression for so long. Pray for all people. Why? Because He loves us. He doesn’t just love people who live in America. He loves people who live everywhere. He came into this world to put the love of God in our hearts so that we could love each other. So that we could be the kind of people that
demonstrate to the world that there is something better than hatred. There is something better than bitterness. There is a forgiving God who can put love in your heart and change you forever and forever.
In fact, we are here to fulfill the Great Commandment and also the Great Commission. When I realized what the Great Commission was, I was 21 years old, it really began to dawn on me why God put me on this planet. Matthew Chapter 28:18-20 says, “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’” Why am I here? I am here to show people all over this world, in my community, in this church, in my town, in my country, in my state, and in the world that Jesus Christ came and died for them; to make disciples out of them and teach them to obey God. That’s why I am here.
I remember sitting in church at 21 & the pastor came to church and he preached on serving God. Basically, his sermon was, “you can serve God regardless.” Every Christian is supposed to serve God regardless of their profession, whether you are a doctor, a machinist, a lawyer, a cashier, whether you work for Verizon. Whatever it is you do, your real purpose in being, is not your profession and not your career. It’s getting out the gospel of Jesus Christ. When I was 21 years old that dawned on me in a church service one day. You don’t have to stand up and be a pastor, teacher in front of a crowd like this to give your life to Jesus Christ or for the purpose of the gospel. You can do exactly what the pastor was preaching to me that day. You can serve God in any profession. That’s what God wants you to do. He wants you to stand up for Him and be what He wants you to be, fulfilling the Great Commission and the Great Commandment and tell the world how much God loves us. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” Man, it’s available. And there are people who want it who don’t even know that they want it. The apostle Paul didn’t know what he was missing until he met Jesus Christ. And as soon as he knew Christ, he said “Lord, what will you have me do?”
You will find your purpose for existence when your life is spent worshiping and enjoying God.
There is another thing I want to mention. You will find your purpose for existence when your life is spent worshiping and enjoying God. In Revelations chapter 4:11, there is this great scene of the four and twenty elders who represent us at the throne of God in heaven. And all the cherubims and seraphims and the angels gathered around the throne of God on a sea of glass the Bible says. And they are gathered there around God. What are they doing there? They are saying this, and let me read it to you, “You are worthy, Oh Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” Now listen to what they said, “By your will they were created and have their being. By your will.” Some versions of the Bible say, “By your will they were created and therefore they exist.” Why do I exist? I exist so that I can worship and enjoy God. You are worthy, God, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things. I am a special creation of God. You are a special creation of God. There isn’t another one like you in the whole world. Thank God. There isn’t another like me in all the world, and the whole world whispers, “Thank God.” What are you here for? John Piper book in Desiring God, takes an old quote from a catechism that was written years ago that says the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. He just changes it a little bit. I think the change is the correct change. It says, “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”[7] God is not standing over you with a cosmic hammer waiting for you to sin, and then He is going to beat the stuffing out of you.
God is a God who loves you, who cares about you, who has an infinite capacity to love you in every situation. Now when you do wrong, He wants to pull you back to do right. And He will help you get back to that right position. Sometimes He will interrupt your life and get your attention--whatever it takes. He wants you to--whether it’s through discipline or love--but God wants you to worship Him and enjoy Him forever. Starting to worship God and enjoy Him, starts now. It doesn’t wait until we get to heaven. We start now. We are coming into the service today before God. It’s not for what you can get out of it. It’s what you can put into it. And when you come before God and to His church, it’s not coming to get something like a sponge and just soak it up so you can go out and do whatever with it. It’s coming to worship Him. To go to church is about giving Him glory. Giving Him honor. Giving Him praise. If you get something out of it, that’s just kind of a by-product. As Christians, we need to get it right. We exist on this planet to worship and glorify God. If you will do that I promise you this: you will enjoy Him forever. God is to be enjoyed and wants to bring happiness and wonderment and joy into your life. He wants to answer your prayers. He wants to be your best friend. He wants to stand with you when you are hurting. He wants to stand with you when you are a mess like Solomon. I am sure when Solomon was writing in Ecclesiastes, “It’s meaningless, it’s meaningless, it’s meaningless,” God the Holy Spirit was whispering in his ear, “You’re an idiot, you’re an idiot, you’re an idiot.” It’s not meaningless.
Life has great meaning when you know who God is. Life has great meaning when you understand, I was created by a benevolent, loving God who put me on this planet to show His love to other people and to tell the world how loving He is. Don’t ever accept that false teaching that people give from time to time that God doesn’t love people. God desperately loves people. God desperately cares about people. We are here to love Him and enjoy Him forever. I like what J.P. Moreland said, who is a professor at Talbot School of Theology. He says, “God is the most generous, loving, wonderful, attractive being in the cosmos. He has made us with free will and He has made us for a purpose: to relate lovingly to Him and to others. We are not accidents. We are not modified monkeys. We are not random mistakes.”[8] How can we not pour out our lives to a God that’s like that: generous, loving wonderful? “The most attractive being in the universe,” he says, is God. He is what you are giving your life to.
Some of us here, here is our routine: We get up in the morning. We take a shower--I hope you do, to get all that stuff off that you gathered in the night. You walk downstairs and you put some food in that hole in your face. And then you go to work and at 10:30 it’s break time for fifteen minutes, and you go put some more food in that hole in your face. Then at lunch time another break, and you put some more food in that hole in your face. You come home and turn on the television set, and you put some more food in that hole in your face. You just do the same thing day after day, after day. Man, life is so much more than that. Life is so much more than that to the one who knows Jesus Christ and gives his life to Christ. You say, “So what? So what’s the point? Get to it. Get it done.” And I am right now. Here is the point: Your life is a gift from
God--a life full of divine, cosmic purpose. Use it with passion.
How many know who Dr. Phil is? In Life Strategies on page 32, Phil McGraw talks about the fact that he was assigned to a VA psychiatric hospital. It was actually a geriatric rotation that he was on at a psychiatric hospital. He had many encounters and was helping the people. He said the thing that happened to him in his tour of duty in the psychiatric hospital is the guys in that hospital helped him more than he ever helped them. Here is what he said,
“These men, from all walks of life and all levels of education and sophistication, taught this young doctor some important things in life. Paramount among those lessons was that every single one of them, approaching the end of his life, wished that he had done things that he had not. One regretted that he had never returned to the Philippines to visit the grave of an army buddy; another had dreamed of publishing his detective stories, but ‘never got up the guts’ to send off any manuscripts; another wished that he had spent more time with his teenage granddaughter before her tragic death in a car accident.
“Every one of them, in one way or another, said, ‘Doc, don’t waste it, Son. When it’s over, it’s over.’ With the wisdom of age and experience, each told me that he had intended so much more than he had ever done. They talked not only of actions not taken and opportunities lost, but of timing. It is true that life presents windows of opportunity. Very often, the window of opportunity will be open for a time, but then slam shut forever. As you evaluate your life in the areas and the categories in which you feel moved to take action, recognize that you have to seize the opportunities when they present themselves, and create them when they do not.”[9]
Sometimes we just have to get off the easy chair and say, “I am going to take hold of this life of mine and I am going to live for the purpose for which I am alive. No matter what my profession.” It doesn’t matter what you do--whether you are a teacher here this morning, whether you work in the law profession, whether you work in a shop, whether you work as an executive assistant or whatever it is you do. It doesn’t matter what you do. Who you are is what matters. Who you belong to is what matters. Hopefully, you understand that you belong to Christ. You exist to fulfill the will of God. Be sure you know it. His will is not hidden. It is wonderfully revealed in detail in the Bible. I believe with all my heart this Bible is truth. That it was given to us by God and that His will is revealed. You just read it and you will know it. Until you know God through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, life has no significant meaning. I believe that is true. I believe it may have some kind of meaning for some people who don’t know Jesus Christ as Savior, but I don’t believe it has as significant meaning. Because if God is the God of the Bible, is the God who created the heavens and the Earth, then He created you for a reason. If you don’t know Him, you don’t know the significant meaning of life. Many who know God have lost their purpose for existence because they no longer see God with all their heart. That was Solomon’s condition. Solomon was a man that God said didn’t ask riches for himself. God said, “He asked for wisdom.” God said, “I am going to give you wisdom and riches.” But he was a man who knew God, but got so caught up in the world and in what was going on around him that he lost his meaning for existence.
You are here to have a personal relationship. You know what? This is just a testing ground. Heaven and Hell comes after this. You exist on this earth for God to find you. I started to say to find God. You can’t find God; He finds you. I can’t prove that to you theologically because of the time this morning, but He finds you. I know you think you found Him, but He found you. And He loves you. He has been searching for you your whole life. If you are here and you’re a Christian, and you say, “My life doesn’t really have any meaning;” then you’ve just kind of abandoned what you are here for. I believe that life exists now and forever. I believe life exists beyond the grave.
When my mom died it was tough, tragic. I didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to her the morning she died. But you know what? I really do believe life exists beyond the grave and that I will see my mom and my dad again. When my dad died, I was not there to tell him good-bye before he went into a coma. I don’t care how old you are when you die, you want to live longer. He loved life. He really did. But he was fighting to hang on. I finally got a chance alone with him, and I hugged him. I put my head down on his chest and I said, “Dad, it’s time to go. You’ve got to let go. Heaven waits. It’s okay. God’s waiting for you.” Let me tell you something. I believe that--all of my heart, all of my mind and all of my soul--that a person who puts his faith in Jesus Christ lives forever. Let’s bow in prayer.
With our heads bowed and our eyes closed, can I just say a couple of things to you this morning? Just let me say again God loves you and put you here for a reason. He wants you to know His Son. If you are here this morning and you have never, ever trusted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, there is life after death. Jesus proved it when He rose from the grave, descended into heaven before the disciples, and left them with the work to do to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. If you are here today and you say, “God spoke to my heart today, and I need Jesus Christ as my Savior, and I am willing to give my life to Him.” That’s not the real thing by the way; the real thing is that He is willing to give His life to you. He is willing to come into your life and save you forever. He has been searching for you for a long time. But all you need to do is say, “God, I am sorry for my sins. Forgive me.” Tell Him that you believe that He died and rose again from the grave. Ask Him to come into your life and change it--to forgive you of your sins--and to change you forever. I promise if you pray for His forgiveness for your sin because you have sinned against Him--so have I--and you ask Him to come in, He will come in. Ask Him to save you and change you forever and forever, and He will do it.
Father, with our heads bowed and our eyes closed, I pray that there are people here today right now praying and asking you into their hearts. I pray that they will find you. That they will know you. That there lives will be changed forever. In Jesus Christ, Amen.
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Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version ©. NIV ©. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used with permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
[1] Jay Stevenson, The Complete Idiots Guide to Philosophy (Indianapolis, Indiana: Alpha Books, 2002), p. 59.
[2] Simon Blackburn, Being God (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 79.
[3] Ibid, p. 80.
[4] Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Navpress, 1995), p. 156.
[5] Ibid, p. 121.
[6] Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 105.
[7] John Piper, Desiring God (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2003), p. 15.
[8] Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 2000), p. 173.
[9] Phillip C. McGraw, Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters (Hyperion, 2000), p. 132.