It’s good to know what God’s purpose on earth is. But have you ever asked yourself how well your life goals line up with Scripture?
When I ask people what they want to do in life, I often hear things like this:
“I want to be a great doctor, one of the best heart surgeons in the world.”
“I want to do what I love so that I never feel like I have to work a day of my life!”
“I want to own my own business.”
“I want to make a good living so I can take care of my family.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with those answers. Yet when I ask believers what these ambitions have to do with God’s agenda, I often get blank stares.
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When it comes to the will of God, many of us are narcissists; we want to know all about us. It’s one of the reasons we’re so into the Enneagram, or the Myers-Briggs, or StrengthsFinder. I’ve got no ax to grind with personality tests—they can be very helpful—but long before those things are relevant, we have to figure out what God is doing in the world and conform to that. Our understanding of our ambition doesn’t begin with knowing ourselves; it begins with knowing God.
Old Testament scholar Christopher J.H. Wright pinpoints the problem: We ask, “Where does God fit into the story of my life?” when the real question should be, “Where does my little life fit into the great story of God’s mission?”
Many of us have turned the need to find the will of God into an idol, wanting to know it more than we do the purposes of God and seeking it more than we do the glory of God.
We talk a need to find the will of God, but it’s not really lost. “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
Don’t think about your life narcissistically. Think about it in light of the purposes of God.
This article about the need to find the will of God originally appeared here.
