November 15, 2020
Several years ago, Pastor Rick Warren wrote a book entitled A Purpose Driven Church and later followed that volume up with A Purpose Driven Life. In both books, he wrote about living life on purpose and with a purpose, both at church and everywhere else. The longer I live, the more I realize how much of our lives are lived in reaction to things that happen to us. While there are a number of things in our lives that are thrown our way that are mostly out of our control, such as the weather, sickness, and income tax, many of our misfortunes come from living life without a purpose and being reactive instead of proactive. Instead of planning our day, we wake up, put our catcher’s equipment on, ready to catch whatever life throws our way. By the way, even in my “catcher’s” illustration, the catcher signals the pitcher as to which pitch to throw and sets up his mitt where he wants the pitcher to pitch the ball. The catcher has some idea where the ball is going to be thrown (unless, of course, your pitcher is Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn or “Nuke” LaLoosh). The point of all this rambling is this. If we want to lose weight, we need a diet and exercise plan. If we want to save money, we need a budget. If we want to be productive at work, we need some sort of to-do list to keep us on track. Speaking for myself, far too much of my life is spent just “showing up”, without a plan or a purpose. Pastor Warren reminded us in his books that with the primary purposes of the church being to reach the lost and to build up its members, we need to focus the local church’s activities around those purposes and not just show up, sing, tithe, listen to a message, go home, then show up and do it all over again next week. Personally, our purpose in life should be pointing others to Jesus and glorifying God. We can do that at work, play, the grocery store, and everywhere else. I understand that we are not promised tomorrow and just the fact we woke up today is by the grace of God. With that being said, when we wake up with a plan in mind for our day, we will have a better chance of laying our head on our pillow tonight having lived a purpose-filled day, to the glory of our God, in spite of the “wild pitches” that might come our way.
Be blessed and be a blessing….Bro. Andy
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