Ministry Resources

What’s Life All About?

In This Lesson You Will Study

  • Why Were You Born?
  • How Are You Like God?
  • How Are You Not Like God?
  • What Kind of Person Do You Want to Be?
  • How Can You Know You Are a Child of God?

Why Were You Born

You Need to Know

What would you think of a person who tried to use a straw hat as a cooking pot or a glass bottle as a hammer? What would you think of a person who used up all his life before finding out its purpose?

Until we put our lives to the use they were made for, we are like the hat on the fire or the bottle used as a hammer. We go through life without finding satisfaction and fulfillment.

God has a purpose and plan for your life. He has a work for you to do on earth and has prepared a wonderful home for you in heaven. You were born to fit into God’s plan.

You Were Born to Be God’s Child

You have learned that you were created for God’s pleasure, to be His child, enjoy His love, and love Him in return. Whatever else you do, if you don’t have this fellowship with God, you have missed the main purpose of life.

Psalm 16:11 – You will show me the path that leads to life; your presence fills me with joy and brings me pleasure forever.

You Were Born to Grow in God’s Likeness

For you, a child of God, life on earth is like a school to prepare you for eternity. Your experiences are lessons to equip you for the part you will have in God’s Kingdom. The problems and struggles you experience now are designed to teach you patience, faith, and obedience. They will help you to mature spiritually so you will be more like your heavenly Father. Let God make you the dependable person He can use both now and in the future.

2 Timothy 2:12 – If we continue to endure, we shall also rule with him.

You Were Born to Work with God

You were born when you were, where you were, and who you were so that you could be a blessing to your family, your community, your country, and the world. God wants you to be His partner and work with Him. He will help you lead others to Jesus Christ and to a better life in Him.

Ephesians 2:10 – God is our Maker, and in union with Christ Jesus he has created us for a life of good works, which he has already prepared for us to do.

How Are You Like God?

God Gave You a Spirit Made in His Likeness God made Adam’s body out of dust, giving it an earthly nature like that of other earthly creatures. You have inherited that earthly nature. Adam’s inner life, his spirit, came from the breath of God. Adam’s spirit was like God. Your spirit, too, is like God in many ways.

 

God’s Image in You Is Shown in Many Ways

This special spirit makes you different from the animals. We call it the image of God in human beings.

You can see the image of God in yourself in:

  • Your moral nature: sense of right and wrong.
  • Your aesthetic nature: love of beauty.
  • Your intellectual nature: desire to know the truth, ability to reason, power of speech, and communication.
  • Your spiritual nature: desire to worship and ability to have fellowship with God.
  • Your creative nature: desire to improve your surroundings. Man builds skyscrapers, channels rivers, harnesses electricity, and invents machines to work for him. He creates beauty in music, art, architecture, poetry, song, motion, and his handiwork.

These things come from God’s nature and make you very different from the animals. They show that you were born to be God’s child and that He has a special purpose for your life.

HOW ARE YOU NOT LIKE GOD?

You Have a Physical Body

God is an infinite, eternal, all-powerful Spirit. He is not limited by time or space. He will never die. Your spirit lives in a body which has very limited strength, can only be in one place at a time, and will die some day. However, it is a wonderful gift from God to you. Because of your body, you can work for God in ways that would be impossible if you were just a spirit. You should take good care of your body because it is a home for your spirit and a temple for God to use.

1 Corinthians 6:19, 20 – Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you . . . ? So use your bodies for God’s glory.

Some people blame their bodies for the bad things they do. They punish their bodies to try to make themselves good. Your body is neither good nor bad. It is like a tool that you use. You decide what to do, and your body does it. You can use your body for either good or evil, for Satan or for God. God uses His Spirit for only good.

Romans 12:1 – Offer yourselves a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him.

Be sure to control your body. It is a good servant but a poor master. If you allow its physical needs to rule your life, you will have trouble. You can even become a slave to habits that will destroy your health and make you do sinful things that are evil and displeasing to God. When you neglect the needs of your spiritual nature and live only to satisfy the desires of your body, you become less and less like God.

Sin Has Ruined Your Nature

Sin has blurred the image of God in you. People get worse and worse as they try to rule their own lives and ignore God’s purpose for them.

Galatians 5:19-21. What human nature does is quite plain. It shows itself in immoral, filthy, and indecent actions; in worship of idols and witchcraft. People become enemies and they fight; they become jealous, angry, and ambitious. They separate into parties and groups; they are envious, get drunk, have orgies, and do other things like these. I warn you now as I have before: those who do these things will not possess the Kingdom of God.

You Can’t Please God by Your Own Efforts

God has a good purpose for you. But unless He helps you, you will not be able to follow it. No matter how hard you try, you will never be strong enough to do what pleases Him all the time. He must change you.

Romans 7:18-20. I know that good does not live in me—that is, in my human nature. For even though the desire to do good is in me, I am not able to do it. I don’t do the good I want to do; instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do…. It is the sin that lives in me.

You Are So Unlike God That You Must Be Renewed and Changed Inwardly

You can’t change yourself simply by joining a church or trying to be good. You need God to help you. If you let Him, He will send His Holy Spirit to restore His nature in you. Only then will you be able to please Him.

What Kind of Person Do You Want to Be?

A piece of clay can be either an ugly lump or a piece of fine porcelain. The outcome depends on the owner’s desires and the potter’s skill. Human nature left to itself goes from bad to worse. It becomes a filthy wallow of dirty, hateful thoughts and wicked actions. However, in the hands of God, the Master Potter, your life can become an example of wonderful beauty and usefulness.

Romans 12:2. Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God— what is good and is pleasing to him and is perfect.

How Can You Know You Are a Child of God?

The minute you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, God accepts you as His child. He makes you aware of this in three ways:

  • Through His Word, which says so
  • Through the inward assurance of the witness of the Spirit
  • Through the change in your life

1 John 5:10-12. Whoever believes in the Son of God has this witness in his heart…. God has given us eternal life, and this life is ours in his Son. Whoever has the Son has this life.

Romans 8:16. God ’s Spirit joins himself to our spirits to declare that we are God’s children.

1 John 3:14. We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love our brothers.