Your life is not an accident. Your thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams are not mere byproducts of eons of natural selection. Your days have a purpose. Your relationships have meaning. You are here for a reason.
It’s tragic that so many people don’t know that. Whether that stems from ignorance or deception, the consequences are the same – and very real. Depression. Substance abuse. Suicide. For all of our supposed enlightenment as a modern society, the world looks incredibly dark for many.
Yet, it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Bible begins with a much different view of humanity than the world at large, and it is a literal light shining out in the darkness.
God made you, so you have value.
No matter who you are, what you look like, or what you have accomplished, the Creator of everything made you. He made you to be like Him. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26 ESV). You were specially created to bring God’s image and likeness into this world.
That means whatever your education or occupation, your age or your health status, you have a purpose. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). You are meant to be fruitful: the things you do matter. Made in God’s image, you are here to bring more and more of His goodness into the world. Because you are human, you are called to exercise the same creative, compassionate leadership over the world around you that God showed in making everything so good in the first place.
Now to accomplish that, God purposefully made us different. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). From the beginning, it was God’s design that we bring His image into the world…together. We need each other. We aren’t interchangeable, nor is any one of us more important than the other. The only way God’s good purposes for the world can be fulfilled is if we work together – with one another and with Him.
So, you are needed. There is a reason you are here. Don’t believe anything different. There is a God-given purpose for your life, and it is good. Not just for yourself, either. When you and I are truly committed to living according to God’s design, it helps to make everything very good.
Discover God’s design for your life in our sermon series Real Men and our Bible study Ladies Night.