THE MEANING OF LİFE

But… many folks think of their vocations here on earth as their “purpose.” Do I marry, if so to whom, what do I study in school, what job do I seek, and so on. While these things are important to us, they are not our reason for being alive.

There are no destinations in this life. Life is a journey, from here to God. We are to follow His directions, without ever losing faith that His way is the only way. When we do that, we can be certain we are on the right path. We leave it up to God just where in this life that will lead. Our lives may turn out quite differently than what we might expect. There is no guarantee of earthly success or comfort. God judges success very differently than we do.

His directions are very simple. Love and help others. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless. Simple, and yet so hard to do. We are to use all of the talents and strengths that He gave us to achieve this selfless goal.

But although we rarely know God's specific plan for us, we all know just where we are going. We are true children of God. He created us for the express purpose of sharing the happiness of His existence with us, and our destiny is to be united with God in eternity.

In His infinite goodness, God could not keep all to Himself the happiness of existence He enjoyed in heaven. Just as we may love our pets very much, cats and dogs are just not able to share with us the happiness we feel from music and sunsets and Super Bowls. Only our children can do that. This is why God had to create us as His true children.

But complete free will is the essence of His nature. So we, His true children, also had to have complete free will, only without the infinite power and wisdom. That makes things difficult. That makes it possible and even likely for us to refuse to accept God's authority.

God knew that even though He would start out giving us Paradise to live in, we would soon think that we were His equal and rebel against Him. He knew that we would not like the idea of anyone in authority over us, and that we would think that we could make the rules for our lives ourselves. He knew that then He could not leave us with Him in Paradise, and that once we left that we would be severely tested in this new world, a world of random events and pain and sorrow.

He knew that some of us would continue to heed our conscience, and be kind and good, and have faith that God knows best. He knew that others would feel pain and sorrow, and blame Him.

God, in his infinite goodness, has arranged a way for us to return to Paradise. All it requires is a short stay in this hard world of temptation and pain. All it requires is to prove to Him that we will not rebel against Him again, and to realize that God knows better than we do how to rule the universe.

But our rebellious nature has not changed. We still turn away from God and think that we know best how to lead our own lives. So how can we live forever with God in happiness?

God's great Plan, from the beginning of time, was to do atonement Himself for the many sins of mankind. Christianity spells out the mechanism by which God is able to forgive us for turning away from Him and not obeying His commands.

Coming to earth as Christ and doing infinite atonement for our sins as true God, and yet being able to do it on behalf of mankind as true man, has always been God's plan. ("In the beginning was the Word (Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"). That is the great miracle of Christianity.

Above all, to believe in God is to have complete trust in His love and His commands. Being obedient to His commands allows us to receive His grace, which in turn will lead to faith and salvation.

And what is God's greatest command? 

"Love the Lord thy God with your whole heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself." That is how Christ put it. That is what the entire word of God boils down to.

You love yourself quite a bit. You go to great trouble to make sure you are fed when you get hungry. Do you do the same for all other people on earth? If not, you are not obeying Christ's command.

You go to great trouble to make sure that you have warm clothing and shelter when you are cold. Do you do the same for everyone else on earth? If not, you are not obeying Christ's command.

In the Bible, Christ said that if you do not feed the hungry and shelter the homeless and comfort the lonely, He will cast you into the eternal fires of Hell Himself. That's what it says, right in the Bible. It is also later on this page with chapter and verse.

It is not enough to sit like a vegetable and think you are doing nothing wrong. You are commanded to act. You are commanded to relieve the suffering of your fellow human beings.

The meaning of religion is to do that because God is our common Father, making us all brothers and sisters. We do our best to make life happy for our brethren, out of love and respect for God. For Christians, this is what is meant by living our life in Christ. True peace in this life is knowing that when we do that, we are assured of being eternally happy.

But how can we love God? He does not expect us to be able to love Him in the way that we love other people, since no one personally has ever actually seen Him or heard Him.

Christ spent His three year public ministry here on earth showing us how to live. What did He do? He helped other people. He fed them, he cured their sicknesses. In His teachings he repeated, over and over, stories about Good Samaritans who took care of complete strangers by tending their wounds and giving them shelter; and of how terrible it was for a rich man to ignore the hungry beggar at his gate. (The beggar went straight to heaven, the rich man went straight to eternal torment.) The entire focus of His teachings was for us to take care of His other children. This was His life. This is what He taught.

Strictly speaking, our entire meaning of life is to love God with our whole heart. But God is perfect and complete. He does not need our love for Himself. He cannot "need" anything. So what can this mean?

We are to show our love by caring for His other children, just as he has told us so many times in the Gospels.

But is this not a case of "chasing our own tail"? Why would He create billions of people who are all supposed to care for each other, instead of just seeing to it that they do not need to be cared for by anyone but Himself?

He does care for us, in the most important way. He always shows us the straightest road to salvation, and He does this of His own free will. But as His true children, we must also–by our own free will--be able to do as He does, and take care of theworldly needs of our fellow human beings, even though doing so is inconvenient or even painful, and goes against our own perceived interests. 
     

By following God's commands to care for our brethren, we will receive all of His grace, which in turn will strengthen our faith, make our lives here on earth as happy as possible, and assure us of eternal life by proving that our faith in Christ is true and real.

The little-understood paradox, then, is this: the only way we can be happy ourselves is to follow God's commands and make other people happy. Selfishly trying to make only ourselves happy is self-defeating. It is impossible.

But if you can make just one other person happy, or relieve their suffering, your life will be a resounding success! And this is always possible for you, every day. Even a single kind word can lift someone's spirits and make them happy. In WWII concentration camps, some prisoners shared their small rations of food with others, even though it meant certain death by starvation themselves. And survivors tell us that in the midst of all that horror, other prisoners sang joyful songs to make everyone feel better.

The key to all happiness, both in this world and in the next, is so easy. It is complete unselfishness.

You can be one of these jewels. The choice is up to you.