How to Live a Purpose-Driven Life as a Christian

Vanessa Chaput, age twenty-four, was jogging recently on a paved trail near a highway and residential homes in Ontario, Canada. Her German Shepard Luna was with her. Suddenly, she was attacked by three grizzly bears. She said later that the largest one “took my head in its mouth, and I ended up on the ground.” In that moment she thought, “I’m not ready to leave my daughter and my husband,” so she just “went into survival mode,” refusing to give in to the massive animal. The bear suddenly let go of her head, perhaps because her hair clip exploded in its mouth. Luna’s barking may also have scared the bear away.

She was hospitalized for ten days, receiving more than thirty stitches on her head, back, arm, and ear. She has a broken arm as well. “I am very shocked at how lucky I am,” she says. “I’m extremely thankful that God was watching over me that day.”

“Man Cannot Live Without Meaning”

Vanessa’s refusal to die and leave her daughter and husband powerfully illustrates Nietzsche’s reflection, which I quoted earlier this week: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Ideas change the world, for good or for bad.

As examples of the latter:

The Paris Olympics were successful in large part because 45,000 police, 10,000 soldiers, and 22,000 private security guards protected the games from terrorists driven by jihadist ideology.
The teenage terrorists who allegedly targeted as many as twenty thousand Taylor Swift fans in Austria were motivated by the same resurgent ISIS ideology now threatening the West.
China’s autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, is enabling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in order to vindicate Marxist doctrine.
Israel’s jihadist opponents are motivated by an ideology that paints the Jewish state as the enemy of Islam.

On the positive side, Arthur Brooks writes in the Atlantic that we can find meaning in life through coherence (how the events of our lives fit together), purpose (having goals and direction), and significance (a sense of our inherent value).

As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius advised:

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. Therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Pastor and author Paul Powell likewise noted:

If we are the illegitimate offspring of thoughtless order, then we have no identity and life has no meaning. However, if we have been created by God, then we have little problem with knowing who we are. Here is a person created in the image of God and for fellowship with God.

He then quoted Albert Camus: “Here is what frightens me: to see the sense of this life dissipated. To see our reason for existence disappear. That is what is intolerable. Man cannot live without meaning.”

How do we find it?

Three Paths to Finding Personal Meaning

One: Acknowledge Our Need for Divine Wisdom

David reported: “God looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God” (Psalm 53:2). What was the result? “They have all fallen away; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one” (v. 3). Paul echoed the same: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

This means that you and I need wisdom beyond our fallen minds. The first step to finding it is seeking it no matter our circumstances. Consider this resolution: “On my best day, may I remember that I still need God as desperately as I did on my worst day.”

Two: Submit to the Spirit

My wife framed this promise for me years ago, and I have it on my desk where I can see it today: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). When we submit to the Spirit, we can be led by the Spirit (John 16:13).

Consequently, I invite you to join me in praying these words from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: “Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will.”

Three: Live by Biblical Truth

Charles Spurgeon said, “The word of God is the anvil upon which the opinions of men are smashed.” As British philosopher J. V. Langmead Casserley observed, we do not break God’s commandments—we break ourselves on them.

Part of living by Scripture is persuading others to do the same (1 Peter 3:15). George Orwell noted, “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” Athanasius (died AD 373) resolved: “If the world is against truth, then I am against the world.”

In No God But God, Os Guinness writes:

“As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has reminded us, just as a shout in the mountain can start an avalanche, so a word or stand for truth that does God’s work in God’s way in God’s time can have an incalculable effect.”

How will you “stand for truth” today?

*Denison Forum does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in these stories.