Created for a Purpose

By Greg Laurie

“You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created.” (Revelation 4:11)

Years ago, one of my sons asked me, “Dad, why did God put us here on the earth?” I said, “God put us here on the earth so that we might worship Him and glorify Him and know the God who created us.”

Our ultimate purpose in life is not to attain success, fame, or even happiness. It should be to know the God who made us. In fact, the Bible says there are those in heaven singing, “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created” (Revelation 4:11).We were created to worship God.

Everybody does worship. Certainly, we don’t all worship the true God in heaven. But everyone, no matter who they are, worships someone or something. What do they worship? That all depends. Some worship the true and living God. Others worship a god of their own making. Some people worship people. They worship sports heroes or actors or musicians. Some people worship possessions. Some people even worship themselves. But when you get down to it, every person everywhere worships. And the reason for this is that God created us with an inner drive. We are created with a sense that there is something more to life than what we experience on this earth.

You can worship a false god—a god of your own making, a god that you have brought out of your own imagination—and ultimately be disappointed. Or you can worship the true God. The true God—the living God, the only God, the God of the Bible—is the one to worship. He is the one to bow down to.

Obstacles to the Eternal Life of Muslims

By John Piper

Paradoxically, hatred and tolerance are teaming up to take eternal life from Muslim people. Jesus said - and we say it with tears - "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him" (John 3:36). In other words, nominal Christians, devoted Muslims, pious Hindus, faithful Buddhists, orthodox Jews, devout animists, sincere agnostics, secular atheists - everyone who does not hold fast to Jesus Christ as the supremely valuable Son of God and Savior - will perish and not have eternal life. "He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son of God has not life" (1 John 5:12).

Whatever obscures this message for Muslim people obstructs their way to eternal life. For them Christ is a prophet, but not the divine Son of God who said, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). For Muslims Jesus is not the Savior who died for their sins and said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). Unless Muslims - and all others who deny Christ's deity - hear and embrace the good news that "the fullness of deity" dwells in Jesus (Colossians 2:9), they will be without eternal hope. This has always been true, but today things are different. Two seemingly opposite forces gather to block the gospel from Muslim minds.

First, there is the fire of hatred, fanned by the flames of September 11. Second, there is a twisted tolerance fed by the fear of man.

My son called me from Chicago to say that one of his Muslim friends had been beaten on the street. No reason. He just looked like one of "them." The spirit of revenge against Muslims in our nation these days is indiscriminate. Rage boils just beneath the surface. This is not the way of Christ. He calls his people to suffer for the sake of love, not seethe with the fire of hate. "Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he trusted to him who judges justly" (1 Peter 2:21-23).

Hatred from Christians keeps Muslims from seeing the superior worth of Jesus Christ. The spirit of revenge sends the false signal that Christ is not an all-sufficient, all-satisfying Savior. We justify our own little jihad, and seek our satisfaction by injuring the adversary. But true Christians treasure Jesus above vengeance, and do not rob Muslim people of truth and hope in this way. Christians would rather suffer to show the supreme worth of Christ. They crucify the craving of hate in their own hearts. They long for Muslims to see Jesus for who he really is. They know that eternal life is at stake - for both.

In reaction against indiscriminate hate there is now a stampede to pluralism and twisted tolerance. If Muslims are hated, then let us call ecumenical gatherings, and let us all praise the virtues of Islam, and the wisdom of Allah and the goodness of Mohammed. But let no one speak the intolerable and indispensable truth that Jesus is the only way to God.

Once upon a time tolerance was the power that kept lovers of competing faiths from killing each other. It was the principle that put freedom above forced conversion. It was rooted in the truth that coerced conviction is no conviction. But now the new twisted tolerance denies that there are any competing faiths; they only complement each other. It denounces not only the effort to force conversions, but the very idea that any conversion may be necessary for eternal life. It holds the conviction that no religious conviction should claim superiority over another.

When Muslims are protected from hate with this "tolerance," they are cut off from eternal life. And what promises deliverance proves to be death. If, in the name of this new tolerance, we are forbidden to say of Jesus, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12), then eternal life is concealed and we are cruel.

Therefore let us open the door of life for all Muslim people by renouncing hate, showing love, conquering fear, commending the King of the universe, Jesus Christ, and suffering willingly, if we must.

Learning to See When the Lights Go Out

By Sharon W. Betters

God is keeping the promise of Isaiah 45:2-3 to me:

I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you m ay know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. (Isa. 45:2-3)

When death grabbed my youngest child, Mark, and tried to destroy our family, I wondered how my heart kept beating. In my grief I felt estranged from God. For more than twenty-five years I had taught women to believe that God will make beauty out of ashes, that he is the Repairer of broken walls, that they could trust him. But on July 6, 1993, I concluded that I had lied. How could God ever bring beauty from the ashes of the sudden deaths of our sixteen-year-old son and his friend Kelly? How would I ever trust my heavenly Father again?

Because of my rich spiritual heritage and role as a pastor's wife and Bible study teacher, it's possible that people who knew me well imagined that my response to deep sorrow would be great faith. Instead, my long journey into the abyss of grief frightened our closest friends and extended family. I raged against God, demanding that he give me back my child, demanding that he show himself to me in the way I wanted. At other times, I sobbed quietly, exhausted from the constant presence of the ghost of grief, surrendering to God's silence, longing for what had been, concluding that never again on this earth would I know joy or happiness.

Early in my journey, I often envied those who experienced similar loss but seemed to be in a cocoon of peace and strength. Though their grief was as deep as mine, they never seemed to question God's presence or love. It seemed that I, indeed, was in a cocoon, but one characterized by darkness that blinded me to God's presence.

Why didn't God grant me peace and strength? Why did I have to struggle to trust him once more? My personal journal is filled with questions like these - and more.

I have concluded that God gave me the gift of wrestling. At first I think I wrestled with him in order to win - to change his mind. But soon the wrestling was for the purpose of resting in him. I learned that he is not afraid of our confusion and needs no one to defend him. But neither is he obligated to answer all of our questions.

A friend of Amy Carmichael, missionary to India, once said, "The woman who has no experiences in the dark has no secrets to share in the light." This statement challenged me with a choice in the aftermath of Mark's death. Would I accept midnight sorrow as an opportunity for God to reveal his secrets of the darkness? Or would I refuse to open my eyes and hands to treasures designed to turn my heart toward him? In time, desperation to understand my heavenly Father and experience his power drove me to place my hope in what I know about him, now in what I do not know. That's when I began to more clearly experience the treasures in the darkness and riches stored in secret placers.

Learning to see when the lights went out took me back to the foundations of my faith, where I unpacked each belief and examined it through the grid of God's Word. I needed to know that what I had believed and taught for more than twenty-five years was absolute truth. Through tear-filled eyes, I searcher for God's presence everywhere and in every event. No detail was insignificant. It still isn't.

My journal is a written record of the many times God responded to my please for relief. It gives me tangible evidences that before I even expressed my sorrow, he had sent treasures to turn my heart toward him. I know now that he prepared many of those gifts before the foundation of this world, with plans to send them to our family at just the right moment.

Thirteen years later, God continues to keep his promises by sending treasures in the darkness, riches stored in secret places - treasures designed to turn my heart toward him and remind me that he calls me by name.

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Sharon W. Betters is the wife of Dr. Charles F. Betters, pastor/teacher of MARK INC Ministries. Sharon is the author of Treasures of Encouragement, Treasures in Darkness, and co-authored Treasures of Faith with her husband. For more resources designed to help turn your heart toward the love of God, visit www.markinc.com.

Adapted from Treasures in Darkness: A Grieving Mother Shares Her Heart. Used by permission of P & R Publishing Company, copyright ©2006 by Sharon Betters. All rights reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without permission of P & R Publishing Company and/or MARK INC Ministries.