God has a purpose for every single person, whether they realize it or not. Your parents may not have known you were coming, but God did, and He created you for a reason. You didn’t evolve by chance, and you aren’t a mistake.
Sad to say, most people don’t live with a sense of destiny. They’re doing their own thing and asking God to bless it, or they believe that God’s will for their lives will just automatically come to pass because it’s fate, and they don’t need to do anything. But that’s not true.
All my life, I’ve had zero doubt that God created me with a purpose. I remember being a kid and looking up at the stars and wondering why God created the world and what my part was in it. I had this longing to know what God’s will for my life was, but I pushed it aside and acted like a typical kid, goofing off until I was ready to graduate from high school. As graduation approached, people would come to my school and advertise their college or trade school, and it would rekindle my desire to know God’s purpose for me.
In my senior year in high school, I began to diligently seek the Lord. I read the Bible from cover to cover. I even went out and bought a Bible commentary to get inspiration. I knew that somewhere in the Bible it had to have the formula to figure out what God’s will for your life was. I asked the people in our church, and they said, “You’ll just know,” and “Fate automatically happens.” I reject that 100 percent. People like Hitler and Mussolini didn’t live God’s purpose for their lives. God didn’t raise them up to do what they did. God intended something totally different for them.
God has a purpose for every person, but it doesn’t just automatically come to pass. Fate, or sovereignty, doesn’t make it happen. If you believed that, you would have to credit God with all the rapes and murders and terrible things that happen.
To know God’s purpose for my life, I had to intentionally seek it to find it. I had to ask God to show it to me. I had to knock before it would be opened unto me (Matt. 7:7).
After high school, I went to college and still didn’t know my purpose, but I was really seeking the Lord and studying the Word. I was at a church function over the Christmas holidays in 1967, and a man read Romans 12:1–2:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
For the next four months, I studied those verses. On March 23, 1968, I was in a prayer meeting, and God showed up and revolutionized my life. He knocked self-righteousness out of me. My life changed radically after this experience as I began to understand grace. And it all goes back to the fact that, for a year and a half, I had been praying and seeking to know God’s will. And for four months prior to that, I had been focused on Romans 12:1–2 and trying to fulfill the requirements listed there.
Many of you are in the same situation I was in—you know there’s got to be more to life than what you’re experiencing. You have to initiate seeking God’s will, and you have to persevere past any obstacles.
If you enjoyed what I shared here, visit my website at awmi.net, where you’ll find additional free teachings and resources. If you need prayer, I encourage you to call my Helpline at 719-635-1111, where one of my trained prayer ministers would love to pray with you.
We love you,
Andrew and Jamie
