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In an interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren,
author of The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren said:
People ask me, What is the purpose of life?
And I respond,
In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity.
We were made to last forever,
and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven.
One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be
the end of my body - but not the end of me.
I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going
to spend trillion of years in eternity.
This is the warm-up act, the dress rehearsal.
God wants us to practice on earth what
we will do forever in eternity.
We were made by God and for God, and until you figure
that out, life isn't going to make sense.
Life is a series of problems:
Either you are in one now, you're just coming out
of one or you're getting ready to go into another one.
The reason for this is that God is more
interested in your character than your comfort.
God is more interested in making your life holy
than He is in making your life happy.
We can be reasonably happy here on earth,
but that's not the goal of life.
The goal is to grow in character, in Christ-likeness.
This past year has been the greatest year of my life but
also the toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer.
I used to think that life was hills and valleys -
you go through a dark time, then you got to the
mountaintop, back and forth.
I don't believe that anymore.
Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's
kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times
you have something good and something bad in your life.
No matter how good things are in your life, there is
always something bad that needs to be worked on.
And no matter how bad things are in your life,
there is always something good you can thank God for.
You can focus on your purposes, or........
you can focus on your problems.
If you focus on your problems, you're going into
self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my issues, my pain."
But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to
get your focus off yourself and onto God and others.
We discovered quickly that in spite of the
prayers of hundreds of thousands of people,
God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her.
It has been very difficult for her, and yet God
has strengthened her character, given her a ministry
of helping other people, given her a testimony,
drawn her closer to Him and to people...
You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life.
Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder.
For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the
book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy.
It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had
to deal with before.
I don't think God gives you money or notoriety
for you to own ego or for you to live a life of ease.
So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do
with this money, notoriety and influence.
He gave me two different passages that helped me
decide what to do, Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72.
First, in spite of all the money coming in,
we would not change our lifestyle one bit.
We made no major purchases.
Second, about midway through last year,
I stopped taking a salary from the church.
Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call
The Peace Plan - to plant churches, equip leaders, assist
the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation.
Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in
the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back.
It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.
We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions?
Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures?
Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism?
Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my life)?
When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed
and say, God, if I don't get anything else done today,
I want to know You more and love You better ....
God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list.
He's more interested in what I am than what I do.
That's why we're called human beings, not human doings.
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