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Thank you for this wonderful message.
Hope your Lord's Day is wonderful.
~~
Pastor of
Saddleback Church in California
and Author of
PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE
Rick's wife now has cancer and from his book's sales he now has “wealth”. Interviewed by Paul Bradshaw, Rick said:
People ask me, What is the purpose of life?
And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for
eternity. We were not 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 trillions 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 go 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. 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
and drawn her closer to Him and to others.
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 your 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.
II 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 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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