Bible Text: 2 Timothy 4:7 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 2 Timothy 4:7

“Live–Love–Enjoy!” reads a billboard advertisement for a local funeral home, with the caption underneath, “We’d rather wait.” When I saw that, the message grabbed me. “Hey,” I said to myself, “isn’t that what people strive to do?” Scores of people spend their lives in search of happiness–the right mate, the right job, friends, good feelings about themselves, and enough money to surround themselves with anything they want.

Often their search for happiness ends in despair and cynicism. Their conclusion to the whole search is much the same as that voiced by Solomon, who had both women, riches, and fame, yet cried, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Whatever it is that makes life worthwhile eludes them. Yet, if God’s Son came for a purpose, and His death wasn’t wasted, then there has to be more to life than just living, loving, and enjoying–a purpose for which you live, a reason for your existence, and an answer to the searching of your heart. To really live, love, and enjoy, you need three things–none of which can be bought with money or influence: a sense of definition, a sense of purpose, and a sense of empowerment. You are a composite of body, soul, and spirit, emotions, flesh, and a spiritual nature.

Let’s start with a sense of definition. You go to the dictionary when you want the definition of a word, or you want to know what a term means. So where do you go when you want a definition of what your life is about? Psychotherapy? Psychology? A scientific laboratory? Religion? No, even religion doesn’t give you a definition of life and what makes it worthwhile. Go to the Bible. It alone answers the serious questions that define life. Such as? Such as two vital questions: “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” When you have found answers to these questions, you have defined the parameters of life and existence.

In answering those two questions the Bible says that you are not an animal, but a person, an individual, a unique being created in the image of God. Unlike an animal, you love, you emote, you feel, and as a person with intelligence, volition, and a human soul, you will live forever. “Dust to dust and ashes to ashes” doesn’t apply to you, which accounts for the deep searching of your heart to know God and to know that you are His child.

Admit it; the very question of what makes life worth living is proof of a spiritual nature which wants to connect with God.

Then, what of the second question, “Why am I here?” Is it important? Tremendously important. The Bible says that your birth was not an accident, an evolutionary happenstance. Neither are you a “mistake” as one woman put it, adding that her mother tried to abort her since she was conceived out of wedlock, and she wasn’t wanted and should not have been born.

The Bible says that every person is important in the sight of God, that He loves you as an individual, and that He will respond to your heart cry. To know that you are an individual of value and worth in God’s sight helps you to understand life, and only when you are in conscious agreement with God’s purpose for your life, will you find a sense of fulfillment which allows you to live, to love, and to enjoy your world, your friends, your children, and your neighbors.

A sense of definition–what life is all about–produces a sense of purpose, but God alone gives you the empowerment to life, a successful life which allows you to come to the end and look back and say, as did Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).

Resource reading: Philippians 1