“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (ESV)
A hammer is created, built and designed for a chief purpose – to drive nails into wood. You can use a hammer as a paperweight, door stopper, or entirely something else. Of course, a hammer can also be used to remove nails, break pieces of masonry or bend or straighten nails, but it does not take away the truth that the hammer was built chiefly to drive nails into pieces of wood. That is the hammer’s “endgame.” After the hammer’s lifetime, we could only decide if it was a good hammer by checking if it fulfilled its chief purpose – did it drive the nails well into pieces of wood?
How about you? What is your Summum Bonnum, your highest or ultimate good? Have you considered your purpose in life? What were you built or designed for? Are you living your life based on that purpose? Or as a hammer, are you using your life as a paperweight, door stopper or something else?
Who designed you, anyway? It is God who made us [Psalm 100:3]. We were created for a chief purpose in life – to glorify God. When God thought of creating humanity, He wanted to share His glory with humankind. We were created, built, and designed mainly to glorify, love and serve Him. This is God’s plan, His endgame for us. This is our ultimate purpose in living. How do we know this?
Deep within us, we know nothing truly satisfies us in life – success, fame, wealth, power, etc. All of them are fleeting. Nothing in this life truly satisfies us except God. Augustine of Hippo says it well:
“You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord.”
Augustine of Hippo
God created a vacuum, an emptiness, deep within our souls that nothing can ever occupy – except God alone. We were made by God, and we were meant for God, for His purpose, for His use.
What are you pursuing in this life?
Many use our lives with a different endgame – to be happy, successful, rich, and have fun, or something else. We could also have other good life purposes – save the planet, care for the poor and needy, seek justice, etc. But still, what is it we are pursuing in this life? What do we want to achieve before we go six feet under?
No other good apart from God
To truly reach our highest potential, we must return to our Creator, Builder and Designer. It would seem that our chief purpose, to glorify God, is very “selfish.” Why did not God design us for our own good and glory instead of His? The reality is that there is no other good apart from God.
All that is good, beautiful, majestic, perfect, great, praise-worthy, and commendable comes from God alone. Apart from God, we cannot have anything good. What we do not realise is that when we seek to glorify God, to love and serve Him, we also attain the greatest function or role we can ever achieve, regardless of our state of happiness, riches and fame.
It is sad but true – many people create their own endgame without regard to their maker’s endgame. Many spend their years like a dog chasing its own tail, circling around and around. Many have a short-term vision for their lives – no long-term plans, no future thinking, no eternal perspective. They only live for today and the immediate tomorrow.
Some have a vague idea of what they want to accomplish in the future – seek the next thrill, the next gratification, the next powerful sensation. Some seek fulfilment through gambling, alcohol, drugs, sex, and so on. Some have lives damaged through these vices, and their lives have been thrown out of kilter, and now they spend their lifetime trying to overcome all of their detrimental effects.
Some live their lives harbouring anger and resentment against those who abused and maltreated them, and so they carry a heavy burden of revenge in their spiritual backpacks.
Many still lack awareness that their lifetime is limited and live with a “don’t worry, be happy” mentality daily.
Each and every one of us has the freedom to choose which endgame we want to pursue on our own. The noblest thing we can ever seek in this life is to discover our Creator and find out why He created us in the first place. There and there alone, we can only and truly find lasting freedom and ideal inner peace when we are one and in tune with our greatest and ultimate good, who is God and God alone.
In the end, those who choose to follow the path created for them in the first place would enjoy eternal friendship with His Creator and with all those who follow His ways. They will live glorious, fulfilled and majestic lives – the life that their Creator envisioned for them in the first place, their Summun Bonnum, their endgame.
Top image credit: Digital artwork depicting a woman pondering her future, © by Kevin Carden, from ChristianPhotoshop.com. Used with permission.
Tom Caballes is a National Coordinator of the Lamb of God, a community of the Sword of the Spirit with seven branches located throughout New Zealand. Tom and his wife Mhel and their two daughters [with his son-in-law and grand-daughter] live in Wellington, New Zealand.