From His Heart

Speaker 1

Today on From His Heart, Pastor Jeff continues his series, Life's Big Questions.

Speaker 2

Today we want to talk about another really critical question. And that question is this: Why am I here? Why are you here? Why are we here? What is the purpose of your life? And my life, I dare say.

If you go to the mall and you just started asking people, what do you think is the meaning and purpose of life? So many people would say, "I don't know." Hey, why are you here? Why am I here? What is the purpose of it all?

There is tremendous truth. There is love. There is hope that you always dream. Love can heal every scar of truth. Real love, real from his heart.

Speaker 1

This is From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve. Thank you for joining us today as we explore the question that has probably been asked by every rational, thinking human being who has ever lived.

Why am I here? That's the title of the lesson. It's from the timely six-message series that we've been airing this month, Life's Big Questions. Now you can download any broadcast for free online. When you go to fromhisheart.org, just click the Listen link.

Now, though, open your Bible to Isaiah, chapter 43. Here's Pastor Jeff Shreve to help you know the truth to this question: Why am I here?

Speaker 2

Heard a story about a lawyer. He was on an airplane ride from New York City to Los Angeles, and seated next to him was a blonde lady. He knew it was gonna be a long flight, and he was just kinda bored. And so he engaged the blonde lady in a conversation. He said to her, "Hey, you know, this is a long flight. What if we played a little game?" She replied, "I don't wanna play." He insisted, "No, we can play a little game. It'll be a fun game. It's an information game. Here's how it goes: I'll ask you a question, and if you can't answer, you have to pay me $5. Then you can ask me a question, and if I can't answer, I'll pay you $5." She said again, "I don't wanna play." He thought to himself, "All right, I'm a lawyer. She's blonde." He then proposed, "How about this? You pay me $5 if I ask you a question you can't answer. But if you ask me a question and I can't answer it, I'll pay you $50." She thought for a minute and finally agreed, "All right, I'll play."

He said, "Great, I'll start. How many miles is the Earth from the moon?" She replied, "I don't know," and pulled out her purse, grabbing five dollars to give him. He laughed and said, "All right, now it's your turn." She asked, "What goes up a mountain on three legs and comes down the mountain on four legs?" He thought and thought, trying to figure it out. He even got on the airplane's Internet and emailed some friends, but after 30 minutes of frustration, he finally admitted, "I don't know. What goes up a mountain on three legs and down on four? Here's your $50." She smiled and said, "I don't know either. Here's your $5. It's the revenge of the blondes."

Hey, we're in a series called Life's Big Questions. Now, that might be a big question that doesn't have an answer: What goes up on three legs and down on four? But we want to talk about questions people have been asking for centuries. For thousands of years, really, since the dawn of civilization, people have been asking these questions, and they do have answers, and they have answers in the word of God. Today, we want to talk about another really critical question: Why am I here? Why are you here? Why are we here? What is the purpose of your life and my life? I dare say, if you go to the mall and just start asking people, "What do you think is the meaning and purpose of life?" so many people would say, "I don't know." They just live their lives. One guy even said, "Well, I know my purpose for today is just to work and then go to a party and get drunk." Oh, what a purpose. Yay for you. But that's how some people live.

When I was in high school, there was a song on the radio that said, "I live, I live, I live for the weekend." Because that's my only purpose in life: the weekend where I can party and get high and get drunk and things like that. Hey, why are you here? Why am I here? What is the purpose of it all? Now, the big question, the mother of all questions, is: Does God really exist? Listen, if you get that question wrong, you get everything else wrong. Every other big question of life is affected by that one question. Because that one question, "Does God really exist?" is the first button on your shirt. You miss the first button on your shirt, you miss it all.

As we look at the answer, there are two opposing views, two opposing answers that are the main worldview answers to that question: Does life have any ultimate meaning and purpose? You're going to see that they're very, very different. The first answer is from those who reject God and the Bible. When you ask those who reject God and reject the Bible the question, "Does life have any ultimate meaning and purpose?" their answer is an emphatic no. It's really a forced no. They don't want to answer the question because they know if there is no God, if there is no creator, if there is no designer, then there is no purpose to life. They have to say with Solomon in Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 2, "Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity." It's all empty, futile, meaningless, and useless.

If there is no God, here's the bottom line: If there is no God, then you are a random accident. That's what evolution says. That's what the Big Bang is all about. The Big Bang—what happened? Well, everything just kind of banged together. It was just a Big Bang. From the Big Bang, everything began. It was just a cataclysmic bang, just a random accident. And that's what you would be, and I would be. If there is no God, we would just be a random accident. Not very encouraging. But as the scientists who reject God say, "Well, it's not about being encouraging; it's just about telling you here's the way it is." Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, the biologist who says he's 99% sure there is no God, said this: "In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." You're just an accident.

So you don't have any purpose, and the universe doesn't care about you. Richard Dawkins was pressed in a Q&A one time and asked, "What does science say about the meaning of life?" He didn't want to answer the question, and he didn't answer it. What he told the questioner was this: "That's a dumb question. You shouldn't ask that question. That question is like asking me, 'What is the color of jealousy?' Some questions don't deserve an answer, and they shouldn't be asked. Who are you to ask that question?" That's basically what he said. Why? Because he doesn't have an answer to the question other than life has no meaning and no purpose. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. All is vanity. You're just a random accident if there is no God.

But it gets worse. If there is no God, you are totally irrelevant and pointless. Not just a random accident, but totally irrelevant and pointless. Let me give you another quote. This is from physicist Lawrence Krauss at Arizona State University. He said this: "We're just a bit of pollution. If you got rid of us, the universe would be largely the same. We're completely irrelevant." Wow. That's who I am. My life is just completely irrelevant. Completely pointless. Yeah. If there is no God, there is no creator, there is no designer. You know, Shakespeare hit the nail on the head when he said in Macbeth, "If there is no God, life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Nothing. If there is no God.

But you know what? There is a God. He is creator God. Genesis, chapter one, verse one: "In the beginning God," the eternal God, the one who is before the beginning. The One who is before anything because he's eternal. The eternal God Elohim created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. He created everything just by the power of his word. Now, this idea of evolution—you know, you hear about it in school, and that's all that's taught in school, is evolution. Some people think if you don't believe in evolution, well, you are an idiot. You are under a rock somewhere. If you could possibly believe in creation, because evolution has already been proven, they say, from the sciences.

I ran across an illustration from Ravi Zacharias. He was talking about the mathematical impossibility of evolution and natural selection. Not even given the fact that, well, where did it all come from? You know, when you have a Big Bang, where are the substances? Where did they come from that banged together? But he just said this: Suppose you had 1 million monkeys, and you took a million monkeys and gave each monkey a typewriter. A million monkeys with a million typewriters. And you had each monkey type out, just randomly type out, bang out a letter a second. So you would have a million letters a second being banged out on the typewriter from these million monkeys.

Then he said, suppose that you presented to the million monkeys a paragraph from William Shakespeare, from one of his plays, 379 letters. You are going to see just through the random banging of these monkeys how long it would take for all the letters to come into the right sequence—not with spacing and punctuation, just the right sequence to be able to spell out all the precise letters in a 379-letter paragraph from William Shakespeare. Now keep in mind that the evolutionists say that the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, give or take a billion years or so. 13.7 billion. That's what I found today on the Internet.

Do you know how long it would take the monkeys—how many years it would take the monkeys to, by natural selection and haphazard chance and random accident, to do 379 letters in the right sequence? Not a billion years, not 10 billion years, not 13.7 billion years. It would take them a million billion years, a million billion years to get 379 letters in sequence. Did you know that science tells us that in human DNA there's a code? There are letters in the code of human DNA. Precisely. In this code, you know how many letters there are? 3.1 billion letters in the human DNA. It takes a million billion years to come up through natural selection to come up with 379 letters. How long does it take to come up with 3.1 billion letters? Evolution is a mathematical impossibility. God created this world. He designed this world. It is very complex and extremely ordered.

He tells us in Genesis chapter one, verse one, "In the beginning, God created the heavens." And hey, those who reject God in the Bible are forced to say there is no meaning and purpose in life. I say that a life rejecting God and his word is a life not worth living because you have no meaning and no purpose. But now, changing gears, let's go to those who accept God and the Bible. What do they say concerning the question, "Does life have any ultimate meaning and purpose?" They gladly say yes. The atheist says no, forced to say no. The Christian says yes. Those who accept God in the Bible say yes because God is the creator God.

Now I want you to notice some things about God that reveal our purpose. First of all, God is a purposeful God. It says in Proverbs, chapter 16, verse 4, "The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil." Everything God made, he made for a purpose. Now, it's kind of interesting if you think about it. Debbie and I were talking about this this morning, and she said, "I never thought about that." The things that God made that everyone can see—Christian, non-Christian, atheist, or believer—we all see the same thing. We can see the sun, and the sun has a purpose. I mean, you don't say that the sun has no purpose. The sun is meaningless. The sun has no purpose at all.

Hey, take the sun out of the solar system, and we're dead meat. We need the sun. It has a purpose. The moon has a purpose. The stars have a purpose. Everything that God made has a purpose. Even things like grub worms and inchworms, they have a purpose. They lift up the soil. Even little things have a purpose. Big things have a purpose. All in-between things have a purpose. And then you come to man and say, "Well, man doesn't have a purpose." Baloney. Man has a purpose because everything that God made has a purpose. God created you, and he created me in his image so that we could know Him. God is a purposeful God, and he created us in his image so that we can know Him. Isn't that wonderful?

It says in Genesis chapter one, when God is creating, and God comes to day six, and God is creating everything that we see. He's creating the fish, the birds, and the animals. Then he comes and says in Genesis chapter one, verse 26, "Let us"—God speaking in the Godhead. In the Trinity, there's one God. But the one God says, "Let us." Because God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit—Elohim is a plural noun. God is Trinity. "Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

And God created man in his own image, in the image of God. He created him male and female. He created them. Male and female, he created them. Everybody in this room, you either have an XX chromosome female or an XY chromosome male. And there ain't nothing else. There's male and female. That's all there is. And so you're either a male or you're a female. You're not in between. You're not gender fluid. You're not any of that stuff. That's not how God did it. He made them male and female, and we are created male and female in the image of God.

Now, it's different than all other created things because God created plants, fish, fowl, and the creeping things and the crawling things, and then he created the animals. But man is not the same as that because man is made in the image of God. Those things are not made in the image of God. See, God is spirit. Jesus said that in John chapter 4. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. When God created man in his image, he created man with a spiritual side.

See, man is really a house of three rooms. We're body, we're soul, and we're spirit. The spiritual side of man is different than anything else that God created. See, God created plants and trees. Plants and trees have a body, but they don't have a soul or a spirit. They just have—you know, you see a tree outside. Well, that lives in the—I mean, it's just a body. It's just a thing, this tree. It's living, but it's just living as a body. Animals have a body, and they also have a kind of a rudimentary soul in which they can—they're aware of the things around them. I mean, we have three dogs at home, and those dogs are aware of things around them, just like your pets are aware of things. They're aware of feeding time, they're aware when you leave, and they're aware when you come home.

It's not like they're not a plant. They have some kind of awareness, but they don't have a spirit. See, a human being created in the image of God—we have a body. And with the body, we know the world beneath us, the physical world. We have a soul. And with the soul, we know the world around us, the psychological world. But then we also have a spirit. And in our spirit, that's where we know the world above us, the spiritual world. When a man's body is right, he's healthy. When a man's soul is right, he's happy. When a man's spirit is right, he's holy. That's God's plan for a man: to have you healthy, happy, and holy. Most people are unhealthy, unhappy, and unholy. They're not the person that God wants them to be.

But that's how God created Adam and Eve. They were created in his image. The spiritual side is the side that connected with God. When God put them in the garden and gave them all these trees to eat from, he said, "In the midst of the garden, there's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You can't eat from that tree, for in the day you eat from that tree, you will die. You will surely die." Well, as we know the story, Eve ate from the tree, she gave to her husband with her, and he ate from the tree, and they died, just like God said. In the day they ate, they died, but they didn't die in their body. Adam lived to be 930 years old. He didn't die in his body that day. In Genesis chapter 3, he didn't die in his soul. He went on to have communication and relationships with people. Where did he die? He died in his spirit. In his spirit, in that part of him that connected with God. That's where he died. And Eve died there too.

The eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. Everything fell apart from that moment on. That was the fall of man. Now, when Adam and Eve came together and had children, they passed on a dead spirit to all their kids. When you're born into this world, and I'm born into this world, we're born with a dead spirit. We're body, soul, and spirit, but the spirit is dead. Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1: "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins." We're all dead, and there's nothing—what do you do in here? You're dead in your spirit. That's why Jesus said, "Unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." You have to somehow get life in you to illuminate your spirit and bring your spirit to life. And that's what the Holy Spirit does. When you pray and receive Christ as Savior and Lord, the Holy Spirit comes into the human spirit, and life comes.

Hey, you're created. I'm created in the image of God.

Speaker 1

All people truly are created in the image of God. But that alone is not enough to be righteous in the sight of God. If you realize you're dead in your spirit, as Pastor Jeff just mentioned, then you need to come to Jesus Christ today. And as the Bible clearly tells us, simply and sincerely cry out to him from your heart with genuine repentance and faith in him alone, and he will forgive your sin for now and for forever. You will be a child of God and you will be with him in heaven when you die.

To help you do that, we invite you to go to our website and click the "Why Jesus?" link. There you can get some free downloads to help you start with your Christian journey and learn to trust God because He's got you here for his purposes.

Today's message is part one of the lesson called "Why Am I Here?" It's from Pastor Jeff's series "Life's Big Questions." Other messages in this series include "Does God Really Exist?", "Why Should I Believe the Bible?", "Is True Happiness Really Possible?", and "How Could a Good God Allow So Much Suffering?" This series, along with Pastor Jeff's bonus booklet, "The ABCs of the Christian Life," are our two special thank you gifts for your support this month of any amount to From His Heart, from which Pastor Jeff receives no income.

We're broadcasting each day across the nation and around the world, and it's because of people like you who listen, who are blessed by the messages, and apply the truths they hear to their lives, see the fruit of that, and want to share that with others. Your gift today will help us do just that. With your gift, again, we'll send you the series "Life's Big Questions" and also the companion booklet "The ABCs of the Christian Life" in the format of your choice. Call 866-40-BIBLE (866-40-BIBLE) or go online to fromhisheart.org and make that gift today and join us in our mission to reach the world for Christ. Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us today on From His Heart. I'm Larry Nobles, excited that you'll be here next time for part two of the most critical question for us to ask and make sure that we've answered: the question, "Why Am I Here?" Join us then when we'll open up God's Word and share real truth, real love, and real hope.

From His Heart is the listener-supported broadcast ministry of Dr. Jeff Shreve, speaking the truth in love to a lost and hurting world. Remember that no matter what, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Find out more at fromhisheart.org.