Living Your Purpose Is the Key to Fulfillment in Life

We also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to [God].
–2 Corinthians 5:9

Living your purpose is the key to fulfillment and enjoyment in your life.

In his book “Modern Man in Search of a Soul,” psychologist Carl Jung wrote, “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. . . . This can well be described as the general neurosis of our time.” Even though Jung wrote those words more than one hundred years ago, they are just as true today. People are searching everywhere for meaning and purpose in life. Some people try to find fulfillment in their jobs. They spend 60 percent of their waking hours at their job, yet they are not happy and fulfilled there. Not finding fulfillment in their work, people think, “I will try pleasure.” Or, “I will try accumulating money.” But those are empty as well. Solomon, the richest man who ever lived, tried every pleasure under the sun, and he came away saying in Ecclesiastes 2:11, “All was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun.”

Why do people keep searching for some new pleasure, new achievement, or new mate, but they never find satisfaction? Here is the simple reason: eternal beings can only be satisfied by that which is eternal. You can’t fill the Pacific Ocean with a bucket of water, can you? It takes more than that. It is the same with us. In Ecclesiastes 3:11, Solomon said God has placed eternity in our hearts. Whether you are a Christian or non-Christian, you have a sense of the eternal, and only that which is eternal can fill that eternal void. That means we need an eternal companion, one who transcends this life.

Second, we need an eternal purpose to give our lives to. Living out our purpose is not only the key to fulfilment in this present life, but it is also the key to future reward. In 2 Corinthians 5:9-10, Paul said, “We also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” We are all going to stand before that judgment seat of Christ, and we are going to be evaluated on whether we invested our life in fulfilling God’s purpose or our own.

Eternity will hold for us what this life has invested in it. What are you investing your life in? Where are you putting your money? Where are you spending your time? Where are you dreaming your dreams? Are you investing those things in that which is temporal or that which is eternal? Is your life about fulfilling your dreams or God’s dreams? It is one or the other. It can’t be both. On the wall in my study for many years was a little plaque that said, “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last.” That is the secret to fulfillment in life.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Finding the One Thing in Your Life” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2019.

Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 2001), 62.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.