ARME 6: Spangle, WA - July 2011

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ARME Bible Camp

Alan Parker

The Purpose For Your Life

Father God, we want to thank you that we have the privilege of being in your presence.

We ask now that you bring your Word alive and that you help us to understand your will for our lives.

We believe that with man things are impossible, but with God all things are possible.

So be with us now in this place, for we ask this in Jesus' name.

I know that many of you have come some distance in order to be here.

And so I decided what we would do to begin with is take a look at God's call to service.

And you may be wondering, I'm here at an army Bible camp, but what does it mean to be part of this Bible camp, and what am I called to?

And so this afternoon, we want to take a look at God's call to service.

There was an article written in a newspaper, in US News, and they asked a question of their readers.

They said, if there was 1 question that you could ask God or a higher power, what would that question be?

They got in all of the responses and they tabulated it all together.

And can you guess what the number 1 question was?

It was, God, what do you want me to do with my life?

I want to know what I should do with my life.

I'm wondering where I'm going to go, what I'm going to do.

And so I want to know what you want me to do with my life.

So we want to step back first and ask a question, Does God have a plan for our lives?

Does God have something that He wants you to do?

No, you want to know what the Bible says.

And so let's take a look at what the Bible says about God's plan for our lives.

It says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

I ordained you as a prophet to the nations.

Jeremiah is being told, look, before you were even born, I had a plan for your life.

We find the same kind of idea coming out with David.

David in Psalm 139 says this, your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed, and in your book they were all written, the days fashioned or shaped for me, when as yet there were none of them.

God had a plan for our lives before we were even born.

God has a plan for your life before you're even born?

Now, some of us may be on the alternative plan.

God had his plan over here and we had our plans over here and God is constantly trying to bring us back to his plan.

So when we ask the question, what is it that you want me to do with my life?

Many of us are interested in God's answer.

The problem is that we make a common mistake.

When we ask questions like, Lord, who should I marry?

The common mistake that we make is a mistake of selfishness.

Many of us approach God as if He was some kind of psychic person.

You know, a person that you go to and they look into their little crystal ball and they examine it and they try and figure out what the future is.

Because they believe that the psychic will be able to tell them what the future is so they can plan for it, so they won't make any mistakes.

See, the psychic phenomenon is 1 that is based around selfishness.

It says, if I can just get everything to work according to plan, then I won't have to face hurt or fear or pain or any of these things because I can plan for my future in advance.

But I have to tell you right away that God is not saying that our enemy is pain.

God tells us that the enemy is not pain, but sin.

And so when we can figure out what the right enemy is, we don't have to know the future, we don't have to know what pain is going to be caused to us, because we believe that God can teach us how to overcome sin even in the midst of pain.

So the psychic phenomenon is we go to psychics so that they can tell us the future.

I heard of 1 gentleman who decided to play a trick on the psychic.

So he called up the number, you know, 1-800-psychic, whatever it was.

And they answered the phone and the very first question was what?

Can you give us your credit card and your name?

And he said, well, you're the psychic, you tell me.

No, the psychics can't tell us and God chooses not to tell us always what our future is because He wants us to grow through the process.

So instead of coming to, Lord, what should I do?

With the idea that how can I selfishly find out from God about the future so I don't make any mistakes?

He says, look, You may make some mistakes, but I will be with you through this process, because who you become is more important than what you do.

Who you become is more important than what you do.

I'm more about changing your character than choosing your career.

And when we understand that, that will help us to understand God's purpose in His call.

Now I'm going to share with you today 3 ways to discover God's call.

Now you're going to find they're not what you expect.

3 different ways, when we put them together, help us to discover what is God's call in our lives.

So the first principle is this, you do not find God's call by looking for it.

Oh, wait, I thought that was the whole point.

We go to the Bible And we read the Bible and we look at circumstances and we find God's call that way.

But you know, I've read through the Bible and I never found anyone in the Bible who found God's call that way.

You know, as I looked at Moses and Paul and Isaiah and Peter, and we'll look at the 4 of them this afternoon, I never discovered any of them who said, this is how you find God's call, you look for it as hard as you can.

Instead, what I discovered was something quite different.

And it came to me when I was grappling with God's call for my life.

My wife and I were I was working for Amazing Facts.

She was at Weimar and we were trying to decide what it is that God was going to do in our lives and So I had this great plan.

I said, honey, I've got this plan all worked out.

Don't you hate it when people come up with these cookie cutter methods that tell you exactly how to discover God's will?

I said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the forests of Weimar.

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The Purpose For Your Life

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