Why Are You Alive?

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett quoted George Orwell as saying, “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.” I intend to restate for you a truth so obvious that many Christians seem entirely to neglect it.

When you became a Christian, God might well have taken you directly to your eternal home with Him. Consider the blessings that would currently be yours if He had done so. You would now be in the presence of Christ, beholding His glory and enjoying His splendor. You would be in the assembly of the redeemed, delighting in the never-ending fellowship of the Bride of Christ. You would be experiencing all that your heart has ever longed for.

However, God did not take you immediately into His glory when you, by His grace, first repented of your sin and put your trust in His Son. He left you here. In fact, He did more than merely “leave” you here: He commissioned you to be here; and He had a well-defined purpose for doing so.

The Apostle Paul understood this purpose, and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he made it quite plain. In Romans 14:7-8, he wrote, “For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.”

First, God’s Word states in negative term why you are alive: “none of us lives to himself.” In other words, you are not the reason you are alive. The purpose of your existence emphatically does not focus on you. In the words of a song we often sing here at First Baptist, “It’s not about me, Jesus, as if You should do things my way.”

Can you say with conviction, “It’s not about me”? How much more complete and joyous your life would be if you could finally renounce your need to be at the center of all things and cease evaluating everything on the basis of how it effects your comfort!

“None of us lives to himself.”

Then there is the positive and straightforward declaration, “If we live, we live to the Lord.” That means He must be the center of your life, the focus of your thoughts, your daily preoccupation, your delight, the axis around which your life revolves. To “live to the Lord” is to dedicate your life to do his will and to promote his glory. Indeed, that is the definition of the truly Christian life.
Other people live to please themselves. Christians live to please the Lord.

At the moment you trusted Christ, God commissioned you to spend the rest of your life focused on Him and pointing to Him, so that others would see His glory and come to Him as well. Are you living up to your purpose for being?