I have two great ministry associates. Today I've invited one of them, Alex, to be my guest blogger!

THE Goal of Life

What is your goal in life? Is it to have a happy and healthy family? Is it to help others? Is it to attain property? Have a successful business? Travel? To be well educated? To be well known? Well liked? What is your goal?

According to the Bible, you have one goal in life, and that is to know God. In fact, it’s not only your goal in this life…it’s your goal in the next life as well! In John 17:3, Jesus says: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” So according to Jesus, knowing God is not even the goal to eternal life, but it is eternal life! Wow! God is so huge, and complex and wonderful that knowing Him ­is eternal life. To know God is an eternal endeavor. It’ll never end. We’ll never get to the bottom of His greatness or His goodness! The apostle Paul says “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” Each day we spend in eternity we will get to know God more. Each day we will come to know His attributes and His ways with deeper and fuller understanding, and we will fall down in awe of how great He is! Then the next day, we will repeat the process! We will forever and constantly be getting to know God better, and He will forever and ever constantly be blowing our minds and extracting worship and praise from our hearts and lips.

C.S. Lewis, loved this concept and used it often in his books. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader C.S. Lewis likens getting to know God to the image of a ship sailing on an endless sea. The further on you travel, the sweeter the water gets, and the brighter the sun becomes…yet the brightness doesn’t hurt your eyes. The further on you row upon this endless sea, the better your body is able to handle the brightness, and as it becomes brighter it also becomes sweeter and sweeter to your soul. In The Last Battle Lewis also likens eternally getting to know God more to the image of people traveling up a beautiful but endless mountain. The farther up and in they trek, the more vivid everything becomes. The air becomes fresher and sweeter. The grass looks greener, and the sky a deeper, “farther” shade of blue. In fact, the farther in they travel, the more colors start to become shades that they’ve never even really seen before. And the farther in they travel the steeper the hill becomes, yet this does not hinder their travels. In fact the farther on they go, and the steeper the hill becomes, the faster they are able to move, until pretty soon they are flying over fields so truly green that the eyes of this earth could not set a gaze upon them. And this process goes on forever!

C.S. Lewis surely paints us a beautiful picture of what it will be like to eternally get to know God better. God is that big!! We will forever be knowing Him and enjoying Him. It will be a beautiful time that we can look forward to. The challenge for us today, however, is this: If we do not want to get to know God better here and now, is heaven really a place for us? If we don’t care about knowing Him now, we definitely won’t want to be there forever. Let us begin training for our “real” life by getting to know Him now. Get a head start on a never ending joy. The field is in front of you…Get to trekking.

-alex

Hosea 6:3 “Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD”