Education
Explore. Learn.Grow in the Word.
Explore Scripture, its story, its people, and what it means for life today.
Bible Studies Everyday Christian Life
Finding Your Purpose
Scripture answers the purpose question, but not usually in the form people are asking it.
Scripture answers the purpose question, but not usually in the form people are asking it. This study is partly about correcting the question.
What you’ll explore
- 01 The question behind the question
- 02 What Micah 6:8 asks of everyone
- 03 Jeremiah 29:11 in its actual context
- 04 Created for good works, not for greatness
- 05 Purpose in an ordinary job
- 06 Guidance: how decisions actually get made
- 07 Faithfulness as the measure
The question behind the question
Read Ecclesiastes 1:2-11; Ecclesiastes 12:13
Ecclesiastes spends twelve chapters on the futility of everything and lands on fearing God and keeping his commandments. The book takes the question seriously and refuses to romanticise it. "What is it all for" is a biblical question, not a modern one.
What Micah 6:8 asks of everyone
Read Micah 6:6-8
The passage sets up an escalating list of sacrifices and then answers: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. This is addressed to everybody, requires no special calling, and is available today. It is the most complete answer Scripture gives to the question, and it is disappointingly ordinary.
Jeremiah 29:11 in its actual context
Read Jeremiah 29:1-14
The famous verse is written to Judeans deported to Babylon, and the plans in view are for that people’s return after seventy years — the same letter tells them to build houses and plant gardens where they are. Christians have long drawn comfort from God’s character in it, and that is fair. Reading it as a personal guarantee about your career is not what the sentence is doing.
Created for good works, not for greatness
Read Ephesians 2:10
We are his workmanship, created for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Prepared beforehand and walked in — not discovered by a search. The scale of the works is not specified, and the New Testament’s examples are mostly small.
Purpose in an ordinary job
Read Colossians 3:22-24; 1 Corinthians 7:17
Paul addresses people with no career choice at all and tells them to work heartily as for the Lord. He also tells the Corinthians to lead the life the Lord has assigned them. Scripture locates meaning in how work is done at least as much as in which work it is.
Guidance: how decisions actually get made
Read Proverbs 15:22; James 1:5; Acts 15:28; Acts 16:6-10
Counsel, prayer for wisdom, discussion with other believers, and occasionally something unmistakable — Paul’s vision at Troas comes after two closed doors and no explanation. The normal biblical pattern is deliberation, not revelation. There is no technique for extracting a decision from God without thinking.
Faithfulness as the measure
Read Matthew 25:21; 1 Corinthians 4:2; Luke 16:10
The commendation in the parable is "well done, good and faithful servant" — not successful, not significant. Paul says stewards are required to be found faithful. If faithfulness is the measure, then purpose is available in any circumstance, which is the point.
Questions to sit with
- Are you looking for a purpose, or avoiding the one in front of you?
- What would "do justice, love kindness, walk humbly" change about this week?
- Whose counsel have you not asked for?
Every passage in this study
Go deeper
Where this connects
This study sits inside a larger story. Read the passages above in their own books, and follow the thread back through Scripture as a whole.