What Is God's Will for Us? | Finding Purpose Through Faith
Learn how to reflect on God's will for us, find purpose through faith, and make meaningful choices with prayer and spiritual wisdom.
Sapphire Lang
9/23/20262 min read
The search for life's purpose tends to settle into a few major trends in the modern world:
Create our own purpose — we are our own god.
God created us so He could love us, and we were created to love Him back.
God wants us to worship and obey Him.
The purpose of life is for God to experience all things by becoming all things.
Each of these reasons makes sense in its own way. But something still feels missing.
What makes humans so special among all other life forms? Why does Jesus keep emphasizing the importance of love? If life were created purely for the sake of experience, why love at all? Why do the saints of the world keep telling us to love one another?
I think the New Age idea of "experiencing all" can actually be dangerous, because it encourages people to seek out "good" and "evil" intentionally, as if both were equally worth pursuing. Concepts like good and evil, positive and negative, up and down—they sit on opposite ends of the same spectrum, and they are part of life. But I've noticed how easily people fall into the negative and get stuck there for a long time. The positive, meanwhile, sometimes never comes on its own—it often requires an external force to pull us back out.
I've written about this before, but it's too important not to say again.
The purpose of our lives is to experience God's divinity and God's creation through positive feelings—not simply to experience everything, but mainly to experience the positive. I don't believe God ever intended for us to experience negative feelings.
Feelings are not things. They are not objects that can be measured or quantified. They exist in polarity and density, meaning:
You can only feel joy because you have felt sorrow.
You can only feel warmth because you have felt cold.
You can only feel love because you have experienced the absence of love.
Feeling requires contrast. Without contrast, there is only existence—not feeling. Negative feelings exist so that we might experience the positive. As I've written before, the spectrum of life offers all these experiences, at different levels of intensity.
Here is how I'd describe the contrast: God's realm is the highest possible level of positive experience. We, here in this physical world, exist at a much lower level of positive experience than God's realm—regardless of how good our lives may seem. Imagine divine beings arriving from their perfect realm onto Earth. The contrast would be so stark, in the "eyes" of the divine, that to them, we would appear to be living in Hell.
And yet God intended to create us imperfectly, so that we might experience perfection—experience divinity itself. God cannot experience Godself while remaining only Godself. To know the self, we must, in a sense, un-self ourselves. To observe an object, we cannot be the object itself. God created all things and knows all things, but God cannot feel the stunning beauty and excitement of His own creation from the outside—not the way we can, standing inside it. Beauty and love exist fully within God's realm too. But we were created and carefully crafted by God to live in this imperfect world, feeling all the ups and downs of life, on God's behalf.
My point is this: it was never God's intention for us to feel the negative—the lower end of the spectrum of feeling—because those feelings, God can already experience within Godself. There is no need for us to carry them through our physical forms.