Rick Warren on a Purpose-Driven Life | Big Think

Rick Warren on a Purpose-Driven Life

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Rick Warren describes his understanding of the meaning of life.

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Rick Warren:

Rick Warren is an evangelical leader, best-selling author, and founding and senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California. Along with his wife, Kay, Warren founded Saddleback in 1980 with just a single family to fill the pews. Today the church has a 120-acre campus, 22,000 weekly attendees, and has provided spiritual guidance and source material to over 400,000 ministers worldwide.

He also leads the Purpose Driven Network of churches, a global coalition of congregations in 162 countries. More than 400,000 ministers and priests have been trained worldwide, and almost 157,000 church leaders subscribe to the Ministry ToolBox, his weekly newsletter. His previous book, The Purpose Driven Church is listed in “100 Christian Books That Changed the 20th Century.” Forbes magazine called it "the best book on entrepreneurship, management, and leadership in print.”

Warren received his BA from California Baptist College, his MA from the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary, and his Doctor of Ministry from the Fuller Theological Seminary. Warren has recently taken on several issues previously ignore by the evangelical community; he is the most prominent signatory of the "Evangelical Climate Initiative," and is the co-founder and co-director (with his wife) of The Global PEACE Fund, which fights poverty, disease, and illiteracy. Warren has spoken at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the African Union, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is a purpose driven life?

Rick Warren: First of all you understand some basic things. You’re not an accident. You were made by God and you’re made for God. And until you understand that life’s never going to make sense. There are accidental parents, but there are no accidental children. There are illegitimate parents, but there are no illegitimate children. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did, and He wanted you alive.

Psalm 139 in the Bible tells us that before we were born, God planned our days in advance. He formed us in our mother’s womb; that He uniquely and custom-designed us. He shaped us for a purpose on this planet. And what the Bible teaches us, and what I believe, is that God created the entire universe just so He could create this galaxy; just so He could create the planet earth; just so it creates sustained human life. In other words, it sits on an axis so it doesn’t turn too much this way and burn up, or turn too much this way and freeze up. He perfectly sustains life.

Now why did He do this? The Bible says this over and over. He did it to love us; that we were created to be loved by God. If you want to know, or anybody who is watching this on the Internet wants to know why your heart is beating right now, why your lungs are taking breath, you were made to be loved by God.

The second principle is you’re made to last forever. The Bible teaches that this is not all there is; that we were made to last forever. One day your heart’s going to stop. That’ll be the end of your body, but it won’t be the end of you. It’s not an understatement to say that God has long-range plans for your life. And you’re actually going to spend more on that side of eternity than on this side. This life you get 60, 80, maybe 100 years at the most. It’s very, really, quite short. On the other side of eternity you’re going to spend millions, and millions, and millions, and actually trillions, and trillions, trillions of years in eternity.

So if we were to stretch a string from New York City all the way to, say, Johannesburg, South Africa, and that represented all of eternity, your life on this earth would just be the first little tiny millimeter compared to all the time you’re going to spend in eternity.

So if we only get 80 years, maybe, here on earth, what on earth am I here for? Well the Bible teaches that this life is preparation for the next. We are to practice some things here that get us ready for heaven. And these are the purposes of life. And it doesn’t matter what your religious background, your ethnic background, your social background — I believe these purposes are universal for every person.

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