PRINCIPLES OF PURPOSE!!!! PART 2!!!!

Genesis chapter 1







Today we are walking in: The Principles Of Purpose Part 2!!!!







Today we look to the word-UNDERSTAND- H8085 shama`--to hear with attention or interest, listen to understand (language)










The Torah testifies...............




Genesis 11:7




Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand H8085 one another's speech.










The prophets proclaim..................




Nehemiah 8:2




And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear H8085 with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month.











The writings bear witness...........................




1 Kings 3:9




Give therefore thy servant an understanding H8085 heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?







1. Yah Is a Yah of Purpose




Yah is a purposeful Being. He has a purpose for everything He has ever done. He established His purpose before He created what was needed to fulfill it. What He plans is intentional, meaningful, and guaranteed to succeed.




This theme is found throughout the Bible. Consider these Scriptures:




The Most High Almighty has sworn, “Surely, as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand.” (Isa. 14:24)




The plans of The Most High stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations. (Ps. 33:11)




As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

(Isa. 55:10–11)




Men swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. Because Yah wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath.

(Heb. 6:16–17)




Yah has purposes that He determines beforehand and then carries out. These include plans for humanity as a whole and plans for males and females who carry out humanity‘s purposes. To bring this to a personal level, this includes plans for you and me. Yah does not do anything on a whim or without knowing the end result.




The origins of humanity are described in the book of Genesis, which means beginning. However, the Creation that we read about in Genesis was not the real beginning. I would like to call Genesis the end result after Yah finished His thought processes. When Yah finished deciding what He wanted to do, then He created. First Yah predetermined, predestined, or purposed everything. Then He produced it.




This concept is crucial to our understanding of purpose. It means that Genesis was not the beginning of a supernatural experiment with an unknown outcome. Genesis was the beginning of the production of something that was sure. So, when we talk about what happened in Genesis, we‘re really talking about what happened after Yah finished thinking.




Therefore, in Genesis, we are looking at the start-up of the project, as I like to call it. Those of you who are studying project management know that this is an important step in the process of building. When you reach the start-up phase, it means that you have all the plans drawn, all the physical resources in place, all the management resources in order, and now you‘re ready to begin. That‘s Genesis.




Do you begin building a house when you dig the foundation? No, you begin building it when the idea is conceived.




This means that the finished house is in the unseen. People pass by the property, and they don‘t see it. However, to you who understand and know what is going to happen, it is already finished. Digging the foundation is the beginning of the implementation of your purpose. So, after you dig the foundation, when somebody asks you, What are you doing? your answer is very definite. You point to the architect‘s rendering of the house and say, I am building this.




Yah revealed this truth to me in a very visual way. There is a street near where I live called Shirley Street. At one time, there was only a parking lot there. One day when I was driving along that street I saw a large sign with a beautifully painted picture of a building. There was no building on the site yet, but there was the big sign and the name of a building. It showed the landscape, the color of the building, the windows, everything. It was a detailed picture of what the completed building would look like. The sign said, Coming soon.




I drove past the lot and sensed the Holy Spirit saying to me, Did you see that? I said, See what? He said, Did you see the finish? Did I see the finish? I drove by the post office and came back around to take another look at the painting. He said, There it is. The finish. The construction company was showing us the end of their purpose. To have vision means to see something coming into view as if it were already there. The company had a vision for this building.




Likewise, Yah in His wisdom is not guessing about His plans for us for humanity as a whole or for each of us individually. Yah has already decided on His purpose. He has the complete picture. It‘s on His drawing board. It‘s His vision for us. It isn‘t an afterthought. In Genesis 1, we read how He began to dig the foundation of humanity. We‘ll pick up on this theme in chapter 4, because it is essential to understanding the nature and purpose of the male.




What we need to understand at this point is that when Yah created the male and the female, He had already predetermined what they were supposed to be and do. They are not divine experiments. Together, they are an intentional divine project with a predetermined purpose.




2. Yah Created Everything with a Purpose




Yah created everything with a purpose in mind, and He also created it with the ability to fulfill its purpose. Everything Yah has made is the way it is because of why it was created. The why dictates its makeup. The purpose of a thing determines its nature, its design, and its features.




You don‘t make something until you know what you want and why you want it. You‘ll never find a manufacturer starting a project in a plant, hoping it will turn out to be something useful. Its purpose and design are complete before production starts. For example, if a manufacturer decides he wants to build an apparatus that can both record moving pictures onto a magnetic tape for replay and broadcast them live through the medium of television, then he has created a product, a video camera but the manufacturer designed it first. What‘s more, everything in the video camera is necessary for its proper functioning. If you could look inside such a camera, you would see things that you didn‘t know were there and that you don‘t know the use for. Yet nothing in that product is there for the fun of it. As a matter of fact, because it is so expensive, there had better be nothing in it just for the fun of it.




Let me give you another illustration that is even closer to home than your big toe. Are you aware that if your big toe were cut off, you would lose your balance and fall down? You probably never think about your big toe until you stub it. Then it just seems like an annoyance. Yet it keeps you standing up when you lean forward. Your big toe isn‘t there just for fun. Thank Yah for big toes! There‘s also a purpose for your fingernails. Some of you know exactly how important they are because you‘ve had an accident and lost one. Your fingernails are there to protect the softer skin on your fingers.




Since Yah created everything with a purpose, both males and females need to go to Him if they want to know their true reason for being. If they try to change His plans or fight against them, they are in essence fighting against themselves, because they‘re working against their own nature, their own makeup, the way they function best based on the Manufacturer‘s design. Moreover, because Yah is love, His plans embody what is best for us, so they would also be working against their own highest good.




Yah‘s purpose requires two genders working together in cooperation to accomplish a mutual vision. Accordingly, males and females have complementary designs that enable them to fulfill Yah‘s purpose together.





3. Not Every Purpose Is Known to Us




Although everyone and everything on earth has a purpose, this does not mean that we are aware of their purposes. When human beings as a race turned their backs on Yah and His ways, as we learn about in Genesis 3, they ended up losing their knowledge of Yah‘s intent for themselves and for the world.




Rejecting Yah was the equivalent of buying a sophisticated and intricate piece of equipment and then throwing away the user‘s manual. If you get something to work under those circumstances, it is only by pure chance. The more likely scenario is that you will never get it to function properly. You will also miss out on the many features and functions it has to offer. It will never fulfill its complete purpose.




Likewise, humanity has not honored the fact that Yah‘s creation and His directions for living were established for a specific reason and that, if that purpose continues to be abandoned, males and females will never function properly as human beings. This is a very dangerous situation for them to be in, because it leads right to the next principle.




4. Where Purpose Is Not Known, Abuse Is Inevitable




Whenever purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable. Suppose I‘m Henry T. Ford. I‘m going to add a motor to a carriage and build a product called a motorcar. I know the purpose before I build this vehicle. It will enable people to be more mobile on land. Now suppose you decide, I want to use this motorcar as a boat, and you drive it off a cliff and into the water. What will happen? You‘re probably going to drown, and the car is going to be ruined. Why? The car was built to fulfill a specific purpose, and if you do not use it according to its purpose, then you will likely be harmed in the process. We need to keep from driving off the cliff of life by understanding and fulfilling our purpose as human beings.




Here is another aspect of this principle: the penalty for drinking poison is death from poisoning. You don‘t need Yah to kill you after you have swallowed poison. What this means for us is that Yah doesn‘t have to do anything to judge us for abusing our lives. We judge ourselves by receiving the consequences of our participation in harmful practices based on our determination to live according to our own knowledge rather than His. Consequently, we are victims of our own decisions, not of Yah‘s judgment.




These examples demonstrate that if you don‘t know the purpose of something, you will misuse or abuse it in some way. That‘s why it‘s possible to be sincerely wrong. It‘s possible to be faithfully wrong. It‘s possible to be seriously wrong. You‘re serious, but you‘re wrong, because you don‘t know the purpose for the thing you‘re involved in.




This principle holds true for everything, including people.




How many people go into marriage very seriously? Most people do. They go to the church, stand at the altar, and say to their betrothed, I will love you until I die. They‘re very serious. But then they die in three months. At least their love dies. Then their family and friends try to figure out what happened. Their marriage failed because they didn‘t understand the purpose of marriage, the purpose of a mate, or the purpose of family. Because they didn‘t understand these things, they abused their union.




People abuse things because they just don‘t know their purposes or because they disregard those purposes. When males and females don‘t know Yah‘s intentions, they end up abusing each other, even if they don‘t mean to. If males are going to solve their current identity crisis and fulfill their purpose as men, husbands, and fathers, they must rediscover Yah‘s plan for them. Otherwise, they will hurt those around them, even if it‘s unintentional.




5. To Discover Purpose, Never Ask the Creation; Ask the Creator




If you want to know the purpose of something, don‘t ask the thing itself. Why? It didn‘t plan, design, or build it- self. Only the manufacturer knows the why and how of his product; no one else truly does. That is why he can claim perfect relationship with his product.




Therefore, if you‘re going to use something, the first question you need to ask is, Who made this? If you buy a certain kind of guitar, you need to consult the manufacturer who made that particular guitar. That is why the company includes an instructional booklet with the instrument; the booklet tells you how to use the guitar based on its purpose. You don‘t use it to paddle a boat. You don‘t use it to play baseball. In other words, the manufacturer sent you the manual to protect you from abusing the product and so you could have the full enjoyment of it.




The point is this: to understand how we function as human beings as males and females we need to go to the Manual given to us by the Designer and Manufacturer who created us: the Bible. Yah knew exactly what He wanted when He thought of the male. Remember that He created both male and female after He had decided what each should be in order to fulfill His purposes and plans, and that He designed them accordingly.




This means that He is the only One who knows how humanity is intended to function. If you have any questions about why you are here, you should check the Manual. If you don‘t know the purpose of a thing, all you can do is experiment. Everybody who doesn‘t know his or her purpose is just experimenting with life.




Let me use marriage as an illustration again. Do you know what most marriages are today? Big experiments. I don‘t really know what a wife is for, but I‘m old enough to get married, so I‘m going to have one. You get married because you‘re twenty-five. All right, then what? Do you know what you have? No, but she looks good. What‘s a wife for? Hey, man, to have sex with and to clean the kitchen. This is a big experiment. But guess what? After three weeks, you realize she doesn‘t agree with your definition. The experiment isn‘t working. She isn‘t cleaning those dishes, and she isn‘t into being a living sacrifice every night. She begins to ask for things like time. She wants love and affection and attention. She wants appreciation. Hey, I didn‘t bargain for all that. Well, my friend, marriage is not a trial run.




Again, whenever you don‘t know the purpose of a thing, you‘re experimenting. That‘s what many people, especially young people are doing with life. They don‘t know what education is for, so they treat school like an experiment. They skip classes and spend their time partying, then they flunk out. They experiment with sex and sexual identity, and they end up with all kinds of problems. They experiment with drugs and hurt their bodies.




Dr. Munroe said, When I was a boy, I was tempted to experiment in order to find out about life. I‘m grateful Yah protected me from much of that. But many of the young people whom I grew up with did not make it through their experimentation. The experiment blew up. Some are dead. The bodies of others are contaminated and wrecked from using destructive substances. They didn‘t know the purpose of the elements they were using.




I‘d like to say to the young people listening to this series: if you want to know why you were born, the worst people to ask are your friends, because your friends are trying to figure out why they‘re here, too. If you want to know your reason for existence, don‘t ask another product; ask the Manufacturer. Everyone else is guessing.




What we‘ve been doing all these years is asking the product why it exists. Because the world doesn‘t understand much about the reason for the existence of things, it functions like one big experimental lab. All of us seem to have been assuming the position of scientists. We have imagined that we have the time and intelligence to discover the reason for our existence through experimentation. Then we find out that life is short, and that we‘re very poor researchers.




Life is too precious to treat like a trial run. The only way to avoid the cost of trial and error is to learn the purpose of your life. Think about a car mechanic. If he‘s just experimenting, he won‘t last long in the automotive business. If he says, I wonder what this part is for? Let me guess what section of the engine I should attach it to, that‘s experimentation. He doesn‘t know what the manufacturer had in mind.




Well, if you wouldn‘t let an inexperienced mechanic work on your car, what about your life? No university professor knows people well enough to write a definitive book about what makes us tick. No psychologist or psychiatrist truly knows me. Yah wrote a book on His product, and the product is me. Tell yourself, I‘m an expensive product. I won‘t let anyone experiment with me. It‘s a dangerous thing for us to experiment with this precious commodity called life.




Therefore, if a man wants to know his reason for living, He must look to Yah and His Manual not to other males. If he looks to himself or others, he will travel an unreliable and hazardous course in life.




6. We Find Purpose Only in the Mind of Our Maker




If you remember this principle all your life, you‘ll be safe: before you buy something, check to see who made it. Right away, you‘ll know what was in the mind of the maker. If you buy a shirt on sale at a discount store, and you see the store‘s label in the collar, you‘ll treat it differently than if you buy a Pierre Cardin shirt. You might toss the discount shirt on a chair, but you‘ll put the designer shirt on a hanger in your closet.




We need to understand the mind of our Maker. How do we do this? By learning how He thinks. The only way for us to succeed is by discovering and living in the purposes of our Maker, by undergoing a transformation in the way we think about ourselves based on His original intentions for us. That transformation comes about by a renewal of our minds: Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of Yah’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to Yah this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what Yah’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:1–2)




Yah‘s ways will transform your spirit, your mind, and your outlook. When you present yourself to Yah and learn from Him, you will begin to understand His purpose. “The law of The Most High is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of The Most High are trustworthy, making wise the simple” (Ps. 19:7).




The greatest way for you to find purpose is to yield your life to the Manufacturer. You shouldn‘t come to Yah because it‘s the religious thing to do. You shouldn‘t come to Yah because everybody is doing it. You shouldn‘t come to Yah because it‘s good to be a part of the community. You should come to Yah because you want to find out how not to waste your life. No one knows you like the One who made you. That‘s the bottom line.




We are so special to Yah that He sent His only Son to die for us. There must be something unique about each one of us for Yah to want us to receive salvation so that we can fulfill the purpose for which He gave us life. We need to seek Him earnestly in order to discover that purpose. “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13).




Thus, the male will fulfill his purpose only if he seeks the mind of his Maker with all his heart. When Yah‘s plans unfold before him, his fragmented life will become an orderly whole, and he can become the man he was meant to be.




7. Yah’s Purpose Is the Key to Our Fulfillment




You can never be totally and completely satisfied until you find your purpose and then live in it. You cannot do what you‘re supposed to do until you discover what you are supposed to do. And if you do what you‘re not supposed to do, you‘re not going to be fulfilled. You‘re wasting time. You‘re abusing your life. Stop it right now.




I was speaking about purpose at a community in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A lady came up to me after the service and said, I‘m fifty-six years old. Where were you fifty-six years ago? I said, What do you mean? She said, You‘re the first person ever to come into my life and help me understand that I have a reason for living and I can‘t give an account of fifty-six years right now. Where were you for fifty-six years?




Sometimes people begin to feel the way that woman did; they‘re distressed because they‘ve wasted so much time. If this is your situation, don‘t be discouraged. One of the wonderful things about Yah is that He has a way of restoring the years that the locusts have eaten. (See Joel 2:23– 26.) When you go to Him, He knows how to make up for the time that you‘ve lost.




Yet Yah would prefer that we follow Him and know our purpose all our lives. That is why the Word of Yah says very strongly to young people, “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth” (Eccl. 12:1). The Bible is saying to us, Remember Yah now—not when you‘ve finished partying and ruining your health with drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, so that you say, Well, I‘m sick now; I‘d better go find Yah. Don‘t wait until after you have messed up your life to remember Yah.




“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.” Why? Yah wants you to remember the Manufacturer early so that He can set you on course for your entire life.




Yah didn‘t say, Remember the university. He didn‘t say, Remember the school guidance counselor, or Remember what your friends are saying. They can give you only their opinions about what you should do. Yah said, Remember your Creator, the Manufacturer, the One who made you. Remember Him first while you‘re young. Why? So that the evil days won‘t rob your life.




Some of you know what I‘m talking about because you‘ve been there and now regret it. Some of you might still be in the middle of it. Others of you might not be using harmful substances, but you‘re still ruining your life. You‘re working fourteen hours a day trying to be successful, but you‘re not doing what you were put on the earth to do. You‘re not going to be fulfilled.




Wouldn‘t it be great to live every day effectively, doing exactly what you were born to do? There‘s no fulfillment without knowing your purpose.




Remember the painting of that building on Shirley Street? After I had driven past the sign the second time, the Holy Spirit said to me, If you were to see the men working on that project, digging up all the mud and muck, all the rocks and everything, making big holes, and if you were to ask them what they were doing, they would say, We‘re moving toward that. We are building that.‘ They could tell you exactly where they were headed. I have never forgotten that lesson.




I have a question for you: is your life similar to that? If someone were to ask you what you‘re doing, could you tell them you‘re headed somewhere? Could you tell them where? Are you so clear about your dream that you could paint a picture of it?




If you know where you‘re going, then when someone doesn‘t understand the reason for the mud, the muck, the water, and the hole, it doesn‘t matter. All that might not look right, but you see, that‘s the process. The process gets really messy sometimes. When you‘re in the midst of the process, your life might not look like it‘s becoming anything. But take careful note: there‘s a painting of you. Yah has painted it for you in His Word. Anytime you get bogged down in the mud and the muck, every time you get discouraged, you can look at that painting.




When a person works in construction, sometimes the contractor will tell him just to dig a trench. He can‘t see what this trench has to do with anything, but he has to trust him. He digs the trench because he knows the contractor sees things he doesn‘t know about. Likewise, Yah is in the business of constructing us and our lives. He is the Contractor. Sometimes He will tell you to do something, and He won‘t explain much about it.




You may be in the middle of something right now that He‘s told you to do, but that you don‘t understand; it doesn‘t seem to make any sense. You feel like you‘re just digging a trench. You‘re saying, This isn‘t what I bargained for. Maybe your job is a trench. Maybe your marriage is a trench. But when you are pursuing Yah and His purposes, He‘s saying, Don‘t quit. You don‘t understand. Just stay where you are. We‘re building something here. Just dig the trench.




A man may be able to see the outcome of Yah‘s purposes in his life twenty years into the future or only one day ahead. Yet if he is living in Yah‘s plans for him, he has found the key to his existence.




Yah Put Your Purpose within You




Becoming what Yah has purposed for you not only allows you to live effectively, but also to worship your Creator, who has given you ideas, talents, resources, and energy to fulfill His desires and plans for your life. Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purposes of a man‟s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out.” That‘s a powerful statement, isn‘t it? “The purposes of a man‟s heart are deep waters.” That means your purpose is inside you. Yah has placed it deeply within you. However, in order to draw it out, you need to be assisted by Yah‘s wisdom and revelation because your purpose was born in the mind of your Maker.




Remember that Yah created the male with a specific purpose in mind, and He designed him uniquely for that purpose. Therefore, a man possesses inherent characteristics and qualities that are necessary for his functioning and fulfillment as a male. Moreover, when a man identifies, understands, effectively applies, and manifests these qualities in his life and relationships, the female will also experience a fulfillment she has always longed for.




As we‘ve seen, it is beneficial to look at the overall picture before seeing how all the details fit into it. In order for a man to know Yah‘s purpose for him as a male and as an individual, he first needs to see Yah‘s purposes for humanity as a whole. In the next teaching, we are going to take a close look at Yah‘s wisdom and revelation in regard to the creation of man.




Principles




1. Yah is a Yah of purpose.




2. What Yah plans is intentional, meaningful, and guaranteed to succeed.




3. Yah created everything with a purpose.




4. The purpose of something determines its nature, design, and features.




5. Not every purpose is known to us because we have lost our understanding of Yah‘s original intent for us.




6. Where purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable.




7. To discover the purpose of something, never ask the creation; ask the creator.




8. If we don‘t know the purpose for our lives, we‘re just experimenting.




9. When you go to Yah, He knows how to make up for the time that you lost from not knowing your purpose.




10. We find our purpose only in the mind of our Maker.




11. Yah‘s purpose is the key to our fulfillment.




12. Yah put your purpose within you. To draw it out, you need to be assisted by His wisdom and revelation.