I don't think we were made human beings in the image of God to live without a fantastically important, sure, glorious, good, beautiful destiny.

As a Christian, what is your God-given destiny and how can you be certain that it's yours?

John Piper addresses these questions using Ephesians 1 3 to 6 in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on March 8, 1992.

One of the saddest feelings I think that you can have in life is to feel that your life is going nowhere. You're alive, but you feel like you can't

even think of any real good point in being alive. Get up in the morning and the day looks blank, it looks

empty. You have a little flicker every now and then a little daydream that it might be awesome if your life could be connected in some significant way to a cause or a future that is beautiful and

glorious and sure.

And then you wake up from your little flicker and your little daydream and everything around you looks small and insignificant, short-lived and not very important at all. I don't think we were made to live that way. I don't think we were made to live that way. I don't think we were made human beings in the image of God to live without a fantastically

important sure glorious, beautiful destiny.

I think we were made to be sustained moment by moment

by the sure confidence that there's a connection between what I'm doing today

and something great that's coming tomorrow.

I think we were made to be nourished and strengthened by the hope that no matter how mundane,

no matter how ordinary what I do from day to day is it's hooked in meaningfully to something great, something

glorious, something sure, something good and beautiful. In the Second World War, there was a Nazi concentration camp in

Hungary and the prisoners of this concentration camp were put to work in a very ugly, horrible,

slimy, nauseating sewage plant that took human waste and garbage and

processed it so that there could be

fuel and other kinds of things. In other words,

it had some little remnant of significance, what they were doing, as horrible

as it was.

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