Before God began to make the universe, he had in his mind what he was going to do. He decided that anyone who is "in Christ Jesus" in the final analysis is going to be in the Kingdom. If a person is in Christ Jesus, they are in the Kingdom.

Now, switch it all around. If this passage is about the purpose of God in creation, then what does it have to do with an individual person? Do we have a purpose? Do human beings have a purpose or reason for being here? Do individual lives have any meaning?

Everyone has different needs. Some of these are self-evident. We have a need for food and water and shelter. If you deny us any of those three, in time we will die. If you deny us water we will die very quickly. If you deny us food we will last a little bit longer, but not much longer. Deny us shelter, and we will wind up like the folks on the Titanic who died of exposure.

Some of the needs we have relate to the very idea of life and death itself. But people have other needs. Every person has a need for relationship with other people: for love or attention. I cannot make anyone love me, and no one can make me love them. But we can all get attention if we want it. We learn to do this as very small children. Imagine a hospital in which babies are taken into a seminar room to go through a workshop on how to cry in order to get attention. At least, somehow they have learned it early on. We know how to get attention. We get better at it as we go through life. We learn subtle ways to do it, and any of us who has ever been in the first grade has known children who have learned how to get attention, one way or another.

We know from war-torn situations in which little babies are orphaned, if someone does not pick them up, hold them, touch them, the little babies will languish and die. In hospital settings, they may all be in cribs, but if they are not regularly tended to, they will die. We have a need for relationship, but what about purpose? Is purpose really a need?

Babies have a need for relationship at the beginning of life. We also find that at the end of life, some people, the doctors say, "give up." A person does not have to be old to give up. Many teenagers in urban society today have given up. That is, they have no reason to live. They have no meaning; they have no purpose. Is purpose a need? Is there something within us that tells us we have a purpose?

The existentialist philosophers, most of whom were not Christians, described three dreads that human beings have. The first dread is the dread of death. That is, for me to be aware of my existence is to be aware of the fact that I am going to cease to exist sooner or later. I am going to die. This realization is anxiety-producing for people. Some of us devote our lives to ignoring our mortality. In fact, the American culture is consumed with distracting us from the fact that we're all going to die. This first dread relates to that first human need for food, water, and shelter. It relates to death. We have a need for somehow preserving life.