Make Your Life Count

Making Your Life Count

The world needs you. It’s broken.

Look around you. We’re facing economic chaos, endless wars, AIDS, famine, ecological ruin, political corruption—the list is endless. Your neighbors are in desperate need of love and a helping hand.

It’s my belief that what the world needs is God’s love. But whether or not you share my Christian beliefs, you can recognize that someone needs to do something. Right now!

That someone can be you. You were created to do something great. You want your life to count, or you wouldn’t have picked up this book. There’s no better way to make a difference in the world than to take action and help someone out—no matter your age or race, no matter your religion or lack of religion, no matter what.

But there’s a step we all need to take first: you and I need to recognize that not only is the world broken, but we are broken also.

The Plan

Through the years I have gained insights from the life of Jesus Christ on how I can do something to make my life count and to help people in need. These insights might save you some time and energy.

I asked myself, if Jesus was God—holy and perfect—why couldn’t He just have revealed Himself as God and then died, say, a week later?

Wouldn’t that have been enough to pay for our sins? He was sinless, after all. His sacrifice would have been acceptable. Why three years of ministry? Why teach the lessons? Why perform the miracles? Why be denied, why be betrayed, why suffer a horrible death?

The reasons are many, but here’s the one I want us to focus on. He was on earth to do more than to accomplish the sacrifice on the cross.

Jesus came to launch a plan.

Jesus’ plan would not only secure salvation for those who would believe but would establish a foundation for us to execute our individual roles in the plan of salvation for others.

One way to look at this master plan, and apply it to our lives, is to divide it into five parts. Being the preacher I am, I have named the parts with labels starting with P:

Preparation

Purpose

Pain

Power

Passion

The five P’s make up a plan that you and I can follow. This plan empowers us to communicate hope to a broken world. A world that is wounded, critically ill, sustained by life support. A world that has been burned by sin.

Simply put, you and I were created by God to do something great with our lives, something like Jesus did—but not because we are smarter, more special, or better qualified than anyone else. We’re not. Whether you accept it or not, you too are broken.

Miles McPherson, Do Something! Make Your Life Count (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009).