Dr. Rick Warren challenges students to find their purpose in God’s love

Riverside, Calif. (Sept. 12, 2017) – “I am here to tell you that God has a plan and a purpose for your life,” Dr. Rick Warren told a California Baptist University chapel audience on Sept. 12.

Warren, a CBU alumnus (’77) and founding pastor of Saddleback Church, spoke at the first chapel service held in the new Events Center. He focused on the importance of students finding their purpose in life. Warren is also the author of the New York Times best-seller “The Purpose Driven Life.”

“If you don’t know your purpose, you aren’t living,” Warren said.  “There are plenty of wealthy and successful individuals who feel empty inside.”

People cannot live their purpose unless they know how to find it, Warren reiterated several times.

“You can’t tell yourself what your purpose is because you didn’t make you,” Warren said. “You can also talk to others but that’s just speculation; you need revelation. The only way you will know your purpose is to talk to your creator and read your owner’s manual—the Bible.”   

The Bible tells us, we were created to connect with God and to know God and love Him back, Warren said. If you want to know who God is look at the person of Jesus, he added.  

“God made you to love you. He planned you for his pleasure,” Warren said. “God is love, it is the essence of His character. The only reason we can love is because we were made in his image.”

Warren said that a purposeful life is all about love. 

“Jesus taught us to love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and also love your neighbor as yourself,” Warren said, quoting Matthew 22:37.

Warren challenged the students to think about investing their lives in purposeful living.

“There are three things you can do with your life; you can either waste your life, spend your life or invest your life,” Warren said. “Invest your life in things that will outlast us. God’s word will never pass away …and people will last forever.”

God made people to live forever, Warren said in regard to putting life into perspective.

“You are going to spend more time on the next side of eternity than this one,” Warren said. “This life is learning to practice what you are going to be doing in eternity. Life is preparation for the next.”