You may know what is the hope to which he calls you, what the wealth and glory of the share he offers you among his people in their heritage, and how vast the resources of his power open to us who trust in him. Eph. 1:18, 19, N.E.B.

The Christian is a person of divine destiny. All the circumstances that come to us conspire in our favor. In the heart of God we are destined to be like Christ. God provides us with an eternal calling and opportunity so magnificent as to make all other offers undesirable by comparison. He has made us partners in His everlasting enterprise. He arranges all the forces on our side.

Consider God's ultimate purpose for our lives. An artist sees the picture in his mind before he begins it. Michelangelo, before he sculptured his masterpiece, David, looked at that block of marble and saw there the image that he wished to produce.

God looks at us and sees the Christlikeness into which our lives can be shaped. This is God's supreme purpose for us. We can see the finished picture in Jesus. We see what we ought to be. We have no need to invent such a picture; it is already revealed to us. Our eternal destiny is in Christ. Christ is the archetypal man, the man God intends to produce in us.

Describing his conversion and commitment to Christ, Martin Luther wrote, "I feel as if I had been wafted through the gates of Paradise." We who live with Christ in view remind ourselves of the sublime purpose for which we live now. Our life is not a haphazard thing, lived from hand to mouth, at random, disjointed and fragmentary.

The painter does not go on aimlessly smudging the canvas, adding one blotch of color to another, and yet turn out a worthy picture. The sculptor does not chip the marble at random and produce a David such as Michelangelo's, or a Christ such as Thorvaldsen's. What is our purpose in life? One cries wealth; another, position or fame; another, worldly greatness and honor. These are intoxicating words breathed often from the impassioned lips of those who are captured by such things. We have an image greater than all these, more splendid, more enduring—the restoration of the image of Christ in us.