Building a Life That Matters for Good - the Quest for SignificanceSample

Desiring Significance

For a moment, think of your life as a story.

Recently, I was driving my daughter halfway across the country to college. We talked about lots of things, including tales of her grandparents she never met. I didn’t plan it that way, but I realized I was teaching my daughter about her grandparents with stories. Suddenly I wondered what stories she would tell her kids about me someday.

Every time I hit a big birthday or another life milestone, I wonder again what I’m doing with the time I have left.

What About You?

What do you want your story to be?

It’s helpful to think of our lives as a story because we humans are designed for stories. We tell them; we watch them; we sing them; and we learn from them. Stories resonate with how we’re made. It’s no surprise that our Creator taught with stories when he was here on earth.

There’s another reason we love stories—we're living inside one. Our story began in a beautiful, perfect world with a hero named Adam. Then the villain, Satan, entered, caused a huge reversal, and the entire world fell into sin and death. At last, another hero appeared, Jesus, and what a plot twist—the Creator entered his own creation to save it!

A second reversal occurred when humanity rejected their own Creator, their own Rescuer, Jesus. But in that rejection, a great victory was sown. All sin was paid for—a full price was paid to redeem all the torn and tattered relationships among creation, humans, and God. The power of death was overcome through the resurrection of the hero, Jesus.

We’re now in a waiting period—a pause in the story—until the full expression of these victories is made manifest, and we truly live happily ever after.

This pause is where our stories play out. Our lives unfold like books written in real-time. Whether knee-deep in parenting, juggling work, or figuring out the next chapter, we’re crafting a narrative. It needn’t be—it can’t be—a perfect story, but it should be one filled with meaning, purpose, and real, lasting impact. Come along as we learn how to live a life of significance.

To think about this, start at the beginning, where all good stories start. When you were a child, what did you tell the adults you wanted to be when you grew up? Most kids will say something they believe is heroic. They’ll describe a baseball star, a firefighter, an Olympic athlete, a nurse, a school teacher, or maybe the president.

But then life happens. Somewhere along the way, reality sets in—the childish dreams of heroism and grandeur start to fade. You no longer run around the house in your Superman cape.

But truth be told, most of us still long to live a life of significance, to do something meaningful, worthwhile, something that will impact our family and others. In short, we want our lives to matter.

But is that childish? Silly? Maybe you’ve even heard from some well-meaning soul in your church that desiring significance is a sinful, worldly, prideful desire. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. You desire a significant, heroic life because you were created in the image of God, the Creator of the universe, the ultimate hero.

The desire for significance isn’t wrong. Like most desires—food, sex, companionship, ambition–whether they are sinful or not depends on how we seek to fulfill them.

In this study, we’re going to examine how Jesus responded when some of his disciples expressed a desire for significance. We’ll see what it takes to make a life significant and how to achieve a lasting impact.