Knowing your purpose gives your life meaning, simplicity, focus and motivation. It also prepares you for eternity.

YOU ARE NOT AN ACCIDENT. Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke of nature. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He was not at all surprised by your birth. In fact, he expected it.

Because God is sovereignly in control, accidents are just incidents in God's good plan for you.

the greatest hindrance to God's blessing in your life is not others, it is yourself — your self-will, stubborn pride, and personal ambition. You cannot fulfill God's purposes for your life while focusing on your own plans.

Nothing will change permanently until you dig down to the bedrock of truth about your life and God's purpose for it.

The greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose.

You may be serving in obscurity in some small place, feeling unknown and unappreciated. Listen, God put you were you are for a purpose! ... He will let you know if he wants you somewhere else.

Nothing matters more than knowing God's purposes for your life, and nothing can compensate for not knowing them — not success, wealth, fame, or pleasure. Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction, and events without reason. Without a purpose, life is trivial, petty, and pointless.

Knowing your purpose gives meaning to your life. We were made to have meaning. This is why people try dubious methods, like astrology or psychics, to discover it. When life has meaning, you can bear almost anything; without it, nothing is bearable.

Surrendering is not repressing your personality. God wants to use your unique personality. Rather than its being diminished, surrendering enhances it. C. S. Lewis observed, "The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become — because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Most people think of "vision" as the ability to see the future. But in today's rapidly changing world, vision is also the ability to accurately assess current changes and take advantage of them. Vision is being alert to opportunities.

A young man in his twenties wrote, "I feel like a failure because I'm struggling to become something, and I don't even know what it is. All I know how to do is to get by. Someday, if I discover my purpose, I'll feel I'm beginning to live.