Purpose

FORWARD

In writing this booklet, Dick Tripp has highlighted the inability of our western culture to give the present and the future generations little if any sense that life has any overall meaning or purpose. In the last decade, our South Sea's paradise has gained the reputation of having one of the highest teenage suicide rates in the world. We lead the world in teaching hopelessness to our young people. Dick shows the meaning of life is not found in the pursuit of wealth, career, and our personal happiness.

When I was 30 years old my wife Miriam and I had a family of three lovely children. We had just built a new home in a nice suburb in Dunedin. At the time I was a Detective in the Police, and a few years previously I had represented Otago and NZ Services at Rugby. I was about to retire from the game and life was boring. It was at this reflective time I converted to Christianity out of a nagging sense that there must be more to life than just living and playing sport.

I left the Police five years later, accepting a call to pastor the Baptist Church at Oxford. During our early years in the pastoral ministry we discovered that with some people their faith and personal lives crumbled in the storms and pressures of life. They wrongly concluded in the face of these setbacks that God had failed them and they had not achieved the success they thought He owed them. Some of them actually believed that faith in God almost guaranteed complete personal happiness and the fulfilment of their desires. In this book Dick Tripp has identified this western worldview as one of the major causes of immaturity and failure of personal faith in the church today.

Following the sudden death of our daughter Caroline we came to realise that the difference between getting bitter or better lay not in our personal strength to stand and overcome the tragedy. It lay rather in just simply trusting in Jesus, in the knowledge that we were on this earth for His purpose and pleasure. Whatever came our way, if we only laid hold of this just, loving, and merciful God, He would give us the strength and comfort to make the right choices. During that terrible time of pain and grief, Miriam and I will never forget, despite our loss, the almost overwhelming sense of His presence and love.

In this book Dick Tripp has discussed heroes of the faith, people who performed deeds that, in comparison with our own, can leave us feeling quite inadequate as Christians. Without detracting from the sacrifice of these saints, I feel they all discovered a key which the Apostle Paul wrote of in Philippians 1:21, "to live is Christ and to die is gain", that was the foundation of their lives. When hardship, difficulty, persecution, rejection and injustice came their way, their reactions and decisions were based on the belief that they lived for Christ no matter what, and He would always be there for them. That key opened the door to God's unlimited resources of love and strength, demonstrating in them that He is more than able to bring us through all that life may confront us with.

This way is open to all of us. Dick Tripp's booklet could be the key to opening the door for the first day of your life.

Pastor Maurice Atkinson, Maurice and his wife Miriam have pastored Oxford Baptist Church for 19 years and speak throughout NZ.