Do College Students Know Their Purpose? | The Populace

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My name is Zach Conover, and this is The Populace. Here at The Populace, we want to apply a robustly

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Christian worldview to broadly held cultural opinions. Whether it's street interactions, articles, other media publications, we want to weigh the spirit of the age against the biblical hope.

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In today's episode, we ask the question, what is your purpose?

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What is the general public's consensus about this question? To put our finger on the pulse of The Populace, here are some responses university students gave us when asked why they believe they're here and what their lives are for.

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What is your purpose? My purpose, that's a loaded question.

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I guess I would feel like my purpose is really to be an educator. All right. And help,

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I guess, bring forth the younger generation in some way, fashion, or form using those types of gifts. Here to spread the love of Jesus Christ, to everyone do the right thing.

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Help people out, make things easier for people I meet in my life and wherever I can.

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What is your purpose? Do what I want, get what

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I want done, I think. I think I'm here just to enjoy myself. I think that pleasure and just living life to however you want is the real meaning to just being here,

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I guess. I think your purpose is kind of to find your own purpose. You can't really just kind of label yourself as any individual purpose that can apply to everyone.

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To share the gospel and just to talk about God. That's my purpose. My purpose, probably to grow up with a companion that cares for me, that I care for.

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And to provide and care for the people that I love. Now that we've seen a sample of some answers, let's take a closer look at one interaction that allows us to get into the meat of this conversation and meaningfully apply our biblical beliefs.

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Check it out. What is your purpose? My personal purpose, honestly.

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Are you talking about the purpose of humanity or my personal purpose? I guess you could go a little bit broader, but I'm curious as to you.

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Why are you here? What are you for? I don't know,

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I feel like, personally, I couldn't answer for myself, but I feel like we're all just here to just experience, just to be alive, you know?

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That's kind of the reason we're here. Any particular experience? Or like good or bad experience?

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The good and the bad. You just gotta have it all, you know? Now, the answer to this question from this young man is interesting.

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He clarified by wanting to know, well, what do you think my personal purpose is?

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Is that what you want me to answer? Or what's the purpose of humanity in general? And then he said, well,

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I can't speak personally for myself, but I think, corporately speaking, this is why we're all here.

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We are here to experience things and be alive.

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Now, that answer sounds a bit shallow, but if you think about it for a moment and we ask ourselves the question, don't we all want to live lives that are rich and meaningful and filled with purpose?

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I think the answer is absolutely. But life is about more than just experiencing things or feeling things, right?

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We want to have lasting satisfaction in the lives that we lead. The question has to be asked here of this young man, is this kind of existential philosophy that is just focused on me, myself, my personal experiences, the way to a truly fulfilled life, right?

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How do we apply the hope of the gospel to that? What does Jesus say? What does the biblical worldview say to a life that is just focused on self, on self -discovery, on feeling things, on having experiences as the way to truly be happy?

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Well, Jesus says very, very clearly that if you love your life, you'll lose it.

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But if you lose your life for his sake and the sake of the gospel, then you will find it.

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You will know what it is to have true meaning, true purpose, and to live a meaningful, satisfied life, but that only comes from knowing

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God. So here's really what I see as the core of what this young man is saying and what it's rooted in.

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He's in the image of God, as are we all. We all want to have experiences and gain insight and gain skill and gain knowledge, but we need to understand that because we're made in the image of God, whatever things that we hold over our head as meaningful and worthy of pursuit, all of those things will be subject to the law of diminishing returns.

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What that means is that whatever we're chasing, right, whatever we're looking to to give us satisfaction or peace or security or pleasure even, those things will not ultimately satisfy us.

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We'll pursue them and we'll go after them, but the more we do so, we'll find them leaving us more and more empty.

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So that's the first thing that I would try to communicate in asking this young man, what do you think the way to a meaningful and satisfying and richly and deeply lived life is?

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How do we get there? Now let's listen to some more. Okay. It's just everything. Okay, just got it.

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Just experience, take it all in. Okay. You only have this one life, so it's like make the most of it.

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What happens after this one life? I don't know. I feel like we could go somewhere, but at the same time, it's like everything could just be physical.

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So it's like, it would make sense for everything physical to stop.

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And so I feel like our conscious experience is mostly physical. So I feel like that can stop too after we die.

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So honestly, I don't know. Does that give you hope for the future, knowing that your experience that you said was the purpose of your life would go away?

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No, because I feel like it makes the time we have more valuable, because if you only get to experience it that one time, then it's just like, that's all you have.

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So make the most of it. How would you respond to someone that said this?

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Someone that doesn't necessarily affirm belief in God, someone that's just living for the moment?

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Because I think this is a very common thing and Christians have failed to provide maybe a compelling response to this, right?

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Someone says, this life is all there is. My physical experiences and my happiness, that's what

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I'm living for. And because this is all there is, that's what makes life worth living, because it's more valuable, right?

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We don't have very long here, so let's make the most of it, right? Take it in. We only have this one life.

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Now this YOLO philosophy, you only live once, downplays the spiritual dimension of our lives and really the vertical relationship between us and our creator.

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He's saying something that's true here, and that's important for us to acknowledge. The Bible speaks clearly about numbering our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

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It speaks about the importance of redeeming the time. It emphasizes the shortness of our lives, and that provides the motivation for us to live lives that are meaningful, that are satisfied, that are rich, that are filled with things that are worthy pursuits.

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But again, we have to ask the question, is a life that is oriented on self and doing what makes me happy and doing what makes me fulfilled, is that a life that can produce long -lasting meaning and contentment, satisfaction, or because it's all about me and my own desires, is that philosophy, that way of living, really just a recipe for not being satisfied, about always wanting more?

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You see, what I think this young man needs to hear is that he's a worshiper, as are we all, right?

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We give glory to and sacrifice for what holds the weight in our lives, what is most important to us, whether people, things, various pursuits, accolades, the praise of others, our achievements, our relationships, right?

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We're pursuing things like security and freedom and comfort and peace, and we are holding up something that we think will get us that.

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But the Christian worldview doesn't view created things as simply a means to an end to make us happy.

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It views God as the ultimate end. It says that God is really the only reality that will satisfy our hearts that are longing, that are craving for meaning.

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You see, as the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, God has put eternity into our hearts.

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There's a hole there in our hearts that can only be filled by God, right?

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We weren't made for ourselves. We are worshipers. Our ultimate value and pursuit and the key to living a rich life filled with meaning is seen in relationship to the one who made us.

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And so, for this young man, has he considered that there is a way to have a life of rich meaning that isn't found in pursuing lesser things that will never satisfy him?

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You see, we're all seeking the quality of life that can only be found in knowing God. If we wanna live the best life that can be imagined, then we have to know the

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God who made us for worship. He says, I came that you may have life and have it abundantly, beyond measure, more than enough.

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And when we find this life, we are well taken care of. We do find that contentment and rest for our striving souls.

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Our days are short. Time is brief. Do you want not only a life that will never end, but the best quality of life that you can possibly know?

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A life at its scarcely imagined best? Then you have to know

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God through the person of Jesus Christ. That's the key to living a rich and meaningful life that is filled with hope and peace.

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So this is the portion of the show where we wanna interact with the feedback that you left us on the previous episode.

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So let's go ahead and go through some of the comments that you guys left, and I'll interact with a bit of it.

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Nick Nixon says, less talking to the camera, more street interviews. This is a great format, but needs more polishing.

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Just talk to people on the street. Leave commentary to a minimum. Nick, really appreciate that feedback there.

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Highly value it. So the vision of the populace that we're aiming at here is that we do want to provide a decently robust Christian response that really gives people a way to answer the things that they're hearing in the public square.

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And the issue is balancing that with a wide sample of answers.

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What is the general public saying? How are they responding to these questions and thinking through these issues?

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So sometimes balancing that can be an aspect of discovering what this actually is and how best to approach it.

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So I'm not absolutely wedded to this format. I believe that it works in the sense of capturing what we're trying to do with this.

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But I'm absolutely all for finding the right balance between the commentary that we're giving on this and letting people talk.

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And in the meantime, that's why we post these full -length interactions and conversations on All Access so that you can watch in greater detail the length of these conversations and really study up and examine these in terms of what people are saying and how we can respond to it as Christians.

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So again, highly appreciate that feedback. It is much, much appreciated. We have one here from Yusa Regular Guy.

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Always glad to hear street conversations. Thanks for the work all you guys do. Looking forward to more of these. Always like to see more street engagement.

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Appreciate that so much. We agree. That's why we wanna give it to you. Let's see, next one here.

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Shmushwan Emek. Hard to pronounce that one here. But this is actually a great comment here.

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I'm gonna read it. I think an important question would be, how then are we remade in the image of God?

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The atonement has been provided for us to have a restored relationship with God, yet I feel most people seem to either purposely skip or accidentally miss the repentance and sanctification process.

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Psalm 119 describes a changed heart that is turned away from sin and towards God and repentance. A heart that desires to be transformed by the implanting and washing of God's law in their heart.

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This is missed in today's churches just as the prophets warned it would be. Man, this is excellent.

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Because as you noticed in the conversation that I interacted with in the episode, the image of God takes that central place.

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The young man was saying, this is the image into which people should make themselves.

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And we kind of examined those foundations, but this is a wonderful follow -up question because it gets really to the heart of the gospel.

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How then do we recover this image that we were created in?

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How do we get back to the beginning? Because if it's designed to be recovered in the atonement of Jesus Christ, if that's what the redemption that Christ accomplishes gives us is a restoration of the image of God, how does that take place?

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And why does it need to be recovered? How is it lost? Which gets us really into the conversation about the problem of sin and why we need to be redeemed.

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So amazing question. Thank you so much for the feedback here, guys. Looks positive overall.

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There was a comment here I wanted to address also. And very briefly, it just had to do with the use of the young man's word.

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When he said objective, right? He said, objectively, you cannot deny the influence of Christianity on the world.

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And in the video, I was talking about how an atheist can't really appeal to objective standards.

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But it's important to note, I believe someone pointed this out in the comments. I'm not seeing it here, but I did see it earlier that what he meant was you can't deny it.

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Even from an atheist perspective, I'm trying to be objective here and say, if you look around at this world, you really can't deny the effect of Christianity on really every area of life.

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And that's totally fair. Perhaps I went down a little bit different of a direction than how he meant his words.

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But what I love about that is it still feeds directly into the point of this episode, and that is this.

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Christianity undoubtedly has been good for the world. It's an inescapable concept.

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So it still ties into the purpose and the message that we're trying to get across with this first episode.

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And that's why I think it's great to have other insight from people that watch this to point out those things so that I can be sharpened in interacting with these things.

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But also, it ties in perfectly with the message of the question that we are seeking to provide a response for.

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So thank you guys so much again for providing this feedback for us here on The Populist.

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That's all for this week. If you wanna see more of these interactions, subscribe to All Access at apologiestudios .com

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where we'll post these full -length conversations. And again, we'd also like to hear your thoughts on any topic we cover.

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How would you have answered or responded to these things? How would you have thought through this on the spot and given a

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Christian response? Leave a comment below or send us an email at thepopulist at apologiestudios .com.