The meaning of life

People often ask what life means in the middle of the night, after a loss, or when the days have started to feel empty. Christianity answers that human beings were made to know and love God and to love one another, and that this love is the meaning of life. You were made by love, for love. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, a Reformed teaching text that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) keeps in its Book of Confessions, opens with the question “What is the chief end of man?” and answers, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.” Genesis says that “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), and Christians have long read that verse to mean that every human being is made able to know God, to love, to reason, and to create.

What does the Westminster Catechism say is the purpose of life?

The Westminster Assembly, a council of English and Scottish church leaders, wrote the Shorter Catechism in 1647 to teach the Christian faith in short questions and answers. Its first answer joins two things that people often separate: glorifying God and enjoying God.

To glorify God means to honor God and to show God’s goodness in the way you live. Paul applied that to the most ordinary acts: “Whether therefore you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). To enjoy God means that the purpose of life includes delight. The psalmist prayed:

You will show me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy. In your right hand there are pleasures forever more.

Psalm 16:11

The catechism’s answer means that God made people for joy as well as for duty, and that the joy lasts “for ever.” Your life is meant to be a delight to God and to find its delight in God.

What did Augustine mean by the restless heart?

Augustine of Hippo, a North African bishop, wrote his Confessions around 400 CE as a long prayer to God about his own life. He opens the book with the line Christians have quoted ever since: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (Confessions 1.1.1).

Augustine had tried most of what his world offered. He pursued fame as a teacher of public speaking, a career in the imperial city of Milan, a long relationship with a woman he did not marry, and several philosophies, before he was baptized in 387. He concluded that each of those things was good and that none could satisfy a heart made for God. If you have felt that same restlessness, Augustine would say it is a sign of what you were made for. The Book of Ecclesiastes says something similar: God “has also set eternity in their hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

What did Jesus say is the purpose of life?

When a teacher of the law asked Jesus which commandment in the law was the greatest, Jesus named two:

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.

Matthew 22:37–40

The prophet Micah, more than seven hundred years earlier, had put the same answer in practical terms:

He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does the LORD require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8

Jesus also described his own purpose in terms of life: “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The love of God and neighbor is how that abundant life looks in practice. For more on the two commandments, see What is the greatest commandment?, and for Micah’s words, see What does Micah 6:8 mean?

What does Ecclesiastes say about the meaning of life?

The Book of Ecclesiastes asks the question more bluntly than any other book of the Bible. It opens: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The Hebrew word translated “vanity,” hevel, means “breath” or “vapor,” something real but brief that cannot be grasped. The author, who calls himself the Teacher, tried pleasure, great building projects, wealth, and wisdom, and found that “all was vanity and a chasing after wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:11). He knows that the wise and the foolish both die.

Ecclesiastes does not end in despair. The Teacher keeps coming back to the ordinary gifts of each day:

Go your way—eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works.

Ecclesiastes 9:7

The book closes, “Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Many scholars think an editor added those closing verses, but the whole book is Scripture. Its presence in the Bible shows that the hardest questions about meaning, asked openly and without a quick answer, belong inside the life of faith. If you are asking them now, you are in good company.

What does “the glory of God is a human being fully alive” mean?

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon in Gaul (modern France), wrote his work Against Heresies around 180 CE. In Book 4, he wrote, “For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Against Heresies 4.20.7). The popular form, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive,” is a paraphrase of the first half of that sentence.

Irenaeus meant that God is honored when human beings live, and that the fullest human life is the life that sees God. God’s glory and human flourishing do not compete. Psalm 8 says that God has crowned human beings “with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5).

The Greek-speaking church after Irenaeus carried his thought further. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote of Christ that “He was made man that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54), and the Second Letter of Peter promises that believers will “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Eastern Orthodox Christians call this goal theosis: a growing share in God’s own life and love, which begins in this life and has no end. On that view, the meaning of life is union with God, and every act of love is a step toward it. For more on that hope, see What is heaven like?

What if my life does not feel meaningful?

In Christian teaching, the meaning of your life is a gift before it is an achievement. It begins with God’s love for you, which comes first: “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Martin Luther taught that ordinary work, such as farming, cooking, or raising children, is a calling from God when it serves other people. A life spent loving a few people well is a meaningful life by the standard of the Gospel.

If the question of meaning comes to you in a season of despair, you are not alone, and you do not have to answer it by yourself. Talk to someone you trust, a priest or pastor, or a counselor. If you are thinking about ending your life, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com. For more on God’s love for you, see Does God love me?

Julian of Norwich, an English anchoress who lived in a small cell attached to a church in Norwich and received her visions in 1373, prayed for the one gift that holds every other. Her words, in older English, say that God is enough, and that anything less leaves us always wanting:

God, of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself: for Thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to Thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth,—but only in Thee I have all.

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5, ed. Grace Warrack (1901)