Planted for Purpose
Stop Missing God's Purpose and Start Living with Intent
Most people are not missing God's purpose because they stopped caring. They are missing it because they are too busy, too distracted, and too in the habit of making the same choices to notice the life they were actually built for. Purposeful living is not about having everything figured out. It is about choosing, right now, to stop counting your days and start making them count. That shift begins the moment you decide to take your time and your decisions seriously.
Are You Redeeming Time or Just Running Out of It?
There is a statistic that stops most people cold. A Christian counselor named H. Norman Wright calculated that if you are 35 years old and you subtract all the time you spend eating, sleeping, running errands, scrolling social media, and managing the background noise of daily life, you have roughly 500 days of truly purposeful time left. Five hundred days. And the average person spends 38 of those days every single year on social media alone.
That number is not meant to terrify you. It is meant to wake you up. Scott Williams (Dr. Scott Williams, senior pastor and chaplain who delivered this message at Impact Church on May 24, 2026) framed it as a sports problem: clock management. Redeeming time is not a passive hope that life will somehow get more meaningful. It is an active, daily decision about where your attention and energy actually go.
The apostle Paul made the same argument nearly two thousand years ago. Writing to the church in Ephesus, a city full of distraction, idol worship, and spiritual compromise that sounds uncomfortably familiar to anyone living in a major metro area today, Paul issued a challenge still sharp enough to sting: "Be careful then how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil" (Ephesians 5:15-17). Paul was not writing a self-help checklist. He was writing to people trying to follow Jesus in the middle of a world that was doing everything it could to pull them off course.
Redeeming time, in Paul's framework, means choosing wisdom over foolishness in the granular, everyday moments: who you spend it with, what you consume, what you pursue. The foolish person is not necessarily the one who believes nothing. Scripture defines the fool as someone who knows there is a God and chooses to ignore what God says anyway. That is a harder category to avoid than it first appears.
One practical step you can take today: spend five minutes writing down where your last 48 hours actually went. Not where you intended them to go. Where they actually went. The gap between those two lists is where redeeming time has to start.
What Does It Mean to Be Filled with the Spirit Instead of Full of Everything Else?
The second key Dr. Scott Williams named from Ephesians 5 is one that tends to get spiritualized into meaninglessness: being filled with the Spirit. But the way Paul frames it in verse 18 is actually a contrast, not a command in isolation. He writes: "Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit." The logic is about being under the influence of something. The question is not whether something will influence your choices. Something always will. The question is what.
When you are filled with the Spirit, it means there is an internal guidance system operating. Dr. Scott described it plainly: "Something told me." That quiet inner signal, that check before the bad decision, that nudge toward the right call; that is what being filled with the Spirit actually feels like from the inside. It is not theatrical. It is functional. It responds faster than your reasoning mind and catches what your emotions want to excuse.
The opposite of being filled with the Spirit is debauchery, which in biblical terms means unrestrained indulgence in the things that feel good right now but cost you everything later. That can be substances or it can be subtler: logging into things you know you should not, staying in relationships flagged as red flags by everyone who loves you, spending money you do not have on an identity you are performing. In the NFL, a coach throws a red flag to challenge a call that might have been wrong. Being filled with the Spirit gives you that same ability: to pause, challenge the moment, and send the decision up to a higher review before it becomes a costly turnover you cannot recover.
The direct application is not complicated. Whatever you are filled with is what you are full of. If you are consuming bitterness, anxiety, comparison, and noise, that is what comes out under pressure. Audit what you are actually filling yourself with this week, not what you say you are committed to but what your screen time, your conversations, and your patterns reveal.
Can Spiritual Wisdom Actually Change the Decisions You Regret Most?
Dr. Scott Williams made a distinction that is worth sitting with: wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing. We live in what he called the most knowledgeable era in human history. The rate of knowledge doubles every 12 hours. There is more information available to you right now than any human being who has ever lived on this planet could have accessed. And yet the decisions people regret most are rarely made from ignorance. They are made in full knowledge of better options that were passed over anyway.
Spiritual wisdom is applied knowledge. It is not about what you know theoretically. It is about whether you are willing to do anything with what you know. Dr. Scott illustrated this with a story from his years as a chaplain for the Kansas City Chiefs. Before a Super Bowl run, he watched Patrick Mahomes and other starters sitting in the front row of chapel, taking notes. He also watched a young backup named Deion Bush, freshly off the practice squad and barely on the active roster, sitting in that same room with the same focus. Deion Bush had not earned his spot yet. But he was preparing like he had one.
Months later, in the AFC Championship game, Bush intercepted a pass in the fourth quarter that sent the Chiefs to the Super Bowl. He later texted Dr. Scott: "I couldn't see how it was going to happen, but God made it happen." The psalmist puts it simply in Psalm 150:6: "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord." Bush's praise after that interception was not a performance. It was the overflow of someone who had been filled with the right things long before the moment arrived.
The question spiritual wisdom asks is not "what do I know?" It is "what am I actually doing with what I know?" If the worst seasons of your life line up with your seasons of foolishness, and they do for almost everyone, then the inverse is also worth testing: what could wisdom do? Take one step this week that requires you to apply something you already know but have been deferring. Not a big move. One decision. Wisdom compounds.
What Does Ephesians 5 Actually Say About Living a Life That Counts?
The text Dr. Scott Williams preached from on May 24, 2026 is one of the most practical passages in the New Testament for anyone asking whether their life is going anywhere worth going. Ephesians 5:15-17 reads: "Be careful then how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is." It is a three-part diagnostic: how are you living, what are you choosing, and do you understand what God actually wants for your life?
Dr. Scott organized the sermon around three keys to being planted for purpose. Each one maps directly back to this passage:
1. Be Wise
What it means: Choose discernment over foolishness in the daily, unglamorous moments where your actual character is being formed.
What it looks like: Stopping the unforced errors: the relationships everyone around you flagged, the financial decisions made to impress people who do not care, the patterns you keep repeating and blaming on everyone else.
2. Be Filled
What it means: Live under the influence of the Holy Spirit rather than under the influence of whatever the world is pouring into you.
What it looks like: Auditing your inputs honestly, throwing the challenge flag on choices that feel off, and letting that inner signal become a reflex you actually act on rather than a warning you override.
3. Be Grateful
What it means: Gratitude is not a spiritual formality. It is the evidence that you understand where your life actually comes from.
What it looks like: Praising God before the breakthrough, not only after it, the way Deion Bush praised God in his lowest season and again the moment his purpose broke open in front of the whole country.
Where Purpose Meets You in the Valley
There are people right now who feel the gap between the life they are living and the one they sense they were made for. That sense is not just restlessness. It is God's purpose pressing against the surface of your everyday, and it does not care how put-together your life looks from the outside or how long you have been drifting. If you are ready to stop running from that feeling and start moving toward something real, Impact Church exists as a community where that question gets taken seriously. With locations serving North Scottsdale and South Scottsdale, and a congregation that draws from across Maricopa County, including Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, and Paradise Valley, there is a place for you here. The door is genuinely open.
The Next Step Is Simpler Than You Think
God's purpose for your life is not hidden from you to frustrate you. It is revealed to you as you take the next step in front of you with wisdom, with a spirit that is filled rather than emptied, and with gratitude for the days you still have. Deion Bush could not see the whole path from the practice squad. He just kept preparing as though the moment was coming. That is what being planted for purpose looks like in real life: not a dramatic leap, but a daily decision to stop counting your opportunities and start making them count.
If something in today's message stirred a question or a need you have been carrying, take it somewhere real. Submit a prayer request here and find real people on the other side who will pray with you and for you.
When you are ready to take the next step and see what this community is about in person, plan your visit below and come find us any Sunday morning in Scottsdale.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Discovering God's purpose begins with the daily practice of living wisely rather than foolishly, as Paul describes in Ephesians 5:15-17. It is less about a dramatic revelation and more about consistently choosing to be filled with the Spirit rather than distracted by the noise of comparison and consumption. Purpose tends to surface for people who are already in motion, preparing faithfully for opportunities they cannot yet see.
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The first step is an honest audit of where your time is actually going, not where you intend it to go. Research cited in this sermon suggests the average person spends 38 full days per year on social media alone. Identifying the gap between your values and your actual patterns is where the decision to change becomes concrete. Small, consistent shifts in daily habits compound into a life that reflects what you actually care about.
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Being filled with the Holy Spirit is less about a single spiritual experience and more about an ongoing, daily orientation. Paul contrasts being drunk on wine with being filled with the Spirit in Ephesians 5:18 to make the point that both are states of influence. Practically, being filled means auditing what you consume, who you spend your time with, and whether you are responding to the internal signals God places in you rather than overriding them.
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Knowledge is information; wisdom is applied knowledge. The book of Ephesians draws a sharp line between the person who knows what God says and chooses to live accordingly and the person who knows and does nothing with it. In practical terms, almost no one regrets a decision because they lacked information. The regret almost always comes from knowing better and not acting on it.
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Paul was writing to Christians living in Ephesus, a city marked by paganism, distraction, and spiritual compromise that fits many modern cities just as well. When he says "the days are evil," he is acknowledging that the environment you live in works against purposeful, wise living by default. The urgency in that phrase is an invitation to be intentional rather than passive, to actively redeem your time rather than let it be absorbed by a culture that has no interest in your purpose.
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