The purpose of this website is to present some basic, but crucial, truths of the Christian life both to believers and to the unsaved.

These truths are of two categories: the side of our personal experience of salvation in and through Christ, and the side of the church.

As for the former, for over a hundred years Bible teachers have been using the “three circles” diagrams to illustrate God’s plan of salvation as revealed in the Bible. To our knowledge, this method was first used by a sister, Mary E. McDonough, in her watershed book, God’s Plan of Redemption. It first appeared in serial format in Jesse Penn-Lewis’ magazine, The Overcomer, and shortly thereafter, around 1920, was published in book format for the first time. Since then, a number of others have developed the teaching and the presentation of salvation along this line.

I have personally been drawn to the three-circles presentation of the gospel for a number of years. Not only does it provide a very simple, clear, and direct way of presenting the gospel to unbelievers; it also provides Christians with a basic roadmap for understanding what salvation really is. Not many believers today understand that the ultimate goal of our salvation is not “going to heaven,” but for us to be “conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom. 8:29).

As for the church, most of the light concerning this has been brought forth first by the Plymouth Brethren with John Nelson Darby in the 19th century, and then by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee in the 20th. Thus, we now have a much clearer understanding that God’s purpose is to have the church as His Body to be His expression in eternity, and that He desires for this one unique Body to be expressed even today in many localities on the earth (cf. John 17). The Brethren, and the churches raised up through Witness Lee, have for the most part forsaken their testimony to these truths, but the truths themselves are, nonetheless, timeless.

As for me, I was saved in 1983 and have been serving the Lord on a full-time basis since 1997. I currently meet with the church of the Chicagoans, on the northwest side of the city of Chicago. I developed the presentation of the three-circles diagrams we have on this website with the help of some other brothers here in Chicago, which I very much appreciated, but I’m solely responsible for its content.

In addition to this website I also have TheChristianFaith.org. Whereas GodsEternalPurpose.org is especially for outreach, that site is intended for believers.

Also, if you would like to read my personal testimony of how I came to the Lord, “My Faith, then His,” you’ll find it on that site.

I do pray the Lord will bless this website and the materials it presents, for His sake and for the sake of His children, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

In Christ,

David Canfield
Chicago, Illinois
January, 2019
Revised March 27, 2020