A wise teacher answered a question posed by his student about the future by saying, “Always in motion is the future.”
A mother taught her son that “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Scripture warns us in James 4:13-14, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
And Scripture also tells us in Proverbs 13:22, “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”
What are we to do?
I think we should follow James 4:15, “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”
So how do we do that?
Where Will You Be In 5 Years?
Given that we are unable to predict the future, we can imagine what we want and where we want to be in 5 years’ time.
Jim Rohn stated the following:
I promise you 5 years from now you really don’t want to arrive at an undesigned destination because you may very well wind up wearing what you don’t want to wear, driving what you don’t want to drive, living where you don’t want to live, maybe doing what you don’t want to do, simply because you didn’t design a better destination.
We need to “design a better destination.”
We can do that today.
We need to seek out the good works Paul describes in Ephesians 2:10, where he states, “For we are His [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk.”
How do we find out what we are to do? We pray and we do what Stu McLaren advises, “You’ve always got to be willing to experiment.”
Pray for God’s guidance and experiment by trying something.
Continue to listen for God’s calling on the next step and the next.
Will You Design Your Destination?
Unless Jesus returns, in 5 years we will be 5 years older and living a life that was designed or was “allowed” to happen.
What do you want to have happened in your life between today and 5 years from now?
As Dan Miller says, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
Before we put that into practice, we ought to listen to what Jesus said in Luke 14:28, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?”
We need to “count the cost.”
We need to create our ideal life on paper before we try to do it in real life.
Will You Build The Life You Want?
If we want what God wants, He will provide it.
One of the best things we can do in this life is serve others.
When we serve others, we do what is best for them.
When we serve others through our work, we received what Rabbi Daniel Lapin calls “certificates of appreciation,” AKA, money.
As Stu McLaren says, “The more money you make, the more impact you can have.”
The more we are able to serve, provide value, the more money we will receive. The more money we receive, the more impact we can have in life. The more impact we have in life means that we can help serve more people.
This cycle continues on and on.
That’s was Stu McLaren meant when he said, “Build a business that gives you the freedom and space for the people and things you care most about.”
Fear Not!
When angels (aka messengers) from God appeared to people, their first words were a variation of, “Fear not!”
Why? Because most people freaked out when an angel arrived. They are not to be trifled with.
We are still visited by messengers today. They are usually not the angelic kind, but they are the messages that we receive “just when we needed it.”
If you are like me, you need to hear the following message from Brian Tracy. He said, “Self-doubt does more to sabotage individual potential than all external limitations put together.”
We are all called to serve.
As believers in the Lord Jesus, we need to serve people first and foremost by sharing the Gospel with them. Additionally, we need should live out Matthew 7:12 where Jesus tells us, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
I know I would like to be served and offered things (products/services) that would make my life better. So I will offer people the result they want because, as Stu McLaren says, “People aren’t buying stuff, what they’re buying is a result.”
Do not fear failing at something. As Henry Ford said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
