Destiny

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.  Psalm 139:14-16

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10

These two familiar passages affirm a very important principle in the life of every believer.  God had a direct hand in making each of us with a design that reflects an ordained purpose for each of our lives.  According to the psalmist, God wrote, in a book in heaven, all the plans that he made for our lives before one of those days came to pass.  The “good works” mentioned in Ephesians are the works ordained for each of us to accomplish.  In summary, he equipped each of us to fulfill our destiny with just the right  natural abilities, temperament, and spiritual gifts.  Even though this is a well-documented biblical truth, it seems that many believers have difficulty discerning what their destiny might be.  Let me suggest two reasons.

Each of us has been designed for greatness in the kingdom of heaven.  However, we must remember that God’s view of greatness is not the same as the world’s view.  The world’s view of greatness is measured in fame, possessions, power, the number of people who serve you and fawn over you, an extensive Facebook platform, and the number of celebrities with whom you keep company.  If we take those standards as indicators of our destiny because they appeal to us, we may chase something that causes us to miss God’s purposes all together.

In fact, by those standards, Jesus was a colossal failure while he walked on this earth.  He had no bank accounts.  He had no palace or even a home to call his own.  Most people did not know who he was or what he looked like.  We still don’t know what he looked like. He served others rather than being served and shunned celebrities as well as celebrity status.  In the only popularity contest in which he participated, his own people chose a murderer named Barabbas over Jesus.  Any yet, by heaven’s standards, he was the greatest who ever lived or ever will live.

God’s desire is that we find and fulfill our destiny. I think many of us miss it because we are measuring opportunities to advance by the world’s standards rather than heaven’s.  We choose the career path with the highest earning potential instead of the highest serving potential. We pick a path that we anticipate will impress or please people we know rather than impressing our heavenly father.  We often seek the spotlight on earth while Jesus tells us to do many things in secret, seen only by God.  Jesus even warns us of missing a reward in heaven because we have already gotten our reward on earth.  As we seek our destiny, we need to measure it by heavenly values, not the values of the world.  We need to teach our children that same principle.

As much as God wants us to fulfill the destiny he has written for us, Satan wants to prevent us from fulfilling it.  First of all, he will misdirect us in our choices and, perhaps. highlight the motives for career choices that the world offers so that we end up not pursing those things that would have actually given us the most fruitful and most fulfilling life.  

If Satan hasn’t been able to set us on the wrong path, then he will simply oppose those things we are trying to accomplish in order to convince us that we are on the wrong track after all.  In his book, Unlocking Destinies from the Courts of Heaven, Robert Henderson says that Satan feverishly hunts for curses that can be activated in our lives so that he can use them to oppose our destinies.  Curses give him a legal right to hinder, oppress, or torment people and he does so to hinder our progress and effectiveness in the kingdom.  That means we must be aware of areas in which we are not flourishing and scan our lives to see if something in our own life or family line is giving the enemy a legal right to oppose us month after month and year after year.  When we find it, we must remove it so that we can begin to fulfill our written destinies as God intends. 

What is critical is that we do not ignore the reality that God has chosen a destiny for us and part of our reward in heaven will depend on how much of that we pursued and accomplished in this life.  Too many believers choose career paths, relationships, and priorities without any thought as to whether or not they fit into God’s plan for our lives or we abandon his plan altogether as soon as resistance comes our way.  As a result, our lives do not live up to our expectations for joy and fulfillment.  

If we could add a beatitude to the Sermon on the Mount, we might say, “Blessed is the man or woman who finds themselves in the very center of God’s will for their lives, because it is there that we find the true joy and abundance that Jesus promised.”  On many occasions, I have visited with men in their fifties who feel unfulfilled as carry a vague sense of failure.  They have provided for their families, but for years have labored in a career that was not fulfilling or exhilarating and they feel as though something significant has been missing from their lives for years.  They don’t want to end their lives feeling as if they missed something incredibly significant that others somehow found.  This is the stuff of mid-life crisis and the stuff of middle-aged affairs.  It is often because they tried to fit into a role for which God did not make them. The very things in which they invested most of the hours of their lives seem to have no eternal significance.  They discover that what they gave a great chunk of their lives to may not matter at all 5 seconds after they die. That is the price of missing God’s destiny for our lives. 

I’m not saying that all of us have to be preachers or missionaries or worship leaders or Christian writers.  God has made us to fit into every nook and cranny of society so that we can be a redeeming force in that slice of our culture.  He has called us to be teachers, truck drivers, policemen, store owners, nurses, bakers, artists, technicians, soldiers, etc.  When we are following our destiny, what we do makes sense to us.  It almost comes naturally.  We find it fulfilling because we sense a purpose in it greater than the check we get at the end of the month.  We see ways to bear spiritual fruit in our career setting and ways to influence people for Jesus.  If we ask ourselves if we want to do other things, we simply know we are already doing what God has designed us to do.  It is a very blessed place to be, even if the material rewards aren’t all we would like them to be  The emotional and spiritual payoff makes up for the big house and the new pickup that will have to wait another couple of years.

If you haven’t thought this way about the path of your life or if you started out seeking your calling in Christ, but got detoured, I hope you will return to that quest.  Hopefully, our New Year’s resolutions will help us pursue God’s purposes for our lives and reflect the priorities of heaven rather than earth. I believe finding our calling or destiny and stepping into it is the key to the abundant life Jesus has promised.