Facing Your Future
God’s Game Plan for Your Life
8/27/03
I. Introduction
There was a frog that absolutely knew his destiny was to turn in to a handsome young prince. But for confirmation, he decided to visit a fortuneteller. The fortuneteller brought the frog in and gazed into her crystal ball. She said, “Oh, I see something. You are going to meet a beautiful young woman.”
The frog gets very antsy, “Yes, I knew it. I’m going to become a prince.”
The fortuneteller continues, “From the moment she sets eyes on you she will have an insatiable desire to know all about you. She will be compelled to get close to you--you’ll fascinate her."
The frog is very excited. He asks, “Where am I? At a singles club?”
The fortuneteller answers, “No, Biology class.”
Before you go off to a fortuneteller to decide your destiny, you might want to check out what God has to say. Tonight’s message is “Facing Your Future: God’s Game Plan for Your Life.”
By the end of the night, you’ll know that God indeed does have a plan for your life. You’ll learn how to find that plan and how to follow that plan.
First things first, God has a plan.
II. The Man with the Plan
Jeremiah 29:11 “11‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
Jeremiah 29:11 (MSG) “11I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out--plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.”
God has HUGE plans for your life. This Scripture is taken from a letter to the exiles in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzer had sent a group of Israelites from Jerusalem to be held captive in Babylon. These are God’s people that were prisoners of war, but Jeremiah prophesied to them that God had a plan, a better plan than being prisoners. You may not be in a place of prosperity now and you may think God has NO plans for you, but He does. And it’s not just any old plan, it’s a plan to give you a good and prosperous future.
No matter where you’re at in life. No matter what stage you’re in. You may be getting ready to graduate high school, you may have just started high school. You could be in middle school. And you may think, “I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I don’t need to know what I’m going to be doing in the future.” You may think you don’t need to know yet, and that’s your choice, but the cold, hard truth is that God has a plan, and with knowing more about God’s plan, you’ll be able to make quality decisions that will get you to where you need to be.
And the first step is wanting to know more about God’s plan. It’s not enough just to know that He knows and He has a plan. You have to know what that plan is. So, how do we know His plan?
III. Finding the Plan
Let’s look deeper into that passage and see what happens.
Jeremiah 29:12-14 “Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive.”
Jeremiah 29:12-14 (MSG) “12"When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.13"When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.
"Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, 14I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed. "I’ll turn things around for you. I’ll bring you back from all the countries into which I drove you"--GOD’s Decree--"bring you home to the place from which I sent you off into exile. You can count on it.”
Knowing God’s plan begins with knowing the Man with the Plan. To find his plan, pray that He would reveal his plans and purposes for your life.
1 Corinthians 2:9-12 “9That’s why we have this Scripture text: No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, Never so much as imagined anything quite like it-- What God has arranged for those who love him.
10But you’ve seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you. The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God planned all along.”
Keep standing on the promises already made in His word, and he will show you His plan when you earnestly seek Him. Just like He showed the Israelites, and just like He said the Spirit brings out what God planned.
But here’s another key, it’s not just praying and waiting. One thing you can do is discover what you’re good at; discover your talents and gifts.
God’s plan for you is going to make use of the talents and gifts that He’s given you. So, another step to take to find out His plan for your future is to find out the gifts that He’s put on the inside of you.
IV. Finding the Gifts
Proverbs 18:26 “A man’s gift makes room for him, and brings him before great men.”
Your discovery and use of your gifts and talents will bring you the success your heart desires. Here are 4 surefire ways to discover your talents from Blaine Bartel’s Every Teenager’s Little Black Book of Hard to Find Information:
1. Ask those you know and trust what they see as your greatest talents.
2. Pray and ask God to reveal your gifts and talents to you. Jeremiah 33:3 promises that if we call on God, He’ll show us hidden things which we don’t know about.
3. Follow your heart’s desires, and try new things. The results may surprise you.
4. Be faithful in little things you’re asked to do, even if they aren’t on your list of favorites. God tells us that if we’re faithful in small things, we will be rulers over much. (Matt. 25:23.)
So, find out what you’re good at. It may be that you’re really good at organization, or that you’re very creative. You could be very athletic. You may have a gift for performing as in theater or music. There are a number of things that you could be good at, and God’s plan is going to use those gifts and talents.
You know, God created you for a purpose and it’s important that you find out what that purpose is. People spend their whole life searching for “What’s the meaning of life?” or “Why am I here?” but you have an edge because the Creator of the Universe created you with a specific purpose in mind.
Psalm 139:13-16 “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 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.”
He mapped out and planned out every day of your life before you were even born. Does that mean that we’re spiritual robots and that God has this huge cosmic remote control and He is making us step forward or this way or that way? No. God has a plan. A course for your life. A roadmap to get you to the place that He wants you. But just like a roadmap, you can get lost, you can choose another route, you can try to take shortcuts, or you can just try to find your way without asking for directions. See, God has a course, and you have a choice. You either follow it, or you don’t.
You have to make a conscious decision that you’re going to follow God’s plan for your life, and that’s what you need to do. You need to decide that you’ll follow Him no matter what happens. No matter what kind of trouble or storm comes, you’ll stick to the plan.
V. Stick to the Plan
Psalm 119:5 “5Oh, that my steps might be steady, keeping to the course you set;”
David is praying that he’ll follow God’s plan for his life, and you can do that, too. Say that, “Oh that my steps might be steady, keeping to the course that you set!”
We’re talking about walking by faith here. You have to trust that God knows what He’s doing. Listen to His voice.
Psalm 37: 23 “23The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, and He delights in his way.”
Seek after the next step. Follow hard after God.
A family was awakened by their smoke detector in the middle of the night to discover that their house was on fire. The father ran into the upstairs bedroom of his children and carried his eighteen-month-old baby in his arms while dragging his four-year-old son by the hand.
They were halfway down the stairs when the little boy remembered that he had left his teddy bear in the bedroom, so he broke free from his father’s hand and ran back to the bedroom to retrieve it. In all the confusion, the father didn’t notice that his son wasn’t with him until he got outside. By now the flames and smoke trapped the little boy in his second-story bedroom. Smoke swirled around him and he coughed and cried out from the upstairs window, “Daddy, Daddy! Help me!”
His father yelled from below, “Jump out of the window, Andy! I’ll catch you!”
In the darkness and smoke, the little boy yelled back, “But Daddy! I can’t see you!”
Daddy shouted back, “That’s okay, son. I can see you! Jump!”
There is a true saying that goes, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know who holds the future.” Don’t worry about the future. Don’t be afraid of what you can’t see. It may seem dark and smoky right now. None of us can see exactly what lies ahead, but God tells us to trust him and “jump!”
Trust Him and take two steps. You see, because with one step, you haven’t moved anywhere. But take two, and you’ve gone forward.
What does the future hold? You may have a general idea of what you want to be when you grow up, but when you trust God and follow in His footsteps, He’ll lead you to a place that’s better than anywhere you’ve ever been. Believe that!
