In Tune With God?

Have you ever wondered what is God’s plan for your life? How can you have a successful life? We all go from birth until death, and then what? How will you measure success as your spirit leaves your body and enters eternity? Life is a progression from conception to eternity. Finally, what endures is what is of real value. What about your life will endure?

As we begin our lives, we focus on our immediate needs, to find ways to receive gratification for what we want. An infant seeking its mother’s breast may stand for this stage in our development. We are supposed to grow up from this stage.

As we grow up, we become concerned with our self-image. How do we look to other people? Clothes and physical appearance are important in this stage. Who are we trying to impress? Mostly our inner sense of what is valuable, what makes us look good. Being a teenager fits this stage of progress. We are supposed to grow out of this also.

Then we come to a stage in our lives where we begin to plan for our future. Education and skills training become important to us, because we want to have good employment to be able to provide for our wants and needs. We want to have a good life, and money seems intricately connected with our prospect for success. We focus our ambitions on ways to earn money, and to have successful employment opportunities. We are now young adults. We still need more to make our lives successful. We must do something useful with our lives.

And most of us want a family. We want to share our being with someone who will make us more complete. Becoming a member of God’s family will fill this void, if we truly seek Him. But we may also want our own family, and finding a suitable helper for life’s journey may be a key to future peace and happiness. We are now responsible members of society, seeking what is of real value.

Once secure in family and employment, what becomes our focus? Maybe planning for our future, what we will do after retirement. Making wise plans for our future is important. We have reached middle age.

But how can we make truly wise plans for our future? Jesus’ parable about the unjust steward gives us insight into what is truly wise planning. The crooked business manager had been wasting his master’s resources, and his boss had decided to fire him. The manager was concerned about how he would live in the future, so he called in those who owed his master, and reduced their debt, so that they would provide for him after he was fired. His master learned what had happened, and "The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” -------

"No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money." (Luke 16:1-13, NIV)

When our physical lives and means are failing us, what will give us consolation? We will die, and what then? As our spirit leaves our body and journeys into eternity, what waits for us? We are approaching death.

God’s plan for us is eternal life in Jesus. “And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col 1:10-14, NIV)

What do you have to look forward to, in the end?