Where Are You Headed In Life? Part 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. Headed into a new week and I’ve got a great topic for us to talk about this week, and that is the question, where are you headed in life?

Kind of a big topic, isn’t it? But one of the most important things to answer in our lives because it guides every single thing we do in life. How we relate to people, where we take our conversations, how we respond to circumstances and opportunities, which choice we make when offered different paths, where are you headed in life?

Each day this week I want to ask a very significant question that will help you shape where your life is headed. Here’s my question for today.

What is your preferred future? And what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it?

What is your preferred future and what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it, and I encourage you, if you get a chance some time today, just jot that question down now before you forget it and take some time and actually write out a little paragraph. What is my preferred future and what am I willing to sacrifice to achieve it?

You know, when you read in the Bible about people in the Bible, they had a clearly defined preferred future that they were heading for, and it guided their whole lives. You think of the apostle Paul. When he comes towards the end of his life, he’s headed to Jerusalem, he knows bad things are gonna happen to him there, and he talks to some of his friends along the way in one of the churches that he’s started, and here’s what he says to them.

Acts chapter 20 verse 17 in the Bible.

From Mileus Paul sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him. When they came to him, he said to them, You know how I lived among you the whole time, from the first day I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews.

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You can see what he’s willing to sacrifice to achieve his pursued future, right?

He goes on how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now behold, I am going to Jerusalem constrained by the Spirit of God.

Not knowing what will happen to me there except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.

And listen to what he says, but I do not account my life of any value, nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again.

Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.

Well, Paul has a clearly defined preferred future in his mind, doesn’t he? A sense of what his life is for, where he’s headed, and whatever he has to sacrifice in order to achieve that preferred future, he is willing to sacrifice even his own life.

So what about you? What is your preferred future?

What is it that you are aiming for? What is it that you want to see happen in your life? Where do you want to be in the future as you think towards late in your life? Where do you want to be? What do you want your life to be like? What would you like written on your tombstone when you die? Here’s what this person achieved. Well, what are you willing to do to get there?

It’s an important question. We often just float through life saying, Well, I wonder what’s going to turn out, waiting for life to happen to us. That’s not the way to live. The way to live is to decide where you want to be and then do what it takes to get there.

I’m John North.

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