Where Are You Headed In Life? Part 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good Thursday morning to you, and I hope your week’s going well.

All this week we’re dealing with a very significant topic. We’re asking the question, where are you headed in life? Maybe as you look at your life, you think, I really don’t like where I’m headed. My life is a bit of a mess and it doesn’t seem to be getting better.

Well, let’s talk about it a little bit. We’ve been asking a significant question each day that helps us shape the answer to where we’re headed in life.

On Monday we asked what is your preferred future and what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it?

On Tuesday we asked what is God’s preferred future for you and have you embraced it?

Yesterday we asked the question, what or who do you love the most and how can you put God in that place?

And today I want to ask this question, how do you want to influence others? What kind of person do you want to develop and how will you accomplish that?

Now, if you’re a parent, you already think about this from time to time, right? I’ve got kids. God has put them in my life, and I’ve been entrusted with these little lives, and I’m helping to shape them. What kind of person do I want to shape them into? How can I do that? And of course that’s not an easy question to answer, is it, as a parent.

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Your kids have their own minds and wills, and you can’t force them, and sometimes you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels, but this question is so important to ask. And when you ask the previous questions we’ve talked about this week, and you say, OK, I don’t want my preferred future to just be about myself, I don’t want to have an inward-focused life. I recognise that God’s plan for me is to have an outward-focused life.

That as he works in my life and restores and rebuilds my life to what it needs to be, he wants to work through me in the lives of every person he’s put around me, people who already know him, people who don’t know him yet, people whose lives are together, people whose lives are falling apart. He wants me to be an outward focused person reaching out to the people around me, helping them shape their lives the way it needs to be, maybe asking them the same questions as we’re talking through this week.

Well how will you accomplish that? What kind of person do you want to develop?

As you look in the Bible, what kind of person was Jesus trying to develop? And he started with people wherever they were, didn’t he? He didn’t judge them for not already being what he wanted them to be. He started with them where they were and helped them take a step towards God, a step towards where God wanted them to be. Well, that’s what your life can be like too.

How are you going to accomplish that? Well, there’s several basic things that we can learn from the life of Jesus. One is that you need to become what you want to multiply.

What you want to develop in other people, you need to be developing it in yourself. And you know, when you get this outward focus in life, it helps you become much more focused. It helps you move forward in life because you think, well, how can I help that other person develop in this way if I’m not dealing with these issues myself.

And so you move forward as you get focused on helping other people move forward as well. The second thing is, it has to be intentional. It’s not just going to happen because there’s someone in your life and you know the kind of person you want to help them become.

That doesn’t automatically make it happen, right? You have to set aside time, you have to have intentional conversations with people, you have to carve out time to spend in them.

You have to invest time in that person’s life, and this is how you need to think about it, not, oh, I don’t have time, it’s going to cost me so much time to make a difference in someone’s life. It’s not a cost, it’s an investment, right? You’re investing time in that person to shape them into the kind of person God wants them to be. When the Bible describes Jesus’ relationship with the people in his life, this is what it says.

Mark chapter 3:13. Jesus went up on the mountain and called to Him those whom he desired, and they came to Him, and He appointed 12 whom He also named apostles, Listen, so that they might be with Him.

And that he might send them out.

He had a plan for the kind of person he wanted to develop, and he was going to invest in their lives to help them become that kind of person.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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