A New Season #3 – Your Future

Where do you live most of your life? In the past, the present, or the future?

A senior adult might think most about the past. They remember the good old days. When they look at their personal future, they see how short it is. They don’t want to think about that.

A young person might think most about the future. “After I graduate. After I get a job. After I get married. After I have children.” Their thinking in the present is often idealistic.

A person of any age might forget that things said or done in the present, and left undealt with in their past, can affect their future.

Good and bad things can affect our ultimate future. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). We cannot ignore the future.

Other times we worry about the future. We think about the future with great anxiety and apprehension. In one short passage, however, Jesus tells us three times, “Do not worry” (Matthew 6:25, 31, 34).

Worry doesn’t help us meet tomorrow, and worry cheats us out of today.

A great way for approaching the future is anticipating the future with hope.

As we peer into the future, we have no idea what will happen personally, locally, nationally, or globally. Our world today is not a friendly place. Yet this is no time for withdrawal or retreat.

Thousands of movements, organizations, businesses, and churches have started because someone had a vision for the future. “I have a dream,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed it.

God wants to give us an unfolding picture of what could be, what should be, and what can be.

God wants us to dream it, plan it, pursue it, and as he enables us, achieve it. We attempt great things for God, and we expect great things from God.

Let us deal with our past, surrender ourselves to God in the present, and follow Christ boldly into the future. Knowing “there is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off” (Proverbs 23:18).

~ Pastor Dave