If the truth be known – we all want to live life to the full. Tucked away somewhere deep inside is this tiny thing called our sense of destiny. A nagging suspicion that there’s a plan – something to fulfill.
And yet so many will waste a lifetime, never realizing that elusive "something" that you and I call our destiny.
And believe you me – I’m an expert. For the first 36 years of my life I chased that little thing so hard. A high flying IT career. My own company. Jetting around the globe. An expensive car. A big house.
I looked everywhere... but somehow, it always eluded me. It drove me to the brink.
And then, I read what Jesus had to say about "living life to the full:"
The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it to the full (John 10:10, NIV).
Some time later, I discovered that a good translation for the Greek word that sits aback of our English “to the full” would be “super-abundantly." Full to overflowing.
Can you imagine?
Before time began, He conceived us – you and me – in His great and mighty heart. Amidst all His plans for the vastness of the universe, the trillions of stars, He treasured a unique DNA blueprint with your name on it… and one for me too! And to that little blueprint, he added a plan.
Don’t believe me? Listen to King David’s wonder as he ponders that very thing:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb….
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.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
(Psalm 139:13-17, NIV)
How precious and how vast indeed. That’s why we have that nagging sense of destiny in our hearts. Because He put it there. A hunger, a desire to walk in His wondrous plan.
Now, maybe you’re thinking, "Great theory Berni! But you don't know my life. The pressures, the conflict… no I just can’t wear that!" And if you were thinking that, you wouldn’t be alone.
When the Lord sent an angel to call Gideon to free Israel from the oppression of the Midianites, how did this great man of faith respond?
If the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about … But now the LORD has abandoned us (Judges 6:13, NIV).
We, like Israel before us, let the thief plunder our lives and then when the Lord reaches out to us – we look up from the dung heap and ask "Why?"
But then none of that is any surprise to Dad.
So on that starry night so long ago, just as He’d always planned, He sent His Son into that drafty, uncomfortable stable amidst the stench of animal excrement. Not some romantic manger, but a brutal, dangerous place. A place to be misunderstood. A place to be rejected, beaten and crucified.
Why? That we may have life and have it to the full!
What a plan. What a price to pay. What a waste, to let it slip by.
We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that God prepared beforehand for us to walk in (Eph 2:10).
To be the person He made us to be. To walk in the plan He wrote for us before time began.
Just over the next rise, just around the next corner lie those good works that He always planned for us to walk in. That destiny that’s been burning in our hearts. Not of fame or success or wealth.
A destiny that passes through the Cross. Each and every day. The place where we discover His "super-abundance." Where we taste the piercing sweetness of the love of Christ with our lives.
Jesus.
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Original publication date: July 7, 2009