We each have a God-given destiny: A plan that God has for our lives, which fits perfectly with who He made us to be. The problem is that many people aren’t living out that destiny because there are some obstacles in their way, so let’s find out what they are and how to get around them, so that you can live out your destiny.   Putting First Things First Most people these days live hectic lives, just scraping through each day. Personally, my list of things to do is as long as my arm and then some. There are some personal things I have to do; things to do with writing and recording and producing this radio-programme; there’s an organisation to run; people to meet with; this project; that project; a new idea over here, another one over there; hundreds of e-mails each day ... Welcome to my world. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining and none of those things are terribly bad at all, but the point is that with so many more things to do than I can possibly fit into my day, or my week or even my year, my process for deciding what I do is absolutely critical. Chances are, the same is true for you. One of the big mistakes I used to make is that I’d sit down in the morning, which (given that I’m a morning person) is my most lucid and productive time, and just start answering e-mails. After a while, I realised I wasn’t getting anything else done because by putting my E-mails first, I was putting other people’s priorities first. I was in fact dancing to their tune instead of sorting out for myself what the most important things were on my agenda, and doing those things first. There’s a well-known principle or framework that you read in a lot of management books, that sets out the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important, and what you discover is that almost nothing that’s urgent is important, and almost nothing that’s important is urgent. And yet most of us react to urgent things, or at least the things that other people say are urgent, and so we spend most of our time doing urgent things, instead of the important things – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And before you know it, your life is kind of slipping away, doing a whole bunch of things, which, in the scheme of things, sure, they make you busy, but how important are they? Do you see my point here? How are you spending your life, and are the things you’re spending your time on important and worthwhile? I guess I’m asking those questions for you to ask them of yourself, and answer them. Come on! Be brutally honest. For instance, making sure I have some time with my beautiful wife Jacqui is important. Making sure I encourage her and give her a hug and a kiss, and spend some unhurried time with her in the morning over breakfast is really important, but it’s not urgent. It’s not as urgent say as the e-mail that comes in from a radio-station somewhere around the world that says they weren’t able to download tonight’s radio-programme from our FTP server. And yet what I used to do (because remember, mornings are my most productive time) is get up early and spend no time at all with Jacqui over breakfast, and just work furiously through that time, and by the time she comes home from work and I come home from work, we’re both tired and there you go. We haven’t spent any time together. Do you see how easily this stuff happens in people’s lives? The urgent trumps the important in so many people’s lives, and before you know it, your life is falling apart. Things are in a mess. Marriages are falling apart, all because we allow the urgent to crowd out the important. It’s scary, isn’t it? So what about you? What about your life? Are you letting the myriad of urgent things crowd out the important things like spending time with people, managing your finances properly, nurturing your children, developing relationships with your co-workers? See, all those things are incredibly important, and in many-a person’s life, they’re being cast aside simply because we’re too busy doing the urgent stuff. ‘I don’t have time to exercise!’ Well, if you don’t make time for exercise (which is important), let me tell you you’ll certainly be making time for sickness (which will be urgent), and actually, that’s how it works. Doing the important things generally over time reduces the number of urgent things that you need to do because if the important things go undone, that leads to crises and those crises increase the number of urgent things requiring an immediate response. I don’t know what your destiny is, but this is what I do know: It doesn’t lie in a myriad of things that other people tell you are urgent; it lies in the things that, in your heart of hearts, you know are important. If you or I went to God, this God who handcrafted us, who designed us in His heart – blueprinted our DNA, if we went to Him and said: ‘Lord, what’s the most important thing that I have to do with my life’, what do you think He’d answer? What would He put at the very top of our to-do list? Well, actually, we already know. A clever young lawyer once asked Him a very similar question. The lawyer sort of said (and this is my paraphrase): Well, Jesus, you and I both know that in the Law of Moses handed down over all those years, there are 613 commandments and prohibitions. That’s kind of a lot. I mean that’s a lot day-to-day to remember to do, so how would you sum up the Law? I mean, if I’m trying to prioritise these things in my life, which one of all those commandments is the most important one? You can read the exact words in Matthew 22 and Mark 12, and if I had to paraphrase Jesus’ reply in kind of here-and-now speak, it’d run something like this: Look, I know you have a lot of things to do. There are lots of rules: Do this, do that ... They’re all good things, but you can sum up the whole Law in just two commandments – to love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, all your mind and all your strength. That’s the most important one, and the second one is just like it: Love the people around you as much as you love yourself. That’s the whole Law in a nutshell. Do you know something? The most important thing that I do almost every day, the thing that I do before anything else, is that I spend an hour or so alone with Jesus praying; reading the Bible; asking Him questions, and that’s what sets the course for my whole day – day after day, month after month, year after year. Actually, it sets the course for my whole life. It is quite simply the single-most important thing that I do, and it’s through that time with Him that I’ve discovered my destiny.   A Lifelong Journey If I were to ask you, "What’s your destiny? What were you put on this earth to achieve – to do? What impact are you meant to have on this planet of over seven billion people? What’s the point of your life, and is it heading in the right direction", I wonder how you’d answer those questions. I ask those questions of people rather a lot, and I can tell you the number of people who have a clear sense of destiny and purpose and direction – well you know, it’s less than five per cent – maybe one in twenty; maybe. Now I’m not saying that we should each have our lives completely mapped out because things happen along the way. There are twists and turns in life that are totally unexpected. Little things can change the whole course of a life. We can’t map out our whole lives in the minutest detail and say. "Yep. That’s what I’m going to do, that’s where it’s going", and yet deep-down, we need to have some sense of a destiny. Another way of putting it would be to have a sense of direction for our lives. Where’s your life headed? And that destiny is invariably tied up with...

Released on 14 May 2021