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 two things: Our dreams, and our skills and abilities.
If you’re one of the majority – one of those people who hasn’t quite yet cottoned on to the direction for your life, where it’s meant to be headed – then this is for you. Can you remember the dreams that you had for your life when you were young? Can you? There were some back there that were never going to fly. I mean, if you’re short and slightly dumpy, and you were dreaming of becoming a famous basketball-player, well, that was obviously never going to happen. But so often, there’s a dream in people’s hearts that’s been there for a very long time.
Here’s a conversation that I’ve had so many times with people about this whole question of destiny. We get to talking about the direction in which their life is heading, and the person says to me something like: ‘But you know, I’m sure there’s meant to be something else, something more, something that I don’t know, something I’m meant to be doing, but I don’t know what it is’. Does that sound vaguely familiar?
So I ask them then, "If you had no constraints, if money wasn’t an issue, if you could be anything or do anything that you wanted, what would that be?’ And the answer invariably comes back along these lines: ‘Oh, well! Anything I want? Well you know, I’ve always dreamed of" ... and then, they tell me the answer. They tell me about their destiny. It’s already there; it’s already been woven somehow by God into their DNA.
Now of course, there’s a risk that this is a short dumpy basketball-player kind of dream, and so then I follow up with my second question: ‘What are the things you’re really good at?’ Most people can tell you that, and what I’ve found is that there is almost always, in 90% of cases, a wonderful fit between their dream and their natural skills and gifting. You know something? We’ve just discovered their destiny. We’ve just discovered what they’re meant to be doing with their lives, and the tragedy (I mean, the absolute tragedy) is that deep down they probably already knew that. So what’s held them back? The constraints we put on our lives.
Remember my first question? ‘If you had no constraints, if money wasn’t an issue, if you could be anything or do anything that you wanted, what would that be?’ My question removes the constraints. Then all of a sudden, people can look at things the way they’re meant to be looking at them – through the eyes of freedom.
For twenty years, I was a high-priced IT consultant, but there came a time of dissatisfaction – a time when I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t fulfilling my destiny. Every few years, the opportunity emerged to do what I’m doing now – to produce these radio-programmes, and use one of the small handful of talents that I naturally have (which is to be a communicator), to bring hope and change and transformation into people’s lives through these radio-programmes, but that meant taking a risk.
It meant confounding people’s expectations of me. It meant leaving a big salary behind, and going and working in a small, at-the-time ailing, not-for-profit organisation. And those constraints and expectations and the money thing and the risk, all those things I have to tell you, were tough issues to navigate. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. It was (at the time) a huge leap of faith for me.
When I look back on it now, this is what I know ... it’s always like that when we have to make a decision as to whether or not we’re going to get out there and fulfil our destiny, because destiny requires courage. In fact, the two seem inextricably linked. When we step out on the destiny journey, there’s always a risk of failure, and yet there is nothing as fulfilling and energising as living out your destiny.
These last years doing what I’m doing now, there have been some real challenges, some really tough times, but I wouldn’t swap them for anything. And in pursuing this destiny, here’s what I know: The only person who can make it happen in our lives is Jesus Christ. Now some may scoff at that, and sure; there’s plenty of evidence of genius and achievement out there in the world. People are capable of doing amazing things, but here’s what I’m absolutely certain of:
Jesus the Son of God, when He laid His glory aside, when He became one of us, when He came into this world with a destiny, His destiny was twofold. It was to reveal God to us and secondly, it was to die on that cross and rise again to give you and me a free gift of eternal life. And without that Jesus who fulfilled His destiny for you and me, you and I may well be able to achieve some amazing things, but we will never achieve anything of eternal significance and value.
Because of my gift of communication, I guess I can hold people’s attention. I think I can make them laugh and even cry, but without Jesus, without His story, without His grace, I have nothing of eternal value to impart, ‘cos he’s the One that saves. He’s the One that transforms. He’s the One that gives new life, and my destiny lies in Him to be who He made me to be, and to do the things that He made me to do, so that His purposes will be achieved on this earth; and my friend, your destiny, your true destiny, lies in Jesus too.
He has plans and purposes for your life, and He came up with them even before you were born, and when we give our lives to Him completely, wholly, fully, without constraint, without limit, without reservation, then we discover that destiny, and let me tell you it is a perfect fit (your destiny) with who He made you to be. How do I know that? Psalm 139. Go read it – His Word, His truth, your destiny.
Ugly Duckling Syndrome The final obstacle to living out our destiny is this: We compare ourselves to other people. We all do that. We all look at these talented and gifted people around us, and we convince ourselves that we can never be as good as them; we can never do what they can do; we can never live out our dream, our destiny. You know what I call that? I call it ugly duckling syndrome.
Hans Christian Andersen’s powerful story The Ugly Duckling is a literary classic, not so much because of the way it was written (my hunch is that the piece probably loses some of its poetry and lilt, having been translated into English) – no, the power of The Ugly Duckling, the thing that’s made it a classic, is in the way that it resonates so deeply in our souls.
A swan’s egg, by some strange set of events, finds itself in a ducks’ nest in a farmyard, and so a swan is born into a family of ducks. No one really cares why or even realises that it’s happened; everyone just assumes that this little guy is meant to be a duck, and all of his little life people reject him for being an ugly duckling because he’s ugly! Everyone misunderstands him; everyone rejects him, and it hurts. He’s all alone, but amidst the bleakness and hopelessness of this world, there is one thing – just one – that makes his little spirit soar. Have a listen.
One evening, just as the sun set amid the radiant clouds, there came a large flock of beautiful birds out of the bushes. The duckling had never seen anything like them before. They were swans, and they were curved with their graceful necks, while their soft plumage shone in the dazzling whiteness. They let out a singular cry, as they spread their glorious wings, and flew from those cold regions to warmer countries across the sea. As they mounted higher and higher into the air, the ugly little duckling felt quite a strange sensation as he watched them.
He whirled himself in the water like a wheel; he stretched out his neck towards them, and uttered a cry so strange that it frightened him. Could he ever forget those beautiful, happy birds? Then when at last they were out of his sight, he dived under the water and rose again, almost beside himself with excitement. He knew not the names of these birds, nor where they’d flown, but he felt towards them as he had never felt for any other bird in the world. He wasn’t envious of these beautiful creatures, but wished to be as lovely as they. Poor, ugly little creature, how gladly he would have lived even with the ducks, had they only given him some encouragement.
At the moment, he didn’t yet know who he was. He just knew who he wanted to be, but because he didn’t know who he was, who God had made him to be, he simply didn’t have a license to go and be who he’d been made to be, and even when he finally encounters those birds again, he thinks he’s going to die. Surely, surely, that can be the only outcome.
‘I will fly with those royal birds,’ he exclaimed, ‘And they will kill me because I am so ugly! And to dare to approach them ... but it doesn’t matter. Better to be killed by them than to be pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed around by the maiden who feeds the paltry, or starved with hunger in the winter.’ And he flew to the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans. The moment they spied him, they rushed to meet him with outstretched wings. ‘Kill me!’ said the poor little bird. And he bent his head down to the surface of the water and awaited death, but then something happened that changed everything in an instant. What did he see in the clear stream below? His own image: No longer a dark grey bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a ducks’ nest in a farmyard is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.
It’s not until we really know who we are that we discover how inconsequential the distorted images the world’s misunderstanding reflects back to us, in fact, are. My friend, as I meet people around the world (and I’ve met so many; more and more as the years go by), I’m so deeply impressed by the amazing abilities – the talents, ideas, creativity, perspectives, motivations – that are buried inside each and every person, each person whom I’ve ever met. And that’s not just other people: It’s each one of us. It’s not just them: It’s you, because each (in our own unique different way) have the capacity, the capability, the potential to do the most amazing things – to be the most amazing people.
Please, please, don’t fall for that ugly duckling deception. You are such a person. You have a destiny, and it’s waiting for you to be lived. That’s precisely the thing that God wants you to know today, when you step out on your journey of destiny – your God-given destiny, for as the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10, you are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works which God prepared beforehand, so that you would walk into them.
See? God made you in a certain way, and He’s already prepared the way – the good works, and they’re waiting for you on the road ahead, and He’s created you as a piece of His workmanship, perfectly suited to the destiny that you’re called for. If you go back to Psalm 139:13-18, you discover that not only did God create us in our mother’s womb, not only did He lay down every strand of DNA and give you a hair-colour and your heart and your eye-colour and all those characteristics, but He also at the same time wrote down in His book every day, every experience, everything that would happen on your journey, and those two (that He made you, and what He made you to do) are an absolutely perfect fit.
It’s about discovering that we are indeed God’s workmanship, you and I. It’s about discovering who we are and what our purpose is, so that we can go and walk into the good works that God prepared beforehand for us to walk into, with a certainty and a quiet confidence, in the knowledge that we’re a perfect fit – that we’re the right one for the job, no matter how daunting that job may first appear.
Father God, we’ve heard Your good news. We know we’ve made so many mistakes. We’ve stepped out of Your plan. We went our own way, and each one of us (in our own way) knows it didn’t work out. And so, we want to come back and we want to discover the me that you always meant us to be. Father, thank You for Jesus. We just want to accept Him; I believe that He died for me, and that He rose again; I believe that I’m forgiven because of Him, and that I have eternal life because of Him, and Father right this day, lock, stock and barrel, with everything that I am, with every hope and every dream and everything I have, I want to step back into Your plan for me. I want to step back into my destiny. I give everything I am and everything I have to You, for You to do with as You please.
Father God, thank You that You do have a plan. Thank You that I can just come back because of Jesus, and thank You Father that in that plan, I’ll get to know You, and as I get to know You more and more and more, I’ll discover the person I was always meant to be. I’ll discover the destiny that You have for me. I’ll discover, in my heart and in my experience, that I am Your workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that You prepared beforehand, so that I could walk into them. Father, in the mighty name of Jesus, I want to thank You. I want to thank You for giving me this life. Amen.
