Every first week of the year, our church community takes the time and effort to put together a national corporate time of prayer and fasting where we are all encouraged to write down faith goals and start praying for them. I've done this for more than five years now and it's always come out helpful.
Setting goals is at many times crucial to seeing God's best come to pass in our life. Habakuk 2:2 encourages us to make our vision plain and to write it on tablets. Goals are necessary to empowered living and the way that we set them marks how far we will go for God.
But goal-setting doesn't always come naturally. It takes a conscious effort and many times we can miss out on that effort. I came across a scripture in the Bible that radically changed the way I went about goal setting and I have since become much better at setting and meeting goals. That scripture is in Proverbs 19:21:
"Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand."
This verse changed my perspective and attitude towards goal setting because I realized that even God sets goals. Jesus had a goal when He came down as man: to save all mankind from sin and to establish a spiritual community that would carry the good news of His salvation.
Here are three revelations that comes out of Proverbs 19:21 that can radically change the way you set goals today:
It's okay when things don't go your way. "Many are the plans in the mind of a man." We all have plans and goals - to get fit, get rich or get married will probably sound familiar! But not all of them happen at the time we want them to and the way we want them to. But in all this we can be assured that even when things don't go our way, they will go God's way.
God's will is always good, pleasing and perfect. It's scary to go according to the plan of another person if we don't know that person's intent. But we know that God's goal is only to give us a hope and a future. He is for our welfare just as much as He seeks to carry out His agenda. God's will is always "good, pleasing and perfect" as Romans 12:2 tells us.
God makes all things work together. Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." God's goals will always prevail even when things look like they're going a different way. God's ways always work out - and always for our good.
