The Plan for Your Life (Part 2 of 3)
November 4, 2020
In Part 1, I talked about God’s general plans for everyone’s lives – long life, family and friends, prosperity, etc. In today’s post, I am talking about God’s training ground, which are the little individual special tasks, steps, or assignments He gives to those who are obedient to the general plans we covered earlier. If you know what the Bible says and what God’s general expectations are, it will be easier to discern when He is giving you a special task, and you can step out more confidently. Special assignments are His training program to build your faith and trust in Him. If you are diligent at completing the special assignments, you will be ready to take on the overall purpose He has for your life.
The Bible is chock full of special assignments. One of my favorites is the story of Philip in Acts 8:
26 Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is desert. 27 So he arose and went. And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, and had come to Jerusalem to worship, 28 was returning. And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet. 29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.” (NKJV)
Note that when Philip took the first step, which was to go south on the road to Gaza, he was given the second instruction, which was to overtake the chariot. Once he caught up to the chariot, he knew what to do next without being told. The story goes that he baptized the Ethiopian, and the gospel spread in that part of the continent because of Philip’s obedience to the first step.
The special assignments in my life are pretty small. Some of them are for my personal benefit and some of them are for the benefit of someone else. Some of them I don’t know the outcome, but I trust God with that. We are the body of Christ, His hands and feet. He needs us to carry out His purposes on this earth.
One of my assignments is to write 20 minutes per day. That is a specific instruction from God to me. I am to sit down and write 20 minutes per day. I can only assume that if I am obedient to that one instruction, He will give me something worthwhile to write. And without fail, He does. One of the purposes of my life is to encourage others. Writing blogs and books and letters is an opportunity to do that.
I am not saying that I obey this instruction without fail. The lack of blog posts all summer long is good evidence that I have not been completely faithful, but God is merciful and patient. I can tell you that He holds up his part of the promise when I am choose to be obedient with that 20 minutes.
One time, God instructed me to go up to a person and offer to pray for them. I fought Him on this one, but finally I did it anyway. The person was surprised, but accepted the offer and thanked me at the conclusion of the prayer. I don’t know the end result of my obedience to that task, but I knew it was the right thing to do.
Sometimes, God asks me to give money to a homeless person. At first, I was reluctant to do this because I didn’t know what they were going to do with the money – maybe buy drugs? (Boy, does that sound judgmental?! Yikes!) God let me know in a gentle way that it was none of my business how the money was spent; He would take care that. When God asks me to jump, my next statement needs to be “How high, sir?!” Now when He tells me to give someone money, I ask “How much?” And I do it.
As I said, the little assignments are the training ground and the place where faith is built. Each time God asks me to do a task, I compare it to what I know of the Bible. God asks us to give to the poor (Luke 6:30, Psalm 112:9). God asks us to pray for each other (James 5:16). God tells us to be busy with the work he has given us to do (Ephesians 2:10, 1 Timothy 6:18, Acts 9:36). When I do this, I can step out confidently in these small tasks, because they are from a good God. Ask God every day to give you little assignments and then faithfully do them. You cannot imagine the blessing and thrill that comes from His asking and my doing!
