Pastor Steven Furtick

Archive for October, 2011

The Right and Wrong Questions for Figuring Out God’s Plan for Your Life

| Spiritual Growth

When it comes to trying to figure out God’s plan for your life, there are two questions you can ask. One wrong. One right.

Wrong Question:
God, what’s your plan for my life?

Right Question:
God, what’s your Plan, and how can my life fit into it?

That might seem like semantics, but it makes all the difference in the world.

God’s Plan isn’t first and foremost about us. His plan for us isn’t about us either.
It’s not about our lives.
It’s not about our careers.
It’s not about our future spouse.
It’s not about our anything.

It’s about His Purpose, His Kingdom, His Glory. His Plan.
And then about how our lives.
Our careers.
Our future spouse.
Our everything.

Fit into it.

Start asking the right question. And you’ll start figuring out God’s plan.
For His life. And yours.

Resource of the Day: It’s Halloween. Last year I wrote a post on how Halloween should challenge us as Christians that a lot of people said they found very helpful. You can read that post by clicking here.

The Fine Art of Friendship

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A Sneak Peak Into My Second Book

| Resources

Over the past few weeks I’ve been tweeting a lot about my second book. Many of you have been asking about it, so I thought I’d give you a little sneak peak today on the blog.

I’m so excited for the launch of my next book. It’s set to come out in September of 2012 and I believe it is really going to help you and countless others. While I can’t share the full details quite yet, including the title, I can give you a little insight into the central concept of the book.

In my experience, most Christians aren’t in imminent danger of ruining their lives. They’re in danger of something far greater: wasting it.

What I mean is that I’m meeting more and more believers who are unsatisfied with the kind of Christian they’re becoming, and the version of the Christian life they’re experiencing. There’s a huge gap between the kinds of things God has said in His Word, and the results we see in our lives.

We know we were meant for more. But we feel confused about what that looks like or where to start. We feel stuck where we’re at and frustrated because we don’t know what steps to take to move forward.

As a result, most of us end up settling for less than what God created and saved us for.  We then get comfortable in our complacency. And years later we find ourselves stuck in the muck of mediocrity. Just getting by. Living a shadow of the life we dreamed and God intended. Wasting our lives.

I’m writing this second book to help you get unstuck. To help you dream big again or for the first time. To begin living the kind of life Jesus Himself dreamed for His followers:
I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. (John 14:12)

In my first book, Sun Stand Still, I dared you to believe God for the impossible. In this book, I’m daring you to believe that God has created you for a greater life than the one you’re living. And I’m going to give it everything I’ve got, with God’s help, to show you how to live it.

So if you are worn out on cul-de-sac Christianity or self-help pseudo solutions, I’m hoping that you will embrace the message of this book and let God’s greater plan for your life be ignited in full force.

I’ll be posting more updates in the coming months, so keep your eyes open. If you’re really anxious to know the title, I can tell you this: it’s somewhere in this post. Happy looking. In the meantime, help me spread the word and get people excited.

Resource of the Day: One of the essential messages of the second book is if we want to enter into the greater things God has for us, we need to dream bigger, but also start smaller. That statement might make me sound like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth, but I promise you that dreaming bigger and starting smaller go hand in hand. In fact, I wrote a recent blog post on the idea that you can read here.

Whose Idea was That?

| Spiritual Growth

When you look at the miracles in the Bible, you see two themes consistently emerge when it comes to the person involved in the miracle.

1) Many biblical miracles were the person’s own initiative, not God’s idea.

Like the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment.
Or Namaan who went to Elisha for healing for his leprosy.
Or the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant.

And 2) many biblical miracles involved the person’s natural action, not just God’s supernatural intervention.

Like when the Israelites had to walk through the Red Sea after God parted it.
Or when the blind man had to wash himself in the pool of Siloam.
Or when Joshua and his army had to march around the walls of Jericho before it fell.

The bottom line is that when it comes to the miracles you want to see in and through your life, God wants your involvement. I’ve said it before, but most Christians don’t want miracles, we want magic. We want God to wave a magic wand at our problem or need.

We want God to send the money out of the sky.
God forbid we would cut up our credit cards.

We want God to heal us of our physical ailments.
God forbid we change our eating habits or start exercising.

We want to see God do miraculous things through us.
God forbid we get off the couch and give God a platform off of which He can work.

I’m sorry, but God’s miracles don’t work like that. Of course they involve His unmistakable power and provision. Otherwise they wouldn’t be miracles. But they also require your initiative and involvement. Otherwise they would just be magic.

Maybe we could sum it up like this:
Without God, you cannot.
Without you, God will not.

Ask yourself two questions today.
1)   What miracle do you need or want to see God accomplish in or through your life?
2)   What involvement is God requiring from you before He accomplishes the miracle?

Resource of the Day: I hit on the ideas above in a few chapters in Sun Stand Still. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, click here for more information and to order to the book.