 Face the Future with Faith
Dr. Lee shares how you can gain strength in uncertain times by three essential steps to facing your future with faith. Find out how you can live in the confidence of faith in God.
Remember the Past.
In the Old Testament the people of God were always reminded to consider what God had done for them in the past. By looking at the hand of God in the past events of your life, you gain greater confidence to trust Him to be at work in your life in the future. When we consider what God has done in our behalf, we ought to have confidence in the future! He loved us. He saved us. He forgave us. And He has given us an inheritance in Christ that is beyond anything we could ever imagine.
Everybody wonders about their future. They want to what the future holds for them and those they love. Most of us wonder about our health, jobs, family, friends, finance, and a hundred other things.
Ultimately there are only two ways to face the future: faith or fear!
If you are looking at the future with faith and confidence chances are you are looking at the present the same way. If you are facing the future with fear and uncertainty, you are probably doing the same in regard to the present. Our attitude about the future determines our attitude about the present; our attitude about the present often determines our attitude about the future. If you have faith for tomorrow, you probably will have faith for today. But if you have fear about tomorrow, then you’re likely to be full of fear about today. The Bible says, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear: but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Tim. 1:7)
Understand the Present.
The Scripture is filled with divine principles for knowing the will of God. You don’t need a palm reader, stargazer, or a crystal ball to know the will of God. The divine plan of God for your like if laid out in Scripture principle by principle.
Sometimes it is easier to see the hand of God in the past more easily that it is to see it in the present. But we all need to learn to look for the touch of God’s grace in our lives every single day. Time and time again, God is moving on our behalf. Don’t overlook His daily providential care for your life. Remember, you’re not alone. God is with you ever step of the way.
Trust God for the Future.
I once knew a boy who always read the end of the book before the beginning. When his mother asked him, “Son, why do you do that?”
The boy replied, “Mom, it’s better that way. No matter how much trouble the hero gets into, I don’t worry because I know how it’s going to turn out in the end.”
One of the greatest assurances of the Scripture is that it tells us how things are going to turn out in the end. We may have troubles, hardships, and difficulties along the way, but in the midst of them all, we can believe that the best is yet to com. Most of us are willing to trust God with our eternal destiny, but our struggle comes in trusting Him with our immediate future. The same God who can take you on to heaven can get you through like here below as well. Trust Him and see if He will not prove Himself to you in every way.
The Scripture says, “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths” (Prov. 3:5-6).
If we have faith for the future in light of these basic scriptural principles, we are ready to make and execute our plans for future success. Believing that the hand of God is upon your life, that He is leading you every step of the way, you can walk into the future with great confidence.
In his book Christian Excellence, Jon Johnston observes that life is a “race against the clock.” By the time we reach middle age he observes, we try to us up what Mother Nature has given us before Father Time takes it away!
To plan for the future, we have to take the brevity of life seriously. The average man lives about seventy-four years. That is approximately 888 months, 30,148weeks, 270,000 days, 648,240 hours, 38,894,400 minutes and 2,022,508,800 heartbeats.
Some have described life’s brief stages like this:
- Tender Teens
- Teachable Twenties
- Thrilling Thirties
- Fiery Forties
- Fearful Fifties
- Sensible Sixties
- Sinking Seventies
- Aching Eighties
- Shortening Breath
- Death
- The Sod
- God
With so little time we have, should we not focus on the promises of the future knowing that God will lead our way? Remember His faithfulness, know that He is with you, and trust that He will guide you all along the way.
There’s Hope for the Future, Richard G. Lee. Broadman and Holms Publishers. Nashville, Tennessee. 1996 pgs. 95 – 97.
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