Endure: Building Faith for the Long RunSample

Honoring God in every step

Planning out my year and setting goals has been a weakness of mine for many years. I liked rolling with life’s punches with no real plan. That was true even of my preaching. I would sit down at my desk a week from preaching and figure out what sermon to prepare for our people.

That all changed when another friend told me how he would sit down and plan out the next few months' worth of sermons. He would pick the passage, write down a few main themes, and assign each Scripture a Sunday. That way, he knew what his text was for each week without having to come up with a catchy theme or title. He just preached what the Scripture laid out.

That conversation led me to start doing a sermon series through books of the Bible by planning them months in advance, but it also started me down a path of planning more things in all corners of my life. I began meeting with my wife every January to talk through what worked and what didn’t in the previous year. We talk about how we can grow in the next year and how to plan accordingly. This ranges from ministry goals to goals within our marriage... and to what extent we want to save up or how many dates we want to plan.

Your plans and goals will look so much different than mine. They could be long-term or short-term, but assess what is going on in your life and plan how to grow. Some plans may never come to fruition because of unforeseen circumstances, but that should not prevent us from trying to make the most of our days, as we see in Proverbs 6:6–8:

Go to the ant, O sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise.
Without having any chief,
officer, or ruler,
she prepares her bread in summer
and gathers her food in harvest.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?

Scripture reminds us of the life of the ant. Here is a little creature with a little life span. It works hard in the summer to store food for the winter. It is a winter that the ant may never see, but it works nonetheless for what may come. So we must do the same in working and preparing for what may come. Plan, hope, and dream for the days to come. Seek to make the most of each day that God has granted you, knowing that one day you will give an account for each day lived.