If vision establishes the destination you want to reach, and if mission defines the path that takes you there, goals are the milestones that measure your progress. They don’t make you more saved or less saved. They don’t give your family more status or less status. They just help keep you motivated and determined to become everything you can possibly be for Him—and able to celebrate and worship Him for the specific, recognizable ways He does it.
The alternative (I’m afraid we all know too well) is to perpetually underachieve. And question why we’re not experiencing any more joy in our relationship with Christ. And wonder why church and most every other spiritual undertaking is so lifeless and boring. And revert to a judgmental, putdown attitude toward other people and families who obviously are exaggerating about the remarkable way God works in their life, because we know for a fact that most of what we pray for and hear preached about is wishful thinking at best. It doesn’t really change much of what goes on in real life, the rest of the real workweek.
Sure, that’s the way it can seem when we reduce our family’s experiences with God to an unexamined, undisciplined level, where we’re following Him only by feel. Nowhere else in life would we expect to see measurable results from such a haphazard approach. But somehow we deceive ourselves into believing that spiritual growth and progress in our faith ought to happen just because we want it to happen. God ought to hand it out like trick-or-treat candy, simply because we dressed up for it, came over, and looked the part.
Well, what if we stopped working so hard just to look the part? What if we determined not to instill in our kids the implied impression that Christ doesn’t really deserve our best? What if we began deliberately aligning the way we think so that it matches up with the way the Bible defines truth . . . so that by devoting ourselves to Christ and His Word, we and our families would just naturally begin bearing “much fruit”? (John 15:5).
Yes, noticeable fruit.
God already tells us what would happen if we’d do that. “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). He is so invested in wanting to equip and empower your family and mine to achieve our goals that He has promised to keep us moving forward as we actively participate with Him.
So let’s get on our work clothes, our work gloves, our work boots. Let’s pull out our garden tools, our spiritual rakes and shovels. And let’s put ourselves in position for the Sower to come help us harvest a crop, right here where we live—not only this season, but the next and the next season, even (by God’s grace) into the next generations.
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