You Should Distractions & Detours to Divine Destiny

Introduction

All of us at one time have struggled with the questions: “what am I supposed to do with my life?”, “am I doing what I am supposed to do with my life?”, “what is my purpose?”, “am I wasting my life?” Unfortunately, as we seek to answer those questions, we are surrounded by a sea of well-wishers and naysayers whose voices make it even more difficult to hear the answers to these questions. In fact, trying to rely on those voices is the wrong approach altogether.

The fundamental premise of this book is that God has a unique purpose for you, and you must go to Him to get clarity and direction. All the other voices, as they line up with what God tells you, are great compliments. When they don’t, they can become significant distractions, even obstacles to discerning and reaching the destiny that God had planned for you since the foundation of the world.

Our parents, friends, and family, though well-meaning, don’t have the best vantage point to guide us on God’s path for our life. All the human beings in our lives have biases and limitations in their abilities to see us for who we really are. While they may have some limited insight into our giftings, abilities, and temperament, they don’t have a view as to exactly where on earth and in what manner we should use these God-given abilities.

You have a “God-fit” for your life; Pastor Keith Moore says that this “fit” is “a place where you fit, where you thrive and where you prosper.” In other words, you are like a divine puzzle piece, and there is a divinely designated place in God’s masterpiece puzzle where you fit, not as a forced fit, but exactly, perfectly.

You have a path and a place and a destiny that God ordained for you before the foundations of the world (Ephesians 1:4). God and God alone knows how all the ingredients that make you the person you are fit together and where these ingredients will be best used to fit His plan for you on the earth. All other opinions without His direct inspiration, including your own, are subject to error due to the inherent limitations of a human being.

God is your creator; He engineered you and masterfully created you with a divine plan, place, and purpose on the earth. If you embrace that truth, you will be successful in your search for purpose, identity, meaningfulness, and direction.

To the degree that you don’t embrace this truth, you will take a crap shoot with your life trying to sift through the myriad of voices. You will be trying to find clues related to the direction and purpose for your life from the voices of family, friends, and others who alternatively flip-flop from being well-wishers or naysayers based on their biases, experiences, and assessments of you versus insight from the throne of God.

My previous Pastor, Mike Freeman, used to say, “once the destination is known, acceleration is possible.” If you don’t have clarity and certainty about where you are going, how can you confidently move out in any direction? You can’t. So, you slow down, and you prod as you take steps while being uncertain as to whether they truly are the right steps. We lose so much time trying to find the direction for our lives on our own, trying to discern it like a crime scene detective sifting through the clues left behind by other people’s advice and their assessments of us.

In this book, I will give you example after example of how people in the Bible were given inputs, advice, opinions about their destiny; their purpose. I will share how sometimes the advice was right and sometimes it was misleading. I will show you in scripture after scripture that God the Creator is the source of all our questions of destiny, purpose, and direction. Only a person dialed into God can help you tap into God’s plan for your life.

Ultimately, however, God wants to share the secrets of His plan with you in the safety of intimate fellowship with Him. God only keeps secrets from people who don’t want to be close. The perfect example of this is Moses and the children of Israel in Exodus 21:18-21. God wanted intimate fellowship with all the children of Israel, just as He had had with Adam, but the children told Moses, “you go and talk to him.” God has always wanted intimacy with us, and in that intimate place, He wants to reveal things to us:

1 Cor 2:9-10 (NIV) “However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’— the things God has prepared for those who love him— these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.”

Jeremiah 33:3 (NIV) “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”

1 John 2:20 (KJV) “But you have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.”

John 15:15 (NKJV) “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.”

This book should be marked up by the time you finish reading it. You probably won’t be able to resell it. While you are reading, if thoughts about purpose and destiny and giftings jump out at you, jot them down in the margin (unless this is the eBook version). Or keep a notebook or journal. Many of these thoughts will be encouraging and inspiring. The thoughts related to your purpose and destiny will merely be an echo of the Spirit of God in your heart. More than likely, it will be the Holy Spirit prompting you to dig deeper into the Word and to press into intimate fellowship with God.

You will also have thoughts of negativity and limitations and particularly thoughts of discouragement and regret over what you haven’t done, how much time you have wasted, how unworthy you are, and how untalented you are. These thoughts are the veiled voice of the enemy himself, the adversary, of whom Revelations chapter 21 says, “accuses the brethren day and night.” The sole purpose of his attacks is to thwart, to delay, to hinder, or even halt altogether, both your discovery of the purpose and plan of God for your life and the attainment of it.

As the enemy watches you move into more intimate fellowship with God and take steps of faith, He will speak to you in your mind and through others around you to discourage your progress. Make no mistake; the enemy will huff and puff and try to blow your house of dreams and confidence down to the ground. Therefore, it is critical that you are dialed in to the plan of God, securely nestled into the bosom of God in intimate fellowship—that way, you won’t get rattled.

Enjoy this book. Soak in the scriptures that build confidence in the truth that the plan, purpose, and direction of God is readily available and easily obtainable as you draw near to Him.