“I press on toward the goal . . for which God has called me.” Philippians 3:14 NIV
“A God-sized goal is: further than your reach, greater than abilities, and bigger than fears.”
My thoughts today are to remind you “the sky’s the limit!”
Can you imagine the excitement and freedom if you were taught to believe that? What would your life be like if you took off the limits – a few real but many imagined. Don’t settle for living a life that is too small. Some one has rightly said that it is better to have tried and failed than to fail to try! Be sure your goals are God’s goals for you. A God-sized goal is: further than your reach, bigger than your fears, and greater than your present abilities. That’s where true success is found.
You will never achieve your best without worthy and noble goals. Never waste your time or resource with things that give you no pride of achieving, nor simply maintaining an objective you have already accomplished. There is always so much more potential ahead for you. But make no mistake; goals do not themselves insure success. Outstanding achievement takes extraordinary enthusiasm, exhaustive energy, extra effort, and extreme exertion.
Joseph carried a life-long objective in his heart – one that preceded his own life and even extended well beyond it. Listen to his words as he prepares to die, “God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . then you must carry my bones up from this place.” See Genesis 50:24-26/Exodus13:18-19 NIV. What a man! Joseph had a God-sized goal that reached beyond his own ability to achieve – even beyond the extent of his lifetime. That makes some of our little goals look embarrassingly small.
Reaching all your goals is not the highest achievement of success in life. Life is sad, not satisfying, when you have done that. That dubious accomplishment either indicates that your goal was too small to begin with, or that you neglected to replace it with something higher and better that would challenge you to reach beyond earlier successes. A goal should be like the horizon – staying in the distance, calling you forward but never becoming a settled destination.
In my earlier years, a close and dear friend who has long been an encourager to me would often challenge me with these words, “It is better to aim for the stars and hit the top of a mountain, than to aim for a telephone pole and hit the top of a fence post.” I understood him to mean that your goals should be worthy of your greatest commitment and effort, demand your constant focus, and be something greater than you can achieve alone. At the end of it all, it is not so much what your goals were that is important, but that, while you reached for them, you were empowered to achieve more than you otherwise would have. The sky really is the only limit!
Paul was neither impressed by his successes nor intimidated by his failures. He learned from his past, but refused to live in it. His goal was always before him. “The one thing I do is to forget what is behind me and do my best to reach what is ahead. So I run straight toward the goal in order to win the prize, which is God’s call through Christ Jesus to the life above.” Philippians 3:13-14 TEV. That’s a good example for any of us.
My prayer for you today is this: dream big, always reaching for your full potential in God.