Goals are our friends

When I was in college, we had to take a class called Integrated Field Experience. In this class, we learned about valuable, practical skills we would need as we prepared for a life in ministry. One day, our professor told us that "goals are your friends." Up to this point in my life, I was pretty much a "go with the flow" kind of person; I did very little intentionally. So even though my professor told me that goals were my friends, I wanted nothing to do with them.

As I have gotten older and been given much more responsibility than I had in my youth, I have learned to make goals my friends. They help me prioritize my agenda and my money; they help me prioritize my time and my relationships; they help me--most importantly--to be intentional in growing more mature in my faith.

In Philippians 3, we see that the Apostle Paul had a goal for himself:

¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Pressing on Toward the Goal

¹²Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.¹³Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

You see, Paul himself had a goal: to become more and more like Jesus and achieve the prize of being made completely perfect in Jesus. His goal was to live his life like Jesus, to become like Jesus.

What is your goal for your life? What are your goals for the upcoming school year? What are you goals in becoming more like Jesus? Take some time in the next week or two to ponder these questions and seek out the Lord's guiding hand in your life.