Why am I here? What is my purpose? What am I supposed to be doing in this period of my life? These are questions that anyone with breath in their lungs will either have wrestled with or might be wrestling with. You as the reader might even find yourself pondering these questions. My hope is that by the end of this read, you will be filled with a God centred trust, peace and hope regarding your future.

Your Present And Future Is God’s Past Memory.

In other words, you’re contemplating what God has already envisioned. Psalms 139:16 comforts us with the following verse, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Jesus stated that he came to do what was already written in the scriptures according to God’s will (Hebrews 10:7). God essentially authored the autobiography of Jesus’ life, the prophetic words we read in Isiah 9:6 and other passages of the Old Testament are the things Christ became flesh to fulfil. In the same fashion, God has envisioned and authored the fulfilling and purposeful autobiographies of you and me. He created our human bodies for His vision to be fulfilled on the earth. We do ourselves a great disservice trying to figure out the answer to these big questions of our life without its source.

Prioritise Intimacy With God

The psalmist states “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place when I was woven together in the depths of the earth (Psalm 139:15).” Our lives were formed in the secret place and it’s in the secret place that we uncover it. In the secret place is where we ask God the deep things concerning our lives and he guides us in connecting the dots of the skills, passions and talents that He intricately formed in us. It’s where he leads and guides us into what He authored beforehand as we prayerfully, persistently and patiently ask Him to lead and guide us. One of the superpowers of the secret place and intimacy with God is seeing the famous verse on faith come alive and replace all our worries and anxieties about our present and future with confidence and assurance. “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1).

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Prayer Is The Master Key

When Cornelius calls for Peter, and Peter goes to see Him, they are both led by God to meet one another in their times of prayer (Acts 10). When the Church at Antioch were praying and fasting, they were led by God to consecrate Paul and Barnabas for his work Acts 13:2. There’s an obvious correlation that we ought to learn and emulate between Jesus’s prayer life as documented all over the gospel, and his seamless discernment of and submission to what the Father was saying (John 12:49) and doing (John 5:19).  May the Holy Spirit direct us to discern and enable us to perform God’s will concerning our lives in the present and future.

Since you’ve become a Christian, what has changed? Do you have different desires, interests, passions or battles? Or are things the same? Throughout the scriptures, Christians are described as aliens. As those who ought to be experiencing a transient reality in this world. Yet, a problem first identified in the early church, finds itself present in the modern church. This problem is conformity. Whilst Christians are ought to be lights that are set on top of a hill (Matthew 5:14), we often find ourselves dimming this light as if it’s a shame to share the glow of Christ. When the world around us tempts us to imitate its nature, the call of God declares in defiance be alien.

You’ve Been Changed

Another way to consider being an alien is to be holy. To be holy is simply to be set apart or dedicated to God. When a person is saved, they are immediately made holy. This person is taken from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:13). Now you have been made holy, the next step is to be holy. This is the message proclaimed by the apostle Peter to the Christian exiles in the first century (1 Peter 1:1). Like the early Christians, we can be tempted to deviate from our new nature because of the various trials that we face. When times are hard, we can be drawn to one of two extremes: either trust in our good works to prove our holiness or discarding holiness altogether and swimming with the current of whatever culture deems acceptable. But there’s another way, a better way that Peter presents to us. Before any call to holiness, Peter reminds us that we are holy already (1 Peter 1:1-2, 3-5). Peter lets us know we aren’t trying to become holy, instead we are called to live out who we already are (1 Peter 1:13-14). The impetus behind our holiness is not our actions but Christ’s

Dare to be different

The temptation to conform is all around us. It can seem like a never-ending bombardment of ungodliness that seeks to penetrate our minds to tell us “Holiness is impossible”. And yet, Peter quickly dismisses this notion by repeating what God first told the Israelites on their pilgrimage to the promised land, “Be holy” (Leviticus 20:7; 1 Peter 1:16). Or in other words, be alien. This is not a call to be different for the sake of being different. Instead, it is a call to fulfil what we were created for; to spread the fragrance of God’s glory anywhere we may find ourselves (Genesis 1:26-28, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 2:14-15). To be an alien is to be so consumed by the glory of God that it impacts every part of your being. This may mean that you don’t watch certain shows or go to certain events. But it does mean that as you go out into the world people should be able to say of you “…these people have been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

You may be thinking, that’s an odd thing; to be ashamed of a testimony. Is it even possible to be ashamed of something great God has done in your life? It may have been sheer confusion or even intrigue that promoted your interest in this article. Either way, allow me to explain where it comes from.

I was privileged enough to have had the Gospel presented to me at a young age.

I was 13 years old in my church when a guest pastor mounted the stage and my life would change forever. He preached the Gospel in a way I had never heard before. He was eccentric, smart and eloquent. Sweating on that stage, he skilfully articulated something that had been obfuscated in the church thus far; the explicit Gospel. He preached about Gods wrath, Jesus the saviour and how we could obtain eternal life. After he asked us to respond and I responded, I believe I became a Christian that afternoon.

As I grew up in the church, I would hear many people give their testimonies, how they came to know Jesus and believe in him and after celebrating with them, I would often take a look at my life and in compassion, my story just did not sound interesting enough. My story sounded mundane and ordinary whilst others were som colourful and vivid.

I remember one particular Sunday service where a friend of mine held the youth churches attention as he told his story of salvation. Jaws dropped, they hung on his every word as he explained how he was stabbed by a gang and fell to the ground, right before he passed out he asked God to save him and that if God did, he promised to follow Jesus for the rest of his days. The youth church drew a collective gasp and started to clap. I clapped too but in my young mind, I also thought. ‘that’s so cool’, why didn’t I have a story like this to tell, why was my testimony so vanilla and ‘ordinary’.

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It’s hard to articulate what I felt, but for years I would pass on the opportunity to tell my story, I would change the subject or defer to people who had more interesting stories to tell about how they met Jesus. Growing up and maturing in the Word has helped me address this earlier gnawing concern of mine

We are not really aware of our depravity.

One of the major reasons we seem to be shy about our testimonies is because many people aren’t taught about the nature of their depravity, what they saved from and the gravity of their sin. Despite what your life before salvation looks like to the carnal eye, no matter how grotesque or good it may appear to you, the truth is that the carnal eye cannot weigh up things in this way. In Ephesians 2:1, the bible says you ‘were dead in your trespasses and sins’. This was our default state before we knew Christ. We were dead. There are no degrees of spiritual death, dead is dead. It is only carnal eyes that rank sins in this way, the biblical reality is the same across all people and is very serious.

Consider this, the God of the universe who controls all things, the wind changes directions at his behest, the seasons follow his leading and the sun is only a spec of his brightness. This God that controls all things, called you and you said no. This is the gravity of our transgression. A day spent in rebellion against this great God is a day too much. That he did not wipe the earth of us is a miracle; instead, he waited for us and in his time he saved us. It really is as Michale.

Maybe you were the pastor’s kid or a pretty smart kid or you got saved young. You probably don’t think you were that bad. You maybe stole a sweet here or there but you never murdered someone. Maybe you think a white lie here and there can’t be that bad compared to a murderer. Rather than focusing on what you can remember you did, considered who you sinned against.

Consider your sin against an almighty and righteous God, consider the depth of the sin. I grew up trapped in my web of lies, dripping in jealousy and revelling in sexual immorality. Every time I tried to be good, it would last for weeks and I would fall back harder than I did before. I would dig an increasingly deeper hole for myself, trapped between peoples image of me and who I really was. When the gospel was presented to me, it was a miracle. It was a breath of fresh air after being underwater for so long. How could God bring good out of my life when there was so much bad? How could be fashion something beautiful out of something so broken? Well, that’s God. That’s the miracle of his work, bringing beauty from the ashes.

When we understand the depth of our depravity, then we can start to really appreciate just what God saved us from. We appreciate Jesus so much more because we realise just where our lives were going without him. The only thing we contribute to our salvation is the sin that makes it necessary

What is the greatest miracle?

There is much debate in theological circles about the most amazing miracle Jesus performed. Some say it’s the feeding of the five thousand with barley loaves. The sheer spectacle of it must have been much to behold. Others hold to Jesus turning water to wine, in a time where natural fermentation took forever, this miracle would have made some mouths drop to the ground. That wine could be created so instantaneously.

Today many marvels at healing services and legs growing on social media but of course, consider an even greater miracle. There’s a famous gospel song that poses a set of interesting questions. How can a brown cow, eat green grass and produce white milk? Don’t worry, you don’t have to answer. Consider God’s chemical laboratory of redemption that takes our black hearts, stained with sin, dips it in red blood, the blood of Jesus and we come out white as snow. This is what Jesus achieved on a cross, a miracle that would melt our brains if we tried to understand it. He took something dead and gave it new life. He closed a void that nothing else could close. He bridged the gap. Whether you were stabbed or not, this is what it means to be snatched from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. It’s the same thing for all of us. We all sin and fall short and all of us are inputted with Christ’s righteousness, Romans 3:23