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Let God sculpt His purpose out of your life

Tick listWhether you have a personality type that likes to tick boxes or whether you work in big broad brush strokes, Ruth Tong encourages us all to move from good intentions to putting our plans into actions.   

I'm a planner, I love lists! I love setting goals and I love ticking boxes, I love completion. I love the feeling of drawing a line under what I'd hoped to accomplish so that particular 'box' can be set back on the shelf. Do you know it actually causes me stress to leave things unfinished! To me there is no greater joy than seeing, as Hannibal from the A-Team used to say, 'a plan come together'. 

For those of us box tickers I think there is a sense of productivity or perhaps a need for fine detail in this process.  We work well within structure, and are often creative as we work through. For this personality type evaluating how a project went and how it could be improved upon for the future will be totally satisfying. However if we were all like this, teams wouldn't work.

I have a friend who finds great joy in starting a project, growing a team and handing it over long before it's completed. He has started so many visionary projects which have born great fruit but he has rarely been involved in their completion. He works in big broad brush strokes leaving the (for him) dull aspects of fine detail to others.

Our Father, in His wisdom, has designed us to negotiate each other, to experience and work out what it is to work in team as modelled by the Godhead for His glory; to bring each of our gifts, idiosyncrasies, our 'us-ness' to the table for His glory.  

This is all well and good but unless we act on our plans big or small they are well, useless. 2 Corinthians 8:11 - Message version – encourages: 'The best thing you can do right now is to finish what you started last year and not let those good intentions grow stale. Your heart has been in the right place all along. You've got what it takes to finish it up, so go to it'. You see guys; the devil loves to distract us, so that we're big on good intentions but small on doing. He will throw fear, doubt, discouragement anything he can, to stop us taking that first step from plan to purpose.

But hear this, sweet cheeks, our gracious God takes the pressure off by the caveat found in Proverbs 16:9 which tells us: 'we make our plans but the Lord positions our steps'. Isn't that fab?  All God requires of us is to keep a pure heart, get off our butts and He will sculpt His purpose out of the clay of our lives.  

  • So what do you need to do to move from plan to purpose?
  • When are you gonna do it (date/time)?
  • Will you let me know how you get on? 

Ruth Tong is the Coordinator of Women’s Ministries at Downham Market Christian Fellowship and the author of ‘Love Drops from Heaven’.  Ruth regularly blogs at http://lovedropsfromheaven.blogspot.co.uk.

The views carried here are those of the author, not of Network Norwich and Norfolk, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users. 

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