God's Blueprint for Your Life

Years ago, my wife and I built our dream home. We met with the builder and an architect, and together, we designed a blueprint for our house. Without that blueprint, we would have made some terrible construction errors, errors both costly and bothersome.

If the builder had strayed from the blueprint, we would not be living in the house we had planned. It would have been a different house altogether. Likewise, as believers, God has a spiritual blueprint for our life.

Ephesians tells us this, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus onto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. And when we die and stand before Jesus at his judgment seat, he will unfold that blueprint of our life, and we will look at it, and what we had questions about down here will all make sense up there. And as he reviews the life we live for him, he will point to his blueprint for us and say, just according to plan.

But there are some who may miss that plan. I was talking to a businessman years ago who shared with me a story that when he was a young man, he felt God called him to be a pastor. And while he was in college, he pastored a little country church for two years.

But he made the decision that he didn't want to be poor all his life, so he quit the ministry to become a successful businessman instead. Then he shared with me about his three failed marriages, and what ruin and heartache they had brought into his life. And as he related his story to me, I had a sense that here was a man who turned his back on God's best for him to go do what he thought was best for him.

And it was all one big train wreck. It's God's plan of salvation is a theme that runs all throughout my Bible from Genesis to Revelation. And you can draw a line from Genesis to Revelation and connect those dots.

I believe that God has a specific plan for our life to bring him glory. And once we get a better understanding about God's design for our life, then we can live it for him with the conviction that Romans 8.28 reinforces that divine purpose in our life. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

And the emphasis there is on his purpose. I recall my homiletical mentor, Dr. Stephen Oford, relating a story to me. He said he had an uncle in England who was a pharmacist.

And one day he dropped in to see him at his pharmacy. Stephen Oford said he found his uncle in a back room, huddled over a long table with various glass bottles containing different concoctions, some green liquid, some white powders. And in front of him was a large mixing bowl.

And his uncle would take a little of this and a little of that and mix it all together to make a medicine fit for the patient. And Stephen Oford said that God was like that, as seen from Romans 8.28, where God, as the divine alchemist, takes a little bit of this and a little bit of that and mixes it all together for our good and his glory. I know I've been guilty of delaying God's plan for my own life, because for years I fought against surrendering to God's call on my life as a preacher.

But when I finally gave it all to him, soon I was in a full-blown global preaching ministry. I'll always remember that story of what that man told me about how he quit being a pastor because he didn't want to be poor and he became a success in business but a failure in his domestic life with his three failed marriages. And I always wondered if he had stayed faithful to his call, maybe his whole life would have run on a different track altogether, a better track from God's perspective.

When we surrender to God's will for our life, that's when we line up with that heavenly blueprint he has for us regarding his purpose. There's a little poem that every time I read it, it's a warning to me. I'll read it to you, friends.

It's called His Plan for Me, and it goes like this. When I stand at the judgment seat of Christ and he shows his plan for me, the plan of my life, as it might have been, had he had his way, and I see how I blocked him here and checked him there and would not yield my will, would there be grief in my Savior's eyes, grief though he loves me still? Would he have me rich and I stand there poor, stripped of all but his grace, while memory runs like a haunted thing down the paths I cannot retrace? Lord of the years that are left of me, I give them to the hand. Take me, break me, and mold me to the pattern that thou hast planned.