A Custom-Made Dream
God has a “good, pleasing and perfect will”2 for your life. It’s not a one-size-fits-all plan. God’s dream for you is personal. It’s custom-made for the way He shaped you.
There are five important factors that make you you. To help you remember them, I created a simple acrostic: SHAPE.
- Spiritual gifts
- Heart
- Abilities
- Personality
- Experiences
You are the only person in the world with your unique, God-given SHAPE. That means you are the only person who can fulfill God’s dream for your life. Not only is God’s dream personal, it is also positive. It’s a plan “to prosper you and not to harm you... to give you hope and a future.”3
How do you figure out what God’s dream is? Let’s look at five steps based on the five letters of the word dream.
DEDICATE ALL YOUR LIFE TO GOD
If you want God to show you His dream for your life, then you must be willing to do whatever God wants you to do, even before He tells you to do it. Don’t say, “God, show me what you want me to do, and then I’ll say yes.” Just say yes, and then He will show you what to do.
Romans 12:1 says,
Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service.4
To discover God’s will, the Bible says you must “offer” yourself to God. That means you must dedicate every part of your life — your time, your talents, your treasures, your relationships, your past, your present, and your future — to God’s purposes. Sacrifice your agenda for His. Release control of your life to Him.
The Bible goes on to say,
Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God — what is good and is pleasing to Him and is perfect.5
To conform means to fit something into a mold. To transform means to change something from the inside out — and there is a huge difference between the two. God wants to transform you by changing the way you think about Him, yourself, life, and the world around you. The number one reason people miss God’s dream is because they are trying to fit in with the rest of the world. They become a carbon copy of somebody else instead of being the person God made them to be.
If you want to get serious about figuring out God’s dream for your life, then you have to decide if you’re going to conform or be transformed. Are you going to settle for the “good life” or God’s life, the world’s standards or God’s standards?
Hebrews 12:1 says,
Let us strip off anything that slows us down or holds us back... and let us run with patience the particular race that God has set before us.”6
God has a particular life course for you to run. If you are always looking at other people, you’ll end up trying to run their race, and there’s no way you can win that one. To know God’s will, you have to stop conforming to the world’s standards and let God transform you into the person He designed you to be.
- Hebrews 11:6 (NIV).
- Romans 12:2 (NIV).
- Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV).
- (GNT).
- Romans 12:2 (GNT).
- (TLB).
