Friday, September 28, 2018
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I'm a city boy. Where I grew up, kids were about the only things that grew. We didn't even have grass in the backyard of the apartment building where I lived-just dirt. So over the years I've had a lot to learn from the farm girl I married, as well as my many friends who are farmers. I was traveling in the heartland with one of our leaders, and he had spent many years in farming, and he taught me a pretty memorable lesson as we were driving down a country road just past a cornfield. He was explaining how a farmer harvests his corn and how the end row may get knocked down when he turns the corner from one row to another. That leaves some corn stalks knocked down, lying horizontal and broken. And they're often in the shade of a stalk that's still standing near it. But don't count that stalk out. No, not just yet! The pollen from the overshadowing corn stalk filters down onto that broken corn. And amazingly, that plant that has everything going against it starts developing another crop and eventually you'll be able to pick corn off that old boy! (How about a city boy telling you that!)
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Missing Your Destiny."
My friend made a point that day that I haven't been able to forget. Cornstalks do what cornstalks were made to do-produce an ear of corn, even when those plants are wounded and beat down and in the shadows. Waoh! Actually, everything God made does what it was made to do: the sun lights our solar system, cotton plants produce cotton, bees pollinate flowers, water evaporates and condenses to give us rain. Everything does what God created it to do except us. And we humans do what we want to do.
The single question on that great life quiz is, "Why am I here?" If you flunk that one, you flunk life. The truth is the only One who knows why I'm here is the One who put me here. And God tells us what we're here for in just six simple but revolutionary words. They're in Colossians 1:16, which is our word for today from the Word of God. It says, speaking of Jesus Christ, "All things were (here are the six words) created by Him and for Him." You were created by Him; you were created for Him. Your life will never be fulfilling, and it will never know its purpose until you have Him. Like the earth was created to revolve around the sun, you and I were created to revolve around our Creator.
But we've made another choice. We treat people like we want to treat them, we say what we feel like saying, we do what we want to do, and one day at a time, we drift further from the only One who can make our life mean anything. We are the earth away from the sun that it was made to have at the center and it's not working. That's why your life, in spite of all those relationships and experiences and the religion you've tried, feels so lonely, so small, so unsatisfying and so full of regrets. You're away from the One who gave you your life. And if you die like this, you'll be away from Him forever.
Our only hope was the rescue that Jesus came to give us. The Bible says, "He brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have...the forgiveness of sins" because Jesus "made peace through His blood shed on the cross" (Colossians 1:13-14, 20). Only the death of Jesus in your place, for your sins, can erase a lifetime of going against God.
You don't need to waste one more day of this life being away from Him. You don't need to risk an eternity without Him. Not if you'll grab Jesus like a drowning person would grab a lifeguard and say, "Jesus, you're my only hope. I'm yours!" In that moment, you can find the God who made you, and you can finally find in Him the reason you're here.
Are you ready for that? You want that? You been looking for that? Tell Him, "Jesus I'm yours." Go to our website. You've got information there that will help you be sure that you now belong to Him. Our website is ANewStory.com.
This could be the day your life really begins. I mean the life and the destiny you were made for, which is belonging to the God you were made for.