Now Determines My Future
1996
Your now determines your future. That’s why there’s hope. The old season is passed. Today is a new day. Great is His faithfulness. Our opportunities are right in front of us right now. Last year’s bad harvest or even my current bad harvest will never depress me or discourage me. I can fail infinitely right before your eyes and I’m not worried. You might be worried about me. You may even judge me for that. I hope you wouldn’t. But my future doesn’t depend on my past. My future depends on my decision to follow Jesus, and to humble myself before Him. I have an infinite future and an infinite hope, regardless of anything that has ever happened to me in my life. No past failure determines my future. What I sow now determines my future.
I am not a product of my parents, of my upbringing and my limited I.Q. and my limited willpower, my limited memory and my limited personality. That’s not my limit. My limit is, “Well, I know I’m all those things because look how crummy I’ve been doing. I don’t have any friends, I don’t have any fruit....” That has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. Your past does not predict your future. What you sow NOW determines your future. Your potential is limitless. Totally limitless. Your past doesn’t determine your limit. The only thing that determines your limit is your willingness to sow good seeds and your refusal to sow bad seed or neutral seed.
We are wide open, no matter how bad. Mary the whore, or Matthew or Zacheus the tax collectors, or Simon the murderous, hateful, prejudiced zealot. Go through the list-- Bathsheba and David--go right down the list of anybody who ever was. Abraham--go right on down the list as far as you want backwards, forwards, any way you want to go down the list and you see one common thread, is that their past didn’t determine their future, and their hope was in a living God, the I AM. It had nothing to do with the mistakes they made.
As they humbled themselves before Him, His forgiveness was as deep as the ocean and their potential was only limited by their willingness to humble themselves and to sow good seed. I am not whoever I was. I am who I will be, depending on how I see God and how I respond to Him at this moment in my life. Think what you want to of me, good, bad or ugly, but I know where I’m going, and by God’s grace, I’m going to sow good seed. My potential in so doing is limitless. Wherever I’ve been. It doesn’t matter who made your bed. God is going to draw you to Himself. The mystery of His grace and His faithfulness is dependent on how you see Him in His forgiveness and the potential that is in Him and our willingness to submit ourselves into His hands and His care for the future and to not crowd Him out. To make room for Him in our hearts. Our willingness to make all this vertical, rather than just religion.
What about with David, the sword never left his house. How do you look for those things that have affected you now and how do you turn your heart towards God and say, “Okay. I know I blew it, and now what are the ramifications in my life and how do I deal with it from there?”
Keep in mind, where do you see Moses after Mt. Nebo? After he died on the mountain, where does he show up next? He’s on a different mountain, and he’s doing okay. There were ramifications. He didn’t get to go into the Promised Land. But he wasn’t looking for a nation or a city that was built by men’s hands anyway. There were ramifications, and I know he would have loved to have gone in, and it broke his heart. There were ramifications.
For David, there was a ramification--his child died. The sword never left his house. His son had to build the house and David never got to see it, although he gathered the materials for it, he couldn’t build it. There were ramifications, but see, David was free. And Moses was free. And the ramifications they accepted as due course. David didn’t whine and complain about it. Moses did not whine and complain about it. He acknowledged the God who was and is and shall be, and he humbled himself before Him, accepted the ramifications, accepted the discipline of the Lord because of the love that that speaks of, but he never lost his identity. There is no fear there. Moses wasn’t whining and complaining on the Mount of Transfiguration.
God brags on Moses so much it’s unbelievable. All the way through the scriptures, “Moses, my man!” “David, a man after my own heart!” There he is again and again. These guys doing stupid, bozo things. But in their hearts they were free. There were ramifications. They did reap what they sowed and there were ramifications, but because they came forward before God, they were free. While they never saw Mt. Zion on the right side of the river, they saw the Mount of Transfiguration, which is where it really counts anyway.
That’s something that could never be taken from us, is the greatest love of all. “I’m free. They can’t take away my destiny. Because the greatest love of all is inside of me. Whether I fail, whether I succeed, I’m free.” It doesn’t matter. I’ll accept it. In fact, I even glory in the ramifications. I don’t have to fear them. Because hopefully some of God’s people can learn in a right way by revelation, rather than by fire. I became a vessel of wrath in that area in the household rather than a vessel of honor. But I’m still in the household, and I’m still being used by God. I’m not bragging on that, but I am saying that Moses wasn’t insecure on the mountain that he died on, and David wasn’t insecure when the sword stayed in his house.
It was disappointing to him, it was heartbreaking to him. He realized he blew it when he took a census and 18,000 people died because of his stupidity. But he didn’t curl up in a little ball and die. He was still free. When his child died, what did he do? He washed his face and got back up and went back to the Father’s business. When Peter failed miserably, just totally blew it big time, utter humiliation. What did he do? Right back into the Father’s house.
“I’ll be a doorkeeper in the house, then. I don’t care! I wish I hadn’t done that.” But there wasn’t fear, there wasn’t guilt. They didn’t curl up in the fetal position and die. They saw God’s grace and they received it, and they went forward regardless of the failures that they had, accepting the ramifications, but not being destroyed by it. Still being right there on the Mount of Transfiguration. That’s where God has called us to be if we live by faith and not by sight. There’s no fear there, even if there are certain physical world ramifications.
It’s like Ananias and Sapphira, or the ones that died in 1 Corinthians 11 because of their sin, their presumption and their arrogance and their selfishness and factions. God brought about even physical death in that situation, but it was all unto His honor. It wasn’t like some big failure that crushed them and they fell apart eternally. It wasn’t like that. It was building, building, seeing things not through the natural eyes of 72.4 years. “Well, that’s all I’ve got. If I blow my 72 years, I guess that’s it.”
When you see things through the spectrum of, “If a man believes in Me, he shall never die,” then what you’re looking at when you look at a believer, a true hearted disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, is that you’re looking at their caterpillar skin, that ugly old thing that they’re just carrying around for a little while, until the tent of this physical body is set free into a glorious body, transformed, transfigured in a twinkling of an eye. That’s what we’re called to.
As we look with our natural eyes right now, we’re seeing physical bodies. That is not what’s there. Stop seeing that if that’s what you see! That’s not what’s really there. That’s just a shell of the eternal thing that is fashioned in the image of the Godhead that is living inside behind “them little ol’ eyeballs.” It’s probably been choked quite a bit by worldliness, so you don’t see it very well just yet. But, given the process that we’re talking about tonight, the glory of the Godhead is going to emerge with ever increasing measure in your brothers and sisters all over the world, and it’s going to be spectacular! Spectacular. Again, the ramifications along the way, those are temporary setbacks. I have a wart on my caterpillar skin. I have a little cut from getting cut on a rock, or getting bit by a spider on my caterpillar skin. There is a butterfly inside of here! That’s only a temporary setback. To die on Mt. Nebo, so what? He didn’t die! He didn’t die!
