davidbowerkingwood

God’s Plan for Your Life

In my correspondence with other Christians I get many expressions of concern about the nature of God’s plans for individual lives. While only God knows the details of His plans for each of us; a general overview is revealed in the Bible that can serve as a guide to the direction God is taking in our lives as Christian men and women.

One thing we can know with complete confidence is God does have a plan for us and we are, in fact, a work in progress being conformed to the image of His Son. When Christians are born again they are made into a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come. While this is true of their spiritual nature their bodies are not included and remain under the curse of the fall of Adam.

You may recall the unique nature of the creation of Adam, while his body was fashioned from the dust of the earth; his living essence was breathed into him by the breath of God. All else was spoken into existence but man was breathed into existence directly from God; we are animated by a part of the eternal essence of God and share God’s immortality. I have written more on that in Let’s Face it, you’re Eternal!

This beginning is described in greater detail in a series which starts with, The Creation Story. Adam’s opportunity resulted in failure; Adam disobeyed a direct command from God and immediately died spiritually and later died  physically.

God would try again with a Second Adam from above, the Lord Jesus Christ; this time the divine essence would be the personal essence of the Son of God joined with an earthly body from the dust of the earth.

God was Leaving Nothing to Chance the Second Time

There is a great deal of recognition given to the First Advent of God the Son; the virgin birth, Christmas, the Star, the shepherds, the wise men, Bethlehem are all part of the traditions of the First Advent. This is surely appropriate as the birth of the Son as the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, is without a doubt the most important event in human history!

This birth alone made possible the death on the cross which paid the penalty for all human sin; it is because of the death of our Lord that all else becomes possible. We owe everything, all that follows, to this historic event.

In His matchless grace, God the Father did not stop with the incarnation of His Son but determined the Holy Spirit would also become incarnate in a specific group of believers who would become the body of Christ, the church. The Holy Spirit would indwell all those who were born again between two points in time, one past, Pentecost AD 33, and one future, the Rapture of the Church.

This is an enormous change that has taken place yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves; the Holy Spirit has become or will become incarnate in every person who is born again during the Church Age. In addition the presence of the Holy Spirit will always be with each individual who is joined to the body of Christ during this period of time.

The words of Paul are significantly true in the life of every Christian when he writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

“¹⁷ This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”

Next time, your process of conformation and your new life as a temple of God.