The reason you need to set goals if you are a Christian

Welcome to episode 229, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 229. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I am going to continue on talking about setting goals. We're going to goal setting for the next few weeks in the next few episodes. And I want to start by talking about Habakkuk. And that's one of the— and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's the Old Testament. It's a minor prophet. It's something that you're probably familiar with if you've ever done a scriptural or biblical goal setting. Habakkuk 2:1 I will stand my watch, and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer when I am corrected. 2 Then the LORD answered me and said, Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. 3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry. Behold the proud, his soul is not upright in him, but the just shall live by his faith. Now, if you've ever sat under a sermon about goal setting, about the vision, it seems like it always comes up. I know I paint with a big broad brush when I say always comes up, but it, it is talking about writing down on tablets the vision, and I believe a goal for it to be a true goal, it needs to be written down. With technology the way it is, you might can put it in a spreadsheet or a Google or Word doc, but I like good old-fashioned paper and pen, and I write my goals down. And I'm not here to talk to you about writing your goals down. I'm trying to set the stage for what the Bible has to say and what I found in Ezekiel's wheel, in the middle of the wheel, but I've got to at least get us on the same page for why we're even doing a goal. The Bible also says in Proverbs 29:18, "Where there is no vision, the people perish, but he who keeps the law, happy is he." And the word vision in this case isn't just limited to the goals and dreams that God gives you. It's specifically referring to the godly revelation of right and wrong. And that's another reason, reason number 117, why you need to be in the word of God, because you have to have a godly understanding of what right and wrong is. And you get that, strangely enough, by reading the Word of God. In this same verse, the American Standard Version translates it, "The people cast off restraint," or lawlessness. And it's speaking of living lawlessly. And it's exactly, I think, where a lot of people are living today. We are in the midst of a lawless society. Well, I really didn't want to go off on that tangent, but what I wanted to do is take a picture in your mind of the vision. If you don't have something pictured, if you don't have a vision for where your life is going and you don't have it written down, you're never going to reach it. You're never going to hit it. Zig Ziglar, who, if you've ever had any kind of business motivation, if you've ever been in sales and you're close to my age, you're around 50 or 45, 50, you have had to have at least heard of Zig Ziglar. And if not, I wish you would have seen him. And I would go check out some videos and watch old Zig get after it. He was awesome. When he taught goals, he talked about a wheel of life, and it's kind of where I got motivated. I guess it was my training with Zig Ziglar and his company with the wheel of life, and then with the wheel in the middle of the wheel. So I wanted to give him credit for this, and it's a great picture, and it's a great goal-setting tool, but I think that we just need to tweak that wheel, just one little simple tweak, and we're going to get into that in the next episode. I'm going to link in the show notes to— Zig Ziglar has passed away, but his family is still running his business. I think his son is in charge of the Ziglar Corporation. It's a great organization, but he has got a wheel, and if you can picture 7 different spokes, and each spoke, it stands or represents a different area of your life. One of them is career, one is social, one is financial, one is family, one is physical, one is mental, and one is spiritual. And the way he's got this picture is each one of these spokes has 10 different settings or 10 different levels. What he talked about is it's better to have a balanced life and have all of your different areas, all 7 of these areas at a level 4, you're gonna have a lot smoother ride in life than having your spiritual at an 8, your career at a 4, your social at a 10, your finance at a 5, your family at a 2. As this wheel goes around in your life and the wheel spinning, and the wheel turning is a picture of you going through life And as this wheel turns, as you get to different areas of your life, it's kind of hard to talk about, but if you can picture these different areas and each spoke has different heights, if this wheel isn't circular and one's an 8 and one's a 2 and one's a 3, then it kind of clumps as you go through life and it's very awkward, it's very uncomfortable, and it's a very good way to picture it. And I think that I'm just going to tweak one little spot on Zig's Wheel of Life, I'm going to use the wheel as, as we picture goal setting, but the wheel in the middle of the wheel, the way Zig has got it, 7 different areas in life all attached to the center. And I believe the wheel that's in the middle of the wheel, he's got your spirit life just as important as your physical life and as your social life, and it with this on the same level. And I don't believe that's the case. And I think that's why a lot of people in the church get kind of messed up and they get kind of off-centered, is because we don't give God's word, we don't give hanging out with God's people, we don't give acts of service, we don't give praise and worship. We give it the same kind of tick the box value as we do our social media posts or hanging out with friends or our career choice, business, our finance, whether we've got debt, whether we got money in the bank. When we start leveling out our wheel, I believe this is what God is showing me or has showed me, and I have been working on this for the past 6 months, but it's this wheel in the middle of a wheel. The wheel that's in the middle of the wheel, the outside is your life. And if you kind of want to get a picture of spirit, soul, and body, you know, we are 3 parts, spirit, soul, and body. And our spirit man is that wheel in the middle, and our flesh is on the outside, and the spokes represent our mind, will, and emotion. And it could also represent the different areas of our life, and we're going to touch on that in the next week. But I just want you to kind of picture that you've got two separate wheels going on with spokes coming out. The thing that's attached to these spokes, that is your spirit man. I think that is the most important thing in your life. You hear people say it all the time, but I don't know that anyone's ever pictured it where God is first, then my family's second, and I am third. I believe putting God first, you need to do it as a practical application, not as words. We need to figure out how to picture this, then we need to figure out how to fulfill what we've done, how to apply this to your life. What does this mean? It has very little to do with writing it on a piece of paper. I put it on a piece of paper so I can see it. And then we gotta go to Ezekiel's wheel. We really gotta read Ezekiel 1, which I'm not gonna do that. Y'all can settle down. I'm not gonna read Ezekiel 1 to you on this podcast, but we need to read Ezekiel 1. That can be your homework. And again, I don't know that I can give homework on a podcast. Go to Ezekiel, read the first chapter, and where it's talking about it introduced the four living creatures and the wheel in the middle of the wheel, and just kinda ask the Holy Spirit what he's saying to you. And we're going to dig into this in the next episode, but I want to— I just want to set the stage. We're going to talk about setting goals in the next few episodes, and we're going to talk about why it's important to have the center of your life, your spirit man, the Word of God. The spiritual needs to be your anchor, and it needs to be the center of your life, and everything from that needs to go out from the center. I'm probably going to have a picture of this wheel, Zig's wheel, on my website if you want to take a look at it, and then we'll have it a link to the Ziegler page so that he gets proper credit. But I'm going to tweak that in upcoming episodes so that you'll have something to look forward to. But anyway, let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for this listener. I thank you for what you're doing in my life. And what you're doing in my family's life. And I pray in Jesus' name that you would continue to lead and guide and direct this listener, lead and guide and direct me. Lord, we thank you. We pray for our country. We pray for our leaders. And God, we pray for you. Whenever it is time to come back, we pray that it will be quickly. God, we thank you. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.