What is your destiny? What will be your legacy?

Those aren’t fringe issues; they – together – create the framework for your life, for both today and tomorrow. How defined are those pursuits?

Ask “the Google.” The available connections that emanate from those two signposts are significant: Destiny: 421 million hits; Legacy: 1.38 billion hits. Why? What do they represent?

Destiny: Scripture teaches that we are created with the ability to make moral choices and that we are responsible for those choices. Therefore, our destiny depends upon whether we live in harmony with God, following His moral teachings. Our destiny represents the mysterious collaboration between the potential granted to us by God and the responsibility that is ours to live in a manner that unleashes – without restraint – that God-sourced Calling.

Legacy: formally, it refers to money or property given to another by will; something handed down from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past. In a more ideological context, it’s anything of lasting value that survives one’s departure from this earthly existence.

Like a craving woven into one’s biology, fueling appetites and actions that don’t have evident, conscious drivers, Destiny resides in the higher reaches of Maslow’s Hierarchy pyramid, in the penthouse called “self-actualization.” Without a personal connection with the Creator – on his terms, through a relationship with his Son, the Lord Jesus – climbing through Maslow’s levels of physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging and self-esteem will be wasted effort. The ultimate objective – to find one’s place in the flow of history, in the grand creation – is impossible.

The opportunity to help Christians who are leaders to clarify the uniqueness of their divine Destiny was the ultimate objective that launched The Master’s Program, 23 years ago. After two decades of individual discovery and engagement, the community that has grown around the TMP movement has sensed the next, reasonable pursuit on their lifetime horizon: it’s Legacy.

God has always promoted a strategic agenda that stretched beyond the horizon of mortal life expectancy. In Moses’ time – around 1200 BC – God promised that current obedience would pay far-reaching dividends: “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. But those who hate him he will repay to their face by destruction; he will not be slow to repay to their face those who hate him. (Deuteronomy 7:9-10).”

When David extolled God’s eternal existence and his reliability for people who have chosen to relate to him, on his terms, this reminder was offered: “He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all the earth. He remembers his covenant forever, the promise he made, for a thousand generations. (Psalm 105:7-8).”

American culture is in a values free-fall. Younger adults (the children of Baby Boomers) are confirming a steep decline in interest and commitment to religion, to American patriotism, and to having children. Rejection of the historic foundations that are linked to a biblical worldview is evidence of a significant shift – an inflection point – for American society, into the future.

The road ahead – for America – is darkening: “Those who hate him he will repay to their face by destruction…” Has that payback begun?

Thank God for the outstanding alternative: “…if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 25:15).   Joshua said it; I echo it: my Legacy – to 1000 generations – is that.

Bob Shank