Goal Setting: The Key to Success - Part 2

Welcome to this weekend's In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley. Today's lesson teaches you how to shift focus from a self-centered attitude to a Christ-centered one. Here's part two of Goal Setting, The Key to Success. Do you really want God's very best for your life?

Are you willing to settle for just what you can do? Well, remember, if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting. And what you have to ask is this, do I really want the best that God could provide for my life? And remember that we have defined success as the continuing achievement of becoming the person God wants us to become and accomplishing those goals that God has helped us to set. If God desires that you succeed in life, and He has a plan for your life, and He has equipped you with the Holy Spirit to help you, given you spiritual gifts to equip you, given you the privilege of prayer to call upon Him, and given you, given to every single one of us an innate desire deep down inside to achieve and to accomplish. And you either follow that or you have to put that to death some fashion because God's put it in every single one of us. There is no way that you can live a life and waste time and resources and the very gift of life itself without sinning against God.

It ends up being sin. That doesn't mean that you have to set a goal equal to somebody else's in life. You don't have to be like anybody else in life. It's a matter of God, what do you want to do with my life? What is my potential? What's your plan for my life? What's your plan today? What's your plan three months from now? What's your plan 10 years from now? God, what's your goal?

How do you want? You see, we don't belong to ourselves. We read these scriptures and move right over them. He says you are not your own. You have been bought with a price, the blood of Jesus Christ. We are the blood bought possessions of Jesus Christ.

We don't belong to ourselves. We have a life to live, a life to invest, a life to count to the glory of God. If somebody says to me, Oh, what is your overriding goal apart from your personal relationship to Christ? Here's what I'd say. To get the gospel of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible, as clearly as possible, as quickly as possible, as irresistibly as possible to the glory of God.

Period. Now, so what does that, how does that motivate me? Here's what motivates me.

Motivates me to want to eat right, sleep right, have enough recreation, take care of my body, be as healthy as I possibly can. Why? Because the healthier I am, maybe, possibly, the longer I may be able to live and the more gospel I can preach. I'd rather preach it 40 years than to preach it 20 years.

Why? If it's a matter of me taking care of this body and doing simple right things, I'm going to do my best. I can die tomorrow, tonight, in the next five minutes. But God knows as best I know my heart and my life, I am motivated to be healthy. Not so that I'll just feel good in order that the gospel of Jesus Christ may be preached and taught from this place as long as possibly God will allow me to do it. So that's my motivation. My motivation.

My motivation isn't just want to be healthy so I can just run around saying feeling good and just spending my time wasting my time. I believe there's a sense of contentment. There's a sense of satisfaction. There's a sense of happiness, even in the process of pursuing goals that are life stretching kind of goals. And some of them are those kind of goals. Now, which leads me to the thing that I want to discuss here for a few moments.

And that's simply this. Why people fail to set goals. Why do people fail to set them?

Now, I'm going to ask you again. How many of you, really and truly, if you could set three goals in your life and know that you could not miss, you could not fail, what would they be? Well, why don't people set goals?

Number one, let's give it to some. They don't know how. They honestly don't know how to do it.

I understand that. Secondly, they're mentally lazy. Sometimes people just mentally lazy.

When you sit down and you begin to ask the Lord to show you how and what He would have you to do, how He would have you to go about it. And we're not thinking about just buying this and having that. But maybe achieving this and accomplishing that and maybe something that's going to take you several years to accomplish or to achieve. Most people, they don't want to take the time and the energy to think through. So one of the reasons is ignorance. A second reason is the fact that they are mentally lazy.

And a third, they lack the faith. Well, you know what, I don't think I could possibly do that. You know what, here's what I decided a long time ago. I'd rather try something and absolutely fail at it than to try nothing and totally succeed at it. And that's exactly what you have to do. Listen, it's better to try it and fail than to say, you know what, I just don't think I can do that. Let me ask you a question.

What can you do? What can you achieve if you let God have your full life? What could you achieve in life? Well, one of the reasons people do not set goals is because they don't have faith.

A fourth reason is because they're afraid. Yeah, well, you know what, I'd set some goals in my life, but you know what, I'm just afraid I'd fail. Well, you know what, so what? Listen, distinguish now between being a failure and failing at something. Distinguish between failure and defeat. I may be defeated in this particular game, but that doesn't mean I'm a failure. I may fail to reach that goal at that particular time, but you know what, I'm going to keep trying. I may fail to reach it on my schedule, but I'm not going to fail because I'm going to get there sooner or later.

When God allows defeat in the life of a believer, He's got something better in mind, I believe. Another reason I think is a lot of people don't think it's necessary. Well, you know, why set goals?

Well, I've given you a reason for that. And then some people are just short-sighted. Now, here's what they can do. They can plan today or tomorrow, next week or next month, but you get them past that. Unless it's, for example, they're going to buy a house out there somewhere or a car or something like that. But when it comes to many goals, they just don't want to think beyond today. They say, well, you know, the Bible says we never know what a day may bring. Well, thank God we don't, but you know what, there's a God who does. And the God who knows what tomorrow is all about is the God who's helping you set your goals. He's not going to help you set a goal for something He wants you to accomplish if He's going to wipe you out three weeks before you could have got it done. God's on our side. The Bible says, don't you know that God is for you?

When you're one of His children, He's for you. He's there to help you to achieve and to accomplish whatever it might be. With all that in mind, what areas of our life should we set goals in? Number one, spiritual goals. You say, what do you mean spiritual goals? Well, let me ask you, wouldn't you like to have a deeper relationship with God? I'm going to talk about goals in a few moments about being able to measure something. So hold on to that because you might think, well, how can you measure that?

You can. Let's talk about spiritual goals. Let's talk about, for example, your prayer life.

Let's talk about your Bible, your meditation, prayer time, how much time. Let's talk about maybe a goal to learn how to share the people with other people, what Jesus Christ means to you. Or maybe to start a Bible study in your home. Or to serve the Lord in the church.

Or to play in the orchestra. So short-range, long-range, immediate goals, whatever. Now, then for example, there are personal goals. Things that you want to accomplish and achieve for yourself. And then of course there are family goals for your family.

Educating your children, buying a home, whatever it might be. Lots of goals for your family. And then for example, your vocation. You want to be, maybe you want to be number one salesman in your vocation. Maybe your goal is a promotion. Maybe that's an immediate goal. So you've got goals about how you want to progress in that. Then there are goals, for example, in your social life. And you can just go on and on and on dividing up financial goals, for example. What's your financial goal? If your financial goal, my financial goal is to be rich.

Forget it. That is not a legitimate goal. All right, now.

How do we go about setting a goal? Now let me say this. You listen, say amen. You're not going to use all of these points for every single goal you're not going to. I understand that. Especially if it's an immediate goal for tomorrow, for example, every night before I go to bed or sometime during the evening, I make me a list of all the things that I think I need to do, want to do the next day. Do I get them all done? Oh, do I wish I did.

I know I don't. You know what I do the next day? I just, I've scratched off the ones I got done and I just add them to the next day. And so every day I have goals.

They're immediate goals. I don't have to go through this process every night. Oh, all right. Now let me think about this.

Let me, no. They're just natural numbers. But I'm talking about things that you want to accomplish and achieve that are bigger than just your ordinary, everyday affairs, though some of them are extremely important and need to be a definite goal. And you've set the goal, tomorrow I must do this.

And there are those that fit into that category. Well, let me just start. How do you set goals for your life? Well, number one, you ask God to guide you. God, guide me to set goals, or this goal, or whatever it might be, according to your purpose and plan for my life. Now, listen carefully. Don't underestimate what God wants to do for you.

Don't underestimate that. I'll give you an example. Back in the early seventies, very, very early seventies, I went to Stone Mountain, my travel trailer, sat through the whole week, had one thing in mind. At that point, God, what do you want to do with my life?

What kind of goals do you want to set for my life? Monday morning through Saturday afternoon, fasted to some time, spent time praying, writing them out, asking God to show me. I remember oftentimes I'd come up with something, I think, well, now that is one more egotistic. God said, write it down. I'd come up with something else, well, no way, write it down. So I came back home, I typed out every single one of them in complete sentences so that I'd know exactly not only what the goal was, what was I willing to do in order to reach that goal.

Well, you know what? Everything that I thought was an impossibility and far beyond my reach, every single one of those, with a few exceptions, I saw, I have seen the Lord in these years accomplish every single one of those goals. I would never take any credit because He knows that when I wrote some of them down, I thought, Lord, there is no way, but I feel You said write it down, I'm writing it down. If you write down a goal and it's not of God, it won't take you long. You'll pray about it and you know what? You get this real empty feeling inside. That's God's way of saying scratch that one.

That wasn't of me. We're going to all make those mistakes. I mean, nobody's going to list all perfectly. Here are God's infallible goals for my life.

No, because we're going to make mistakes at the time. And you know what? He'll scratch those.

He's not disappointed. He knows, listen, we still got enough naturalists in us that we're going to set out something that's not necessarily of Him. All right, number one. First thing you want to do, number one, is to ask God to guide you. Number two, you want to determine exactly what you want.

Now watch this carefully. Listen, you don't want it to be fuzzy. Get these three things, three words down.

Fuzzy, unreasonable, unmeasurable. So determine exactly what it is that you believe God would have you set as a goal. Thirdly, you've got to write it out. If you say, well, I got it in my mind, forget it.

Because that's what you'll do. You've got to write it out. And this is where you should write it out. My goal is to finish college in four years.

My goal is to finish this seminary course in three years instead of four. Or my goal is to save this much money in order to put down on the house or whatever the goal may be. You've got to write. If you don't write it out, it's not going to work. There's something about writing it down. Just say, for example, you say, well, you're a lady and you want to redecorate your house.

You've just been living in the same furniture, the same place, hadn't moved that stuff in five years. And you want to redecorate your house. How would you set that as a goal? My goal is to redecorate this house in a way that would be pleasing to God and to my family. And I'm going to talk about the and in a moment, but that's something very specific.

All right. Not only do you want to write it out, but you want to ask this question. Does this goal fit God's purpose and plan for my life?

Somebody says, well, now, wait a minute. If my goal is travel and I want to go, for example, I want to go to Switzerland, see the Alps. I want to go to Australia.

I want to go. How can God be in that? Well, why don't you give Him a try? Here's what I've discovered that oftentimes I will set a goal for something. And this is my purpose. And what happens when I reach that goal, I discover that certainly God helped me.

But you know what? His purpose for getting me there and my purpose for getting me there weren't the same at all. And I found that His purpose was a whole lot more important than mine.

So don't underestimate just because you have a for example, you say, well, I'm just going over there. You may get over there and you say, well, I don't know whether God sent me or not. You get over there and God gets you on a conviction. Next thing you know, you come home and you're going back as a missionary. Did God have anything to do with that?

Yes, He did. Don't underestimate God's ways and what He wants to do in your life. So one of those steps is the question, God, how does this fit your plan for my life?

Now, listen to this next one. And this won't always be true. I understand that, but write that in a way. Set a goal so high if God doesn't help you, you're going to fail. Set it so high that you know that if God doesn't help you do it, there's no way to do it.

We grow by being stretched, pulled, challenged, our gifts, our talents, our abilities, things that you never thought you had. They're there because God isn't going to give you a goal and not equip you to accomplish it or give you the resources to do it. So set a goal oftentimes.

Now, that doesn't mean every time and every goal, but some of them, high enough that if He doesn't help you do it, it won't get done. And then here's another big problem people have. You've got to set a date by it. If you don't put a date by it, you won't get there. Remember what we said, it can't be fuzzy, can't be totally off the wall, and it can't be what?

Immeasurable. If I set a goal, I need to put a date down by it because how am I going to measure my progress? If I said it's going to take me six months, I want to get this done in six months and three months go by, and I haven't even got started, then that should tell me I'm not committed to that.

If I were committed, I'd have gotten started that day. And so you want to put a date down by it. You say, well, I put a date down by a few of my goals and it didn't come out that way. Well, you know what?

So am I. We all sometimes are going to be more optimistic than we realize. And so we set goals and they don't come out. But you know what?

Let me ask you a question. If you set a goal and your date doesn't come up just right, does that mean you throw up your hand and say, I quit, I was defeated? No, it doesn't mean that.

It simply means that in our humanness, we could not predict all the circumstances involved in causing some bit of delay. And so what happens? You keep moving on. Most people don't reach their goals just on the exact minute. This is the day and this is the day I got it. So what?

You know what? Your goals should be so important in your life that whether you reach them beforehand, because I've reached a lot of mountains before the time, and some after the time, it doesn't make a difference as long as you reach it, as long as you achieve it. A few days, a few months, or even what?

A year or so doesn't make a difference as long as you get what you believe God set out for you to have or to accomplish in your life. You've got to have a date. And then this is the last one that I'll mention, and that is you've got to make a commitment. If you say, now here's what I desire, forget it.

Here's what I've always dreamed of, forget it. Unless you put it into a specific goal, unless you make a commitment, I'm going to work at this, I'm going to do whatever's necessary because I believe this is what God would have me to do or to accomplish. And listen, when you get committed, something's going to happen.

Now, I want to ask you a question. If you knew you couldn't fail and you could set three goals for your life, what would they be? Do you want God's best for your life or you just want to get what mediocrity will give? Spiritually, are you in a condition that you can ask God to help you achieve the goals that you want to set for your life? And if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. Are you willing to change what you're doing so you can get something you have not been able to get? Achieve something you've never been able to achieve.

Become something you have not yet become. God is on your side as one of his children if you've trusted Jesus Christ as your savior. He's on your side to help you, enable you, strengthen you, encourage you, motivate you in every possible way. Provide every resource necessary to accomplish those things he's called you to accomplish. It all begins with a personal relationship with his son, Jesus Christ, whose death at the cross atoned, paid for it, your debt, sin, debt in full in his death, making it possible for you to confess your sins, ask him to forgive you of your sins, receive him personally as your savior. And in that moment, you become a child of God and all, listen, all that God has promised to his children becomes yours for the asking.

And God will begin to work in your life in the most incredible fashion. Thank you for listening to part two of Goal Setting the Key to Success. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.