Before Time Began // Discover Your Destiny, Part 2

Most of us have a sense of destiny – something that we're supposed to fulfil in our lives. But if I'm going to be the me I was meant to be, if you're going to be the you that you were meant to be, then we have to know who we were meant to be in the first place. If you want to ask yourself the question, am I being the "me" I was meant to be, am I really fulfilling the destiny for my life, how would you answer? On a scale of one to ten how would you rate your life against that question? Well the problem is so many people can't answer it because they don't know who they were meant to be in the first place or where they're meant to be headed. All they sometimes have is a nagging suspicion inside, a bit of an unsettling feeling that the answer is more a "no" than a "yes", more a one or two than an eight or nine out of ten. Am I being the "me" I was meant to be? Am I really fulfilling the destiny of my life? See they're really good questions. I don't know how to talk about this except at least in part from my own experience because discovering your destiny is a profound issue of life. I'd like to share with you today part of my journey and something that began to answer those questions for me. By global standards I was blessed, I grew up in a wealthy household, we had plenty of food, a roof over our head, I had a good education and one of my physical attributes, as well as being short, as well as having some grey hair, as well as being short sighted in one eye and long sighted in the other eye, is that I have a high IQ. So I did really well at school and I had the choice of doing anything that I wanted to do, medicine or law. Back then I was interested in these emerging things that they called computers. So I left high school and I went to the Royal Military college Duntroon, the officer-training academy for our army, a bit like England's Sandhurst or the USA's WestPoint. Now I graduated with an IT degree and spent ten years in the military and after that had well paying jobs and I owned a consulting firm for seventeen years in the IT industry and I travelled around and spoke at international conferences and lived the high life. I basically had it handed to me on a silver platter. Okay it had its ups and downs, I had to work hard, I had to strive for things but by any standard I had it pretty good and I kind of enjoyed that stuff but all along I found that nothing ever really satisfied me. I was so concerned about being the best, I was so concerned about what other people thought of me that I couldn't enjoy my life, I couldn't relax. I was successful on the outside but inside I had a deep sense of inadequacy and failure and the feeling of being a fraud and that's how I lived my life, day by day for many years and believe you me it's not a lot of fun. Why is that? What's going on? I had this emerging sense that I wasn't being the me I was meant to be and that there was some destiny for my life that I hadn't yet stumbled across. Despite all the good things that were happening in my life I had this sort of vague distant belief in God I guess but even in my late thirties when I gave my life over to Him, when I became a Christian, there was still something, well it wasn't quite right. I look back on it now and I know there was something missing, things I didn't really understand. For me the starting point of being the 'me' I was meant to be was knowing where I'd come from and who I'm meant to be. So, so many people in the midst of their lives aren't really comfortable with who they are or where their life's going and so you don't have a real sense of security, you're more like a cork bobbing around in the stormy ocean. We're going to explore that today through Psalm 139 from the Old Testament of the Bible. I come back to it again and again and again in my own life because it reminds me of exactly who I am. What I love about this Psalm is that the writer starts in the middle of the dilemmas of life and works his way back to God to discover who he is and ultimately he comes to this point. Have a listen: God you created me in my inner most being. It was you that knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful; I know that full well because my frame wasn't hidden from you when I was being made in that secret place. When I was being woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed substance and all the days ordained for me were written down in your book of life before even one of them came into being. How precious to me are your thoughts O God, how vast is the sum of them. Were I to count them they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake I'm still with you. There's something that really strikes me in there and this is one of those passages in the Bible that is beautiful and wondrous to me and as I said I keep coming back to it again and again. It's like my passport; it tells me who I am. We all started life in our ...