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We are tackling a big topic today that will help to set the tone for what you want to achieve this year. We know that the world says we should set goals, but what does the Bible say? In today’s podcast, we are talking about a biblical perspective on goal setting by looking at some bible verses on goals. This is part of our series on goal setting and planning. You can find the previous post in this series here.

S1E40 – What is Theology Proper?: 3 Questions to Help You Know God Better – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

We have to start our study of theology by looking at Theology Proper. This is the study of who God is, what God is like, and what God’s nature is. As we look at theology proper, we are focusing primarily on how knowing God more leads to (1) worship and (2) a deeper love. Our study of God should inspire us to know and love God more and more. This podcast will dive into 3 questions that will help you to know God better to start your study of Theology Proper. The Deuteronomy 34 passage is actually EXODUS* 34:5-7. Sorry! View the full post here. Get the Doctrine and Theology Cheat Sheet Here. Get a list of the names of God here. Get a copy of our personal statement of faith creation guide here. Get “Building Our Foundations: 10 Week Study” here. . Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: Read the full post here. I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

A Biblical Perspective on Goal Setting

Hey everyone! This is Season 1 Episode 20 of A More Beautiful Life Podcast. As you can tell if you’re watching on YouTube, we have video now on the podcast! If you are listening to this as an audio podcast, nothing will change. There will still be an audio version each week, but we are introducing this as a video podcast to keep improving. If you are enjoying this podcast, be sure to like and subscribe. You can also leave a rating and review to help others find the show. We also have opened up A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. This shop has digital PDF resources to help you create a life you love and cultivate your heart for God. In the upcoming year, we have a lot of plans to grow the shop and add more resources, and I will let you know about those as they are added. You can learn about this and more by visiting the blog at amorebeautifullifecollective.com.

I hope everyone had a wonderful few weeks celebrating the holidays. I definitely feel like we celebrated Christmas well this year. We did so many of the Christmas traditions that I know and love during the Advent season leading up to Christmas, and then, after Christmas, we had a lot of time celebrating with family and friends who were visiting.

One of my favorite quotes growing up was this saying by Henry David Thoreau, “I want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life.” This has become an anthem for my life over time. What does it mean to live deep? I think culture tells us living deep is living a wealthy life with many luxuries, and though you may have to be rich to afford that life, I don’t think that is what it means to live richly. The holidays give us a picture of living deep, a glimpse of celebration and feasting. But, we recognize that too much time eating, drinking, and being merry can lead to an intense laissez-faire, lethargic way of living. I’ve often found that whatever we are currently doing, we desire to do more of. So, if we live in a slothful, lazy way, that’s how we want to continue to live.

Celebrations with a selfless purpose are good. It can teach the stories of our history and rehearse deep truths about God.

But, when we just celebrate because of the feeling that it gives us, we are pursuing an idol. And, we grow fat off of our excess.

We may feel the tension of this now, as we come off a weeks (or months long) celebration of holidays – Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter come back to back, and schedules are thrown off, boundaries loosened, priorities shifted in order to celebrate these days well.

However, January puts us back into our ordinary schedules, where we look forward to the Year ahead and dream of how we want to spend our days and steward them well.

***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***

**2 Bible Verses on Goals and why you shouldn’t make them.**

In the last episode, we talked about casting a vision for the year ahead with our theme of the year.

As I finished recording that episode, I started to think about some contradictions people could make about it. Primarily this question: Does God want us to make goals for our lives?

Now, for some of you, this could seem like a silly question. But, I am going to share with you some verses that may seem like goal setting is foolish and maybe even wrong to do. These bible verses on goals show us how not to set goals in our lives.

James 4:13-15 says, 13 Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” 14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

Luke 12:16-21 contains a parable that describes a man who continues to build bigger barns because he has much wealth and wants to store it to live the rest of his life partying. But, his life was demanded of him that night.

In both of these bible verses on goals, there is a sense of people making plans without God. If they do this, they end up being led astray. The sin that tempts them is twofold: there is the sin of excess, pursuit of wealth, and greed. And, there is the sin of pride – that I have all of these things because of my own greatness.

If goal-setting is just based on what you have accomplished, what you are amassing, and what you care about, I think you can fall into this trap as well. And take care, because God may say to you, “You Fool, your life will be demanded of you tonight.”

So, what does this mean? Is planning wrong? Are we not supposed to set goals and a vision for our lives?

Well, no. I think that we should. In fact, I think we are commanded to plan and set goals. But, it looks a little different than the picture painted in these stories. In these stories, there is a focus on the self, without considering God (or other people). It is all about accomplishing things for their own benefit so that they will ‘have a good life’ by their standards.

Bible Verses on Goals

The following bible verses on goals help to show us the way that we should plan. These bible verses on goals help us to make goals wisely and to make goals that glorify God.

Proverbs 16:3 – Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.
Psalms 20:4 – May He grant you your heart’s desire and fulfill all your plans!
Luke 14:28-30 – For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’
Proverbs 16:9 – In their hearts, humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.
Psalm 90:12 – Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

That last verse is one of my favorites. The Psalm was written by Moses, and it reminds us of the fleeting nature of life. When we consider our plans, we have to understand them within the context of the brevity of life. There is a pattern in these bible verses on goals that stresses the tension between being wise in planning our days while not being foolish in thinking that we are in control of our lives. We trust God with our lives and try to work heartily for him now.

Numbering Our Days Well: What these Bible Verses on Goals can Teach Us

Why does the fleeting, short nature of life lead to more wisdom? It’s because we recognize that time is something that we spend. It is a currency. A resource. It is not abundant. If we don’t have this view, we treat time like it is a renewable resource. We think we will get do-overs and infinite chances. But, this is the mentality of youth. It seems like we have an infinite amount of time when we are young. Before we know it, though we are married with two kids. Or your kids are graduating and leaving the house. Or your kids have kids of their own. And, you never get back those high school and college days. You never get back those sweet baby days. You can only live the next days better.

Years ago, I read a book called The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them by Meg Jay. In this book, the author goes against the common idea that your thirties are your new twenties which is commonly expressed in culture. In modern times people are postponing getting married, getting the job that would be their career, and having kids. Instead, they use their twenties to just ‘hang out.’ It seems like by spending their days eating, drinking, and being married, they would be making the most of their twenties. That they would be living deep. But, we recognize that this is not often the case. Meg Jay describes that many of the people came out of their late twenties feeling like they wasted those years instead of living them well. Their resumes were empty, they had no long-term meaningful relationships, and their main life goals were put on hold or left behind.

A foolish heart says that you can put off for tomorrow what you should do today because there is always more time.

A wise heart says that our days are numbered, so we must live them well. We must live them with intention.

When we talk about making plans and goals, we recognize that we walk this balanced path between living with intention and living with pride and selfish desire. We should always keep in mind the caution from Proverbs 23:4, “Do not wear yourself out to get rich, do not trust your own cleverness.” Based on one of these bible verses on goals, We don’t want to be prideful or greedy with our days. And, we don’t want to be foolish either.

So, we must make plans to live our days well. But, crucially our plans must be about God’s work. Our goals are not how we can build bigger barns. Our goals should be about how we can be the hands and feet of God now. By reading through these bible verses on goals, we recognize that we have to use wisdom and discernment to live our lives well.

When we live with intention, we can accomplish great things for God. We can grow God’s kingdom. That is why we must work, plan, and aim to grow.

Do our works save us?

So, yes. I believe planning is biblical, and honestly commanded.

But, then the next question becomes what do we do next? How do we actually accomplish our plans?

A short answer could be “through faith and the grace of God.”

James talks about the tension between faith and works. We recognize that we are not saved through anything that we do (which I talked about in Season 1 Episode 18 of the podcast). We are saved through the work that has already been done on the cross. Because of this, we can have a relationship with God and we are released from the bondage of sin. But, we are also saved into a new work. This is the work of seeking the kingdom of God today.

This means that we must actually do something. We have to work at something. In fact, we are created to work. Work was not a function of the curse. It was something established in the Garden of Eden.

To accomplish things, we must work at it. We devise plans and then we must act on the plans we devise.

Goal Setting Requires Intentionality

No matter what stage of life you are in, goal setting is something that you should regularly do. It helps you to live your life wisely because goal setting requires the intentionality needed to ‘number your days.’ If you work full-time, you may feel like you have no time to set goals or accomplish them. You are barely getting the things done that you need to survive, much less reach those big goals you’ve always been dreaming about. But, that is exactly why you need to set goals. Goal setting in that instance will help you to steward those few hours you have of alone time away from work and family pressures to move your life forward instead of just “veg-“ing out.

If you are self-employed, a Stay at stay-at-home mom, or retired, you may not feel that you are ‘time-poor’ but you may still feel like your life is stagnating. I think this is because you have the luxury of large amounts of unstructured time. With all that time, you find ways to fill it, some good and some bad. But, those ways of filling the time become the pattern of the rest of your life. You may keep putting off those big goals while going through the rhythms of your day-to-day life. In both cases, goal setting will force you to restructure how you spend your days in order to get more things done than you need to.

You don’t want your whole life to be dictated by other people, but really that will happen if you don’t set up goals for yourself. Bosses and other leaders will take as much as you give them, but for most people – especially in the case of careers that you have – they don’t have “to further the kingdom” as their driving focus. If that is your main priority, you need to make sure that you are establishing goals for yourself that do this because no one else is going to do that for you.

If you’ve ever felt a little lost, listless, or rudderless, think about the goals that you can accomplish for God. Imagine what you can do with your life to glorify him. Study the Bible and read bible verses on goals. In this way, you can grow the kingdom of God and live a life that you love. A life worthy of the gospel of Christ.

What are some of the dreams that you have? What do you think the Bible says about goals and dreams? How has reading the bible verses on goals changed your perspective on goal setting? You can comment below or email me and let me know what you think. Next week, we are going to think more deeply about what exactly I mean by dreams and big goals so I hope that you join us. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a rating and review to help others find the show. You can also find more encouragement and helpful content on the blog at amorebeautifullifecollective.com

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