Audio Transcript
Happy New Year’s Day, 2026! And that means we launch this podcast into year number fourteen. What an amazing ride — all made possible by the grace of God and by your involvement in listening, sending us your questions, praying for us, and financially supporting us over all these years. Thank you, each of you, for your role in making it all happen.
Well, I bet you would agree that making a personal mission statement can bring focus to your life in 2026. But where do you begin? That’s today. But before we get there, I hope one of your priorities in 2026 includes the commitment to read the whole Bible with us. If so, you might already have a fresh, blank Bible reading slate ready to go. I have a new one on my desk right now that I just printed out — 1,200 empty boxes to check off this year. Four readings per day. Three hundred days of readings with breaks at the end of each month. Ten to fifteen minutes of reading per day.
Pastor John and I will again be using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan in 2026, the same plan we used last year, and plan to address your questions about key texts along the way. So, this is our invitation to you to read the entire Bible with us. For some, this will be your first attempt. Welcome along! If not, welcome back! You can find the Navigators Bible Reading Plan online by searching for it. Print the PDF and join in with us today in reading Genesis 1 and 2, Psalm 1, and from Matthew 1 and Acts 1.
So, last time, in episode 2215, Pastor John gave us a broad defense and explanation of resolve as a general Christian practice. He addressed cultural views of resolutions, reframing them biblically, and urged us against “irresolute hearts,” and encouraged in us constant, faith-filled commitment of resolution, calling us to make resolutions continually.
Today, we focus on creating a personal mission statement or life plan, because God is a planner. So, we should plan — and to do that planning, we need to discern God’s ultimate purpose in the universe first. We get into all of this from this question from a listener named Paul: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast! In past episodes, you mentioned the importance of writing out a personal mission statement for our lives with the aim of enhancing personal productivity. I agree completely. And I find this task entirely daunting.
“So, how do I, as an average Christian layperson, go about coming up with a personal mission statement? Should we be strengths/talents-oriented about it? Focus on roles? Should we mostly focus on spiritual needs in the church, both locally and globally? And how do we avoid letting this statement grow so broad that we get overwhelmed to the point that such a statement does nothing to actually help us focus our energies? Any help would be appreciated.”
God the Planner
When I read the Bible, I cannot escape the relentless teaching that God has purposes. He has goals in everything he does. He’s not a God who is coasting aimlessly. He’s not going in circles. The God of the Bible is pervasively pursuing accomplishments of his own counsel.
- “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring . . . ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isaiah 46:9–10).
- “As I have planned, so shall it be, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand” (Isaiah 14:24).
- “I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass” (Isaiah 37:26).
I don’t think there would be any gospel, any salvation, any eternal joy if God were not a planner — one who lived with purposes and goals. Acts 4:27–28 says that all the enemies of God were gathered together in Jerusalem at the crucifixion of Jesus “to do whatever your hand [O God] and your plan had predestined to take place.”
Joining the Ultimate Goal
Now, when I step back from that vision of the planning, purposing God, the effect it has on me is to stir up really serious questions, like, “Well, what is God’s ultimate goal then?” I’m sure he has millions of sub-goals and sub-purposes in everything he does. I like to say God is doing ten thousand things we don’t know anything about. Most of those goals and purposes are hidden from us. But what has he revealed as his main or his ultimate purpose? Where’s everything going? That’s the question that has burned in me ever since I was 22 years old and became a lover of the all-ordaining, all-planning God.
And then the next question becomes — if I could discern what his ultimate goal was — “How can I join him in it?” I want to fit into his ultimate purpose. I don’t want to strive against it — I want to be right in sync with what God is pursuing in the world. Nothing seems more obviously reasonable to me, or hopeful to me, than that God’s creatures should gladly fit into his purposes. So, surely that’s his call on us; that’s what he’s beckoning us to do: “Find my purpose; join me in it.” That’s my second question, then: Is there a way I can join the purpose of God once I have found out what his ultimate purpose is?
“The God of the Bible is pervasively pursuing accomplishments of his own counsel.”
And then the question becomes, “How do I do everything I am doing so that I help that ultimate goal come about, or so that I can be used by God to make it come about?” I want everything — not just a few things, but everything — I do to somehow contribute to that purpose.
So, that’s why mission statements seem helpful to me. They keep me focused on the great things of life.
Big Enough to Last
But let me caution us here — I think the particularities of life are too variable for our mission statement to be very detailed. I know our friend asked that it not be too general, and yet I might disappoint him because I find big, general purposes really helpful if they’re the right kind.
So, the more particularities about yourself and your circumstances that you include, the more short-term your statement is going to be. Because so much changes, right? You change, your job changes, you have kids, you get sick, you move. Oh my goodness, life is just so variable that if you make your mission statement to include things about yourself — things about your circumstances that are going to change relatively quickly — then you’re going to have to be changing your mission statement all the time. And that’s probably not very helpful.
If you want your mission statement to last more than a few years, it will need to be high-level and general. And that’s mainly what I have in mind when I think of my own statements that guide my life. I need to be reminded regularly about the big picture of life. What’s everything about? What goals can I have that are in sync with God’s goals and are so clearly biblical that they don’t change?
Seen, Savored, Shown
Let me give you a whirlwind process of arriving at such a statement, and then you can adapt it to your situation. In those crucial years of discovery for me — life-changing years, 22 to 25 — what I saw and could not deny, and have never changed my mind on since, was that God was infinitely full of every perfection, and he could not be improved, and he was the sum of all excellence — all beauty, all worth, all greatness — so that his purpose never included people counseling him, or adding to him, or improving him, or providing for his needs (since he doesn’t have any).
Rather, what I saw was that God was the kind of God whose ultimate aim was that his fullness — his completeness, his perfection — would overflow with the communication of all his satisfying greatness and beauty and worth and excellence to me. In other words, God’s ultimate purpose is to be seen and savored and shown — those are my three favorite words for describing it — as infinitely glorious. That’s his ultimate purpose.
This is not megalomania, by the way, because the communication of himself in all his glory is what the human soul was made to be satisfied by. So, God is the one being in all the universe — and he’s the only one — for whom self-communication and self-exaltation is the highest virtue and the most loving act: “Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:6–7).
And so, the very first thing that he teaches us to pray, over and over, is “Hallowed be your name” — that is, glorified, treasured, loved, honored, praised, admired, and enjoyed: “Hallowed be your name” (Matthew 6:9). That’s the first and foremost cry of every saint every day: “Make me a means, God, please make me a means of the communication and the display of your beauty and your worth and your greatness.” That is, may others hallow your name because I exist. That’s why we come into being. That’s the essence of every biblical personal mission statement, I think, if it ties into God’s ultimate purpose. So, that’s where I start.
Aiding in Accomplishment
And then the question becomes, “How?” That is, “How can I live that way? How can I join in that accomplishment of that purpose?” And the Bible just seems to offer countless answers:
- “Whether you eat or drink . . . do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
- Give thanks to the glory of God (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
- Confess Jesus to the glory of God (Romans 10:9).
- Do good deeds that God may be glorified (Matthew 5:16).
- Welcome one another to the glory of God (Romans 15:7).
- Be generous to the poor for the glory of God (Hebrews 13:16).
Everything we should be doing with our bodies, our minds, and our hearts should make God look glorious — because he really is. We’re helping people see him, savor him, show him for what he’s really like.
So, finally, the question becomes, “Is there a common denominator that runs through all of those deeds, all those attitudes, all those words that turn them into God-glorifying acts? How does everything I do become worship? How does everything I do become a display of God’s greatness and beauty and worth?”
“God’s ultimate purpose is to be seen and savored and shown as infinitely glorious.”
And the answer is given, for example, in 1 Peter 4:11: “Whoever serves, [let him serve] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” So, if everything you do is a service, then he says, “Let the service be by relying on the all-sufficiency of God’s grace in your life, so that when you accomplish what you just attempted to do, it’s done in his strength so that he gets the glory.” You get the enablement and the power and the guidance and the strength, and he gets the glory.
So, when we joyfully rely on God in all that we do in the service of others, God looks glorious in our lives. We see the same thing in 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12, “[Let] every work of faith [be] by [God’s] power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” We do what we do in glad reliance upon God for everything we need in order to love people. In other words, we live by faith in the promises of God in the service of love.
Down into the Details
I would say build your life mission statement by thinking through this before you get to the details of your own gifting and your own calling. God is infinitely glorious. God means to communicate that glory to his people — to see it, savor it, show it. He means for us to join him in that purpose. That applies to absolutely everything we do. And we do it in humble reliance upon his grace and power, which come through Jesus Christ, in the service of others. That will make him look great.
Then, when you have crafted an overarching mission statement built on those purposes of God, then you can make some short-term mission statements, say for a year. You’re going to write a book, or you’re going to change jobs, or you’re going to pursue marriage, or whatever — some short-term goals that then draw particularities up into that mission statement according to the season of your life.
