How to Live from Your Future, Not Your Past, with Two Simple Lists

Most of us live from the pain of our past. We try to medicate it with addictions. We try to bury it by being busy doing good things. We try to drown it with a constant buzz of media, entertainment, and self-gratification. But none of it works because God, in his great love and mercy for us, doesn’t let it work. He has a better way for us to live. God’s calling us to live from our future.

How do you think God sees you? What face does he make when he thinks of you? Many of us think of God frowning and disappointed over our mistakes. We think God’s pre-occupied with our shame because we are. But he’s not. He sees us from the perspective of our future destiny.

Here’s why. God doesn’t experience time moment after moment, like we do. God experiences all the moments at once. So when God sees our future, it’s not some cosmic fortune-teller thing. He’s just telling us what he’s experiencing in that other moment.

Think of it like this. You’re in a house with walls but no roof. You’re in one room with a radio to a guy in a helicopter hovering over the house. He’s telling you what’s going on in another room. You wouldn’t think, “Wow, he’s got supernatural powers and can see through walls!” No, you’d just understand that from his perspective, he can see all the rooms at once.

That’s how God experiences time. From his perspective, he experiences all the moments at once, just like the guy in the helicopter sees all the rooms of the house at once.

So God is experiencing our future right now, and he speaks to us from that place, reminding us who, from his perspective, we really are.

When God thinks of you, experiencing your future, he has one of two different emotions.

Regardless of the pain in your life, which God weeps over right along with you, God smiles when he thinks of you. For those who have, or will, accept the love of God, he smiles a lover’s smile. He laughs a lover’s laugh. An intimate smile, an intimate laugh, reserved just for you. He calls to you from your future, that place of mature authority to which he sees your present suffering is bringing you. He tells you just enough now to encourage you and light the way to the destiny he created you for.

Look how God calls Gideon in Judges 6:12. Gideon, the weakest person in Israel’s weakest tribe (see verse 15), was threshing wheat in hiding, living in fear of Israel’s cruel, oppressive, and powerful enemies. But when the angel of the Lord shows up, he greets Gideon with Gideon’s true identity, “Hail, mighty man of valor!”

I’m sure Gideon turned around to see who the angel was talking to. Realizing that, indeed, there was no one else there, I’m sure Gideon was like, “You talking to me?”

God was experiencing Gideon’s future, where Gideon, with just 300 men defeated an army of tens of thousands. He was speaking to Gideon from his future and inviting him into it. It was Gideon’s choice. Gideon had to work through some doubts, which God is totally okay with. But in the end, Gideon chose to follow God into his destiny.

But there are some people who, no matter what God does, will never respond to the love of God. For these people God weeps. By refusing his love, they’ve chosen to be separated from him forever. That’s called hell, the only place in existence where God has chosen to withdraw his presence, which is why it’s so torturous there. We don’t like to think about it, but that’s reality apart from the love of God.

This may sound strange, but the most loving thing God can do for those who absolutely will not accept his love is allow them to go there. Think about it. How would it be love for God to force people to spend an eternity with someone they’ve spent their whole life trying to avoid?

For these people God weeps. But he continues to woo them, romance them, and call them into the glorious potential he has for them, if they will just accept his healing love in the midst of their pain. He brings circumstances into their lives that make it very hard for them to not love him back. Because that’s what love does. It never gives up.

So how do we live from our future? You can start with two simple lists. This is a simple but powerful exercise I learned from Graham Cooke.

This first list goes really fast. Make a list of everything wrong with you, everything you’re ashamed of, all your faults. Give yourself two minutes. Go.

Then make a second list on a second sheet of paper. For every item on the first list, ask the Holy Spirit what the opposite is, and write that on the second list. 

Maybe you wrote anger on the first list. For one person, patience will be the opposite. For someone else, it might be sensitivity. For someone else, maybe gentleness. That’s why you have to ask the Holy Spirit. Write the first thing that pops to your head. God so wants to talk to you about this.

Then throw the first list away. Rip it up into little pieces. Do it right now. Enjoy it! Rip up that thing! That list is not you. It doesn’t exist in Heaven, so it shouldn’t exist on this earth. Don’t we pray, “on earth as it is in Heaven?”

Now take the second list and pray over it. Dwell on it. Keep it with you. Look for opportunities to practice those things in your life. The second list is your game plan for what God wants to do in your life. Not all at once, don’t panic. Pick one or two and focus on those.

When something on the first list pops up in your life, pray a moment and thank God he’s giving you an opportunity to practice the corresponding item on the second list. Focus on the second list. That’s the future God wants you living from.

Say you wrote anger on the first list and patience on the second list. Then you find yourself going into one of your rages. Don’t pray, “Lord, help me not be angry.” If you pray that way, you’ve just spoken over yourself what God says you’re not. You’re focusing on the sin that died on the cross with Jesus.

Instead, pray, “Lord, help me be patient.” Now you’re speaking over yourself who God says you are. You’re partnering with him working patience into your life. You’re focusing on what he wants to do.

Yes, you can do this. This is the empowering grace Jesus bought for us through the cross.

When we live from our future, we practice the habit of becoming. God loves this process. Just like a parent loves watching their child learn to walk, God loves watching us become who he knows we are.

We chose the picture we did for this post because that mom dressed her baby in a powerful identity, and he has no idea what it means. What identity has God dressed you in?

Who are you becoming? What future is God calling you into? What’s on your second list? Tell us in the comments. And please share if this would bless someone else.